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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
Pro-business Republicans and the religious right have joined in a frighteningly successful campaign to undermine the findings of science.
Sep 14, 2005 | It took almost no time for the devastation of New Orleans, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to become the newest beachhead in the science wars. On the evening of Sept. 1, when the waters were still rising and we had no idea how much worse things were still going to get, Brit Hume devoted an extended segment of his Fox News program to interviewing Patrick J. Michaels, an environmental scientist at the University of Virginia.
Michaels' purpose, and Hume's, was to rebut a widely circulated Op-Ed article by Ross Gelbspan in the Boston Globe arguing that Katrina, and a host of other natural disasters, had been caused or exacerbated by the effects of global warming. A likable, slightly acerbic fellow who refers to himself as a "weather nerd," Michaels told the Fox audience in judicious, neutral-sounding language that there isn't much correlation between global warming and hurricane strength -- and added, almost as an afterthought, that there isn't much we can do about global warming anyway.
I don't know whether Chris Mooney, author of the profoundly discouraging new book "The Republican War on Science," watched Hume's broadcast. Probably not -- Mooney grew up in New Orleans, and one imagines he had other priorities that night. But if he saw it, or heard about it later, he could only have rolled his eyes, not in surprise but in exasperation: Here we go again. In fairness, Hume told his audience that Michaels is a fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. But he didn't tell them that Michaels' work at Cato has been extensively funded by oil and gas companies, or that he's also affiliated with the George C. Marshall Institute, an industry-supported, right-wing think tank almost exclusively devoted to debunking global warming concerns. Nor did he mention that Michaels edits World Climate Report, a newsletter (and now a blog) primarily funded by the coal industry.
Even more to the point, Hume didn't reveal that Gelbspan and Michaels are longtime adversaries in the so-called global warming debate; their feud goes back at least 10 years, to a Harper's article in which Gelbspan outed Michaels as one of the energy industry's favorite mouthpieces. There are legitimate criticisms one could raise about Gelbspan's melodramatic Globe Op-Ed: Nobody can say, with any degree of scientific certainty, that global warming caused Katrina (or the other natural disasters he references). But in general terms, Gelbspan's position reflects the consensus view of climate scientists all over the world that human activity is gradually raising global temperatures and that the consequences may be catastrophic. Michaels, on the other hand, is an exceedingly well-compensated scientific contrarian, a key player in one of the right wing's biggest industries: the manufacture of doubt.
"The Republican War on Science" is nothing short of a landmark in contemporary political reporting. Mooney compiles and presents an extraordinary mountain of evidence, from several different fields, to demonstrate that the conservative wing of the Republican Party has launched an unprecedented and highly successful campaign to sow widespread confusion about the conclusions of science and its usefulness in political decision making. Using methods and strategies pioneered under the Reagan administration by the tobacco industry and anti-environmental forces, an alliance of social conservatives and corporate advocates has paralyzed or obfuscated public discussion of science on a whole range of issues. Not just climate change but also stem cell research, evolutionary biology, endangered-species protection, diet and obesity, abortion and contraception, and the effects of environmental toxins have all become arenas of systematic and deliberate bewilderment.
Mooney quotes an internal strategy document from the tobacco company Brown and Williamson, written around 1969: "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." B&W and the other tobacco giants achieved no better than a stalemate in their long battle against government regulation, but whatever chain-smoking, skinny-tied executive wrote that memo ought to be beatified by the conservative movement. With those two sentences he became its accidental Karl Marx, launching an antiscientific counterrevolution that rages around us today.
No matter how much you think you know about Republican distortion and misuse of science, Mooney's account will startle and perhaps terrify you. Many conservatives, he argues, have stopped regarding science as an objective search for truth (conditional as that truth necessarily is). Instead, they see it as just another realm of naked power politics or, less cynically but more ominously, as a contest between a pseudo-socialistic, tree-hugging worldview and one that is avowedly pro-Christian and pro-capitalist. Furthermore, right-wingers have mystified this conflict almost completely, cloaking it in self-defined terms of "sound science" (i.e., science that agrees with them, or reaches no conclusions at all) versus "junk science" (anything that might impinge on corporate profits or conflict with the most extreme version of Christian morality).
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