November 5, 2012
Why Conservatives Turned Against
Science
Remember when environmental protection was a bipartisan effort?
By Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes
A
prediction: When all the votes have been
counted and the reams of polling data
have been crunched, analyzed, and spun,
this will be clear: Few scientists will have voted
for Republican candidates, particularly for
national office. Survey data taken from 1974
through 2010 and analyzed by Gordon Gauchat
in the American Sociological Reviewconfirm
that most American scientists are not
conservatives. A 2009 study by the Pew
Research Center found that only 9 percent of
scientists self-identified as conservative, while 52
percent called themselves liberals. Only 6
percent of American scientists self-identified as
Republicans. This state of affairs is bad for the
nation, and bad for science.
It was not always this way. In the 1968 election,
Richard Nixon won the votes of 31 percent of
Jonathan Twingley for The Chronicle Review
physicists, 42 percent of biologists, 52 percent of
geologists, and 62 percent of agricultural
scientists (compared with 43.4 percent of the popular vote). While these data do not include
party affiliation, they suggest that the scientific community of the late 1960s was much more
evenly divided between the two major parties than it is now, and, with the exception of
physicists, slightly more conservative than the American voting public at large.
Why have scientists fled the Republican Party? The obvious answer is that the Republican
Party has spurned science. Consider Mitt Romney's shifting position on climate change. As
governor of Massachusetts in 2004, he laid out a plan for protecting the state's climate. As
presidential candidate, he has said that climate change is real, but has questioned whether
humans are causing it. His stance is consistent with the Republican Party platform, which
unambiguously calls for expanding the production and use of the fossil fuels that drive climate
change. In 2009, Paul Ryan accused climate scientists of "clear efforts to use statistical tricks to
distort their findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change,"
echoing false accusations leveled against climatologists at the University of East Anglia. Mitt
Romney and Paul Ryan exemplify the conservative turn against science, but what explains it?
I
t seems hard to believe today, but environmental protection used to be a bipartisan affair.
In the early half of the 20th century, Republican and Democratic administrations pursued
conservation, setting aside land as national forests and parks but leaving pollution control
to local and state governments. By the 1950s, however, pollution became a national issue.
Above-ground nuclear-weapons testing spread radioactive fallout globally, along with a fear of
the consequences. Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring, documented the adverse effects of
pesticides, especially DDT. Less well remembered but equally important was the work of Clair
Patterson, a geochemist at the California Institute of Technology, who showed that lead
pollution from cars had reached Antarctica. By 1970 it was no longer plausible to argue that
pollution was a local problem—a "neighborhood effect," as the economist Milton Friedman
called it in 1962.
Over the next few decades, scientists identified more problems:
acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, anthropogenic climate
change. These largely invisible threats were transnational, even
global, and required scientific expertise to understand, and
international coordination (if not international governance) to
resolve.
Confirmation of
global warming
activated a new
phase in the
conservative
assault.
Early pollution legislation, passed during the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations, was relatively weak, but a growing
national consensus motivated President Nixon to accept stronger
measures. The National Environmental Policy Act, enacted in 1970, formalized requirements
for environmental review of federal actions. The Clean Air and Water Acts, the Endangered
Species Act, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency established a powerful
new framework for environmental protection in the United States.
The historian J. Brooks Flippen has argued that so much progress was made so quickly in part
due to party competition: Democrats were trying to appropriate the mantle of
environmentalism from Republicans; Nixon was intent on retaining the mantle for himself and
his party (although he ultimately concluded that despite winning the 1972 election he had not
received enough benefit from his environmental leadership). He was also losing support from
the Republican Party's traditional base of business leaders, who opposed the expansion of
federal regulatory power and worried about the effect of new regulations on their businesses.
Nixon resolved to recommit to business. Although his premature departure from office
prevented him from having an immediate impact, he wasn't alone in believing that the GOP's
future depended on realigning itself with business.
There had long been a Republican anti-New Deal coalition focused on promoting "free
enterprise" and rolling back perceived restrictions on economic freedom. In the 1930s, the
National Association of Manufacturers strongly opposed Roosevelt's reforms, which were seen
by many business leaders as socialist. This critique was revived in the 1970s and given new
vigor by a coalition of business leaders and conservative foundations, who established think
tanks to promote deregulation and laissez-faire policies, based particularly on the ideas of
Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman.
One of the new think tanks, the Heritage Foundation, was especially influential with the Reagan
administration. Conservative foundations also gave rise to an explicitly anti-environmental
literature during the 1980s and 1990s. A study published in the journal Environmental
Politics in 2008 found that 110 environmentally skeptical books were published between 1970
and 2005 in the United States. Only nine had no apparent connection to a conservative think
tank.
