This week the Bush administration called for hiring tens of thousands of science and math teachers for advanced placement classes, and also for new tax cuts and incentives for research and development in science and technology.
Why? Because business executives said it was important. At Prometheus, Roger Pielke, Jr., runs down the list of corporate executives lobbying the Bush administration on this topic, including Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel; Charles Holliday, CEO of DuPont; and Lee Raymond, former CEO of ExxonMobil.
But below the headlines, the Bush administration continues in its efforts to ignore or silence scientists concerned about issues that have less to do with money and more to do with planetary health.
According to today’s NY Times (reg. required), shortly after Bush was re-elected:
In interviews this week, more than a dozen public-affairs officials, along with half a dozen agency scientists, spoke of growing efforts by political appointees to control the flow of scientific information.
In the months before the 2004 election, according to interviews and some documents, these appointees sought to review news releases and to approve or deny news media requests to interview NASA scientists.
Repeatedly that year, public-affairs directors at all of NASA’s science centers were admonished by White House appointees at headquarters to focus all attention on Mr. Bush’s January 2004 "vision" for returning to the Moon and eventually traveling to Mars.
Starting early in 2004, directives, almost always transmitted verbally through a chain of midlevel workers, went out from NASA headquarters to the agency’s far-flung research centers and institutes saying that all news releases on earth science developments had to allude to goals set out in Mr. Bush’s "vision statement" for the agency, according to interviews with public-affairs officials working in headquarters and at three research centers.
Many people working at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said that at the same time, there was a slowdown in these centers’ ability to publish anything related to climate.
Most of these career government employees said they could speak only on condition of anonymity, saying they feared reprisals. But their accounts tightly meshed with one another.
One NASA scientist, William Patzert, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, confirmed the general tone of the agency that year.
"That was the time when NASA was reorganizing and all of a sudden earth science disappeared," Mr. Patzert said. "Earth kind of got relegated to just being one of the 9 or 10 planets. It was ludicrous."
Most ludicrous of all was George Deutsch, a twenty-four year-old former 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign worker appointed to a position in public relations overseeing NASA.
Deutsch not only tried (clumsily, as Pielke pointed out in an earlier post) to muzzle James Hansen’s statements to the press on global warming; he even edited astrophysicists, declaring in a memo that the Big Bang "is not proven fact; it is opinion," and:
It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator. This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA.
Yes, it would be terrible if young people and others got only part of the story about what’s happening in the universe and our world from NASA, wouldn’t it?
Jeez.
But that’s not all the news of science wars within the Bush administration. Today the LATimes (reg. required) reveals:
In an unprecedented action, the Environmental Protection Agency’s own scientific panel on Friday challenged the agency’s proposed public health standards governing soot and dust.
The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, mandated by Congress to review such proposals, asserted Friday that the standards put forward by EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson ignored most of the committee’s earlier recommendations and could lead to additional heart attacks, lung cancer and respiratory ailments.
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It was the first time since the committee was established under the Clean Air Act nearly 30 years ago that the committee had asked the EPA to change course, according to EPA staffers and committee members.
"We’re in uncharted waters here," acknowledged committee Chairwoman Rogene Henderson, an inhalation toxicologist. She said their action was necessary because "the response of the administrator is unprecedented in that he did not take our advice. It’s most unusual for him not to take the advice of his own science advisory body."
Several members said Johnson’s proposals incorrectly said the committee had called for eliminating the regulation of coarse particulates for mining and agriculture.
Those exemptions have been lambasted by state and regional air regulators across the nation, including officials from the Owens Valley and elsewhere in California.
Keep in mind, this is the same Stephen Johnson who has defended the Bush administration’s non-action on global warming by pointing to the "20 billion" that the administation is allegedly spending researching what is already well-established in the field.
Guess you can imagine how much attention they’re paying to the results of those studies.
Kit Stolz 