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Politics and 'An Inconvenient Truth'
Frogbeater writes "The producer of 'An Inconvenient Truth' is accusing the National Science Teachers Association of being in the pocket of Big Oil because she can't get preferential treatment for her film. The entire situation is turning into a 'if you're not with us, you're against us' yelling match. Regardless of the viewpoint, is it even possible that science can remain apolitical? Has it ever been?" The Washington Post makes things out to be less than above board: "In the past year alone, according to its Web site, Exxon Mobil's foundation gave $42 million to key organizations that influence the way children learn about science, from kindergarten until they graduate from high school ... NSTA's list of corporate donors also includes Shell Oil and the American Petroleum Institute (API), which funds NSTA's Web site on the science of energy. There, students can find a section called 'Running on Oil' and read a page that touts the industry's environmental track record -- citing improvements mostly attributable to laws that the companies fought tooth and nail, by the way -- but makes only vague references to spills or pollution. NSTA has distributed a video produced by API called 'You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel,' a shameless pitch for oil dependence."
-Hypothetical: Let's say you run a business, and people start making what you believe to be baseless accusations about the environmental impact of your business. What do you do? NO, WAIT: You can't fund anyone who tries to scientifically demonstrate the invalidity of the accusations, because that taints the research, right?
-I remember seeing in science class a movie produced by Exxon about the Valdez oil spill. While it was propaganda, I also remember the teacher pointing out all the flaws and telling everyone that it was Exxon's propaganda. "Oh, look at this part, where they act like everything's all peachy now."
-Oh, so *now* you care about teachers' associations getting political. Just not when they oppose any whiff of school choice.
-Should no research into oil be funded by oil companies? Even basic research into hydrocarbon chemistry? That seems to be the implication.
-To answer the question: yes, science can remain apolitical, as long as it rigidly adheres to the scientfic principles of reproducibility and transparency. That's what makes science science: Even if someone refuses to believe you, it doesn't matter. Other people can perform their own corroborating experiments. Even if someone believes it to be all voodoo, you can then go out and continue to make valid predictions that result in useful services. And then anyone is free to propose alternate theories that match the data better.
When the above isn't possible, science can become political. When you can't make a thousand copies of the earth, causally separate them, randomly vary emissions, wait a hundred years, and run a regression, people have all the room the in world to reject your theories since it can't have the repeated empirical validation science relies on. When you can't engineer an entire planet's existence, start a weather system, wait a billion years, and see complex organisms evolve, you again don't have the repeated empirical validation science relies on. BEFORE YOU FLAME ME OR MOD ME DOWN, I'm not trying to dispute global warming or evolution, but rather, just pointing that you can't come up with the plain-as-day prediction and validation you can in other areas.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
...to the known universe. In other words, *everything* has a political dimension to it. Politics is unavoidable.
What needs to be avoided is not politics but the temptation to distort scientific findings and inquiries to match preconceived ideas that support entrenched political interests.
We're pretty terrible at that. But it might not take a genius amount of forethought to understand that putting Al Gore's name on the movie doesn't help to de-politicize the issue.
I mean, duh.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
A week ago slashdot had a story about the inconvenient truth DVD was out, and to go buy it, and about how noble Gore is. I realized, the movie was in theaters first, then the DVD came out, and it hasn't been on tv yet. Isn't that how you maximize profits from a movie? If I was all noble and I made a movie I genuinely felt people needed to see to save the earth, wouldn't I just give it to PBS on day 1?
Just to add and what a cursory review can turn up:
Junkscience.com
The most visible public activity of TASSC [The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) was an tobacco-industry-funded lobby group which promoted the idea that environmental science was "junk science", which should be replaced by "sound science" more favorable to corporate interests] was its support for the Junk Science website run by Steven Milloy, who describes himself as the "Junkman". Milloy denounces research on environmental issues such as climate change, pollution and public health as junk science if it produced results suggesting a need for public intervention or regulation. He promoted the idea of sound science, interpreted in practice to mean science favorable to corporate interests.
Adverse publicity about Milloy's links to Phillip Morris were followed by his departure from the Cato Institute, where he had been an adjunct fellow, at the end of 2005, and the removal of links to junkscience.org from the Cato website. However, Milloy remains influential as the science columnist for Fox News.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advancement_of_Sound
Allow me for one to say that I am sick of the "Christians are anti-science" bullshit that the left loves to harp on while giving the environmental movement a free pass. You will notice, if you are honest, that the areas where even the most fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible conflict with modern scientific work are in areas that Christians have an **ethical** objection to the way that life is manipulated or ended or in how things came to be on some level. The environmental movement on the other hand is generally wildly antagonistic to everything from GM foods to many promising alternative energy sources to nanotechnology.
If there is any group that can be called anti-human, anti-science, it is the "true believer" segment of the environmental movement. No other politically active group is so thoroughly terrified of every promising area of research and development, so violent in opposing science (animal rights groups bombing research labs, for example) and so quick to limit the quality of life of the majority of the human race.
When I graduated high school years ago, our Chemistry II class used a college-level textbook. The education I got from that class was good enough that I sailed through freshman Chemistry in college.
The year after I graduated, I went back to visit a few teachers I considered to be friends, including the chemistry teacher. She told me with some disgust that the school board had decided to replace the chemistry textbooks for both Chem I and II, and she handed me one of the books so I could see what the problem was. Instead of college-prep chemistry, most of the textbook was filled with text and pictures (rather than equations and homework problems) about protecting the environment. The quality of the actual chemistry education provided in that book was so low that I suspected that many students would have insufficient background for their freshman-level chemistry classes they'd be taking next year.
In other words, Big Oil isn't the only lobbying group that attempts to influence high school education.
Do you think that industry-created "think tank" fronts are in any way comparable to scientists working on grants? Have you considered that a scientist who fakes evidence and fudges numbers to garner reputation is taking a tremendous risk of being utterly discredited and never trusted again, while these "think tanks" can do so with impunity, secure in the knowledge that the funds will keep rolling in?
Your attempts at drawing a moral equivalence are feeble, and were I a working scientist, I'd probably be offended.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca