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Bias Is Hurting Women in Science, Panel Reports
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, September 19, 2006
Women in science and engineering are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and “outmoded institutional structures” in academia, an expert panel reported yesterday. The panel, convened by the National Academy of Sciences, said that in an era of global competition the nation could not afford “such underuse of precious human capital.” Among other steps, the report recommends altering procedures for hiring and evaluation, changing typical timetables for tenure and promotion, and providing more support for working parents.
“Unless a deeper talent pool is tapped, it will be difficult for our country to maintain our competitiveness in science and engineering,” the panel’s chairwoman, Donna E. Shalala, said at a news conference at which the report was made public. The report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering,” is online at www.nationalacademies.org.
Dr. Shalala, a former secretary of health and human services who is now president of the University of Miami, said part of the problem was insufficient effort on the part of college and university administrators. “Many of us spend more energy enforcing the law on our sports teams than we have in our academic halls,” she said.
The panel dismissed the idea, notably advanced last year by Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard, that the relative dearth of women in the upper ranks of science might be the result of “innate” intellectual deficiencies, particularly in mathematics.
If there are cognitive differences, the report says, they are small and irrelevant. In any event, the much-studied gender gap in math performance has all but disappeared as more girls enroll in demanding classes. Even among very high achievers, the gap is narrowing, the panelists said.
A spokesman for Mr. Summers said he was out of the country and could not be reached for comment.
Nor is the problem a lack of women in the academic pipeline, the report says. Though women leave science and engineering more often than men “at every educational transition” from high school through college professorships, the number of women studying science and engineering has sharply increased at all levels.
For 30 years, the report says, women have earned at least 30 percent of the nation’s doctorates in social and behavioral sciences, and at least 20 percent of the doctorates in life sciences. Yet they appear among full professors in those fields at less than half those levels. Women from minority groups are “virtually absent,” it adds.
The report also dismisses other commonly held beliefs — that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families. Instead, it says, extensive previous research showed a pattern of unconscious but pervasive bias, “arbitrary and subjective” evaluation processes and a work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.”
Along with Dr. Shalala, the panel included Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard who has long challenged the “innate differences” view, and Ruth J. Simmons, the president of Brown University, who established a widely praised program for aspiring engineers when she was president of the all-female Smith College.
The report was dedicated to another panelist, Denice Denton, an electrical engineer who until her suicide this summer was chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a forceful advocate for women, gay men and lesbians, and minority members in science and engineering.
The 18-member panel had one man: Robert J. Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. But Dr. Shalala noted that the National Academy of Sciences committee that reviewed the report had 10 men.
“Nothing was a foregone conclusion,” she said, adding that the committee was surprised at the strength of evidence supporting the report’s conclusions. In an interview, Dr. Simmons of Brown said: “The data don’t lie. There are lots of arguments one could have mounted 30 years ago, but 30 years later we have incontrovertible data that women do have the ability to do science and engineering at a very high level.”
She said the more relevant question was, “Why aren’t they electing these fields when the national need and the opportunities in the fields are so great?”
Leveling the playing field does not mean giving women an unfair advantage, another panelist, Maria Zuber said yesterday. Dr. Zuber, a geophysicist at M.I.T., said for example that scholarly journals might eliminate the identity of authors when they sent out manuscripts for pre-publication review. That way, she said, work would be judged on its merits, rather than by the prominence of its authors.
Ana Mari Cauce, a psychologist at the University of Washington and another panelist, said at the news conference, “This is about more excellence; this is not about changing the bar or lowering the bar.”
Ben A. Barres, a neuroscientist at Stanford who was not connected to the effort but who published a commentary on women in science last summer in the journal Nature, echoed the report’s assertion that small administrative changes could produce big differences for women in science.
He pointed to the Pioneer award program for young researchers run by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Barres, who has been a judge for the awards, said that even making it known that scientists could nominate themselves helped make the pool of winners more diverse.
Dr. Shalala began the report’s preface by recalling that when she was in graduate school in political science in the 1960’s and as a young professor, she was told that fellowships or tenure would never be hers because she was a woman.
Overt discrimination like that is now rare, she wrote, but progress has been too slow. “We need overarching reform now,” she said yesterday.
