Junking Science

By Richard Wolinsky, AlterNet. Posted October 10, 2005.

[This is an edited transcript of an interview with Chris Mooney from Cover to Cover, a radio show that airs on KPFA Radio in Berkeley. The full audio of the story is available here.]

Richard Wolinsky: Chris Mooney is the author of The Republican War on Science, which deals with the way Republicans, the Republican party in particular, but also individual Republicans, as well as the Republican government, have dealt with science, scientific issues, and controversies involved with science. And my take on this is that the reason it's a war on science is because these people are, they couldn't get economics as an argument, they couldn't get ideology as an argument, so they figured, why not just go after the science? Is that about it?

Chris Mooney: There is a lot of that to it. The "war on science" that I'm describing does have this opportunistic element in which you find that interest groups, whether industry or on the religious right, who want to achieve a particular political end, are using science as their means of doing so and abusing science in the process. And they're not up front, they don't say "We oppose embryonic stem cell research for moral reasons," they want to say, "No, adult cells are better, so we don't need to do embryonic stem cell research." And that's where science is abused and distorted. And I'm detecting that across a wide range of issues. And so is the scientific community.

RW: Well, the history of politicization of science goes way back. To some degree certainly we can go back to Galileo, but what we've got here over the past 20 years is something else again.

CM:That's what I would argue. I would say that to some extent every political interest politicizes science or uses science politically in the sense of selectively using information to back up your point of view. I think that with the Republican Party today, there's something very different. And the reason it's very different is because the party is committed to catering to two key constituencies, big business and the religious right, who are often coming into conflict with the mainstream scientific view on issues like evolution for the religious right or global climate change for the fossil fuel industry. So you have a systematic attempt by Republican political leaders to appease these interests on the scientific issues that matter to them. And so you get in combination a kind of perfect storm of catering to special interests on science, again and again and again, systematically, throughout the Bush government.

RW: Well, it actually started before then, and as I was reading your book, I saw that there's something called the OTA, the Office of Technology Assessment, a congressional committee, a congressional office, I'm not sure how you want to call it. The OTA came out of Congress, it's been around since when?

CM:It was founded in 1972, I believe, and it lasted until 1995, when the Gingrich Congress came in, Republicans had not controlled Congress for decades, and they pretty promptly did away with it.

RW: Ok, prior to 1972, how did Congress learn about science?

CM: Well, they would have to call hearings, and they would have to bring in experts to testify. But in the 70s, there were a growing number of scientific controversies about things like nuclear energy or the super-sonic transport, and Congress felt that they couldn't always trust the executive branch to provide them unbiased information, cause the executive branch is serving the president. So they thought that they would have their own source of information. And they founded OTA, '72, and it struggled at first, but it ultimately became a world-renowned scientific advisory body. The Europeans built their own scientific advisory bodies based on OTA.

RW: And who selected OTA, the people in it?

CM: The staff? Well, it served at the pleasure of Congress, so it actually had an executive board of six Democrats and six Republicans, but then the staff was of course scientists.

RW: One thing, before we go further, is that you make a clear point in your book that science is not a he-said she-said affair. It's something called scientific consensus. What is scientific consensus?

CM: Scientific consensus is something that's achieved when an issue or question has been studied quite extensively, and studies have been published repeatedly in scientific journals that are coming to or bolstering the same central conclusion. So, evolution happened, would be a very good one. You have mounds of evidence, and at some point the scientific community is able to say, well, we think we've got a pretty good take on this one, we think that it stood the test of time. And that doesn't mean that it will never, ever be challenged by new data, but it does mean that a lot of evidence has built up to support a particular conclusion. And when that happens, it doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it's something very powerful. Because it's the best scientific knowledge that the scientific community can give us.

RW: So the OTA basically dealt with scientific consensus?

CM: They would be asked by Congress to investigate a question. They would study it carefully based on the work that had already been done, sometimes they would do new research, and then they would pull it all together in an expert report.

Richard Wolinsky is the host of Cover To Cover, which airs on KPFA Pacifica Radio.

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