From the January 17th edition of The Washington Post, Michael Gerson spends his column space on what he sees as the unfortunate intersection of climate science and the culture wars. A former speechwriter for the George W. Bush Administration, Gerson does not wish to stop the culture wars, but he sees climate science as an unfortunate part of the conflict.
“A scientific debate has been sucked into a broader national argument about the role of government. Many political liberals have seized on climate disruption as an excuse for policies they supported long before climate science became compelling — greater federal regulation and mandated lifestyle changes. Conservatives have also tended to equate climate science with liberal policies and therefore reject both.
“The result is a contest of questioned motives. In the conservative view, the real liberal goal is to undermine free markets and national sovereignty (through international environmental agreements). In the liberal view, the real conservative goal is to conduct a war on science and defend fossil fuel interests.”
Only Roger Pielke can say for sure, but this strikes me as of a kind with the “stealth issue advocacy” he outlines in The Honest Broker. But here the stealth seems to have an extra layer. There’s the stealth of hiding the political agenda in the science, then Gerson is suggesting that there is now an extra layer of stealth – that of ideology. In this case that’s the culture war (on both sides).
Gerson properly points out what the warming facts are, and that those facts do not dictate a specific policy (or political) response. While his last words are a bit problematic (moral good, in a political context, is not as clearly defined as I think Gerson would like), the first part I find properly aspirational. We may never get there, but I think we have to try.
“But any rational approach requires some distance between science and ideology. The extraction and burning of dead plant matter is not a moral good — or the proper cause for a culture war.”
