Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (28 page)

The outrage had been building for a while, and it had become quite general, taking in areas far removed from the study of global warming. At about the same time that the scientists released their report, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, whose groundbreaking work on telomeric DNA has revolutionized cancer research, was summarily dismissed from the President’s Council on Bioethics. Her firing culminated nearly two years of wrangling with the panel’s chairman, Dr. Leon Kass, an outspoken opponent of stem cell research and the man who injected the phrase “the ick factor” into profoundly complicated bioethical debates.

Kass is a true crank, which would be fine if he’d kept his place and carved out a niche among America’s rich trove of exotic philosophical and religious fauna, rather than finding himself installed in the government. He has opposed—in no particular order—in vitro fertilization, cosmetic surgery, organ transplants, contraception, and the public eating of ice cream cones. In thundering against the latter, Kass sounds like someone who missed his calling as a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus:

“Worst of all … are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone,” he writes, “a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know that eating in public is offensive. Eating on the street—even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat—displays a lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly.”

This fellow, waving his stick like an Old Testament prophet who’d somehow wandered into Coney Island—this was the man with whom Elizabeth Blackburn was supposed to make national policy on critical issues affecting millions of lives. Actual science
played a very limited role in the dispute. The serious debate seemed more suited to a caucus room in Iowa, or a late-night bull session in a seminary, than to a panel aimed at giving policymakers the best advice possible on the way to make policy.

The final crack in the relationship between Kass and Blackburn came over the relative therapeutic benefits of adult stem cells, to which the political right has no objections, and embryonic stem cells, which engage the politics of the abortion issue. Among scientists in the field, these two approaches are complementary. They do not compete with each other. The argument that caused Elizabeth Blackburn’s dismissal was a completely political one.

Blackburn did not slink away from the fight. She published quietly outraged articles in the medical journals, and she gave more interviews than she had ever expected to give. “I wasn’t maddened, necessarily,” she says. “You know, you try to give your input based on what you know about, and what you can find out about the science. And you sort of just do your best. My sense was that all I could do was keep giving my input about what I knew about.

“The idea was to just lay it out and say, ‘Here’s what we, as scientists, did think of the scientific situation. First and foremost, that stood out to me because, when one looks at the mandate of the federal commission, it is very clear what they are and it’s advisory to policy. It struck me that, if you’re going to be advisory, you’re trying to give the best advice you can give. It doesn’t make policy, but it certainly has the function of being a resource for advice.”

The dynamic that ensnared Elizabeth Blackburn played out most vividly with respect to climate studies. A report released in December 2007 by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of the U.S. House of Representatives stated flatly that the administration “engaged in a systematic effort
to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.” In the introduction to its report, the committee quotes an internal document from the American Petroleum Institute in which the voice of Clarence Cook Little seems to echo quite clearly.

“Victory will be achieved when … average citizens ‘understand’ uncertainties in climate science … [and] recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” The quote marks are what poker players call a tell. At its heart, this is a strategy that depends vitally on its ability to confuse people. Where most science seeks to clarify, this seeks to muddle. This is science turned against itself at the service of salesmen, selling uncertainty. But the strategy is rooted in the confidence that there will always be a market.

According to the House Oversight Committee’s report, White House political officials determined which government scientists could give interviews about the subject, and what they could say. All requests were routed through something called the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the operation of which would strike Elizabeth Blackburn as very familiar. For example, on July 20, 2006, Dr. Thomas Karl, the director of the National Climatic Data Center, was scheduled to testify before the committee. The CEQ’s editing of his prepared testimony is almost comically piddling. According to the House report, Karl was prepared to testify that “the state of the science continues to indicate that modern climate change is dominated by human influences.” The CEQ, at the request of the Office of Management and Budget, changed the word “dominated” to “affected.”

Elsewhere, the committee laid out how frantically political appointees at NASA tried to keep Dr. James Hansen, whose outspoken criticisms of the administration’s policies toward global warming run throughout the committee’s report, from
doing a single interview on National Public Radio in 2005. The scramble took almost two weeks, and the paper trail of increasingly agitated e-mails—“If Hansen does interview,” reads one, “there will be dire consequences”—is a case study in panicky bureaucratic flop sweat that would have embarrassed the East Germans. None of these frenzied people knew the first thing about climate science, but that hardly mattered. The frenzy wasn’t about science. Hansen did not appear on NPR.

Not all of the committee’s findings are so petty. Throughout the report, there is a striking sense of how profoundly actual scientific expertise was either sacrificed for political purposes or abandoned entirely. All administrations have a natural tension between their political sides and the outside experts brought in to advise on policymaking. But, on this particular issue, this particular administration seemed to be determined to make the information it rejected simply disappear. Major reports were extensively edited not by experts in the field but by a man named Philip Cooney, the chief of staff at the CEQ. Previously, Cooney had spent fifteen years as a lawyer for the American Petroleum Institute, where his last assignment had been as the “team leader” at the API on issues of climate change. He had been there when the “victory” memo had been written, and he seemed more than willing to apply its principles to his government job.

