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Should Candidates Who Don’t Believe in Science Be Disqualified from Serving as President?

Posted by: Heather Taylor-Miesle -

As the GOP candidates jockey their way toward the presidential nomination, they continue to create new litmus tests for what makes a worthy pick. The top contenders have to loathe government. They have to hate health care reform. And most deny the reality of climate change.

Most of these benchmarks have their roots in ideological battles but that last one is different. It requires candidates to forgo reality as they disavow scientific evidence.

I wonder how they choose which science to accept and which to ignore. Is it alright to acknowledge that gravity exists and cigarettes cause cancer, but not okay to concede that man made climate change is making the Arctic is melt and extreme weather events are becoming the norm? When do you cross the line? When does the crazy start? Most importantly, should ignoring science disqualify you from being president?

Having a president who willfully disregards the scientific evidence of a looming threat is not in our national interest, to put it mildly. I don’t think President Reagan would have gotten elected if he’d said he didn’t trust the data showing the Soviet Union had an enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons. We don’t need leaders who close their eyes to the facts.

But in this race, it’s not about the facts; it’s about speaking to the Tea Party crowd. And denying climate change offers candidates an irresistible trifecta. It allows them to belittle the science geeks and eggheads who might think they are smarter than ordinary folks. It gives them a chance to talk about government regulations—in the form of limits on carbon emissions—which gets their base all riled up. And it helps them keep the campaign donations from oil and coal companies rolling in.

Siding with the 3 percent of scientists who question climate change may play well with a small minority of hard-right voters, but it doesn’t serve the rest of us. There has always been a place in American society for the fringe dwellers—the religious zealots and the conspiracy theorists and the committed Luddites. But that place is not in the White House. Living in denial in the face of evidence isn’t a sign of leadership – it is a sign of delusion and it should disqualify you for serving as President.

There is also a healthy tradition of skepticism in America, but skepticism is not an excuse for inaction. It should be the beginning of a quest to find answers. If Representative Michele Bachmann doubts the existence of climate change, she should travel to the Arctic in the company of researchers. If Governor Perry doubts that the globe is warming, he should walk the scarred plains of Texas with those who have studied the links between climate change, more frequent droughts, and intensified wildfires.

The fact that they don’t journey to find the answers tells me they aren’t skeptics at all: they are just closed-minded. They don’t want to pursue new information or collect the facts on the ground. They want to stay within the confines of Tea Party ideology.

Casting doubt in and of itself shouldn’t disqualify you from becoming the president of the United States. But willfully rejecting the facts, when the consequences of doing so will be devastating, should.

Texas is burning. Governor Perry’s Hair Should Be On Fire. (Instead, It’s His Pants.)

Posted by: David Doniger -

At the Republican presidential debate last night, Texas Gov. Rick Perry called Social Security a Ponzi scheme and “a monstrous lie to our kids.” Perry went on to tell a monstrous lie about climate change:

“The science is – is not settled on this. … [J]ust because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell.”

Oh. Here’s what the National Academy of Sciences said, in a 2010 report requested by Congress, aptly called America’s Climate Choices:

“Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.”

Here are three of the Academy’s conclusions – about as definitive as science gets:

“Climate change is occurring is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for—and in many cases is already affecting—a broad range of human and natural systems.”

“Most of the warming over the last several decades can be attributed to human activities that release carbon dioxide (CO2) and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. The burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—for energy is the single largest human driver of climate change, but agriculture, forest clearing, and certain industrial activities also make significant contributions.”

“Individually and collectively, these changes pose risks for a wide range of human and environmental systems, including freshwater resources, the coastal environment, ecosystems, agriculture, fisheries, human health, and national security, among others.”

Former Gov. John Huntsman warned his party again about the danger of becoming anti-science:

“Listen, when you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said, when you call into question the science of evolution, all I’m saying is that, in order for the Republican Party to win, we can’t run from science. We can’t run from mainstream conservative philosophy. We’ve got to win voters.”

Galileo would not be proud.

President Obama’s Decision on Ozone: Bad Policy and Bad Politics

Posted by: Heather Taylor-Miesle -

I’ll admit it. I was originally a Hillary Clinton supporter in 2008. I liked then-Senator Obama’s passion but I was comforted by Clinton’s experience in what I felt was a tumultuous time. After Obama became the victor from the primaries, I enthusiastically got on board.

Now, I feel like sucker.

Last Friday, President Obama forced the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set aside a measure to reduce smog. If you breathe, this should be a big deal for you. The new smog rule would have saved up to 43,000 lives and avoid as many as 2,200 heart attacks every year while making breathing easier for the 24 million Americans living with asthma.

This is a decision that was solely in the President’s court. He ignored the EPA and the recommendation of the agency’s outside science advisors to side with polluting industries.

Why is the President now siding with polluters? He has taken strong environmental stands in the past. We saw the President push what was effectively the largest clean energy legislation ever passed as part of the initial stimulus bill. We stood with him as he pushed the climate bill in that first year. More recently, we saw the White House put us a road to reducing carbon pollution by making our cars cleaner.

But a number of recent moves are going in the opposite direction. The White House gave tentative approval to offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean. The Administration continues to move forward on steps to approve the Keystone pipeline. And now it is backing away from smog rules.

