It's difficult to know how to maintain one's sense of outrage these days. Am I surprised to learn that the House Govern Reform Committee says that its "16-month investigation reveals a systematic White House effort to censor climate scientists by controlling their access to the press and editing testimony to Congress." Well, no, I'm not surprised. So am I shocked by the revelation? I guess I'm not. But is it shocking that this sort of thing has become par for the course? Well, yes it is. After all, this isn't some trivial little thing being kept under the rug; it's probably the most important issue facing the country.
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Censoring Climate Scientists
11 Dec 2007 09:52 am
Comments (24)
So a standard question for administration apointees at every Congressional hearing becomes 'has any person in your department been told not to provide evidence to congress by you or any member of your staff.'
Gee, the bosses were the bosses and the employees weren't. I'm shocked.
Apparently in left-wing world, the employees are the bosses and the bosses should do what the employees tell them to!
The evidence mounts that the Bush White House acts more and more like the Breshnev-era Kremlin, and the right applauds. Outstanding.
I am delighted to hear you say this is probably the most important issue facing the country. The liberal blogosphere -- which loves to focus on politics -- has generally been pretty lax on global warming issues.
al, you gotta try a little harder: as keynes tells us, people are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.
when bosses use their position to substitute their own opinions for facts, we should be outraged. why aren't you? do you believe that this report identifies defensible behavior? if so, why don't you go ahead and come up with a way to defend it?
Apparently in left-wing world, the employees are the bosses and the bosses should do what the employees tell them to!
In right-wing world, "just following orders" has always been a favorite excuse. So it's hardly surprising that refusing to follow unconscionable orders elicits scorn in the authorarian mnid. But really, you've got to do a little better than this. Start by defending the White House decision to censor the material in the first place. Then whine about those pesky employees refusing to follow orders.
That would the proper progesssion in troll-speak.
The most important issues facing the country are enacting further tax cuts for corporations and the upper most tiers of individual income earners. And killing non-Christian brown people. And marginalizing and oppressing those icky gay perverts. Get with the program.
Al, federal employees are supposed to be able to do their jobs free of political interference. It's why organizations like NOAA are located far, far outside the beltway and why the managerial distance between a scientist and a political appointee is as far as possible.
Scientists discover facts. Politicians are free to set policy based on those facts. Politicians cannot, however, dictate what facts may and may not be discovered, nor is their job to serve the interests of "the Party."
A1, I am afraid this isn't limited to the 'liberal blogosphere.' Contrary to your assessment, the bosses of these climate scientists are you and me. (Is it different in the 'conservative blogosphere?') If these scientists have discovered something that is relevant to you and me, they should have unfettered access to their bosses, we the people. Finally, if information is requested by Congress, and that information is suppressed or censored by the White House and global warming is indeed a threat to our commonwealth, there should be criminal consequences.
I would question how you see the world differently but I doubt we will learn. This is about the stage of the conversation where you conveniently disappear.
Just to clarify, the job of the federal scientists is not to serve the interests of "The Party." The the facts discovered by said scientists are public property, not proprietary findings that can only be released at the discretion of the politicians.
Where my outrage meter is being pegged these days is the complete inability of the Democratic Congress to do anything about all these outrages besides hold hearings and bluster.
Fine. We know that Bush Admin officials have been suppressing important climate science information. Now what?
Do something Congress. Oversight isn't supposed to be a passive activity.
It's far from just climate science. Read Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science to get a picture of the full extent of executive branch interference with and suppression of science.
A1, I am afraid this isn't limited to the 'liberal blogosphere.' Contrary to your assessment, the bosses of these climate scientists are you and me. (Is it different in the 'conservative blogosphere?')
I would say that their bosses is the Administration that "you and me" elected.
I don't know where you work, but where I work, the guy in the mailroom doesn't get to tell the world what the company's policies are. Heck, not even the guy hired as the PR spokesman gets to determine by himself what to tell the public on behalf of the organization.
Al, federal employees are supposed to be able to do their jobs free of political interference. It's why organizations like NOAA are located far, far outside the beltway and why the managerial distance between a scientist and a political appointee is as far as possible.
Scientists discover facts. Politicians are free to set policy based on those facts. Politicians cannot, however, dictate what facts may and may not be discovered, nor is their job to serve the interests of "the Party."
I agree with all that. Scientists discover facts. They do not decide when and how those facts are to be made public. They do not decide either policy or public relations. As far as I can tell, the scientists were perfectly free to "discover facts". They apparently disagreed with the Administrations PR strategy and policies. Which aren't the scientists' purview.
While I would discourage anyone from ever, under any circumstances, speaking to the press as a member of any organization, in the case of the federal government, data and scientific discoveries made by federally-funded scientists are public property. For politicians to interfere with this process is simply unacceptable.
If you want to have absolute control over the flow of information, join the private sector or a government organization which deals in secret data. Political interference in the release of public property by scientists whose job it is to release their data is exactly the sort of political interference that our laws were meant to prevent.
