Should Science Be King In Politics? 737
Layzej writes "According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts. He suggests that energy and climate policy warrants a conservative approach based on science and accountability, rather than a populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking. He also proposes an intriguing free market solution to our energy and climate challenges."
Start your party and let democracy decide (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think that'll work. (Score:5, Insightful)
The world is run on emotion as much as logic. Anyone that thinks logic can be king either has never been married, or is rapidly headed towards a divorce...
Fact-based solutions already exist (Score:5, Insightful)
The two solutions that are in line with both past experience and economic theory are:
(A) cap-and-trade, where the government sells a limited number of pollution permits, allows the buyers of those permits to trade them, and then sends inspectors (funded by the proceeds of the original sale) to ensure that nobody goes over the number of permits they have. This was successfully used to reduce SO2 emissions back in the 1980's and 1990's.
(B) A CO2 tax, where the more you pollute the more you're taxed. This gives companies a financial incentive to reduce their emissions, and means that those that do reduce their CO2 emissions aren't at a competitive disadvantage from those that don't. Again, inspectors are needed (funded by the tax) to ensure that nobody cheats.
Both of these basically rely on putting a price on pollution, and then making sure nobody cheats on paying that price. It's enforced by the government because nobody else can - nobody owns the country's air, and nobody reasonably could.
If only... (Score:5, Insightful)
If only more conservatives felt the same way. But American conservatives (and Republicans in particular) are about as far as it gets from "dealing in facts" these days and are more anti-science than the far left.
"Dealing in facts" means recognising evolution. That's unacceptable in the US Right. So something even mildly controversial, like climate change, has no hope.
Not on everything (Score:4, Insightful)
While I can see many will knee-jerk themselves into an emphatic "YES" to scientific superiority in government, there should still be a place for philosophy and morality in politics as well. And in some cases, philosophy should trump science.
When you might ask? How about in terms of macroeconomics? It makes little scientific sense to provide welfare to people who will never be productive citizens ever again. Yet it goes against our values to not take care of our most vulnerable who are unable to care for themselves.
It also makes little scientific sense to protect individual rights to the extent that we do. My friends over in Europe and Asia often point out that the banning of hate speech has a demonstrable effect on reducing bigotry. Yet our non-scientific culture values free speech.
So, science should play a big role in determining the fundamental facts of a political discussion, but after that it is all about values and philosophy.
Re:Start your party and let democracy decide (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with democracy is that it assumes everyone's opinions on every subject are equal.
In the real world, they're not. With a sufficiently educated populace, or a sufficiently minor subset of the populace who gets involved in voting and politics, it can potentially work. But with a populace with shrinking levels of basic education and basic abilities to rationally evaluate the information they're receiving, the US is showing that democracy largely does not work.
The world was a far simpler place when the US system of government was put together.
Am I Reading the Onion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Normally, the country can count on conservatives to deal in facts.
News flash: neither party can be counted on to deal in facts. I will also say with utter confidence that your party line (of which there are only two) will not determine how factual you are. There are goddamn liars among all the ranks of any party.
We base policies on science, not sentiment, we insist on people being accountable for their actions, and we maintain that markets, not mandates, are the path to prosperity.
If you based your policies on science, then why isn't it a completely open process? Anonymize the names (if any) and release the numbers (especially who pays what in taxes from which areas) behind your policy making. Of course you don't and on top of that, paltry though it may be, we have to wait until Obama to get that ball started rolling [whitehouse.gov].
Oh, yeah, accountable of their actions? Yeah, you rich bastards love to hold each other accountable for your actions [forbes.com] -- especially your financiers [bloomberg.com].
You would expect conservatives to stand with 95 percent of the scientific community and to grow the 13 percent into a working majority.
Oh, wait a minute, I see what's going on here. You're not really a conservative. You're like Zell Miller [wikipedia.org] who is a Democrat only by label and paperwork.
Your proposal, though noble, is a fool's errand. I believe this has been tackled before and the real problem is that you can always find more and more ties to pollution or non-renewable resources being used to make your product and get it to the consumer and then even after that you have the whole usage of it followed by proper disposal and returning the resources. That cheap Dell computer your secretary is playing Bejeweled on? Yeah, that's a nightmare.
What if we attached all of the costs -- especially the hidden costs -- to all fuels?
Once you lay out a comprehensive and complete list of what the costs are -- especially the hidden costs -- then I'll hop on board. For now you're basically scratching the surface of a very deep and complicated rabbit hole that is hard to trace backward for many reasons. Some of them supply line problems, some of them scientific problems, some of them statistical problems and some even privacy problems for the users.
