So I have now scanned through the large volume of responses to this post, in which I asked why it is that scientists seem, on average, to be significantly more liberal in political outlook than the general U.S. population. And I have to say, something very striking has emerged.

When I listed some possible explanations at the outset of my post–e.g., conservatives have attacked science lately, so scientists have responded by moving in the other direction; or, academia tilts left, so conservatives tend to distrust its progeny–they all had something in common. They were political explanations, in the sense that they postulated clear and discrete actions by one group leading to opposing reactions from the other.

Or to put the point another way: I was suggesting that the two groups had grown distant from one another by virtue of recent developments–but also implying that it didn’t necessarily have to be that way. Indeed, that’s the same thing I argued in The Republican War on Science: The Republican Party was more science friendly (under Nixon and Eisenhower), but then political dynamics caused it to change and the result was Reagan and Bush II.

I certainly didn’t argue in that book–or in my latest post–that the real causal factor was some underlying or core difference between liberals and conservatives, of a sort that would affect how they relate to science.

But when I looked through all the comments to the latest post, that’s what everybody seemed to be arguing. (more…)

There’s a fascinating discussion thread at Quora on this question–check it out.

First of all, I am not disputing the premise: This Pew survey, for instance, found that

More than half of the scientists surveyed (55%) say they are Democrats, compared with 35% of the public. Fully 52% of the scientists call themselves liberals; among the public, just 20% describe themselves as liberal.

So, scientists are, in aggregate, more liberal than the rest of America…but why?

I am not going to be satisfied with a “really smart people are liberals” kind of answer. I know too many smart conservatives. Other arguments that I’ve seen in the thread that sound more plausible:

1. Republicans have taken a lot of anti-science positions lately (climate, evolution, etc) and scientists are just responding to that.
2. Academia is a very liberal environment, and that’s where scientists cut their teeth.
3. Smart and talented conservatives don’t hang around for a Ph.D., they want to get out of the ivory tower (which they perceive hostile anyway) and into the business world.

What do others think?

Greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. How could it be otherwise? They cause climate change and all its consequences. And those endanger public health and welfare. QED.

What that means is that as long as you have an EPA and a Clean Air Act–and a Supreme Court–greenhouse gases are going to trigger government action. That’s what the newly empowered Republicans want to prevent and are trying to change.

One approach is of course to get rid of the EPA, which Gingrich is calling for. That’s more than a little extreme.

Another is to weaken the Clean Air Act, and Reps. Waxman and Markey have just exposed a draft of a Republican bill that would do just that. But as Waxman observes,

The Republicans have a lot of power, but they can’t amend the laws of nature. Gutting the Clean Air Act is only going to make our problems worse. This proposal threatens public health and energy security, and it undermines our economic recovery by creating regulatory uncertainty.

That last point is, basically, the one that matters. At a time when companies like GE want greenhouse gas regulation, and even Exxon Mobil isn’t the supporter of climate denial that it used to be, the question is….what is driving this GOP push?

The new bill in question is called the “Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011,” which gets at some of the ideological underpinnings–this is about weakening government far more than it is about helping industry. It’s about ideology, not pragmatism. Now more than ever, those two aren’t the same thing.

And as for energy taxes…well, the economic analyses don’t support that either. According to the CBO, a cap and trade bill like the one we didn’t get would actually slightly benefit the poorest Americans in terms of their energy bills, and on average, would raise our bills by 48 cents per day by 2020.

That’s a cost, but it’s not a massive one, and it’s a cost that comes with many benefits, including the growth of jobs in clean energy industries. Furthermore, as Joe Romm notes, gains in energy efficiency (which aren’t taken into account here) can probably offset the basic cost of cap and trade. Hence, there would essentially be no “energy tax” worth speaking of.

But why argue all this–this is not a fact based fight we’re about to have. And it isn’t going to be pretty.

Following John Holdren’s release of federal scientific integrity guidelines late last year, the DOI is first in line to comply–it just released this very long and detailed policy. News release here. A brief quote from the actual policy:

Scientific and scholarly information considered in Departmental decision making must be robust, of the highest quality, and the result of as rigorous scientific and scholarly processes as can be achieved. Most importantly, it must be trustworthy. It is essential that the Department establish and maintain integrity in its scientific and scholarly activities because information from such activities is a critical factor that informs decision making on public policies. Other factors that inform decision making may include economic, budget, institutional, social, cultural, legal and environmental considerations.

I have not read the whole policy yet but AGU has put out an endorsement: (more…)

That’s the question I pose in my latest post at DeSmogBlog:

Essentially, President Obama wants us to recreate the same sense of urgency, and the same national unity, but without the same fear of another competitor country, unless that country is supposed to be China—which, the President noted, recently “became the home to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer.” Okay, that’s something of a spur…but it is not, historically speaking, a Sputnik. (And, making China into the enemy is a very problematic notion.)

Obama wasn’t even speaking in a national security frame last night when he invoked Sputnik. He was speaking in an economic one. The sense of shared threat was displaced from an external other to our own economic problems—joblessness and deficits.