Why? The White House claims clean air protections would be too expensive. But this is a farce. Letting the polluters off the hook won’t save lives, won’t create jobs and won’t fuel innovation. It will, however, endanger the health and lives of children and seniors.

In fact, as NRDC’s Frances Beinecke said late last week, “clean air investments yield enormous returns. The smog standards would generate $37 billion in value for a cost of about $20 billion by 2020. Taken together, Clean Air Act standards generated approximately $1.3 trillion in public health and environmental benefits in 2010 alone for a cost of $50 billion. That’s a value worth more than 9 percent of GDP for a cost of only .4 percent of GDP. The ratio of benefits to costs is more than 26 to 1.”

Why the White House is running away from this story is beyond me. This shouldn’t be about the economy because these safeguards will create jobs. And this retreat certainly isn’t going to get him any votes. In a June poll of likely voters commissioned by the American Lung Association found that 75 percent supported the EPA’s effort to set stronger smog standards and 66 percent believed that EPA scientists– not Congress — should establish clean air standards. Is he is hoping to attract a few votes from right? Unlikely if you consider that only 24 percent of moderate Republicans and 7 percent of conservative Republicans think he is doing a good job according to the the most recent Gallup polling.

Color me confused. The only thing that makes sense is that the White House made a political calculation that it couldn’t win the message war against the Tea Party. The Tea Party has made “regulation” a dirty word when in fact regulations help keep us safe.

Environmental and public health regulations are what keep that industrial mill from dumping its toxic chemicals in the lake you fish in each summer. Regulations have been cleaning our air for decades. Regulations on buildings ensure that your home and office be built to withstand foreseeable natural disasters. Long gone are the days when machinery regularly maimed employees thanks to labor regulations. And a lack of regulations can lead to disaster – just look at the Wall Street crash and the part that lax regulations played in that disaster. The word “regulation” is really a synonym for “public safeguard.” When did that become a bad thing?

President Obama should reconsider this misguided move and redouble his efforts to protect clean air. He is going to have many opportunities in the coming days to right this wrong. The House will be voting as early this month to try to overturn the clean air standards the White House has moved forward with. But if we don’t weigh in, the Tea Party will set the agenda of this White House.

Where is the hope and change that we were promised in 2008? I suspect that a lot of people who walked precincts and stood in long lines to cast a vote for the President Obama in the last Presidential election are asking themselves the same question.

The Questions That Should Be Asked in Columbia

Posted by: Heather Taylor-Miesle -

Imagine a country where the air was so polluted it destroyed whole forests, sickened children and the elderly, and caused nearly 200,000 premature deaths a year, a place where industrial wastes poisoned our waters and lands, and a nation where rivers were so contaminated they caught on fire.

That was the United States four decades ago, when President Nixon made the case for creating the Environmental Protection Agency. He also signed the Clean Air Act–a genuine American success story and one of the most effective tools in U.S. history for protecting our health.

Passed by large majorities in both houses of Congress in 1970, the law has markedly reduced pollution and saved of thousands of lives each year by reducing toxins that cause or contribute to asthma, emphysema, heart disease and other debilitating ailments.

In economic terms, the Clean Air Act has saved tens of trillions of dollars by keeping us out of hospitals and in schools and on the job. It also has helped create new industries and green jobs that annually generate billions of dollars in revenues and wages.

Yet both the act and the EPA are coming under attack in Washington, led by some of the same Republican presidential candidates who will appear Monday (9/5) in Columbia for a debate hosted by Sen. Jim DeMint, the political Godfather of the Tea Party, which has led the worst assault on our environmental and public health protections in modern history.

Given the participants, it seems unlikely that this forum will generate a serious dialogue on the future of environmental protection and job creation, much less yield any positive solutions.

As you tune into the debate, here are a few questions that should be asked of the candidates, but probably won’t be:

  1. Given EPA’s record of protecting our health and our planet, and fostering American ingenuity and economic vitality, why would you block its ability to update public health safeguards, which are based on science rather than on politics or ideology?
  2. According to the National Academy of Sciences, 97 percent of climate scientists believe global warming is caused by our actions. Don’t you believe in science? Why should the public trust politicians who often do the bidding of their biggest campaign donations instead of unbiased scientists whose work is peer-reviewed?
  3. Why do you want to stop EPA from further reducing smog, even though millions of Americans continue living with ozone levels that are unhealthy and violate common-sense, public health standards?

A truly protective standard would prevent each year as many as 12,000 premature deaths, 58,000 asthma attacks, 21,000 hospital and emergency room visits, 5,300 heart attacks, more than 2 million missed school days and 420,000 lost work days. Moreover, clean air yields substantial benefits to the economy and to businesses large and small. And those benefits consistently outweigh the costs of pollution reductions. A strong smog standard would yield health benefits worth $13 billion to $100 billion annually by 2020.

So many questions. So little time. So here’s the bottom line question:

Whose side are you on – the public’s, or the greedy industries’ that care more about their profits above all else?

Now, if such questions were posed by Sen. DeMint, I suspect we’d hear a lot of rhetoric and obfuscation instead of a serious discussion of how we can make America cleaner and more prosperous for all.

But I hold out hope. The one constant thing about this field of candidates is that most have shown a proclivity to change their positions over time. So maybe it’s not too late.

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