Companies already try to regulate themselves by paying a so called 'carbon tax' by being 'carbon neutral' or by planting just an assload of trees so they can say X trees for Y products sold. But you know, that's all really neither exact nor assuredly truly undoing all that is done in their dealings. And while they might tell the public one thing, I don't think they believe it.
Could someone please enumerate every true cost of getting one gallon of gasoline into my car tank? What about what happens as I use it? What about what happens after I've used it?
And the best part is that at some point, as you noted, loss of life is going to be on that list of true costs. Whether you're buying an Apple iPhone that some worker committed suicide while making at the Foxconn plant or BP's little explosion killing 11 oil well workers, you're going to have to say at some point that 1 human life = X million dollars in cost. And that makes people really uncomfortable. It gets even more uncomfortable when whoever deciding that cost considers nationality in influencing that ratio.
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Less 'learn science' than 'learn the scientific method' and its application to everyday life. Or just critical thinking in general.
Too many people stop learning at the end of high school/university. If they just memorize some state of the art science related facts at that time our situation will not likely improve as new facts are discovered.
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Examples
Bad: There is plenty of evidence to support this (*goes on to show evidence)
Good: Nope that is wrong!
Bad: Here is the explanation for why this is a problem
Good: God wants it this way
Valid science's biggest weakness in politics, is a shortage of 5 second soundbites that work. (and before you say less then 1% of voters know what E=MC squared means.)
false premise (Score:2, Insightful)
"Normally, the country can count on conservatives to deal in facts."
I don't think he understands how the rest of us view (modern) conservatives.
If he's trying with this article to pitch reason and science to his fellow conservatives, by suggesting to them that it's consistent with their core values, best of luck to him. But if he really thinks that this is where his audience is really coming from, he's woefully out of touch. Today's conservatives' unwavering faith in The Market doesn't come from their observation of its empirical validity, but from a gut-feeling belief in the Unseen Hand of the market as the demiurge of God.
Re:I don't think that'll work. (Score:4, Insightful)
The world is only run on emotion. Logic always gets shouted down by people who don't like it or, worse, don't understand it.
Re:Start your party and let democracy decide (Score:5, Insightful)
Our population is more educated today than ever before, though I can't comment on their ability to rationally evaluate much. We also have the ability to do what the Greeks considered essential to Democracy, which is allow every citizen to witness the debate over every subject.
Internet, TV, newspapers, these things should be improving democracy and making it work on a larger scale than ever. That we use them mostly for porno and formulaic television shows is unfortunate. You could maybe make watching a debate prerequisite for voting, but we have a hard time even making people identify themselves at the polls, much less prove their fitness for being there.
The Term "Inconvenient Truth" Applies (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's important to understand why conservatives are rejecting certain scientific facts. People like me on the left often make fun of them as being ignorant or anti-intellectual, but the reality is that it's very difficult for anyone to accept a fact that conflicts with your worldview. For example, history has turned the lawyer William Jennings Bryan from the famous "Monkey Trial" into a caricature of ignorance of foolishness in the face of scientific fact, but that belittles his motivation for fighting against the teaching of evolution: the textbook in question was pro eugenics [ideonexus.com] and used the theory of evolution to argue that society should breed people the way we breed dogs. The Theory of Evolution was a fact, but the public policies people were proposing from it were an anathema to our human values. The theory of evolution has never recovered from the damage the eugenics movement did to it in the early 1900s.
The same thing is happening now with Global Warming. Whether conservatives know it or not, they are not resisting the Theory of Global Warming, they are resisting the policies that many conclude from it. Publicly accepting the theory and taking a more nuanced position about what we should do about, if we should do anything about it at all, isn't as straightforward as simply running a campaign against the theory itself using the same tactics the Tobacco industry used [ideonexus.com] as recently as 15 years ago to defend smoking against its link to cancer (Yes, 15 years ago. I recently listened to a 1996 Larry King interview with Presidential candidate Bob Dole where they argued about whether smoking was safe or not).
It's a natural human reaction to reject facts that conflict with our vision of the world. That's why I love the term "Inconvenient Truth" to describe an empirical fact that generates cognitive dissonance. Just today I was reminded of one such truth as the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the discovery that our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate [npr.org], a fact I resisted for a decade because it paints such an incredibly bleak picture of our Cosmos where the galaxies will eventually vanish from the night sky as they fly away from us and the Universe eventually freezes at absolute zero. But you have to accept the fact and adapt your worldview to it.
