Phylum : Integrity, subphylum : scientific, subclass : political.
Last week the Union of Concerned Scientists held a press conference to release a report Scientific Integrity in Policymaking. It garnered a lot of press at the time (that was the idea). The article
Scientists Accuse White House of Distorting Facts in the New York Times covers things well, so does the Tom Toles editorial cartoon that ran in the Washington Post later in the week. Two articles stood out. One appearing in the 08 March issue of nation
The Junk Science of George W. Bush by Robert F. Kennedy jr. is a strong journalistic piece that parallels and recomposes the history and argument of the UCS's report and leaves one with a better sense of the problem (came across that link first in comments to a K5 piece. The other interesting article was in the International Herald Tribune
IHT: When science was thwarted before which compares the case of Trofim Lysenko the paladin of Stalinist science with the growing conception of science of the Bush Administration. As Mark Green puts it in a piece for Alternet.org
his policy process is more catechismic than empiric - instead of facts leading to conclusions, conclusions lead to 'facts'.
AlterNet: W's Reality Gap. The key point is the sense of a creeping ideology moving in to re-organize all things.
About a month ago I had been trying to convince my sister of just this sort of thing (this would be my older sister Ann). That some industries and industrial trade groups were embarked in a long term project to create their own army of scientists, credentialed expert witnesses who will reliably gainsay, assail, and prevent the formation of any scientific consensus that isn't conducive to their bottom line. They want nothing from the Sierra club, from Greenpeace, from the Nature Conservancy to gain any catchet from the public at all. With the Bush administration they have found the perfect authoritarian partner.
My sister mentioned something called the Proposed Bulletin on Peer Review and Quality Information Federal register 15 Sep 03 (pdf) from the Office of Mananagement and Budget's
OIRA Regulatory Matters office. I hadn't heard about it, but the Union of Concerned Scientist's report takes this issue up in the last section of Part I.
The new rule proposed by OMB would centralize control of review of scientific information relied upon in policymaking at federal agencies,
even though OMB fails to identify any inherent fl aws in the review processes now being used at
these agencies. The proposed rule would prohibit most scientists
who receive funding from a government agency from serving as peer reviewers, but would permit scientists employed or funded by industry to serve as reviewers (unless they had a direct financial interest in the issue under review). This is a government wide ruling that will have the force of law when it takes effect. Currently it is in a "call for comments" stage. There is another page -
2003 Information Quality Peer Review where the comments received so far can be read. They are in pdf format and 1 to 3 pages in length. I read ones by the American Library Assn., the National Academy of Science, and the American Bar Assn among others. The unifying element to these was that no one seems quite to know where the need for such a move came from, and view it awkward restrictive and unnecessary.
The Bjorn Lomborg book the skeptical environmentalist epitomizes the whole trend. Starting, as he tells it, from the point of an earnest environmentalist Lomberg looks into the work of economist Julian L. Simon (who taught here at the University of Maryland in fact). Simon edited a book called the Resourceful earth: a response to Global 2000, and wrote one called Population matters: people, resources environment, and immigration. You can grasp his basic thesis from the titles: human ingenuity is infinite - you can never have too many people. If scarcity - relative or absolute - comes about, the cost of the resource in question will increase (exponentially?) and human resourcefulness will answer for it. Lomborg decides that Simon can't be de-bunked or disregarded, and writes his book essentially claiming that what the entire modern environmental movement is responding to (global warming, deforestation, species extinction) are mere phantoms. From the tower tops of one hundred coal burning power plants, one hundred energy industrialists fling garlands into the air and cry let one hundred flowers bloom! The specter of loss will be entertained no more.
Or look at tobacco. For years there was conclusive statistical evidence that smoking was related to cancer. The Tobacco industry wasn't about to pay damages or allow itself to be regulated on that account. They looked for a threshold of accountability that turned on evidence of a process by which the chemicals in burning tobacco interacted with the chemicals of the human body at a molecular level to produce uncontrolled fiberous cell reproduction. It always seemed to me that they were surprised when medical science began to produce such evidence. In reaction to this and in other area's where the quiet working of research produced bodies of data that lead to conclusions that restricted the freedom of industry, funding lines, career paths and research institutes were established to create a permanent counter-evidentiary avenue. In the process of which establishing one difference between technology and science.
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