Scientific Proof, Political Realities, and Misplaced Faith
Assuming this trend continues, the debate will shift from whether we expand nuclear power to what different reactor technologies we will use and where we will store the mess. (Look out Nevada!)
This shift is a reminder of the perils of using science in politics.
When science is invoked in a political campaign in support of an issue, it is usually as a source of utterly secure facts which no intelligent person should question. The problem there is that for many controversial issues, the science is still evolving.
Consider global warming. There has been for some time a general consensus among scientists in this field that global warming is occurring and that human action plays a significant role. However, consensus is not the same as unanimity, and opponents of policies to slow global warming can point to that. They can also show that even within the consensus there is a wide range of conclusions concerning the speed and severity of the crisis.
So what’s a policy maker to do?
Go with the flow. In the 1990s, the thought of global warming was, indeed, inconvenient. The Clinton Administration support a BTU tax only to have the politics of the issue bite back, badly. For the rest of Clinton’s administration, global warming was a backburner issue.
Now the flow is in favor of doing something. Republicans want to build nukes; Democrats are fonder of other alternatives. Neither side wants an electricity shortage, which is why ripping the landscape for big power lines and why moving away from coal powered plants is so hard to do despite their emissions.
So right now we are likely to get more windmills, more nukes, and even more coal-fired plants (though perhaps fewer than the industry once hoped.)
So what happened to the science? Scientific knowledge can inform a general popular consensus. But, in the absence of a clear danger to the daily lives of Americans, it cannot overwhelm on its own other political concerns.
This is particularly true in a nation like ours, whose majority is not scientifically literate in even an elementary fasion. (Alas, we are not alone.) A literate majority might not be able to do science, but it would be better able to determine when science is being simplified and distorted in the pursuit of political ends. That’s why it is particularly scary when presidents and presidential candidates show themselves to be woefully ignorant about science. That George Bush and Mike Huckabee both believe in intelligent design is a minor thing. That each believes that religious faith alone should result in a bogus hypothesis like intelligent design being taught as equal to one of the more settled major theories in biology is nothing less than having teachers tell their students that 2+2=5.
As a nation—as a world—we can’t afford that kind of nonsense. Evaluating the importance of scientific findings in the context of politics would be hard enough with a scientifically literate population, which we do not have. The last thing we need is a president who would reduce the current quality of scientific literacy even more.