Just this week, we’ve seen the “collapse” of American and global markets, widely attributed to a failure of deregulation.
Also this week, I’ve launched my own very insignificant attack on systemic conservative lying.
And just today, I saw this video, “American Denial of Global Warming”, where science historian Naomi Oreskes outlines the parts of a few players, including Fred Seitz and Fred Singer of the George Marshall Institute. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, I’ll give you my best summary:
The George Marshall Institute is a conservative think tank established to counter scientific resistance to the Strategic Defense Initiative (Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense plan). Their strategy was simple, confuse the issue by claiming that not all scientists are united in opposition to SDI. They subsequently used the same tactic with the second-hand smoke and global warming issues.
Don’t take my word for it, do your own research, google “marshall seitz singer jastrow nierenberg” and note that Singer’s Science & Environmental Policy Project website is alive and well as of Sept 20, 2008.
Oreskes makes it clear that Seitz, Singer et al were fiercely anti-communist, anti-regulation conservatives, and that there’s nothing inherently wrong with that political view (although this week is a bad week for that point of view). The problem is that they’ve used fake science to promote their political views. And they used the media to do it. This has confused Americans, eroded their faith in science & media, and has delayed meaningful action on global warming.
I say again, reasonable Republicans have a responsibility to reject this type of strategy, which is leading America down the path, not just away from global leadership, but actually to irrelevance.