I suspect that conservatives' (including Al's) shock at the fact that people would be shocked by this comes from their authoritarian mindset ("what do you MEAN we can't dictate who the scientists can speak to and what they can say???") which is antithetical to the scientific and intellectual process, and it's another reason why the authoritarian conservatives who dominate the Republican party should never, ever, be allowed to have any role in government, outside of maybe positions in accounting. The mindset is simply at odds with effective delivery of government services and effective collection of needed facts and data to determine policy directions.
"it's probably the most important issue facing the country."
The time frame is too long for that to be true.
I think peak oil is the most pressing issue. Regular unleaded is at $3 a gallon in the US and diesel set an all-time high 2 weeks ago. This is just a harbinger of things to come. The price is not going down.
http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/
Many people in the oil and energy industries feel that it will become impossible to meet the demand for oil within the next 10-15 years. "Some 37.5 million barrels a day of additional oil-production capacity is needed by 2015, but only 25 million barrels a day are planned, International Energy Agency Chief Economist Fatih Birol said." That was released today.
See here: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3336.
I believe in global climate change. However, I don't think it's likely to cause catastrophic problems in the next decade. I think it's probable that dwindling oil supplies will.
So AL is basically saying the scientists can do as much research as they want, we just don't get to hear about it.
Al (presuming Al is a non-parody - I must admit I've become increasingly curious as to the nature(s) of that entity) - imagine the following Bizarro-world situation situation:
1) Al Gore is sworn in as President following the 2000 elections.
2) He pushes for serious, large-scale action to fight climate change, despite an ever-growing scientific consensus that it's a) not significantly manmade & b) not a real problem, and despite convincing arguments that his efforts would cause severe social and economic damage.
3) It comes out that there has been a systematic effort by the Gore White House
"to censor [government] climate scientists [who, based on their research, were making the above points a) and b)] by controlling their access to the press and editing testimony to Congress . . . [and it] was particularly active in stifling discussions of the lack of a link between increased hurricane intensity and global warming. The White House also sought to minimize the insignificance and uncertainty of climate change by extensively editing government climate change reports. Other actions taken by the White House involved editing EPA legal opinions and op-eds on climate change."
Would this be ok?
this is the kind of bind Al gets himself into by knee-jerk reaction: no, NOAA scientists do not just work for the president. they work for congress, too, whom we also elected to represent us: indeed, we elected congress to determine how money is spent, if you want to get all structural about it, and therefore, through our represetatives in congress, we want to hear what federally funded research is determining.
and so when the executive branch suppresses facts because they conflict with opinion when congress has specifically asked to hear about the facts, al's entire construction falls apart.
and yes, mad6798j, that's exactly what al is saying.
"They apparently disagreed with the Administrations PR strategy and policies.
I think Al really does have his finger on how it worked. Facts? Who cares about facts? We make our own reality! PR uber alles!
Reality is what the Party says it is. And when they say something different, well, that's the new reality.
Al's comment is self refuting. Obviously, the bosses at the GOP funded unit where he and other Als are hired to make comments on blogs jimmied up this one from the umpteenth number of times we've found the Bush administration censoring, skewing, or distorting information. Technically, the Bush administration is an employee of the American citizen, so we are talking about the equivalent of an employee handing in hours he didn't work - or fraud. But, more narrowly, this morning's Al should have defied his boss and come up with something a little less brazenly stupid. Als should have that power - and that they don't is a shame.
I think if only Als would unionize, they would be in a better bargaining position vis a vis rightwing wacko funders.
I hope this afternoon's Al thinks about this. You might think, well, I'm in law school, I'm trying to suck up to some crusty Federal Society prof who wants to abolish the income tax, and I can't afford to unionize. But attaching yourself like a leech to some rising psycho rightwinger might be riskier, in the next decade, than it may have appeared in 2004. Sure, the petro gun club people, aka, the axis from Exxon to Raytheon, will continue to pour money into rightwing think tank ratholes, but the network to the plum positions might just be frozen. The boom years might be over. Murdoch, after all, might find it advantageous to link up with Hilary - gotta protect monopoly positions in the media marketplace! And what would you have left? A bunch of insane Al comments that don't even reflect your own thought processes. It's sorta sad.
Al said, "I would say that their bosses is the Administration that "you and me" elected.
I don't know where you work, but where I work, the guy in the mailroom doesn't get to tell the world what the company's policies are. Heck, not even the guy hired as the PR spokesman gets to determine by himself what to tell the public on behalf of the organization."
Your metaphor doesn't work. The Federal government is not supposed to be run as a corporation is run. Corporations are not democracies. Then, again, Bush has run the gov't as if it were a corporation and not a democracy. Maybe the problem is you don't recognize that.
Comments closed December 25, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
you've noted before that growing up in a culture of snark and irony probably makes something as straightforward as "outrage" a little hard to sustain, but us old-timers, unencumbered by such social norms, don't find it hard at all.
Posted by howard | December 11, 2007 10:28 AM