New Species Found Off Indonesia
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, September 19, 2006
BANGKOK, Sept. 18 — Scientists combing through undersea fauna off Papua province in Indonesia said Monday that they had discovered dozens of new species, including a shark that walks on its fins and a shrimp that looks like a praying mantis.
The team from Conservation International also warned that the area, known as Bird’s Head Seascape, is under danger from fishermen who use dynamite and cyanide. The group, based in the United States, called on Indonesia’s government to do more to protect it.
“It’s one of the most stunningly beautiful landscapes and seascapes on the planet,” said Mark Erdmann, a senior adviser at the group who led two surveys of the area earlier this year.
Mr. Erdmann and his team said they had discovered 52 new species, including 24 fish, 20 coral and 8 shrimp.
Mr. Erdmann said the discoveries add to an already legendary reputation for the area, which encompasses 70,000 square miles on the northwestern end of the province.
Dubbed Asia’s “Coral Triangle,” the area is home to more than 1,200 species of fish and nearly 600 species of reef-building coral, or 75 percent of the world’s known total.
It is a few hundred miles from another site studied by Conservation International. Researchers announced in February that a survey of that area, in the Foja Mountains, discovered 20 frog species, including a microhylid frog less than a half-inch long; 4 butterfly species; and at least 5 new types of palms.
Essay: A Psychiatrist Is Slain, and a Sad Debate Deepens
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, September 19, 2006
In the hour before he was killed, on Sunday, Sept. 3, Dr. Wayne S. Fenton, a prominent schizophrenia specialist, was helping his wife clear the gutters of their suburban Washington house. He was steadying the ladder, asking her to please stop showering debris on his clean shirt; he had just made an appointment to see a patient and wanted to look presentable. She said she would be happy to go along, to help control the patient.
It was a running joke between them. For in this part of the country, Dr. Fenton was the therapist of last resort, the one who could settle down and get through to the most severely psychotic, resistant patients, seemingly by sheer force of sympathy and good will. An associate director at the National Institute of Mental Health, he met with patients on weekends, sometimes late at night, at all hours.
“Absolutely the most nonthreatening person you ever, ever met,” his wife, Nancy Fenton, said in an interview last week.
At 4:52 p.m. that Sunday, the Montgomery County police found the 53-year-old psychiatrist dead in his small office, a few minutes’ drive from his house. They soon tracked down the patient he had agreed to meet that afternoon, Vitali A. Davydov, 19, of North Potomac, who admitted he had beaten the doctor with his fists, according to charging documents. When the young man left the office, “Dr. Fenton was on the ground, bleeding from the face,” the documents said.
Dr. Fenton had known that the patient presented some risk: he was young, male, severely psychotic and struggling with a mental state that was frightening and unfamiliar. The psychiatrist was trying to persuade his patient to continue taking medication, Mrs. Fenton said.
The killing, besides devastating the two families involved, has deeply shaken mental health workers around the country. In the days since, many have wondered about their own safety and about the dangers of allowing patients with severe psychosis to go without medication.
Dr. Fenton’s death is not likely to change psychiatric practice, experts said, but it may become a touchstone for one of the most contentious debates in psychiatry: whether people suffering from psychosis should be compelled to accept treatment to reduce the risk of violent outbursts.
“We have been thinking about all these things in the past week, that’s for sure,” said Dr. Thomas H. McGlashan, a psychiatrist at Yale and a close friend of Dr. Fenton’s, who worked with him decades ago at Chestnut Lodge, a renowned psychiatric hospital that closed in 2001. “Yes, there is a risk of violence with some patients, and no, it’s not black-and-white, like some would want you to see it. It’s not just that Wayne is dead, but that the kid’s life is ruined too.”
Violence is less common among those with mental illnesses than is sometimes assumed. Many people with schizophrenia are withdrawn, more likely to be targets of an assault than to commit one, said Bruce Link, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia.
But studies suggest that those with untreated psychosis — often characterized by intense paranoia and imaginary voices issuing commands — are at least two to three times as likely as people without mental disorders to get into physical altercations, including fights using weapons, Dr. Link said.
An analysis published last month in The American Journal of Psychiatry found that people with severe mental illness committed about 5 percent of the violent crimes in Sweden, though they made up a small fraction of the population. The United States, which has higher crime rates, has a much smaller proportion of crime attributable to the mentally ill than Sweden, experts said.
