Former USGS director Charles Groat, former Officials Call for Earth Systems Science Agency

If you don’t follow press releases or read Science you may have missed this:

In an article published today in the journal Science, a group of former senior federal officials call for the establishment of an independent Earth Systems Science Agency (ESSA) to meet the unprecedented environmental and economic challenges facing the nation. They propose forming the new agency by merging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)....

The authors recommend that no less than 25 percent of the new agency’s budget be devoted to grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements with academic and nonprofit institutions.

The full text is behind a wall. The press release goes on to quote David Rejeski, of the Woodrow Wilson Center (and one of my favorite interviewees back in the day), suggesting that high risk, high reward efforts, such as DARPA (the folks behind the Internet among other things) are just the ticket for a better future.