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By Root 1270 0

The government sites devoted to climate change were often inadequate; the State Department’s page, for instance, began with the administration’s ludicrous goal of reducing carbon emissions by eighteen percent over ten years, by voluntary actions—a thumbing-of-the-nose to the Kyoto Accords that was still the current administration’s only tangible proposal for action. Conference proceedings on another page spoke of “climate change adaptation,” actually development agendas, with only a few very revealing admissions that “adaptation” had no meaning in regard to actual technologies, that the whole concept of “adaptation” to climate change was a replacement for “mitigation,” and at this point completely hollow, a word only, a way of saying Do nothing. Whole conferences were devoted to that.

After discoveries like this she would give up and search elsewhere, on scientific sites that were more technically oriented, that had real content. More and more it seemed to her that science as it was ordinarily practiced was really the only thing that worked in the world; so that even with abrupt climate change upon them, requiring an emergency response, dispersing science more rapidly was still not only the only thing she could do to help, but the only thing anyone could do.

Edgardo shook his head when she expressed this thought. “One tends to think only the method one knows will work.”

“Yes I’m sure. But what if it’s true?”

Site after site.

Once after one of these hunts, she went into one of Diane and Frank’s meetings and said, “Let me tell you some history.”

In her reading she had run across a description of a “Scientists For Johnson Campaign” in the presidential election of 1964. A group of prominent scientists, worried by Goldwater’s nuclear bravado, had organized into what would later be called a political action committee, and taken out ads urging people to vote for Johnson. Dire warnings were made of what could happen if Goldwater won, and a vote for Johnson was portrayed as a vote for world peace, for the reality principle, for all good things.

All of which had perhaps helped Johnson; but it backfired when Nixon won four years later, because he came into the White House convinced that all scientists hated him.

“But Nixon was paranoid, right?”

“Paranoid or clearsighted.”

“Both. He thought people hated him, and then he made it come true so he could feel clearsighted.”

“Maybe.”

But for science this had been a bad thing. Nixon had first shut down the Office of Science and Technology, then demoted the remaining position of presidential science advisor out of the Cabinet, exiling the office to the hinterlands. Then he had kicked NSF itself off the Mall, out to Arlington.

“It’s like we’re still in some feudal court,” Frank observed, “where physical proximity to the king actually mattered.”

“You’re sounding like Edgardo.”

“Yes, he said that out on the run today, actually.”

In any case, science had been in effect booted out of the policy arena, and it had never come back.

“Meaning?” Diane said.

“Meaning science isn’t part of policymaking anymore! It doesn’t support candidates, and scientists never run for office themselves. They just ask for money and let it go at that.”

“Science is a higher activity,” Edgardo proclaimed. “What it does is so valuable that you have to give it a lot of money, no strings attached. Pay up or die.”

“Pretty clever.”

“I think so.”

“Too bad it doesn’t work better though.”

“Well, that’s true. That’s what we’re working on.”

Frank was shaking his head. “It seems to me that this story about Johnson and Nixon is just one more indication that science is generally thought of as being liberal in its political orientation.”

No one wanted to think about this, Anna could tell.

“How so?” Diane asked.

“Well, you know. If the Republican Party has been hijacked by the religious right, which most people say it has, then the Democrats begin to look like the party for secular people, including lots of scientists. It’s like the debate over evolution all over again. Christianity versus science, now equating