Yet the risk is real, if remote, for those who meet one on one with severely psychotic patients and try to negotiate difficult issues like medication. So-called antipsychotic drugs effectively blunt symptoms of psychosis and tend to reduce the risk of violent outbursts, psychiatrists say. But the medications are mentally dulling and often cause weight gain, among other side effects, and many patients either stop taking them or refuse them altogether.
In part to forestall violent episodes, several states, including New York and California, have tightened their treatment laws to compel some mental health patients to accept treatment, even if they have not committed a crime. The issue is divisive among former psychiatric patients, researchers and practicing psychiatrists.
“This is an extremely important issue for psychiatry, and there are two sides of this story,” said Dr. William T. Carpenter Jr., the director of the Psychiatric Research Center at the University of Maryland and the editor of the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin. “As doctors, we think patients ought to do what we think they should do, and if someone needs to be on medication it’s difficult not to wish there was some way to do that.”
On the other side, Dr. Carpenter said, “you have a significant civil rights argument.”
In the wake of Dr. Fenton’s killing, some patient advocates cautioned against exploiting the tragedy to promote forced treatment.
“The main concern is that we not let fear and stereotypes based on this case drive public policy” in support of forced commitment and drug treatment, said Will Hall, a mental health advocate in Northampton, Mass., who was hospitalized as a young man and treated with antipsychotic drugs for about four months after a suicide attempt. A better way to prevent violence, Mr. Hall said, “is to offer patients who refuse medication on any ground a much wider range of options, including psychosocial treatments.”
Yet alternatives to drug treatment are not yet widely available. And with the news of Dr. Fenton’s killing in their thoughts, some psychiatrists said they were thinking carefully about the precautions they take every day.
“When a patient is revving up and paranoid,” Dr. McGlashan said, “instead of becoming imperious or dogmatic or rigid I might admit that I’m kind of nervous too. If you’re scared, you let the patient know that. Because a lot of their behavior is coming from their perception of being threatened. If you let them know that you are feeling threatened, vulnerable and not interested in controlling them, that can help defuse the situation.”
All of which, of course, Dr. Fenton understood.
But the need was urgent, Mrs. Fenton said. The need was urgent, the family was desperate, and that was enough for her husband, as long as she had known him. Someone wanted his help, so Wayne would go.
Gore Calls for Immediate Freeze on Heat-Trapping Gas Emissions
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, September 19, 2006
Former Vice President Al Gore called yesterday for a popular movement in the United States to seek an “immediate freeze” in heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases linked by most scientists to global warming.
Speaking at the New York University law school, Mr. Gore said that rising temperatures posed an enormous threat and that only a movement akin to the nuclear freeze campaign for arms control a generation ago, which he said he opposed at the time, would push elected officials out of longstanding deadlock on the issue.
“Merely engaging in high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional and reckless approach,” Mr. Gore said. “In some ways, that approach is worse than doing nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that something is actually being done, when in fact it is not.”
President Bush has opposed requiring cuts in heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide, saying a better payoff will come from a long-term effort to find or improve technologies that provide energy without emissions. The White House last night defended that approach.
“This administration is not just talking about climate change,” said Kristen A. Hellmer, a White House spokeswoman. “There are more than 60 programs in place aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions that do not hurt the economy or move jobs overseas.”
Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the Gore proposals would create “economic calamity.”
Several representatives of industry groups said yesterday that the White House had been consulting with industry officials to consider a new energy initiative.
In his speech, Mr. Gore also renewed a longstanding proposal to replace all payroll taxes with taxes on pollution, including carbon dioxide. And he said the United States should rejoin the Kyoto Protocol, the climate treaty, rejected by President Bush that requires industrialized countries to cut emissions.
Mr. Gore has ridden a wave of attention since spring over “An Inconvenient Truth,” the popular film and best-selling book built around an illustrated talk on what he calls a “planetary emergency.”
His speech in Manhattan came ahead of a burst of planned discourse on global warming this week, including five Congressional hearings and three days of workshops at the Clinton Global Initiative, which are intended to solve the biggest problems hampering international development.
Philip E. Clapp, the president of the National Environmental Trust, a Washington group pressing for limits on heat-trapping gases, said he welcomed Mr. Gore’s speech.
“There is no excuse anymore to continue to increase our emissions,” Mr. Clapp said.