These changes in Republican strategy were not just the result of a political realignment; they
were also a response to a conceptual realignment in the environmental movement. Before the
1960s, land conservation included the possibility of future economic use, while land
preservation focused only on shielding specific wilderness locations from development in
perpetuity. Both ideals focused on protecting areas of singular natural beauty. This "aesthetic
environmentalism"—as some historians call it—did not inspire, or require, a big expansion of
federal authority. Nor did it rely much on science. But pollution control did require federal
government action—and a lot of science. Indeed, most environmental legislation passed in the
early 1970s stipulated that policies be based on the best available science. As a result, scientists
became part of the newly expanded regulatory state. This occurred just as the business
community and its Republican allies were organizing a counterattack.
T
he idea of limits is at the center of early conservationism and later environmentalism.
Conservationists argued that the reckless use of resources could lead to shortages.
Environmentalists insisted that it isn't just physical resources that are limited; oxygen,
water and nitrogen, and the "sinks" that sequester and reprocess waste were limited, too. The
idea of "Spaceship Earth," a vision of Earth as a ship with limited supplies, was popularized
during the late 1960s. And in 1972 a group of systems scientists wrote the book Limits to
Growth, forecasting crisis and collapse if population, resource consumption, and pollution were
not reined in.
Limits to Growth was a phenomenon, selling more than 10 million copies. It was also instantly
controversial, as it countered the most basic tenet of market economics: the idea that infinite
growth is possible. The book claimed that natural limits to growth would be reached sometime
within the next 100 years. The authors focused in part on the likely availability of some basic
industrial minerals, basing their estimates on the known reserves. Critics pointed out that these
estimates understated available minerals because companies stop looking for new reserves
once several decades' supply has been identified—exploration is expensive and only justifiable
when there is anticipated demand. Similarly, Limits to Growth ignored the role of technological
innovation. (The current natural-gas drilling boom in the United States, due in part to advances
in horizontal drilling, is a case in point.)
What the critics missed, and what American conservatives would studiously ignore, was
that Limits to Growth was correct in one of its major claims: There are limits to the planet's
capacity to absorb pollution. The book actually described two different forms of limits: limits to
sources—the commodities necessary to run industrial civilization—and limits to sinks—places to
store and absorb the byproducts of that civilization. Much of the debate centered around
sources. In hindsight, the argument about sinks was more important.
Consider carbon dioxide. The Limits authors knew that it was a greenhouse gas that could alter
the climate, and they extrapolated from a simple exponential curve that the concentration of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would reach 380 parts per million by 2000. (They were
close: It reached that level in 2006.) The authors also discussed the relationship between rapid
increases of pollutants in the Great Lakes and rapid declines in fish catch, as well as the
diminished amount of dissolved oxygen in the Baltic Sea due to organic waste (a later
generation would begin to refer to these proliferating oceanic zones of low oxygen as "dead
zones," where marine life cannot live). The authors acknowledged that these limits, except for
carbon dioxide, were local not global, but they did not doubt that global limits existed—
scientists simply had not yet put much effort into figuring out what they were.
It is hard to argue that the Limits authors were wrong on this point. Yet they were branded as
Doomsayers by their opponents, who became known as the Cornucopians. Their intellectual
leader in the United States was the economist Julian Simon, later hailed by Wired magazine as
the "Doomslayer." Simon rejected the very idea of limits, and especially the notion that
population growth should be restricted. Human ingenuity was the ultimate resource, he argued,
and as long as it was unrestrained there was nothing humans could not accomplish. He saw
pessimism at the root of American environmentalism, and he railed against it. Simon
emphasized data showing improving environmental conditions, contending they were
improving because Americans had become wealthier. "Wealthier is greener," his followers
declared.
Wealth no doubt played some role in enabling the United States to spend money on
environmental protection, but this money would not have been spent were it not for the
demands of environmentalists. In his zeal to oppose the Doomsayers, the Doomslayer could not
admit that the pessimists helped make his own prophecy come true. Humans are innovative,
and many problems have engineering solutions, but innovation follows incentives. The Clean Air
and Water Acts provided incentives to solve environmental problems. Simon's own generation
of economists generally thought these laws were inefficient, and they advocated for more
market-friendly reforms during the 1980s, such as emissions trading to reduce acid rain. But
Simon and his followers refused to admit that the environmentalists had been at least partly
correct.
Conservative politicians sided with Simon and the Cornucopians.
In 1984, a member of the House of Representatives from Georgia
named Newt Gingrich published a book calling for huge
government investment in space exploration and ultimately
settlement of the moon, which was necessary, he said, to destroy
the myth of limits. The solar system contains essentially limitless
resources, Gingrich reasoned; thus, incorporating them into
America's economic sphere would defeat the environmentalists'
Climate scientists
came under attack
because they had
exposed significant
market failures.
critique of capitalism once and for all. That same year, Herman Kahn, a founder of the
conservative Hudson Institute, joined forces with Julian Simon to edit The Resourceful Earth,
an explicit rejoinder to Limits to Growth. And in 1999, a coalition of conservatives created the
Club for Growth to counter the Club of Rome—the group of European business leaders who had
commissioned the original Limits to Growth study.
