from US Republican Party operatives. Within days of taking office in September of 2013, for example, Australian prime minister Tony Abbott—who had, in 2010, said, “The climate-change argument is absolute crap. However, the politics are tough for us because 80 percent of people believe climate change is a real and present danger”—followed Harper’s lead and abolished the position of minister for science, a post that had existed since 1931.
In 2010, his predecessor, Labor (political left) prime minister Julia Gillard, had said, “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” Australia is a major producer of coal, worth about $60 billion annually, and Australians emit more carbon dioxide (CO2) per capita—at the time, about 18 tons annually—than anyone except Saudi Arabians.
To form a minority government, however, Gillard cut a deal with the Greens in Parliament and agreed to a “carbon price.” She immediately found herself the focus of a public-relations attack that coordinated right-wing talk-radio personalities, Rupert Murdoch–owned newspapers (whose articles ran 82 percent negative), the conservative coalition parties, and mining companies.
The tax-by-another-name went into effect in 2011 and was held up by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a model for other nations. But it drew more climate-denial public-relations efforts as the global environmental battle briefly shifted to Australia, ultimately costing Gillard her position as prime minister. Abbott, who at the time was the Liberal (political right) opposition leader and was running for prime minister, made a “pledge in blood” to repeal the tax. After being elected, he succeeded.
Send in the Clowns
In 2012, in an effort to retain power and court Christian conservative swing voters, Gillard had also pushed through a program funding chaplains in secular public schools nationally, something that had already been in practice in the state of Queensland. Australia’s high court struck the program down as unconstitutional, but in 2014 Abbott used a legal technicality to provide $244 million to restore the program, sending 2,339 religious workers into schools across Australia. Trained Humanist chaplains and secular mental-health workers were excluded. Prominent astronomer and atheist Lawrence Krauss suggested that the idea that the chaplains would not be preaching in school was ridiculous: “It’s like sending in clowns and telling them not to be funny.”
Antiscience, now legitimized and empowered by top Australian government officials, began spreading. In early 2013, Merilyn Haines, an activist for the innocuous-sounding Queenslanders for Safe Water, began traveling across the state, urging city councils to stop water fluoridation. Fluoride, a naturally occurring nutrient, helps prevent tooth decay and promotes healthy bone growth. It has been used in public water supplies for seventy years, and health officials have identified it as “one of 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century.” In fact, since fluoride occurs naturally in well water to varying degrees, the correct term for what cities do is really “fluoride regulation,” i.e., adding it or removing it as necessary to achieve the optimum health benefit at .7 to 1.2 mg per litre.
In Queensland, however, the government made its use optional. “I look forward to listening to all views this evening,” said a Charters Towers city councilor, and Haines told the council of how fluoride is “used as a schedule six poison” and “as an insecticide, particularly for roaches and ants,” as well as for “electroplating.”
“Please take it out,” another woman told the Fraser Coast Regional Council. “It’s killing Earth and the rest of us.” A man testified, “It’s a toxic by-product that cost manufactures a lot of money to dispose of so instead we want to have it our water for to us drink it.”
Within weeks, nine cities encompassing almost a half a million residents abandoned the public-health measure. Moreton Bay Regional Councilor James Houghton, who believes fluoridation is mass medication without consent, explained why he was pushing for removal:
I’m not wrong. Galileo was proven right even though they said he was wrong. Columbus was proven right when others said he was wrong. When I was younger they used to spray us with DDT. Spray us! That’s been proven wrong. So science is—makes themselves, provided there’s proper research done—they will come up and prove previous reports wrong, so I’ve adopted an old adage, when in doubt, anyway, leave out. When in doubt, leave out.
Lawrence Springborg, health minister for Queensland, defended the new optional policy with classic Tea Party–like rhetoric. “We understand people want to make different decisions to central government agencies and not be dictated to and we respect that as well,” Springborg told Matt Wordsworth of ABC News. “We just ask them to have a debate on all the information, if upon that they feel they’re uncomfortable to proceed with fluoridation, we do respect that.”
Astounded, Wordsworth asked him, “Even if it’s to their own detriment?”
“That’s a very subjective thing,” Springborg replied.
With repeal of the carbon price, religious chaplains in secular public schools, fluoridation elimination, and other issues, Australian antiscience was in full swing. In 2015, on the day after Pope Francis urged world leaders to cut back on fossil-fuel emissions, the Abbott government appointed a “wind czar” to crack down on wind farms, and to research whether they might damage people’s health. Australians have “concerns over the localized impacts of wind energy and they deserve a right to be heard,” said Environment Minister Greg Hunt.
Banning fluoride wasn’t just an Aussie problem—it was happening worldwide. On the other side of the Pacific, the left-leaning US city of Portland, Oregon, voted in May of that year to ban fluoridation. Ban supporters called the mineral a “toxin” and pointed to a discredited propaganda piece that linked fluoride to IQ problems, despite the fact that no such problems have been observed in seventy years of use in the United States. The piece was most likely the spur that drove a worldwide wave of antifluoridation campaigns. Other North American cities banned fluoride as well, including the conservative cities of Calgary, Alberta, and Wichita, Kansas, where the Kansas Republican Assembly campaigned for the ban, and dozens of other, smaller cities. Across the Atlantic, the city council in Dublin, Ireland, voted to oppose it, while the entire country of Israel banned fluoride after Health Minister Yael German, a history major and former mayor, ruled it must be removed from public water supplies over the criticisms of medical associations. Previously she had raised health concerns over cell-phone towers.
Eugenics
In Western Europe, many more countries decided against fluoridation, including Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Scotland, and Sweden. In the EU, however, the antiscience purity quest was mostly focused not on what we drink but on what we eat, with conservatives complaining that liberals were panicking over genetically modified food.
“There is a danger, almost unintentionally, that we become antiscience,” British prime minister Tony Blair had warned in 2000, speaking of increasing attacks by Green Party members and progressives against government scientists who worked with genetically modified crops. Genetic engineering is, in Europe, still politically tied to the Nazi practice of eugenics, and therefore still causes strong political reactions. Additionally, in Northern Europe especially, the left-wing focus on alternative medicine, holistic health, and bodily purity are major concerns that, when taken to an extreme, drive widespread opposition to fluoride, vaccinations, and genetically modified foods, all antiscience problems that are common in the EU.
While GM crops pose some legitimate economic-justice concerns, science does not support the contention of many anti-GM activists that they are unhealthy to eat. To the contrary, genetic engineering is safer than previous plant-breeding methods because it is more precise, altering just one or a few genes under controlled circumstances instead of blindly altering many through hybridization, or exposing plants to radiation, carcinogenic chemicals, or both in order to cause mutations, a process called mutagenesis (plants modified using mutagenesis can, however, be labeled as “organic”). “Our conviction about what is natural or right should not inhibit the role of science in discovering the truth,” Blair said. “Rather, it should inform our judgment about the implications and consequences of the truth science uncovers.”
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