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, September 19, 2006
Women in science and engineering are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and “outmoded institutional structures” in academia, an expert panel reported yesterday. The panel, convened by the National Academy of Sciences, said that in an era of global competition the nation could not afford “such underuse of precious human capital.” Among other steps, the report recommends altering procedures for hiring and evaluation, changing typical timetables for tenure and promotion, and providing more support for working parents.
“Unless a deeper talent pool is tapped, it will be difficult for our country to maintain our competitiveness in science and engineering,” the panel’s chairwoman, Donna E. Shalala, said at a news conference at which the report was made public. The report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering,” is online at www.nationalacademies.org.
Dr. Shalala, a former secretary of health and human services who is now president of the University of Miami, said part of the problem was insufficient effort on the part of college and university administrators. “Many of us spend more energy enforcing the law on our sports teams than we have in our academic halls,” she said.
The panel dismissed the idea, notably advanced last year by Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard, that the relative dearth of women in the upper ranks of science might be the result of “innate” intellectual deficiencies, particularly in mathematics.
If there are cognitive differences, the report says, they are small and irrelevant. In any event, the much-studied gender gap in math performance has all but disappeared as more girls enroll in demanding classes. Even among very high achievers, the gap is narrowing, the panelists said.
A spokesman for Mr. Summers said he was out of the country and could not be reached for comment.
Nor is the problem a lack of women in the academic pipeline, the report says. Though women leave science and engineering more often than men “at every educational transition” from high school through college professorships, the number of women studying science and engineering has sharply increased at all levels.
For 30 years, the report says, women have earned at least 30 percent of the nation’s doctorates in social and behavioral sciences, and at least 20 percent of the doctorates in life sciences. Yet they appear among full professors in those fields at less than half those levels. Women from minority groups are “virtually absent,” it adds.
The report also dismisses other commonly held beliefs — that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families. Instead, it says, extensive previous research showed a pattern of unconscious but pervasive bias, “arbitrary and subjective” evaluation processes and a work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.”
Along with Dr. Shalala, the panel included Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard who has long challenged the “innate differences” view, and Ruth J. Simmons, the president of Brown University, who established a widely praised program for aspiring engineers when she was president of the all-female Smith College.
The report was dedicated to another panelist, Denice Denton, an electrical engineer who until her suicide this summer was chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a forceful advocate for women, gay men and lesbians, and minority members in science and engineering.
The 18-member panel had one man: Robert J. Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. But Dr. Shalala noted that the National Academy of Sciences committee that reviewed the report had 10 men.
“Nothing was a foregone conclusion,” she said, adding that the committee was surprised at the strength of evidence supporting the report’s conclusions. In an interview, Dr. Simmons of Brown said: “The data don’t lie. There are lots of arguments one could have mounted 30 years ago, but 30 years later we have incontrovertible data that women do have the ability to do science and engineering at a very high level.”
She said the more relevant question was, “Why aren’t they electing these fields when the national need and the opportunities in the fields are so great?”
Leveling the playing field does not mean giving women an unfair advantage, another panelist, Maria Zuber said yesterday. Dr. Zuber, a geophysicist at M.I.T., said for example that scholarly journals might eliminate the identity of authors when they sent out manuscripts for pre-publication review. That way, she said, work would be judged on its merits, rather than by the prominence of its authors.
Ana Mari Cauce, a psychologist at the University of Washington and another panelist, said at the news conference, “This is about more excellence; this is not about changing the bar or lowering the bar.”
Ben A. Barres, a neuroscientist at Stanford who was not connected to the effort but who published a commentary on women in science last summer in the journal Nature, echoed the report’s assertion that small administrative changes could produce big differences for women in science.
He pointed to the Pioneer award program for young researchers run by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Barres, who has been a judge for the awards, said that even making it known that scientists could nominate themselves helped make the pool of winners more diverse.
Dr. Shalala began the report’s preface by recalling that when she was in graduate school in political science in the 1960’s and as a young professor, she was told that fellowships or tenure would never be hers because she was a woman.
Overt discrimination like that is now rare, she wrote, but progress has been too slow. “We need overarching reform now,” she said yesterday.
