Science takes a hit on Election Day
BY DAN GILLMOR
Eric Schmidt and James Cameron
The Democrats weren't the only big loser in yesterday's election.
Science got clobbered, too.
Fueled by disdain for government interference with business and tanker
loads of cash from the energy industry and its allies, the Republican
party has been moving steadily into the denial camp on global climate
change, or at least deep skepticism. And it's practically an article of
faith among the tea-party activist crowd.
A recent survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press
showed a yawning gap between Democrats and Republicans over the issue,
with
just 38 percent of Republicans believing that the earth is getting
warmer -- a belief that drops to 23 percent among tea party Republicans.
By every account, the Republican takeover of the House is likely to derail
any possibility of serious action on climate change during at least the
next two years, longer if President Obama is defeated in 2012.
And Republicans in the House have vowed to go to war against the Obama
administration's environmental policies, including its (too tepid)
approach
to climate change. Republicans have proclaimed their intention to use
their
new investigatory powers -- the majority party controls congressional
investigations -- to go after
climate scientists.
The Republican attack on science is nothing new. The Bush administration
made an art form of it, not just on climate but by supporting such
anti-science initiatives as creationism; at one point during his
presidency George W. Bush said he thought intelligent design should be
taught in class as the other side of the issue, implying two roughly
equal sides to an issue where essentially all the scientific evidence
supports evolution and virtually none supports creationism.
The war on science has extended into the classrooms of America.
Biologists are constantly warding off creationists' efforts to put
"intelligent design" (the standard code word for creationism) into the
curriculum. Climate science will likely face even more hostility,
especially given the moneyed interests fighting to curb
the truth. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent so freely to elect
the Republican House, has ginned up a "teaching guide" in collaboration
with a textbook publisher that should know better to persuade kids that
we
can't afford to save the planet.
There's at least one major industry in this country that absolutely
relies on workers who don't deny reality, and who need to have learned
well in math and science. It's the technology industry, the leaders of
which are constantly wailing about the lousy quality of American
schools.
Most of the tech leaders were silent on creationism, shamefully so. At
least a few, including Google's Eric Schmidt, have offered their
opinions that global climate change is a serious issue that we have to
deal with sooner than later. Schmidt made that point rather forcefully
last week during a Churchill Club conversation with film director and
environmental activist James Cameron.
The tech industry as a whole has been loath to take on causes that don't
have a direct impact on its own immediate bottom line. But what better
cause could there be than to defend science, the bedrock of everything
that makes this industry work.
No group of leaders, speaking out loudly in defense of science and
against propaganda, could have a greater impact on this critically
important issue. Time is running out for them, and for all of us.
Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital
Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite
School of Journalism & Mass Communication.