Technical Controversies over Public Policy

From Fluoridation to Fracking and Climate Change

Allan Mazur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351593021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Newspapers and TV often report controversial risk warnings over technological innovations, scientific developments, or environmental hazards that have at their core a dispute between experts who contradict one another not only on preferred policy but also on the scientific facts that underlie decisions about public policy. Recent examples are the disputes about climate change, fracking, vaccination and autism, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Adversaries mobilize constituents with similar interests or ideologies, form opposing coalitions, and compete for media exposure. They articulate arguments and counterarguments. "Facts" become malleable, differently appraised by each side. Uncongenial evidence is ignored or discredited. For many adversaries, winning the policy argument is primary; evaluating the true degree of hazard is secondary. How can we determine which side's "facts" are right and which wrong? Do news media enlighten the public or worsen polarization? Can policymakers deal with controversial science and technology more cogently than they do now?

PART I

Preliminaries

The dispute over global warming is the outstanding technical controversy of our time. At the extremes, one side calls it an existential threat, an ultimate risk of human extinction. The other side says it is a hoax—that there is nothing going on beyond normal variation in climate. So we jump right in, analyzing in Chapter 1 this highly polarized political controversy that has at its core a dispute between technical experts over the reality, extent, and causes of climate change. This will set some of the themes of this book: What drives the controversy? Why do partisans choose one side or another? Do the existence and persistence of the controversy depend on the underlying scientific dispute between technical experts, or does it float above scientific disagreements, barely dependent on them at all? Do news media inform the public, or drive the controversy up or down, or both, or neither?

Chapter 2 moves from the specific case of climate change to general characteristics of technical controversies about public policy. To some extent, one looks like another, the partisans on either side playing familiar roles, for example, challengers exaggerating risks and minimizing benefits, while the other side minimizes risk and plays up advantages.

Are these controversies obstructionist or useful? In my view, they have utility for technology assessment, as expert adversaries probe each other’s claims for weaknesses and make counterclaims of their own. Often this brings to light hazards previously unsuspected, or disarms needless alarms raised impetuously. Also, they put a brake on overly enthusiastic promoters, or call to account parties that have or may cause serious damage. Unfortunately, when controversies become highly publicized, polarized, and politicized, they have a tendency to become hopelessly mired down, a standoff, and ultimately obstructionist.

1

THE CONTROVERSY OVER CLIMATE CHANGE

December 2015: In Paris, global leaders celebrate the landmark United Nations accord on reducing greenhouses gases, approved by nearly every nation in the world. In America, seven of the Republican contenders for the presidency publicly doubt the reality of man-made climate change (Trump, Rubio, Cruz, Carson, Huckabee, Paul, Santorum), while five (Kasich, Bush, Christie, Fiorina, Pataki) do not deny the science but oppose regulation because of its costs to the economy (Andrews and Kaplan 2015). The ultimate victor, President Donald Trump, once posted on Twitter, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive” (Davenport 2015).

After Trump’s stunning win in the 2016 presidential election, he began dismantling climate protection measures put in place by the prior administration. One of his first actions was to appoint a climate denier named Myron Ebell to direct the transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), then chose as EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, an attorney known for suing the EPA on behalf of fossil fuel interests. Pruitt does not believe the established scientific consensus that carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming (Davenport 2017). Six months into office, Trump announced that he would withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord. (The mechanism of withdrawal takes nearly four years to complete, leaving a final decision up to voters in the next presidential election.)

Eight years earlier, when Republican John McCain ran against Democrat Barack Obama for the presidency, both men agreed that man-made climate change was a threat requiring a solution, though subsequently McCain retreated from that position, which was out of step with his fellow party members. Climate change is not the only instance when Republicans denied science to placate their base. A decade earlier, when the evolution wars were active and newsworthy, some Republican leaders came out against Darwin. Then-president George W. Bush supported teaching “creation science” in public schools (Mazur 2008).

I begin with these peculiar politics of the United States because America’s policies and its central news organs are closely watched by governments and news media of other nations, sometimes as a model to emulate, at other times to oppose. There is also the methodological advantage that America has the longest running polls on climate opinion, which help us understand media amplification.

