More Accusations of Scientific Abuse by the Bush Administration

Saeed al-Sahaf writes "Last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists released new evidence that the Bush Administration continues to suppress and distort scientific knowledge and undermine scientific advisory panels. Of course we're not talking about such subjective issues like stem cell research which Bush objects to on religious grounds. Here we are talking about money. The cases discussed in this story detail incidents of suppression and distortion of scientific knowledge on issues ranging from mountaintop removal strip mining to endangered species such as wild Salmon in the Pacific Northwest."

Comments

Re:Speaking as a scientist

[wanerious]

Call me cynical, but the person who wrote that letter is probably not someone running for office. Any timeline in which George W Bush offers an interpretation on subatomic particle interaction is simply not a solution to the Einstein field equations. It is not allowed in this Universe.

Having said that, the context of this undermining is not clear. Certainly the administration may interpret scientific data any way they choose in forming political action, just as we are free to vote them out if we disagree with their policies or actions. Undermining access to the full set of data, however, should be a crime.

Snore...

[Bluesman]

When the Union of Concerned Economists starts bashing Bush, then I'll be worried.

First of all, blaming the "Bush administration" for the actions of many varied government agencies is a bit disingenous. Does anyone suppose the FDA takes daily orders from the White House? Our government just doesn't work like that.

Second, what [these particular] scientists seem to lack is a sense of perspective. There are no solutions to real-world problems. There are only trade-offs. Sure, it would be great to have perfectly clean water, but at what point is "clean enough?" How much effort do you spend saving one endangered species?

If your answer to any of these is "more!" then you haven't considered that our society, government, companies and individuals can only spend so much money and effort. Spending it all on one area leaves other, possibly more important areas unattended to.

Science is about finding ideal solutions. Politics, and economics, is about managing a finite number of resources to accomplish things. Yes, it hurts when you recommend that a rare swan be saved and nobody listens, but it's likely you don't have any clue what the trade-off would be.

Re:Two points

[meta-monkey]

The administration did not say that non-stem-cell research funding will be cut from any organization that conducts stem-cell research, only that the government will not fund stem-cell research.

Yes, I understand how many people stem-cell research will help, and I'm all for this research. However, I'm not in favor of the government paying for it. What will happen is that taxpayers will fund the research, and then drug companies will take the result of this research and gouge the public that paid for it to begin with. Instead, let the drug companies pay for it themselves. True, it's very expensive. However, a single drug company does not have to fund the entire scope of stem-cell research, only the part of interest to them. As they stand to reap enormous profits for developing new drugs or treatments based on stem-cell research, they should pay the costs, not me.