A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [34]
Anyone expecting thunderous applause for such a rousing call to patriotism isn’t paying attention. Asked what happens to Republicans who respond positively to science, Inglis says, “People look at you like you grew an extra head or something. You’re definitely seen as some kind of oddball, and perhaps even a heretic.”
Congressman Inglis lost his bid for reelection in the 2010 primaries. Too “moderate.”
The fact that politicians, media talking heads, and too much of the electorate lost the ability to differentiate between science and ideology is one of the causes of America’s decline. But if Americans don’t understand science, is it really fair to blame Big Oil?
The government’s main office for gathering all the scientific data on climate change and informing the U.S. Congress, more than a dozen federal agencies, and the American people is called the Global Change Research Program. Rick Piltz was a senior officer there from 1995 to 2005. Soon after George W. Bush took over the White House after losing the “popular vote”—which in other countries is called the “election”—Piltz was putting together a major report for Congress. “We were told to delete the pages that summarized the most recent IPCC report and the material about the National Assessment of climate change impacts that had just come out,” he recalled in 2010. The IPCC is the international scientific body that collects and assesses all the climate research from around the world. The National Assessment was a similar report covering research by U.S. scientists. They’d both concluded that climate change was happening and that human activity was accelerating it.
But the Bush White House put its fingers in its ears and sang, “La-di-da.” Piltz says the experts had made “pretty clear and compelling statements. And to say that you didn’t believe it was to say that you did not want to go along with the preponderance of scientific evidence.” Until he left, four years later, from almost every report Piltz and his team compiled, the White House deleted references to climate change or carbon emissions. Many of those deletions were made by a guy named Philip Cooney. He was chief of staff for the Bush White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. His previous job had been as a lawyer and lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, and his next job was with ExxonMobil.
And when we so crucially need campaign finance reform and publicly funded elections to get the money out of politics, in the 2010 Citizens United case, the Supreme Court overturned a century of precedent, and effectively destroyed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation. McCain-Feingold banned the broadcast or transmission of “electioneering communications” paid for by corporations or labor unions from their general funds in the thirty days before a presidential primary and in the sixty days before the general elections. By doing away with that, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to corporate election-distorting money and made it easier for the sources of that money to remain anonymous. All five of the Court’s “conservatives” joined together to overturn a sixty-three-year-old ban on corporate money in federal elections and twenty-year-old and seven-year-old precedents affirming the validity of such corporate electioneering bans. They ignored the protests of their four more moderate (actually conservative, in other words) dissenting justices. Writing ninety pages for the dissenters, Justice John Paul Stevens noted: “Today’s decision is backwards in many senses. The Court’s opinion is a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized