From Sunday's LA Times' front page: Scientists Expected Obama Administration to be Friendlier. No kidding. Here's what's charged by unnamed government scientists:
* interference with efforts to assess damage to the Florida Everglades from development projects.
* pressure to minimize the effects of dams on struggling salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest.
* ignoring the effects of overgrazing on federal land throughout the West
* allowing some Alaskan oil and gas exploration to move forward despite previously presented evidence of environmental harm
* permitting BP to use enormous amounts of potentially toxic chemical dispersants in the Gulf before thorough review of the dangers
And who's saying this? Well, who knows. None of these government scientists have gone public with their compliants, presumably because of fear of retaliation. This is weasly and irresponsible. Is not one scientist willing to put their career on the line to protect the Everglades or the salmon or the western lands or the Alaskan wilderness or the Gulf?
Instead, they leave it to Jeffery Ruch at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and Francesca Grifo at the Union of Concerned Scientists to front their anonymous complaints. Ironically, the same scientists who are privately criticizing the Obama adminisration for being too politically attuned to protect the environment, shirk from taking any personal risks themselves. And where is the evidence that they should expect retaliation? Without any examples, it seems like it might be more about losing favor than losing job.
This is not to say that the Obama administration doesn't deserve criticism for being slow to develop rules to protect scientific integrity throughout the executive branch as promised early in the administration. But Ruch's claim that "We are getting complaints from government scientists now at the same rate we were during the Bush administration." might be numerically accurate but it's hard to take seriously when there's no one to front the claims. The LA Times falls back on a review of e-mails provided by Ruch. The so-called global warming email "scandal" was a good demonstration about how email culling free of context can create a highly distorted impression. Not that Ruch and Grifo are to be faulted for surrogate whistle-blowing. What else are they to do? But, I for one would like to see some of these behind-the-curtain scientist-critics put up or shut up.
Lacking stand-up scientists, a far better approach than select emails from anonymous scientists would be a decent survey. Here's a great example that also provides some context for making Obama vs. Bush administration comparisons. An April 2008 CBS News report titled EPA Scientists Decry Political Pressure describes a survey conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists during the Bush administration:
The group sent an online questionnaire to 5,500 EPA scientists and received 1,586 responses, a majority of them senior scientists who have worked for the agency for 10 years or more. The survey included chemists, toxicologists, engineers, geologists and experts in the life and environmental sciences.
The report said that 60 percent of those responding, or 889 scientists, reported personally experiencing what they viewed as political interference in their work over the last five years. Four in 10 scientists who have worked at the agency for more than a decade said they believe such interference has been more prevalent in the last five years than the previous five years.
Nearly 400 scientists said they had witnessed EPA officials misrepresenting scientific findings, 284 said they had witness the "selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome" and 224 scientists said they had been directed to "inappropriately exclude or alter technical information" in an EPA document.
Ruch might want to consider walking back his claim that he doesn't see any difference between the Obama and Bush administration in the number of scientists complaining about political interference. Or maybe his numbers are right but the complaint threshold has drastically changed. In any case, these equivalency memes are shoddy and invite cynicism. We need better informants and better information - how else to know whose butt to kick?