May 6, 2015 The G.O.P.’s War on Science Gets Worse By Elizabeth Kolbert http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/elizabeth-kolbert
During last fall’s midterm election campaign, “I’m not a scientist” became a standard Republican answer to questions about climate change. The line seemed to invite parody, and Stephen Colbert (among others) obliged. He played clips of House Speaker John Boehner, then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Florida Governor Rick Scott all offering, more or less word for word, the same refrain. “Everyone who denies climate change has the same stirring message,” Colbert observed http://gawker.com/stephen-colbert-calls-out-im-not-a-scientist-climate-1656115561. “ ‘We don’t know what the fuck we’re talking about.’ ”
The line worked—or, at least, didn’t *not *work—and Republicans won both houses of Congress. Now, it seems, they are trying to go one better. They are trying to prevent even scientists from being scientists.
Last week, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, headed by Texas Republican Lamar Smith, approved a bill that would slash at least three hundred million dollars from NASA’s earth-science budget. “Earth science, of course, includes climate science,” Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat who is also on the committee, noted http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/240549-congress-we-have-a-problem. (Smith said http://www.hq.nasa.gov/legislative/hearings/4-16-2015_SMITH_OPENING_STATEMENT.pdf that the White House’s NASA budget request favored the earth sciences “at the expense of the other science divisions and human and robotic space exploration.”) Johnson tried to get the cuts eliminated from the bill, but her proposed amendment was rejected. Defunding NASA’s earth-science program takes willed ignorance one giant leap further. It means that not only will climate studies be ignored; some potentially useful data won’t even be collected.
The vote brought howls of protest from NASA itself and from wider earth-science circles. The agency’s administrator, Charles Bolden, issued a statement http://www.wset.com/story/28947047/nasa-administrator-statement-on-house-authorization-bill saying that the bill “guts our Earth science program and threatens to set back generations worth of progress in better understanding our changing climate.” In an opinion piece for the Washington* Post*, Marshall Shepherd, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Georgia and the former president of the American Meteorological Association, said that he could not sleep after hearing about the vote. “None of us has a ‘vacation planet’ we can go to for the weekend, so I argue that NASA’s mission to study planet Earth should be a ‘no-brainer,’ ” he wrote http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/05/01/cutting-nasas-earth-science-budget-is-short-sighted-and-a-threat/ .
The vote on the NASA bill came just a week after the same House committee approved major funding cuts to the National Science Foundation’s geosciences program, as well as cuts to Department of Energy programs that support research into new energy sources. As Michael Hiltzik http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-gop-attack-on-climate-change-science-20150501-column.html, a columnist for the Los Angeles *Times,* noted, the committee is “living down to our worst expectations.”
The practical implications of the proposed cuts are certainly disturbing. (It’s going to be hard for D.O.E. to find new energy sources if it isn’t even looking for them.) But perhaps even more distressing is the mindset that led to them. The “I’m not a scientist” line is basically a declaration of willed ignorance. You might think people entrusted by voters to craft public policy would be embarrassed to acknowledge, to paraphrase Colbert, that they have no idea what they’re talking about, and don’t want to.
“Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what? I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and at N.O.A.A., and at our major universities,” President Barack Obama put it a few few months ago, in his State of the Union address https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/01/20/remarks-president-state-union-address-january-20-2015, referring to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “And the best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate.”
Cutting NASA and the N.S.F.’s climate-science budgets isn’t going to alter the basic realities of climate change. No one needs an advanced degree to understand this. Indeed, the idea that ignoring a problem isn’t going to make it go away is one that kids should grasp by the time they’re six or seven. But ignoring a problem does often make it more difficult to solve. And that, you have to assume, in a perverse way, is the goal here. What we don’t know, we can’t act on.
“It’s hard to believe that in order to serve an ideological agenda, the majority is willing to slash the science that helps us have a better understanding of our home planet,” Representative Johnson wrote. Hard to believe, but, unfortunately, true. ----------------------------------------
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at *The New Yorker* since 1999.