Liberals have their own anti-science views: resistance to GMO Foods goes pretty far into unscientific scaremongering ("Frankenfoods" and anti-corporatism), the idea that smaller classes sizes are the only way to improve student performance (teacher accountability does demonstrate equal results for less money), and anti-vaccination scares come mostly from the left (mostly). The science behind these issues are inconvenient to certain aspects of liberal ideology, so it's easier to go off the anti-science deep end rather than refine their positions. The problem is that we the media finds nuanced debate and finely articulated positions inconvenient to ratings.
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Start your party and let democracy decide (Score:4, Insightful)
"I rather believe democracy is the equality in rights."
That's perhaps how it ought to be, but these days having a majority based on equal votes is how things are actually decided. Doesn't matter who is right or wrong, just who has most votes. A bit of a problem, because the minute you decide to let people who understand the issues decide them, you will be charged with weakening democracy.
There is no morality without science (Score:3, Insightful)
Imaging a simple moral dilemma. Choice A: Ten people will die. Choice B: 5 people will die.
The decision is simple - you take B.
The problem? Well, you're wrong. Choice B was based on a popular myth that three of the people involved would not be in any danger - but actually they would die. B would cause the death of 8 people. Choice A on the other hand has only been represented by the media as being extremely dangerous, but a sober scientific assessment would have led you to the conclusion, that only 2 people will die.
Yes, there can be science - even successful science - without moral judgment. Which is a problem and it is highly visible. But there can be no true moral judgment without science. Moral judgment is entirely derivative of our knowledge of the world, of the cause and effect relationships involved.
Unfortunately, pomp and circumstance can easily hide a lack of knowledge about the consequences of decisions made by those claiming (or claimed) to be moral authorities. That includes, unfortunately, the whole debate of climate science that usually sees a lot of discussions among people who hold a claim to moral authority but don't know the least bit about the science. Instead, they rely on biased reporting of the science [wordpress.com] to make and justify their "moral" decisions.
Re:Am I Reading the Onion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, Bob Inglis sounds like a true fiscal conservative.
I suspect people have forgotten what they are, ever since talk radio began turning "conservative" into "people we like" and "liberal" into "people we don't like", there seems to have been a coarsening of the public debate. Nixon officially ended the days of the Republican party being the party of fiscal conservatives, he alienated scientists and universities and began the descent of the Republican party into social conservatism.
Frankly, I suspect that the Republican party is on the verge of a huge collapse that will have them spending 20 years in the wilderness again, if they're lucky. They are deliberately or ignorantly leading their followers astray, and this will blow up in their faces unless they continue to lose to the Democrats. If they win in 2012 it just may destroy the party. It seems highly unlikely the current Republican fiscal policy will make the U.S. economy better. If it doesn't the party could implode like it has so many times before.
Re:Note the 'former' (Score:3, Insightful)
They have a mystical conviction of environmental catastrophe which is unsupported by real science.
Agree with the majority of what you wrote, although that one line is horribly wrong.
Hang out with a geologist, like my former roommate, and even if you don't talk geology all the time, simply having to think about the topic will educate you.
The entire science / history of geology seems to be nothing more than carefully supported / researched / analyzed scientific study of environmental catastrophe. I'm sure there is some weird corner of geology focusing solely on the flight patterns of unicorns flying over rainbows, but 99.9% of geology is catastrophe related. The sea level rising a couple feet sounds really scary in a perfect knowledge vacuum. Compared to past, present, and future geological events, frankly I'm VERY unimpressed by a minor sea level fluctuation like that. Doesn't mean it won't be bad for the fools who didn't plan for it, but it does mean its (unfortunately) pocket change compared to expected geologic evolution.
Environmental catastrophe always has, and always will, occur. The politically correct environmentalist position is if we go Pol Pot on our population (with the poorly hidden message that we'll be going Pol Pot on the "politically nonenvironmentalist" population, or at least not our ethnic / cultural group) and destroy our economy down to the level of Somalia or Afghanistan, then it'll be "better". Nope, its still gonna suck, its just if we torture ourselves and destroy civilization before hand, we can make it worse and increase the total suffering of humanity, if we try really hard to implement hard core environmentalist agenda.
Part of it is what used to pass for environmentalism has become common sense. Don't dump industrial waste into your drinking water is common sense, not "modern environmentalism". All thats left of environmentalism is the watermelon types, green on outside, red on inside.
Re:Yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
Calling it "basic logic" implies that at some point in time most people had it. But that is false - they never did.
