Back to Work - Bill Clinton [12]
A congressional hearing on climate change in March 2011 offered an interesting example of the difference between conservative philosophy and antigovernment ideology. Congressman Ralph Hall, chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, convened a hearing to secure testimony from Dr. Richard Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, who had long been considered a “climate skeptic.” Muller started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project with a team of UC physicists and statisticians to conduct an independent review of the research data in order to challenge the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is real, is caused primarily by human behavior, and is likely to have calamitous consequences. The project’s biggest private backer is the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, established by one of the Koch brothers, conservative oil billionaires who have also funded efforts to defeat proposals to reduce the burning of fossil fuels for transportation and electricity, two of the largest sources of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change.
The committee members who don’t believe climate change is happening or, if it is, don’t think it’s a problem expected Dr. Muller to support them in their drive to stop the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gases by casting doubt on the climate science. Instead, Muller, a supposedly reliable ally, committed an unforgivable error: He was more interested in finding the truth than in confirming the ideological convictions of his supporters. In forthright language, he explained that his project had assembled 1.6 billion temperature measurements and attempted to correct for potential biases he thought might have influenced previous studies. Then he said that as a result of his own review, “We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by other groups.”
The Los Angeles Times reported that “conservative critics who had expected Muller’s group to demonstrate a bias among climate scientists reacted with disappointment.” Disappointment is putting it mildly. Muller’s testimony was ideological heresy, a rejection of the predetermined truth that global warming is a hoax. But Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, which also contributed funds to the Berkeley project, praised Muller’s statement for acknowledging that previous climate studies “basically got it right. . . . Willingness to revise views in the face of empirical data is the hallmark of the good scientific process.”4
It’s also the hallmark of good public policy. When our economic plan passed in 1993, it was a comprehensive program of spending cuts, targeted increases in spending on education, technology, and research, tax cuts to spur investment in areas of high unemployment and to help lower-income working families, and tax increases on the largest corporations and the top 1.2 percent of Americans who had reaped most of the income gains and tax cuts of the 1980s. All the Republicans voted against it, claiming the tax increases would crush the economy, calling them a “job killer” and “a one-way ticket to recession.”5 They were wrong, off the mark by 22.7 million jobs. But today, with federal taxes at their lowest share of national income