New Species Found Off Indonesia
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, September 19, 2006
BANGKOK, Sept. 18 — Scientists combing through undersea fauna off Papua province in Indonesia said Monday that they had discovered dozens of new species, including a shark that walks on its fins and a shrimp that looks like a praying mantis.
The team from Conservation International also warned that the area, known as Bird’s Head Seascape, is under danger from fishermen who use dynamite and cyanide. The group, based in the United States, called on Indonesia’s government to do more to protect it.
“It’s one of the most stunningly beautiful landscapes and seascapes on the planet,” said Mark Erdmann, a senior adviser at the group who led two surveys of the area earlier this year.
Mr. Erdmann and his team said they had discovered 52 new species, including 24 fish, 20 coral and 8 shrimp.
Mr. Erdmann said the discoveries add to an already legendary reputation for the area, which encompasses 70,000 square miles on the northwestern end of the province.
Dubbed Asia’s “Coral Triangle,” the area is home to more than 1,200 species of fish and nearly 600 species of reef-building coral, or 75 percent of the world’s known total.
It is a few hundred miles from another site studied by Conservation International. Researchers announced in February that a survey of that area, in the Foja Mountains, discovered 20 frog species, including a microhylid frog less than a half-inch long; 4 butterfly species; and at least 5 new types of palms.
Essay: A Psychiatrist Is Slain, and a Sad Debate Deepens
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, September 19, 2006
In the hour before he was killed, on Sunday, Sept. 3, Dr. Wayne S. Fenton, a prominent schizophrenia specialist, was helping his wife clear the gutters of their suburban Washington house. He was steadying the ladder, asking her to please stop showering debris on his clean shirt; he had just made an appointment to see a patient and wanted to look presentable. She said she would be happy to go along, to help control the patient.
It was a running joke between them. For in this part of the country, Dr. Fenton was the therapist of last resort, the one who could settle down and get through to the most severely psychotic, resistant patients, seemingly by sheer force of sympathy and good will. An associate director at the National Institute of Mental Health, he met with patients on weekends, sometimes late at night, at all hours.
“Absolutely the most nonthreatening person you ever, ever met,” his wife, Nancy Fenton, said in an interview last week.
At 4:52 p.m. that Sunday, the Montgomery County police found the 53-year-old psychiatrist dead in his small office, a few minutes’ drive from his house. They soon tracked down the patient he had agreed to meet that afternoon, Vitali A. Davydov, 19, of North Potomac, who admitted he had beaten the doctor with his fists, according to charging documents. When the young man left the office, “Dr. Fenton was on the ground, bleeding from the face,” the documents said.
Dr. Fenton had known that the patient presented some risk: he was young, male, severely psychotic and struggling with a mental state that was frightening and unfamiliar. The psychiatrist was trying to persuade his patient to continue taking medication, Mrs. Fenton said.
The killing, besides devastating the two families involved, has deeply shaken mental health workers around the country. In the days since, many have wondered about their own safety and about the dangers of allowing patients with severe psychosis to go without medication.
Dr. Fenton’s death is not likely to change psychiatric practice, experts said, but it may become a touchstone for one of the most contentious debates in psychiatry: whether people suffering from psychosis should be compelled to accept treatment to reduce the risk of violent outbursts.
“We have been thinking about all these things in the past week, that’s for sure,” said Dr. Thomas H. McGlashan, a psychiatrist at Yale and a close friend of Dr. Fenton’s, who worked with him decades ago at Chestnut Lodge, a renowned psychiatric hospital that closed in 2001. “Yes, there is a risk of violence with some patients, and no, it’s not black-and-white, like some would want you to see it. It’s not just that Wayne is dead, but that the kid’s life is ruined too.”
Violence is less common among those with mental illnesses than is sometimes assumed. Many people with schizophrenia are withdrawn, more likely to be targets of an assault than to commit one, said Bruce Link, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia.
But studies suggest that those with untreated psychosis — often characterized by intense paranoia and imaginary voices issuing commands — are at least two to three times as likely as people without mental disorders to get into physical altercations, including fights using weapons, Dr. Link said.
An analysis published last month in The American Journal of Psychiatry found that people with severe mental illness committed about 5 percent of the violent crimes in Sweden, though they made up a small fraction of the population. The United States, which has higher crime rates, has a much smaller proportion of crime attributable to the mentally ill than Sweden, experts said.
Yet the risk is real, if remote, for those who meet one on one with severely psychotic patients and try to negotiate difficult issues like medication. So-called antipsychotic drugs effectively blunt symptoms of psychosis and tend to reduce the risk of violent outbursts, psychiatrists say. But the medications are mentally dulling and often cause weight gain, among other side effects, and many patients either stop taking them or refuse them altogether.
In part to forestall violent episodes, several states, including New York and California, have tightened their treatment laws to compel some mental health patients to accept treatment, even if they have not committed a crime. The issue is divisive among former psychiatric patients, researchers and practicing psychiatrists.
“This is an extremely important issue for psychiatry, and there are two sides of this story,” said Dr. William T. Carpenter Jr., the director of the Psychiatric Research Center at the University of Maryland and the editor of the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin. “As doctors, we think patients ought to do what we think they should do, and if someone needs to be on medication it’s difficult not to wish there was some way to do that.”
On the other side, Dr. Carpenter said, “you have a significant civil rights argument.”
In the wake of Dr. Fenton’s killing, some patient advocates cautioned against exploiting the tragedy to promote forced treatment.
“The main concern is that we not let fear and stereotypes based on this case drive public policy” in support of forced commitment and drug treatment, said Will Hall, a mental health advocate in Northampton, Mass., who was hospitalized as a young man and treated with antipsychotic drugs for about four months after a suicide attempt. A better way to prevent violence, Mr. Hall said, “is to offer patients who refuse medication on any ground a much wider range of options, including psychosocial treatments.”
Yet alternatives to drug treatment are not yet widely available. And with the news of Dr. Fenton’s killing in their thoughts, some psychiatrists said they were thinking carefully about the precautions they take every day.
“When a patient is revving up and paranoid,” Dr. McGlashan said, “instead of becoming imperious or dogmatic or rigid I might admit that I’m kind of nervous too. If you’re scared, you let the patient know that. Because a lot of their behavior is coming from their perception of being threatened. If you let them know that you are feeling threatened, vulnerable and not interested in controlling them, that can help defuse the situation.”
All of which, of course, Dr. Fenton understood.
But the need was urgent, Mrs. Fenton said. The need was urgent, the family was desperate, and that was enough for her husband, as long as she had known him. Someone wanted his help, so Wayne would go.
Gore Calls for Immediate Freeze on Heat-Trapping Gas Emissions
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, September 19, 2006
Former Vice President Al Gore called yesterday for a popular movement in the United States to seek an “immediate freeze” in heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases linked by most scientists to global warming.
Speaking at the New York University law school, Mr. Gore said that rising temperatures posed an enormous threat and that only a movement akin to the nuclear freeze campaign for arms control a generation ago, which he said he opposed at the time, would push elected officials out of longstanding deadlock on the issue.
“Merely engaging in high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional and reckless approach,” Mr. Gore said. “In some ways, that approach is worse than doing nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that something is actually being done, when in fact it is not.”
President Bush has opposed requiring cuts in heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide, saying a better payoff will come from a long-term effort to find or improve technologies that provide energy without emissions. The White House last night defended that approach.
“This administration is not just talking about climate change,” said Kristen A. Hellmer, a White House spokeswoman. “There are more than 60 programs in place aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions that do not hurt the economy or move jobs overseas.”
Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the Gore proposals would create “economic calamity.”
Several representatives of industry groups said yesterday that the White House had been consulting with industry officials to consider a new energy initiative.
In his speech, Mr. Gore also renewed a longstanding proposal to replace all payroll taxes with taxes on pollution, including carbon dioxide. And he said the United States should rejoin the Kyoto Protocol, the climate treaty, rejected by President Bush that requires industrialized countries to cut emissions.
Mr. Gore has ridden a wave of attention since spring over “An Inconvenient Truth,” the popular film and best-selling book built around an illustrated talk on what he calls a “planetary emergency.”
His speech in Manhattan came ahead of a burst of planned discourse on global warming this week, including five Congressional hearings and three days of workshops at the Clinton Global Initiative, which are intended to solve the biggest problems hampering international development.
Philip E. Clapp, the president of the National Environmental Trust, a Washington group pressing for limits on heat-trapping gases, said he welcomed Mr. Gore’s speech.
“There is no excuse anymore to continue to increase our emissions,” Mr. Clapp said.