The Reagan administration also rejected the idea of limits, seeing technological innovation as
the best solution to pollution. Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, set out to reduce or
eliminate the regulatory burden on industry by rolling back regulations, preventing future ones,
definancing enforcement agencies, and devolving enforcement to the states (which were
generally less willing or able to regulate large industries and often lacked the scientific capability
to do so). The Reagan administration's ideological assault on regulatory agencies left their staffs
disorganized and demoralized. Budget cuts also deprived them of expertise, as specialists
moved to positions outside government.
Reagan later replaced his most extreme cabinet members, but the antiregulatory, antilimits
ideology did not fade away; it remained embedded in the New Right's network of think tanks,
law firms, and foundations. It was now orthodoxy in the Republican Party, and when the
Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, soon making Gingrich speaker of the House of
Representatives, Republicans passed bills curtailing environmental laws. Even a Republican,
Senator John Chafee, commented that "when all the artichoke leaves are peeled away,"
Republicans "are out for the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act.
That is what they are gunning for." The new majority whip, Tom DeLay, tried to gut the EPA,
particularly its enforcement powers. Gingrich cut off financing for Congress's science-advisory
apparatus, the Office of Technology Assessment.
All this occurred while scientists were increasingly demonstrating the realities of planetary
sinks. Most evident by the 1980s was acid rain. By the end of the decade, scientists had also
begun to observe the warming they had predicted from rising levels of greenhouse gases.
Confirmation of global warming activated a new phase in the conservative assault on
environmental protection: Conservatives began to attack individual scientists and to deny the
legitimacy of climate science, and sometimes even of the concept of publicly financed science.
These attacks came from think tanks, industry trade organizations, and members of Congress.
Scientists had their offices broken into, their e-mail stolen, and were subject to hostile
Congressional investigations and subpoenas.
Climate scientists came under attack not just because their research threatened the oil industry
(although it certainly did that), but also because they had exposed significant market failures.
Pollution is a market failure because, in general, polluters do not pay a price for environmental
damage (and this includes not just polluting industries, like electrical utilities, but also anyone
who uses a product—like gasoline—that takes up a portion of the planetary sink without paying
for it). Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank, has declared climate change
"the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen."
Accepting the need to correct market failures required one to concede the need to reform
capitalism—in short, to concede the reality of market failure and limits. This became
increasingly difficult for Republicans during the 1990s and 2000s. Party leadership began
supporting primary challenges against party members deemed insufficiently conservative,
driving many moderates into retirement, and some out of the party entirely. Some Republicans
who had acknowledged the reality of global warming lost their seats; others—including Mitt
Romney—began to deny the problem, knowing that if they didn't they would not be electable as
Republicans.
A
nd so it was that during the decades that scientists began documenting how humans
affect the natural world, the Republican Party committed itself to denying that impact,
or at least denying that it required governmental response. And while in 2001 the
historian William Cronon could argue that anti-environmentalism was a vote loser for the
Republican Party, by the end of that decade it seemed no longer to be the case, as polls showed
that rank-and-file Republicans were following party leaders in rejecting climate science.
One more factor should be acknowledged. The conservative turn against science coincided with
the end of the cold war—what some called the "end of history"—defined by the triumph of
market democracy. In one of history's ironies, the vast infusion of public money into scientific
research during the cold war produced the knowledge that underscored the limits of capitalism.
Equally important, the end of the cold war gave rise to an increasingly dogmatic belief in the
efficacy of market capitalism. For some, victory was seen as justification for an uncritical
triumphalism. If capitalism was the better system, then the best form of capitalism was its
purest form. Before the cold war, it had been widely recognized that capitalism could fail (the
lesson most economists took from the Great Depression); by the end of the 1980s, however, the
lessons of the past were increasingly viewed as quaint.
It's hardly surprising, then, that natural scientists have fled the GOP. Scientific research, with
its basis in observation and experience of the natural world, is rooted in the fundamental
premise that when the results of our investigations tell us something, we pay heed. Economists
have accepted that market failure is real, and if its consequences are serious, then remedies are
needed. Even Hayek acknowledged this. Legitimate interventions in his view included
preventing the "harmful effects of deforestation, of some methods of farming, or of the noise
and smoke of factories," prohibiting the use of poisonous substances, limiting working hours,
enforcing sanitary conditions in workplaces, controlling weights and measures, and preventing
violent labor strikes. Hayek believed, quite logically, that if the government were to take on
such functions, and particularly if doing so limited the freedom of particular groups or
individuals more so than the population at large, then the justification should be clear (as it was
in all the examples he gave).
Over the past four decades, natural scientists have given us those justifications. But over the
last two decades, the Republican Party has rejected that science. In turn, scientists have
rejected the Republican Party.