"Sound" vs. "Junk" Science

The Fraud of "Sound Science"
Friday, May 05 2006 @ 11:22 AM PDT
Contributed by: arch_stanton

Over recent months, an unprecedented rupture has occurred between the U.S.
scientific community and the White House. Denunciations of President Bush's
science policies by a slew of Nobel Laureates organized by the Union of Concerned
Scientists, followed by a sweeping rejection of the scientists' charges by
the administration, have made for great political theater. But the controversy
has also shown that on issues ranging from mercury pollution to global warming,
today's political conservatives have an extremely peculiar – and decidedly
non-mainstream – concept of what science says and how to reach scientific
conclusions. Conservatives and the Bush administration claim to be staunch
defenders of science, of course; but close attention to the very language
they use suggests otherwise.

The Fraud of "Sound Science"

A history of a conservative term of art by Chris Mooney, Contributor

Over recent months, an unprecedented rupture has
occurred between the U.S. scientific community and the White House. Denunciations
of President Bush's science policies by a slew of Nobel Laureates organized
by the Union of Concerned Scientists, followed by a sweeping rejection of
the scientists' charges by the administration, have made for great political
theater. But the controversy has also shown that on issues ranging from mercury
pollution to global warming, today's political conservatives have an extremely
peculiar – and decidedly non-mainstream – concept of what science says and
how to reach scientific conclusions. Conservatives and the Bush administration
claim to be staunch defenders of science, of course; but close attention
to the very language they use suggests otherwise. Much of the modern conservative
agenda on science is embodied in the enigmatic phrase "sound science," a
term used with increasing frequency these days despite its apparent lack
of a clear, agreed-upon definition. In one sense, "sound science" simply
means "good science." Indeed, when unwitting liberals and journalists have
been caught using the phrase – which happens quite frequently – it appears
to have been with this meaning in mind. Conservatives, too, want people
to hear "good science" when they say "sound science." But there are reasons
for thinking they actually mean something more by the term. The Bush administration
has invoked "sound science" on issues ranging from climate change to arsenic
in drinking water, virtually always in defense of a looser government regulatory
standard than might otherwise have been adopted. In this sense, "sound science"
seems to mean requiring a high burden of proof before taking government action
to protect public health and the environment (not really a scientific position
at all). Indeed, in an online discussion of "Sound Science and Public Policy,"
the Western Caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives, chaired by Utah
Republican Chris Cannon, notes that "environmental laws should be made with
great caution and demand a high degree of scientific certainty" – once again,
a policy statement rather than one having to do strictly with science. A
short history of the phrase "sound science," and its development into a mantra
of the political right, clearly demonstrates its anti-regulatory, pro-industry
slant. Strategic uses by the business community trace back at least to Dow
Chemical Company president Paul F. Oreffice's 1983 claim that a $3 million
program to allay fears of dioxin pollution in Michigan would use "sound science"
to "reassure" the public – i.e., downplay risks. To rebut Dow's claims, a
young South Dakota representative named Tom Daschle promptly released results
from a confidential study suggesting that dioxin damages the immune system.
In this incident, it's possible to see the first sprouting of a political
debate over "sound science" that would bloom into a full schism a decade
later. A key development came in 1993, when an Environmental Protection
Agency report estimated that secondhand smoke causes some 3,000 lung cancer
deaths each year. EPA classified secondhand smoke as a Group A human carcinogen.
The tobacco lobby quickly sprang into action, and it's not hard to see why.
If smokers were hurting other people, and not merely themselves, the issue
wasn't just about "personal responsibility" any more. Society could find
itself compelled to take steps to ban smoking in a variety of public venues.
The Tobacco Institute, an industry group, quickly labeled EPA's conclusions
"another step in a long process characterized by a preference for political
correctness over sound science." And as we now know from tobacco documents
made available as a consequence of litigation, the industry decided to do
something about it. In early 1993, Philip Morris and its public relations
firm, APCO Associates, created a nonprofit front group called The Advancement
of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) to help fight against the regulation of
secondhand smoke. To mask its true purpose, TASSC assembled a range of anti-regulatory
interests under one umbrella, and rarely, if ever, explicitly challenged
the notion that secondhand smoke poses health risks. Instead, the group,
headed by former New Mexico governor Garrey Carruthers, described itself
as a "not-for-profit coalition advocating the use of sound science in public
policy decision making." Still, at the very least TASSC implied that the
science of secondhand smoke was bogus. For example, in 1994 the group released
a poll of scientists suggesting that politicians were abusing science on
issues such as "asbestos, pesticides, dioxin, environmental tobacco smoke
or water quality."

