about a dozen environmental reporters still standing throughout the five largest US newspapers—with the Los Angeles Times the only one to still have an environmental desk—at a time when the US and the world face the gravest environmental issues in human history.
As a result, we now live in a dangerous situation, when many major challenges revolve around science, and few reporters are covering them. That means they tend to get far less attention than they deserve. Some efforts have emerged to combat this. England’s Science Media Centre seeks to provide general-assignment reporters with the science angle on major policy stories, and similar centers have been set up in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Nonprofit news outlets have begun to spring up, some focusing on the expensive professions of investigative or science reporting. And blogging is creating a new, intimate relationship between educated readers and scientists.
In continental Europe, science coverage has actually increased in the mainstream media. A 2008 analysis of prime-time news on selected European TV stations, for example, showed that there were 218 science-related stories (including science and technology, environment, and health) among the 2,676 news stories aired during the same week in the years 2003 and 2004, an elevenfold increase since 1989.
The European Union of Science Journalists’ Associations, under the leadership of Hanns-J. Neubert and Wolfgang Goede, also promoted a 2009 German parliamentary science debate patterned loosely on the US effort, and similar efforts have begun in Estonia, as well as Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, and the EU as a whole. Goede considers it an essential component of modern democracy, an argument he and I have made together to journalists around the world. The group is also pushing a new initiative called NUCLEUS, along with some two dozen universities across Europe and in Beijing, to devise other ways that scientific institutions can work to counter the communication gap between science and the public.
In the developing world, science reporting is described, for the time being, as “flourishing,” but journalists there have reported that many of the same problems are beginning to emerge.
Congressional Antiscience
Of course, the war on science isn’t limited to presidential campaigns and the media. It is present in city councils, state legislatures, and congressional and parliamentary delegations the world over, particularly in several of the leading democracies with strong corporate economies and liberal interpretations of the right to freedom of expression.
In the US Congress, the war first began to widely emerge in the religious and patriotic fervor following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center by terrorists from the fundamentalist Islamist group al-Qaeda. In April of 2002, then–house majority whip Tom DeLay (R-TX) quoted the evangelical Christian authors of a 1999 book when he told a Texas church group, “Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation.” DeLay, who would soon become House majority leader, said he wanted to promote “a biblical worldview” in American politics. “Our entire system is built on the Judeo-Christian ethic, but it fell apart when we started denying God,” he had said in 2001. After the 1999 Columbine school shootings, DeLay had given a speech on the House floor in which, his voice dripping with sarcasm, he suggested the tragedy “couldn’t have been because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud by teaching evolution as fact.” Ironically, DeLay’s Bachelor of Science degree, from the University of Houston, was in biology.
DeLay’s views ran throughout his caucus, particularly among the increasingly powerful baby boomers in the House. In March of 2002, eventual house speaker John Boehner (R-OH) wrote to the Ohio State Board of Education to urge that the state’s science curriculum content standards require teaching creationism, saying,
It’s important that the implementation of these science standards not be used to censor debate on controversial issues in science, including Darwin’s theory of evolution. . . . Students should be allowed to hear the scientific arguments on more than one side of a controversial topic. Censorship of opposing points of view retards true scholarship and prevents students from developing their critical thinking skills.
This language was coded to boost creationists, who were promoting their “scientific” argument for “intelligent design” in the latest attack on the teaching of evolution. There is no scientific controversy about the theory of evolution. Boehner’s letter was antiscience doublespeak.
Antiscience grew politically stronger as evangelicals were swept into public office in the years immediately following 9/11. Their early battles were over the teaching of evolution in public schools and the anticipated arrival of gay marriage, but they were also upset about scientific characterizations of origins, from the big bang to the scientific definition of when a woman can be said to be pregnant, all of which they saw as an assault on Christian values. The willingness to reject science by these candidates and the vast numbers of motivated foot soldiers they had drawn into the ranks of the GOP provided a unique opportunity for vested corporate interests increasingly vulnerable to political action on climate change.
Outvoting Galileo
The amount of money those vested interests—particularly those aligned with the energy and extraction industries (oil, gas, coal, and minerals)—were willing to spend to battle science, and the power of their public-relations efforts to do so, became the overriding force in American politics for the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
In February 2009, President Obama asked Congress to send him legislation that placed a market-based cap on carbon emissions. The House passed the bill later that summer, with eight Republican votes. Throughout 2009 and 2010, raging battles were fought in GOP primaries throughout the country as energy-industry-funded groups recruited and promoted Tea Party candidates to run against Republicans who had voted for the cap-and-trade bill, utilizing evangelical Republican foot soldiers, and knocking the offenders out with relatively small investments. Climate science became equated with Obama and socialism in Republican talking points, and the technique of bashing science or promoting brazenly antiscientific positions became a political identity statement. By late 2010, fully ninety-four of one hundred newly elected Republican members of Congress either denied that global warming was happening (it was all a vast hoax by scientists, they said) or signed pledges to oppose mitigation.
By the 2012 elections, when Republican presidential hopefuls hit the campaign trail, they were propelled by a strong antiscientific wind. It became a predictable pattern: when a conservative candidate was sinking in the polls, he or she would make an antiscience statement in an effort to get a bounce. Texas Governor Rick Perry compared himself to Galileo when denying in a Florida primary debate that climate science is settled. “The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at—at—at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet, to me, is just—is nonsense. I mean, it—I mean—and I tell somebody, I said, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell.”
It seemed lost on Perry that the people who “outvoted” Galileo were the members of the Roman Catholic Inquisition, who, like Perry, chose ideology over science. The US National Academy of Sciences had in 2010 stated that man-made climate change was supported by so many independent lines of data that its existence and causes should be “regarded as settled facts.”
Other candidates made similar antiscientific assertions. Herman Cain, who was previously well-respected in business circles, said that “man-made global warming is poppycock.” Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a former IRS tax attorney and an ardent evangelical campaigner against gay marriage, talked of how the human papillomavirus vaccine had caused “mental retardation,” while Congressman Ron Paul, a medical doctor, agreed that it was “not good medicine.” Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, also an attorney, said “absolutely not, I don’t believe in” evolution. Even Newt Gingrich, an academic historian who once told me, “I’m very interested in doing anything I can to support science” and signed on as a supporter of ScienceDebate.org, felt compelled to announce that he was “opposed to killing children in order to get research material.” He was talking