The American Case

Americans never worried much about climate change. In 2014 the British market research company Ipsos-MORI released its Global Trends 2014, based on surveys of over 16,000 respondents in 20 countries (www.ipsosglobaltrends.com/environment.html). Comparing nations on the percentage who disagreed with the statement, “The climate change we are currently seeing is largely the result of human activity,” Americans were more skeptical than any other nation polled. In 2015, the Pew Research Center surveyed 40 nations and reported that the United States and China, whose economies are responsible for the greatest annual CO₂ emissions, are among the least concerned. The Pew report, after noting the stark partisan difference in the US, pointed out that in Australia, Canada, Germany, and the UK, there is some but not as great a divide about the climate threat between the political left and right (Stokes et al. 2015).

Why do Republicans in particular deny or ignore established science and diverge so sharply from other nations about the need for action? Anti-environmentalism is not an intrinsically Republican position. America’s most powerful environmental legislation was enacted under Republican presidents: Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon (creation of the EPA, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act), Ronald Reagan (Montreal accord to protect stratospheric ozone), and George H.W. Bush (1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act).

According to the League of Conservation Voters, which scores members of Congress on their support for environmental issues, Democrats have been more supportive since the earliest scoring in 1970, but party differences were modest and fairly steady until about 1991, near the end of George H.W. Bush’s presidency. Thereafter the parties diverged, increasingly through the Clinton and Obama presidencies (McCright et al. 2014). Public opinion about government spending to protect the environment, as measured in the General Social Survey from 1972 to 2014, also shows Democrats more favorable toward environmental protection, but as in Congress, the party difference was small—10 percent or less—into the early 1990s. Then partisan difference abruptly increased to roughly 15 percent, holding fairly consistently into the early 2000s, and then there was a further partisan divergence to about 25 percent from the mid-2000s through 2014 (McCright et al. 2014; also see http://sda.berkeley.edu/sdaweb/analysis/?dataset=gss14).

What most changed is the Republican Party’s rightward shift. Since the 1970s, Republicans have increasingly called themselves “conservative,” a trend that accelerated during the Clinton–Gore administration (January 1993 to January 2001). There was concurrently an increase in Democrats calling themselves “liberal” but not as extreme (Figure 1.1). What does that have to do with global warming?

Polling data show that probably by 1997, Republicans and political conservatives were less convinced than Democrats and political liberals that global warming is actually occurring, that it is human induced, and that it is a substantial threat. Party differences in these earliest polls are small, nothing like the gulf that would eventually emerge (Krosnick et al. 2000; McCright and Dunlap 2011). Republicans, their party friendliest to energy industries—both Presidents Bush were oilmen—were long prone to oppose restrictions on fossil fuels (Shipan and Lowry 2001). Recall too that in the 1990s the scientific case for global warming was not so strong as it has become; indeed, global temperature had declined from the 1940s into the 1970s as the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide steadily rose. The Clinton presidency signed the Kyoto Protocol to limit carbon emissions in 1998 but never submitted it to the Senate for ratification, knowing it would face bipartisan opposition for ignoring emissions from developing nations, particularly China, and for fear of its economic consequences at home. President Clinton talked the talk but took no major action to limit global warming. The following administration of George W. Bush was not greatly different on climate action apart from its vocal hostility to it and emphatic rejection of the Kyoto treaty.

FIGURE 1.1 US Republicans Became More Conservative, Especially During the Clinton–Gore Administration

Source: General Social Survey, variables polviews and partyid.

During the 2000s, what had been a moderate party difference over global warming became extreme, adding fervor to contrarians. Republicans increasingly reflected views then being promulgated by conservative media outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, denigrating the virtual scientific consensus on global warming (Hmielowski et al. 2013). Even prestigious American news organizations gave equal voice to contrarian spokespeople, essentially placing their views on a par with authoritative sources such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Boykoff 2013). Here is a splendid example of partisan amplification by the mass media. One catalyst, though certainly not the sole cause, was the former vice president, Al Gore.

After his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 election, Gore was not much in the news, but during 2004 and 2005 he went on a speaking tour with his now-famous PowerPoint on global warming, and converted it into the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2006. Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican, was at the same time making his own famous claim that attributing a warming climate to human action was a “hoax” (Inhofe 2012).

As a presidential campaigner, Gore had seemed stiff and aloof, but in the film he looks warm and wise, even funny. In the meantime, President Bush’s war in Iraq had become a debacle, and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina a disaster, leaving Bush’s approval rating in continual decline (www.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx). For liberals, Gore became an idealized “president who might have been,” and an international media star. For conservatives, he was a snake oil salesman, roundly lampooned and disliked. In 2007 Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the IPCC, as if raising his finger in the face of the Republicans. All this was a bonanza for news media around the world, helping to elevate coverage of global warming to a level never seen before.