At roughly the same time, fortuitously or otherwise,
the incoming Republican Congress of 1994 adopted "sound science" as a mantra.
Just a week after the November 1994 elections, Newt Gingrich and company
had set the tone. "Property rights" and "sound science" had become "the environmental
buzzwords of the new Republican Congress," a Knight-Ridder news report noted.
The perceptive report also included a definition of "sound science," which
suggested it meant much more than simply "good science." Instead, the point
was deregulation: "'Sound science' is shorthand for the notion that anti-pollution
laws have gone to extremes, spending huge amounts of money to protect people
from miniscule risks." Calls for "sound science" closely accompanied the
push to enact a key tenet of the Republican Party's "Contract With America"
– regulatory "reform," an industry-backed gambit to provide steep hurdles
to future environmental, health, and safety regulations. Reform bills sponsored
in 1995 by Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole would have imposed
stringent new rules on the process by which the Environmental Protection
Agency and other government bodies conducted science-based risk assessments
to determine whether a particular danger should be regulated. The proposals
demonstrated that the new Republican majority wanted nothing less than to
become government's science cops--and to start fixing the tickets of industry.

The leading regulatory reform proposals would have legislated the very nature
of science itself. They prescribed a one-size-fits-all standard for risk
assessment across very different government agencies, potentially stifling
scientific adaptability. The bills also would have erected a "peer review"
process to scrutinize risk assessments with large potential regulatory impacts
– one that would have not only bogged down the regulatory process, but also
allowed industry scientists to participate in or even dominate reviews. In
addition, regulatory reform would have created new opportunities for federal
court challenges over agency risk assessments – an ideal opportunity for
business interests to engage in scientific warfare over analyses they didn't
like. The whole process, Public Citizen lawyer David Vladeck wrote at the
time, smacked of an attempt to achieve "paralysis by analysis." Reformers
didn't describe it that way, of course. As Dole argued in a Washington Post
commentary, the goal was to make sure that agencies were using "the best
information and sound science available." Yet the notion that Republican
reformers were merely calling for better science in the abstract – instead
of issuing unrealistic demands for minimized uncertainty before regulation
could be undertaken – is hard to swallow. At the same time that they pushed
for regulatory reform, the Gingrich Republicans dismantled Congress's Office
of Technology Assessment, a widely respected scientific advisory body, and
sought to slash funding for government scientific research. Throughout the
whole saga, the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition cheered the regulatory
reformers along, sometimes explicitly. In an October 13, 1994 speech, TASSC
chairman Garrey Carruthers specifically endorsed a regulatory reform proposal
by Louisiana Democratic Senator J. Bennett Johnston (co-sponsor of the Dole
bill).

Then in 1995, the group released a study protesting negative media
coverage of regulatory reform, which Dole, in turn, cited in a statement.
Carruthers heralded the survey – without, of course, mentioning tobacco in
any way. "We want to offer information on how scientific issues are communicated
to the public as another means of ensuring that only sound science is used
in making public policy decisions," he stated. Ultimately, the regulatory
reformers went too far and their proposal died in the Senate –but not before
it had helped crystallize a new conservative lexicon. In a 1996 report, the
late Rep. George Brown, ranking Democratic member of the House Science Committee,
issued a long and anguished reflection on the Republican Party's adoption
of "sound science" principles entitled "Environmental Science Under Siege:
Fringe Science and the 104th Congress." Brown's report provides a powerful
riposte to the "sound science" movement, whose proponents he accused of having
"little or no experience of what science does and how it progresses." Brown's
ire had been raised by a series of hearings by the Republican-controlled
Energy and Environment Subcommittee entitled "Scientific Integrity and the
Public Trust," which were a closely related offshoot of the regulatory reform
movement. Presided over by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California – who notoriously
derided climate change as "liberal claptrap" – the hearings levied charges
of science abuse across three environmental issues: ozone depletion, global
warming, and dioxin risks. After an analysis of the hearings, Brown found
"no credible evidence" of scientific distortion in the interest of environmental
scare-mongering. But he did come away with a definition of "sound science"
as used repeatedly by the Republican majority. "The Majority seems to equate
sound science with absolute certainty regarding a particular problem," wrote
Brown. "By this standard, a substance can only be regulated after we know
with absolute certainty that the substance is harmful. This is an unrealistic
and inappropriate standard." Nevertheless, invocations of "sound science"
to prevent regulation remain a core component of the conservative science
agenda today.

In 2002, Republican pollster and strategist Frank Luntz – who
did polling work for the GOP's 1994 Contract with America – wrote in a memorandum
for GOP congressional candidates that "The most important principle in any
discussion of global warming is your commitment to sound science." But what
was most intriguing was what "sound science" actually meant to Luntz on climate
change. "The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed,"
he added cynically. "There is still a window of opportunity to challenge
the science." It's hard to read Luntz's words as anything but yet another
call for "paralysis by analysis." Conservatives and liberals both agree
that science is crucially important for making public policy. But the answers
provided by scientific research are rarely certain and always open to disputation
or challenge. When conservatives today call for "sound science," the evidence
suggests that what they really want is to hold a scientific filibuster –
and thereby delay political action.