Re:Fact-based solutions already exist (Score:3, Insightful)
How about if said carbon tax was calculated at point of sale based on CO2 produced to manufacture and transport, regardless of where?
Re:Start your party and let democracy decide (Score:3, Insightful)
More educated and better educated are not equivalent statements. More people are given a larger amount of education (finishing high school, attending college, etc.)
The main problem is that education is primarily behavioral conditioning that would be beneficial for unskilled laborers. So mostly we're teaching our children how to be replaceable by robots or off shore labor.
Re:Yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no shortage of 5 second soundbites that work, they just happen to hand out a straw man to your opponents on a silver platter. For instance: "WE WILL ALL DIE" works to get people to care about climate change. Of course, that statement is false and ridiculous, but nuance in a statement will never fly against the lack thereof. Reasonable people cannot be heard by the masses unless they resort to the same type of rhetoric as their opponents, in which case they cease to be reasonable, but start being effective. Pretty unfortunate, really :(
Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
We're not talking about "politics", we're talking about governing.
It's not just the political system that's broken, it's us. Precious few citizens of any country except maybe Finland and a handful of others actually understand how their society works.
Look at the currently popular notion in the US that to run government, we need someone with experience running a private corporation. As if running a business had anything in common with running a government except they are both organizations. If that were the true measure, then a general would make the best president and we've seen that's not usually the case. In fact, I'd say that "business experience" or "experience" in general (other than experience dealing with people) is highly overrated. Right now, there's going to be only one person running for president in 2012 that actually has on-the-job experience as president of the US. Does that make him automatically the best person for the job? Does the fact that a leading candidate on the other side ran a business that successfully cannibalized other businesses make him the best person for the job?
I think the notion (mentioned by someone else in these comments) that understanding "science" in the most basic sense of the word, as a system of understanding that things have explanations and effects have causes would be extremely important in government. Certainly more important than the current notion, that the guy who has the most money gets to rule. I would have thought we were disabused of that notion a few centuries ago.
Re:Contentious Subject Matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
And he also seems to forget that scientists will lean to where the money is (left or right, up or down).
If you want to deal in facts, then perhaps you should try showing us evidence for this assertion. The idea that we have been mislead on a massive scale by grant-loving scientists is entirely from the imagination of people who dislike the findings, or from crackpots who had their unscientific papers rejected.
Re:Key words (Score:4, Insightful)
According to former Republican in name only representative Bob Inglis
Text in italics added. Mr. Inglis refutes his own thesis by indulging in fantasy regarding the nature of "conservatism."
This gets back to the myth of US politics. The traditional modern Republican party isn't about conservative values; it's about ruling for the benefit of the richest fraction of a percent of the population. If you look at what Republicans actually *do* instead of listening to what they say, it becomes glaringly obvious that their political philosophy is that the proper role of government is to ensure that the rich get richer faster than they would without having a government around to help.
The problem for that political philosophy is that there aren't enough rich people to win enough elections to rule a republic. So they have to convince half the population to vote against their own best interests. That's where "conservative" comes in. Appeal to White bigots and sanitize it by calling it "the Southern Strategy". Throw an occasional bone to the religious right so they'll vote for your politicians. Pretend there's some scientific doubt about evolution. Stir up Anglo-Saxon bigots and call it "Immigration Reform" - historians will someday call it the Southwestern Strategy.
Mr. Inglis is just objecting to the current race to the bottom. When I wrote "traditional modern Republican party", that was to distinguish the old guard from the nutters they've been suckering into voting for them for at least 50 years, but who are now taking over the asylum. You reap what you sow, kind of thing. But lots of "traditional modern Republicans" don't like what they're reaping. A lot of those nutters don't think ruling for the rich is their top priority.
Re:Am I Reading the Onion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly, Bob Inglis sounds like a true fiscal conservative.
"True fiscal conservative" usually boils down to "don't tax the rich and don't spend on the poor". Look what happened when the party of "fiscal conservatives" controlled the whole US government for six years during the last decade.
Frankly, I suspect that the Republican party is on the verge of a huge collapse that will have them spending 20 years in the wilderness again, if they're lucky. They are deliberately or ignorantly leading their followers astray, and this will blow up in their faces unless they continue to lose to the Democrats.
Fortunately for the Republicans, no one is so adept at screwing the pooch as Democrats are. If the Democrats' politicians had values and leadership, they could have beheaded the Republican party since 2005.