Quantity of News Coverage in the United States

I used the search terms “greenhouse effect” or “global warming” or “climate change” to trace quantity of coverage in major US news organs with computer archives searchable back to the 1980s. (By the early 1990s, “greenhouse effect” had gone out of fashion as a label and was a superfluous search term.) Figure 1.2 shows yearly counts for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal (abstracts), and the Associated Press wire service, all indexed in Lexis-Nexis. After 2010, hundreds of blog entries inflated indices for The New York Times and the Washington Post; I removed these and web-based publications from the counts.

Network television news brings visual imagery, between commercials, to a handful of stories prominent in the national print media, thus amplifying the effect of the newspapers. The number of global-warming news stories televised on ABC, CBS, and NBC, the longest-indexed networks in the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (https://dev-tvnews.library.vanderbilt.edu/search#advanced), are multiplied by 10 for display in Figure 1.2. Unfortunately, there is no convenient index for social media that further amplify major topics of the day.

FIGURE 1.2 Coverage of Global Warming/Climate Change in Major US News Organs

Sources: Lexis-Nexis, Access World News, and Vanderbilt Television News Archive.

The secular increase in Figure 1.2 is to some extent due to the increase in articles with each passing year that mention a search term only incidentally. Otherwise, the figure shows a succession of peaks, the first in 1988–1991, a second erratic rise in 1997–2001, a third (huge) peak in 2006–2008, and a fourth rise from 2014 into 2016, especially sustained by The New York Times. (Also see http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/icecaps/research/media_coverage/usa/index.html.) We look briefly at these four periods of high coverage.

1988–1991

Global warming was not on the public or media agendas prior to 1988. In the summer of that year, during an extreme heat wave and drought in the eastern US, NASA climate scientist James Hansen testified before Congress, as he had on three other occasions with little notoriety, but this time the hearing room was full of reporters cued to expect an important story related to the drought. That evening NBC television news showed Hansen’s statement that global warming is happening now; the next evening’s broadcast connected it with the drought. (Hansen later agreed that long-term climate change cannot be blamed for one season’s anomalous weather.)

Major newspapers carried the story—it was on page one in The New York Times. Newsweek’s cover of July 11, “The Greenhouse Effect,” was pegged on the drought and Hansen’s assertions. News reports during the summer of 1988 about hypodermic needle–polluted beaches on the East Coast and a massive forest fire in Yellowstone National Park amplified the image of intense heat.

The skyrocketing coverage of global warming carried with it stories about man-made fires during the Amazon dry season, used to clear sections of rainforest for planting. Reporters flew to the Amazon to film the conflagration. (Amazon fires were more extensive the prior year but went unreported in the US.) These were juxtaposed against the huge Yellowstone forest fire. Appreciating the press attention in 1988, biodiversity activist E.O. Wilson commented to me, “It’s a pity Yellowstone could only burn once.”

The clustering together of global environmental problems was by then common and received coverage in news media around the world. George H.W. Bush, during his 1988 campaign, announced that he would be an environmental president. National Geographic magazine, for its final cover of 1988, featured a hologram of a crystalline “Fragile Earth” being pierced by a bullet. (The back of the magazine carried a hologram of McDonald’s, sponsor of this extraordinary cover.) Time magazine, instead of naming its usual Person of the Year for 1988, featured “Endangered Earth” as its Planet of the Year. The Exxon Valdez oil spill of March 1989 drove environmental attention still higher. This crescendo of media coverage and public concern reached a climax on Earth Day 1990, the most widely celebrated ever.

By 1992, US press coverage was waning, even as the presidency passed to Bill Clinton and his environmentalist vice president, Al Gore. The sudden outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991, despite publicizing oil well fires started by Iraqi forces, seemed to break the flow of stories on the global environment (Mazur 1998a). The collapse of the Soviet Union was a colossal event occupying news organs. Global temperatures fell in 1991 and 1992, probably because of sulfur aerosols produced by the Pinatubo volcanic eruption in the Philippines. Perhaps these factors contributed to the expiration of the “Endangered Earth” as a news story.

1997–2001

Coverage increased again in the final months of 1997 when the world’s nations met first in Bonn, then Kyoto, to produce a protocol calling on industrial countries to reduce their carbon emissions at least 5 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2012. When the nations met again in 2000 at The Hague to solidify implementation of the K...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I Preliminaries
• PART II The Age of Heroic Engineering and the Age of Technical Controversy
• PART III Facts in Dispute
• PART IV Participants
• PART V Protest Movements
• References
• Index