A Scientist’s Reaction to The New Anti-Science Leaders of Congressional Science Committees

There are many national and science repercussions of putting anti-science Republicans into the Chairs of Senate and House science committees and sub-committees. There are also a lot of personal reactions of scientists and those who rely on science to these choices and to the effects on scientists and science that will result from their policies over probably at least the next four to six years or more.

Scientists are not just scientists as a job. They have essentially adopted the belief in science as the way that knowledge can be gained about life, the earth, and the universe. They hold themselves and their colleagues to the highest standards of honesty and thoroughness in their work, and in their approving of and using government grants. While they tolerate expressions of anti-science under freedom of thought, speech, and perhaps religion, they know that given a fair hearing, that settled science can win the day. The fact that the science and technology committees are now run by anti-scientists and in some cases religionists who will not conduct fair hearings or policies for deciding funding is a severe disappointment and a very practical setback for science, for scientists, for their present and future students, and for the worldwide respect and competitiveness of US science and US industries and American jobs.

The fact that these anti-science committee heads and majorities are politicians who are really servants to their monied backers of polluting or other industries is well known to everybody, and a great danger to the interests of the US public. It is the recent freedom of determined funding by such industrial billionaires and their companies to subjugate government to their robots and manipulation that have brought this about at all levels of government, and have undermined our Democracy.

The politicians who deny scientific expertise or mislead the public about the overwhelming agreement of scientists, are not fooling a lot of people who accept science. They know that these politicians are just taking positions to support their donors, or key voters in their party or their party’s primaries.

Some parts of the public believe in the religious, anti-science, approach to issues, not knowing that you can be both religious and scientifically oriented, as the Catholic Church has recognized.

Of course scientists know that scientific knowledge will win out, despite determined efforts to defund certain areas, as in climate change, economics, politics, and the effects of guns on America. It’s just that the US may not lead the way if areas of research are defunded.

Leading countries around the world are science oriented, and dedicated to educating more scientists and engineers, and are basing their industrial development on it. The United States will only look foolish with anti-science politicians running its congressional budgets. The anti-science committees may also carry out hearings which will provide nonsense about climate change, pollution, and other subjects well understood around the world. That would be very embarrassing to US scientists and the country as a whole. Anti-scientists may well self reinforce with their fellow anti-science legislators and backers, as well as Fox News, and start believing the anti-scientists that they will call up, without being aware of how silly the hearings appear.

The basic fallacy of claims of not knowing or trusting scientists is that everything in our modern life was researched by scientists and designed by engineers using science. If you did not believe in science and scientists, how could you trust driving a car, flying in an airplane, even turning on a complex electronic system such as a computer or tv set. How could such congressmen fund such complex and potentially dangerous systems as the manned space program or the space station? How could they work for oil companies that carry out complex deep sea drilling projects or massive fracking arrays without trusting in their science and engineering? How could farm state congressmen rely on improved crops and livestock using genetics without believing in evolution that is mapped by the same genetic analyses?

Holding embarrassing anti-science hearings is only going to embarrass and sully the reputations and billionaires of the companies that fund anti-science legislators. After years of Benghazi and IRS political bias hearings, the House committee turned up no large scale conspiracies, and those hearings are now considered as purely politically motivated. Even Fox News, which wasted a vast amount of time covering them, got nothing real out of them. It is odd that Sen. Jim Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma (oil and natural gas), and Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, claims that man-caused global warming is the biggest science fraud ever. It sounds like a lot more time in the Senate committee will now be wasted on such nonsense, embarrassing the oil companies and billionaires that back Sen. Inhofe and other Republican members of the committee.

Oil and natural gas companies actually depend on a lot of geological science for exploring and new drilling engineering techniques, and chemistry and physics to design fracking and well sealing to make them leak proof. All of their scientists and engineers have to believe in science, and many undoubtedly understand the science behind global warming, and its main cause by fossil fuel emissions. The geologists also know that all of geology is based on the science of a 4.5 billion years old earth. Finally, the funders of anti-science politicians, the Koch brothers, all have chemical engineering degrees from MIT. David Koch also funds the scientific NOVA series. This has to be embarrassing to all of these company scientists to use the profits of their successful companies to fund anti-science politicians and such a viewpoint.

A majority of liberal and moderate Republicans believe in global warming (66%) , but not conservative Republicans (28%). The majority of the American public, 61%, believe in warming and 51% believe it is due to human activities. A new study says that 56% of Republicans want action to reduce climate. It can’t be a long range advantage to the Republican party, or to its goal of electing a President, to take such unreasonable anti-science stances. People want high paying jobs in technical industries, and don’t want America to lose its leadership in science education or in science discovery or innovation.

I hope in this essay that I have made it clear that an anti-science stand benefits neither the Republican party, nor their billionaire and industrial funders, nor the anti-science politicians that aspire to rise in political status and position.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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