SCIENCE, CULTURED

One Last Whack

John Marburger Is Gone Now, But Wow—His Exit Interview Is Astonishing.

Barack Obama wants us to put away childish things. He wants us to move on to a new age of responsibility.

I’m totally down with that, but first, I’d like to indulge in one final Bush-era diatribe against the longest-ever serving White House science adviser: John Marburger, who has been a poor advocate indeed for the science world.

Seed magazine (my former employer) got an “exit interview” with Marburger just after President Obama’s election, but it was not published until last week. And it’s stunning stuff. Marburger doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with how the Bush administration treated science, in large part because he appears fixated on what one Canadian politician amusingly called the “milk cow–milking machine relationship” between politicians and scientists: So long as scientists get their federal research money, everything’s fine. What a narrow way of conceiving of the relationship between science, politics, and society.

Perhaps Marburger has such an easy time focusing narrowly on science funding levels under Bush (which, incidentally, have failed to keep pace with inflation for four years running) because of his willingness to dismiss other charges against the president without even answering what Bush critics actually say. Let’s go through some examples from the interview:

“His position on stem cells was attacked as a scientific position, when in fact it’s an ethical position…He made federal money available for embryonic stem cell research for the first time.”

Wow. I and many, many others have pointed out that the 2001 Bush stem cell policy was based on scientifically refutable misinformation. The president was wrong about the extent to which his policy would advance (rather than strangle) biomedical research, because he was wrong about the number of embryonic stem cell lines available for federally funded research, and their biomedical potential. This is a matter of fact, not of ethics. But while we’re at it, let’s note that on the question of ethics, the Bush administration was also wrong, and the 2001 policy in fact unethical, because it designated several cell lines as eligible for research that did not meet basic ethics guidelines for informed consent, as Science Progress’s Rick Weiss has pointed out.

“He was attacked for his position on the Kyoto protocol, despite its serious flaws, and the fact that the Senate had already refused to ratify it…The president has not said that we have to wait until the certainties are resolved before we do something about climate change. He has actually said just the opposite. It is not easy for me to understand how the public discourse can get so off track as to hold that the president says, “Oh, let’s do more research, so we don’t have to take any action.”

Allow me to quote George W. Bush on climate change, circa 2006: “There is a debate over whether it’s manmade or naturally caused.” The problem with this statement is that there isn’t such a debate; and there wasn’t then, either. Bush was wrong about a major point of science, and misleading the country about it. And that’s far from the only example of such misinformation from Bush or his administration on climate. But again, Marburger doesn’t even dignify the real criticism of the administration on this point. He completely ducks it, once again hiding behind the insulting idea that Bush critics don’t know the difference between “is” and “ought,” between what science tells us and what we should therefore do about it.

Childish things, indeed.

“We’ve seen some increased visibility of the science community during the Bush administration. I think that was part of a political strategy of the Democratic Party, which was somewhat successful, to undermine the credibility of the Bush administration by fixing on these issues.”

This, too, is false. I’m happy to say that I watched the entire politics and science issue evolve over the course of the Bush administration. It wasn’t that the Democrats stirred up the scientists; rather, the scientists stirred up the Democrats and other progressive advocates. The true coming-out moment for the scientific community with respect to Bush occurred in early 2004, when the Union of Concerned Scientists organized a group of luminaries to denounce the administration’s many distortions and abuses. Since then, I would certainly agree that progressives (including Democrats and some Republicans) more than conservatives have taken up the scientists’ cause; but scientists first laid it out there.

With this, let’s move on to the final, whopping quotation from the “exit interview”:

“I believe that history will show that under this administration, science and technology have thrived as well as they could, given the constraints that we work under. Those constraints are very great. Not least of which is having a very unpopular president, very difficult foreign policy, wars, and unpopular policies of various kinds. Those notwithstanding, I’m satisfied that I’ve done everything that I could to make science work for the nation. I think that future presidents will find it difficult to compile a record as long as this one. In retrospect, it will be seen that this was a tough act to follow.”

Marburger is certainly right about that last point—but not in the way he intends.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Tags: Climate, funding, ostp

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