The committee found Cooney’s fingerprints on a number of draft reports—softening the data with adverbs, making statements more equivocal by running them through the passive voice. In a 2003 draft report, for example, model simulations “demonstrated that the observed changes over the past century are consistent with a significant
contribution from human activity.” In Cooney’s hands, the model simulations only “indicated” that the observed changes “are likely consistent with a significant contribution from human activity.” Thus do uncertainties become part of the “conventional wisdom.” They’re put there by lawyers, and by political appointees. The only empirical contribution they can make to the discussion is to muddle it.

James Gustave Speth has been working on the science of global warming for over thirty years. In 2007, he wrote a scathing letter to the
New York Times
, warning against what he called “the suppression of information and the act of disinformation” that he saw in the collision between science and politics over the previous decade. Like Madison and most of the other founders, Speth sees science and self-government as inextricable. What imperils one imperils the other.

“What we have is that the scientific content of public policy issues is increasing,” he says. “The difficulty of understanding public policy issues, because of their technological and scientific content, is increasing. And so, what you need is a whole support system that really helps assist the public in understanding this. When you have efforts to cloud up public understanding, to cloud up issues that should be clarified, then you are making a serious problem worse. And I think that’s what we’ve had.

“And what’s really at stake is democracy, because the scientific and technical content of public policy issues will continue to increase, I mean, how is the public to understand nanotechnology when the word doesn’t mean anything to most people? So there really is a profound issue here. The issue is even more complex now on the environmental front, where I work, where there is a whole range of threats. I mean, nobody wants to believe bad things to begin with, and when you can’t see them, and you can’t verify them in your own experience, and then somebody tells you they’re not happening, well, it’s very easy to conclude they’re not happening.”

In October 2002, a draft copy of a document called the
Strategic Plan for the Climate Change Science Program came across Philip Cooney’s desk. It included this sentence: “Warming temperatures will also affect Arctic land areas.” Finding the conclusion too strong, Cooney put some mush into the verb. The sentence came out reading:

“Warming temperatures may also affect Arctic land areas.”

THE
ocean is not a presence in lower Manhattan, not the way it is in Shishmaref. Walk around Ground Zero, where the iron is rising again, and you hardly remember that the ocean is a few blocks over, just past Battery Park. Its sounds are buried in the noise of traffic and the gabble of conversation. It smells as rank as a dungeon cell, but is overwhelmed by the hydrocarbons in the air. Its tides seem less powerful a hidden force than the subway rattling beneath the sidewalk. And that is how most of us look at the sea—as an afterthought, a secondary, vestigial presence. Its power seems an ancient myth, almost a superstition, like a dragon or a snow beast. We fool ourselves into thinking it’s something we’ve outgrown, when it’s really only something we’ve talked ourselves out of believing in. We have become quite good at mistaking amnesia for wisdom. The sea is something we can spin, and that is how Frank Luntz looks at the sea.

In 2004, a report called the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment was released, showing the devastating ongoing effect of global warming on the Arctic region and its consequences. Almost immediately, a think tank funded by, among other people, ExxonMobil, attacked the science in the report. James Inhofe, then the chairman of the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, cited the latter report to attack the science in the former report. He looks at the sea as something that can’t
fool him, James Inhofe, who is smarter than the sea will ever be. And that is how James Inhofe looks at the sea.

For centuries, the Arctic seemed an alien place, a place on the earth but not of it. The Canadian archaeologist Robert McGhee summed up that view:

There is an edge to the evening breeze. A vague chill settles in your bones before you know it’s there. It is in the hours like this that you can begin to feel how winter could come pressing in on all sides, like the ice that traps a whaling fleet. But it’s a shadowy and insubstantial feeling, more an intuition than an instinct. The children walk down the street with their coats open.

A couple of nights a week, the people of Shishmaref gather in the community center to play bingo. The hall buzzes constantly as teenagers wander between the tables, selling extra cards to the players. A sign on the doors warns that nobody even smelling of alcohol will be allowed inside to play. This is high-stakes, competitive bingo. The numbers fly swiftly around the room as the players work four and five cards at once, marking off
the numbers in the complicated patterns—“Picture frame!” “Lasso!”—of the game’s variations.

John and Emily Weyiounna, Tony’s cousins, hunch over a long table near the back of the hall. In addition to their own cards, they are helping a clumsy stranger try to keep up with the play. Emily sees first that the stranger has completed his “picture frame,” filling in all the spots around the perimeter of the card. He calls out “Bingo!” too soon, though, and has to split a $300 pot with another player whose timing was better. They laugh as the stranger offers to share his winnings with them.