Democrats Hate Science Too

I read recently that President Obama will be appearing on an upcoming segment of the science TV show Mythbusters. I think that's just great. No I've never watched the show. I'd probably wince if I did. But even cheesy popular science has value and, who knows, this show may actually be pretty good popular science. Any time a president supports geekiness and science in action is just great.

That all said, Obama has not, despite rhetoric used in his campaign, been a big user of science. OK, he and the Democrats are better than the Republicans, who in general still deny both evolution and global warming. Republicans are in fact complete idiots when it comes to science. They loathe us calculator toting geeks as much as they loathe liberals with Ivy League educations. Basically if it looks smart and acts smart, Republicans hate it. They are the party that wholly embraces and is proud of ignorance.

OK, enough Republican bashing. Democrats and Obama hate science too. They are better when it comes to evolution and global warming, yes. But I don't know if their agreement with scientific orthodoxy on these issues represents an acceptance of science as much as it is in accord with their generally gloomy world view. If you're a dark soul, which your typical Democrat tends to be, then maybe it's cool to think you come from apes and maybe it's cool to think in a Malthusian way of fouling your own nest by burning fossil fuels. Maybe Democrats aren't being rational, but just globbing on to something that they like emotionally.

Why do I think Democrats hate science almost as much as Republicans? First, I've had to deal with Democrats on the issue of high level radioactive waste storage. All they seem to care about is that high level radioactive waste is dangerous (which is true) and Harry Reid doesn't want it in Nevada (also true). If you point out that keeping high level waste at power plants near metropolitan areas around the country is not exactly a good idea and that Yucca Mountain, Nevada is probably as good as it gets for a place to store the waste since the area has been nuked to hell already by atomic testing, they don't listen. The science of nuclear waste - the billions spent on testing Yucca Mountain - doesn't matter. The Democrats and Obama say no. When politics are at play, science gets thrown into the ash can for both Democrats and Republicans.

Ditto for the BP oil gusher in the Gulf. After so much bad news on all fronts - the economy, Iraq, Afghanistan - the last thing that the Obama administration wanted was scientists making proclamations of just how bad this gushing well was. So throughout the crisis the administration consistently downplayed the well's negative impact and worked with BP to keep science from being done that might prove to be bad PR.

First the administration went with rates of oil loss that were obviously way, way too low. Then they tried to dismiss the idea that there were any deep gulf oil plumes. The farce continued whey they made the ad hoc claim that 25 percent of the lost oil had already been consumed by bacteria. This wasn't the Obama administration embracing science. Rather they were embracing science fiction.

The aspect of the Obama administration ignoring or purposely pushing aside science that I noticed the most was in their handling of the effort to plug the well. There was all this falderal about top kill, which got everyone excited even though the odds of that procedure working were nil. It was a big side show. Then a plug was installed, which was great, and there was all this talk of the plug capping the spill, which it sort of did. But when it was clear that the pressure readings indicated that there was some leakage of the oil into rock formations above the oil reservoir - known as cross-formational flow to those in the well biz - all of a sudden the news went dead as to the pressure in the well. Why? Because no one wanted people talking about cross-formational flow.

In the end the well was plugged from below, which was definitely the right thing to do. But the way the Obama administration handled both the transmission of information over the months of the spill and handled scientists trying to work on various aspects of the spill was likely not a whole lot different than how Republicans would have done it. Keep the scientists away. Refute statements by scientists that convey bad news. Obama likes to say that he values science. But his actions say he values science only when it is politically convenient to do so.