Re:The Term "Inconvenient Truth" Applies (Score:4, Insightful)
"unscientific scaremongering ("Frankenfoods" and anti-corporatism)"
Sorry but anti-corporatism is hardly UNSCIENTIFIC. With all the military pork and the endless extension of copyright you pro-market. pro-coporate fuckups are some of the dumbest shits on the planet. Nice way to characterize the left as anti-science with your right wing talking points. If anything the left is vastly much more pro-science then the right. This whole idea that you can easily sweep anti-science under the "left" political rubric is a bunch of bullshit. Vaccine people are just insane/crazy, I have never ever associated anti-vaccine people with the left or liberals. This is mere right-wing propaganda to try to demonize the left as "just as bad in their own way" the stupid fox news 'fair and balanced' bullshit. Human beings have always wanted to deny what they feel is inconvenient and it has little to do with political stripe and everything to do with being STUPID. I know people on the right that are intelligent and I know people on the left that are intelligent, but trying to make a political statement out of human stupidity as an act of insight is rather ludicrous.
Most of your criticism of the left/liberal ideology is based on right wing talking points and media propaganda and not fact.
There are numerous mother fucking good reasons anti-corporatism exists... here are some just to name a few.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act [wikipedia.org]
Re:Note the 'former' (Score:3, Insightful)
The sea level rising a couple feet sounds really scary in a perfect knowledge vacuum.
Obviously you don't live anywhere near a coast. The sea level rising a couple feet at the coastal city nearest to me, means probably 5,000 or more people whose homes have a foot of water in them. It also means a major re-planning and rebuild of a lot of the dock structures for the shipping port, and re-planning/rebuild of many of the structures at the local marina and launch docks for recreational boating. It also means a major change in coastal erosion patterns, wildlife, and navigability for the surrounding area due to the creation of highly shallow flat areas that are nevertheless waterlogged / "under water."
Compared to past, present, and future geological events, frankly I'm VERY unimpressed by a minor sea level fluctuation like that.
Volcanic eruptions suck. Earthquakes suck. Tsunami suck. On the other hand, we can't prevent those - best we can do is improve our early warning systems. We CAN mitigate the damage we do to the environment, however.
The politically correct environmentalist position is if we go Pol Pot on our population (with the poorly hidden message that we'll be going Pol Pot on the "politically nonenvironmentalist" population, or at least not our ethnic / cultural group) and destroy our economy down to the level of Somalia or Afghanistan, then it'll be "better".
Oh for the love of... sigh. With this one paragraph you proved how completely fucking insane you are, because nobody I know who is an "environmentalist" has ever proposed such a thing. The closest to come has actually been the racist shitheads of the local Republican Party, who propose enforced limits (either economic penalty-based or forced-sterilization-if-on-government-assistance) on lower income people having babies (while at the same time denying this is anything like China's "one child policy", where only the ultra-rich are allowed to have an extra kid or two) with the express purpose of limiting the growing population of hispanics and blacks.
Re:Am I Reading the Onion? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems highly unlikely the current Republican fiscal policy will make the U.S. economy better.
Agreed. Supply-side economics has been an abject failure. True to form, adherents blame the failure not on the application of supply-side economics, but that it has not been applied enough. A tea-party president and congress might be bloody-minded enough to actually pass legislation that would be disastrous for the US economy.
If it doesn't the party could implode like it has so many times before.
I also see this. At a certain point, the public will just switch off as the ever-party-faithful complain that it is really the democrats that caused all the problems by not letting them cut the budget enough, or lowing taxes below third-world standards.
So ... (Score:4, Insightful)
If we simultaneously eliminated all subsidies, we'd unleash real competition among all fuels. Markets would powerfully deliver solutions.
Re:The Term "Inconvenient Truth" Applies (Score:4, Insightful)
You had me except for the part about liberals and GMO foods. The idea that somehow these corporations are going to lead to just good things is pure fantasy. GMO foods are about LOCK IN. They are worse than Microsoft.
Take Monsanto, they developed GM seeds that worked with "Roundup", their weed killer. The plants are not better, they are created so they could sell more herbicide. How do they react to competition?
So you can color me a little jaded if I ain't all Kumbayah about GMO foods and the companies that produce them.
Re:Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
Obama also had no military experience and little foreign policy experience, yet even most conservatives think that he is doing well on the "war on terror."
I agree with your last point, but experience is overrated in a presidential candidate. They bring a team with them and their ability to succeed in a primary and federal election is a reasonable proof of basic competence. Now, if a candidate has experience running a large organization and seriously screwed it up, that's another issue.