And that’s the real trick: Is the yearning for national unity, in the wake of Tucson, enough to overcome this chief non-parallel in Obama’s Sputnik analogy? Because undoubtedly, investing in more clean energy research, and more research in general, will spur jobs and innovation. But will we remember to forget our differences in the meantime? Is there some glue that will hold us together? Given the way politics now operate in the U.S., it’s hard to be so optimistic.

You can read the full post here.

Recently I came across this Ed Driscoll post at Pajamas Media, riffing on this editorial in Investor’s Business Daily. While the arguments advanced in these paired right wing science commentaries aren’t particularly nuanced, the basic theme is clear–it’s the left that abuses science! In particular–and this is something I discussed with Seth Mnookin on the latest Point of Inquiry–the vaccine-autism claim is becoming Exhibit A in a developing “Democrat War on Science” style argument.

What do I say to this, as the person who coined the phrase “Republican War on Science”?

First, I fully admit that a type of “war on science” has occurred with respect to vaccination over the last ten years; and furthermore, I agree that the animus against good science in this case tends to be located, broadly speaking, on the political left. However, I don’t see how the vaccine-autism case study refutes my broader argument, which was about the relationship between the right and science in modern U.S. politics.

The political “left”–in this country or elsewhere–can certainly serve as a haven for science denialism. Soviet Lysenkoism is by far the most famous case, as was discussed in The Republican War on Science; but there are many, many others.

But just because denialism occurs sometimes on the left does not mean that in the U.S. today–and particularly in mainstream U.S. politics–it’s predominantly a left wing phenomenon.

Having left wing science problems crop up occasionally is only to be expected, because people on both sides of the spectrum are wont to develop strong convictions that they can’t easily let go of–this is just human nature. However, the argument about the U.S. right today is a different one. It is this: Modern conservatism wedded itself quite deliberately to the Christian right and corporate America, leading to a very systematic and even predictable set of political science problems. And these are institutionalized now in one of our chief political parties.

Now, you might argue back that left wing science abuses also spring from a coherent set of political impulses or a worldview–and I might even agree with you. But you’d be hard pressed to show me how these tendencies are currently dominant in the Democratic party. Even in the vaccine case, I don’t see many Democratic politicians scoring points by denying the science on this issue; rather, it’s more part and parcel of a “natural”, Whole Foods lifestyle. Ditto for something like irrational left-wing resistance to genetically modified foods.

This is, however, an argument that could use further developing. I’m sure this post will prompt some comments–so that will be the beginning of that process.

There’s much to admire in this speech, by green iconoclasts Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, about “Why Climate Science Divides Us, But Energy Technology Unites Us.” They get a lot of things right, e.g. this:

It may be hard to remember now but it wasn’t that long ago that much of the American political establishment came to believe that the science of climate would transcend ideological and national boundaries and result in common national and global action. The idea was that climate scientists would tell us what the safe level of atmospheric emissions was, and that nations would take shared steps to reducing their emissions over the next 50 years….

What happened was effectively the opposite of what most of the scientific and political establishment predicted. More scientific research divided rather than united the polity. Increasing numbers of Americans today tell Gallup that they think the news media are exaggerating global warming. And liberals and conservatives are more polarized than ever on the question of climate change – this despite the fact that media coverage of global warming increased and increasingly excluded or dismissed skeptical views.

N&S are right that this has occurred–and right that it was naive to think that better science would solve the problem.

But where they’re wrong is the insinuation that both sides have equally twisted science to support their policy ends. That just isn’t true–on climate, or on other matters. (more…)

My latest DeSmogBlog post is about the folks running this committee…who do not seem very, er, friendly to the scientific community itself.

That includes Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia, who calls climate science a “hoax” and has said that “cap and trade” legislation would actually kill elderly people in the south during the summer, because they will no longer be able to afford air conditioning. Now he’s head of the Science Committee’s Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee.

Details here.

I’ve got an oped with Meryl Comer, founder of the Rock Stars of Science campaign, in the Los Angeles Times today. It’s about why in bad economic times we need to fund research more than ever:

Without ramping up our investments in science and research — a matter barely on the public’s radar in a country where 65% of the citizens can’t name a living scientist and another 18% try but get it wrong — we’ll be hobbled in trying to fix our long-term economic problems. That’s because science creates jobs, and it can also reduce healthcare costs related to the aging of the population.

That’s the central argument, though there’s also much elaboration; you can read the full piece here.

Yesterday on DeSmogBlog, I posted a lengthy assessment of the Obama administration on science–or more specifically, on scientific integrity.

The record here is not nearly as strong as I’d like it to be. Still, there have also been a lot of bogus attacks on the current administration by people who don’t really know what an “abuse” or “misuse” of science actually is, but just think turnaround is fair play.

However, these infractions were defined in The Republican War on Science quite carefully–see chapter 2. One key part of the definition: “any attempt to inappropriately undermine, alter, or otherwise interfere with the scientific process, or scientific conclusions, for political or ideological reasons. To count as inappropriate, such abuses must undermine the integrity of science by turning it into just another tool of political advocacy.” The book then goes on to break the definition down into process interferences and substantive interferences, and provides typologies and case studies.

Anyways, in this light I now want to look at a bogus, or questionable, Obama science abuse case study. (more…)