Index Page 2 Introduction Transcription of the conversation Page 3 The work of the Organization Page 5 The Center for Science and Democracy Page 8 The Role of Politics in the Global Warming Debate Page 10 The Information Problem Page 12 Concluding Remarks Page 13 Acknowledgements
Introduction Cambridge Massachusetts hosts one of the main offices of the Union of Concerned Scientists, described on their own website as “the leading science-based nonprofit working for a healthy environment and a safer world” They go on to state that “UCS combines independent scientific research and citizen action to develop innovative, practical solutions and to secure responsible changes in government policy, corporate practices, and consumer choices”. The Union is about to open its new ‘Center for Science and Democracy’, and I was fortunate enough to meet and record a conversation with the centre’s Program Manager Pallavi Phartiyal. Photos of the event are available here on Flickr. The conversation touched upon the following themes (amongst others): The work of the union The role of politics in innovation The new Center for Science and Democracy Politics in the global warming debate The work and responsibility of the media The aims and objectives of the Science center What follows is a full transcription of the conversation.
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The work of the Organization J Hankins: Can you tell me about your organization please? P Phartiyal: My organization is the Union of Concerned Scientists and we are one of the leading science based organizations. We pride ourselves in taking scientific knowledge and converting it into practical solutions to implement change. We are working on several programmatic areas and they are where most of our efforts are focused. Primarily we are working on climate and energy, on clean vehicles, food and environment, scientific integrity and global security. These are just the titles of programs and they of course contain a very broad swathe of individual topics. For instance the global security program ranges from security of nuclear reactors to space security so it is really very broad, but these are the programmatic areas. As an association we are membership based so all of our support comes either from individual donors or foundation support. We have over 85000 members that actually give money to us and over 400000 people that we call supporters. They are signed up to hear from us through our publications or emails but are not directly funding us. But more than 85000 people actually write cheques to us, and that is how we raise the money to carry out our work. J H: The organization seems very much US geared looking at the website. P P: Yes it is, of the supporters that I talked about roughly 10 000 of them are international but other than that the majority are US based. Some of it is an active decision because the kinds of issues we are working on are these huge issues that are very closely tied to politics, making change in policies or advocating for more US based solutions. We have to work either directly with regulators or citizens who talk to their legislators about making changes, and that is a huge lift as it is. We are an organization of 150 staff members or so we can only do so much, and it is often an active decision that we have to make, even though a lot of the issues that we work on cannot be defined by national boundaries (for example climate and energy). Our staff members are actively involved in international conferences, they go to them, they inform our reports but the focus of our work is mainly US based. J H: One of the things that I find very interesting looking at your website, and that we are very involved in at the Foundation, is politics and its role within innovation, and something that we might be able to describe as innovation as politics. Can you tell me about the Science Under Attack project.
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P P: Yes, one of the programs that I mentioned is scientific integrity. This is the program that most directly interfaces with the political side, the political interference in science, or manipulation of science by the government officials, and we have had great success through that program. We have worked with federal agencies that through our doggedness over the last 7 or 8 years have now put out scientific integrity guidelines (or are in the process of finalizing their guidelines) which basically minimize the restrictions placed on scientists to inform the public about the federal research that they are conducting. A lot of the Scientific Integrity program looks at science under attack in federal agencies. That is the most direct link, although there are other campaigns that we run such as the ‘Weight of the Evidence’ campaign where our expert team (we have a network of more than 18000 experts including scientists and economists) are paired up with media so that they can inform them about what is right and what is not, scientifically, and point out mischaracterizations. We have also done some work aimed at preventing harassment of scientists within institutions, such as the case you read on our website on science under attack- a harassment campaign launched by the Attorney General of Virginia on a climate scientist who was employed at the University of Virginia. All of this is under the broad umbrella of science and scientific integrity.
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The Center for Science and Democracy J H: And tell me about your job and the new center. P P: This is a brand new initiative that the Union of Concerned Scientists is undertaking called the ‘Center for Science and Democracy’. We are in the very early stages of launching this initiative. Internally we have been working on it for some time, and we will formally launch it in May on the East Coast in Cambridge Massachusetts at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, th and on the West Coast on June 13 at the Scripts Institute of Oceanography. The idea behind the center is to go beyond thematic topics in science, beyond just environment, and climate and global security or evolution (that we don’t directly work on) and take everything that comes under the broad umbrella of science, technology and innovation and really integrate it into the democratic process, into the governance and policy making process. We want to do it by mobilizing the public, mobilizing scientists and also through direct conversation with the media and policy makers to re-emphasize the importance of science and science-based decision making in the policy process. We understand that given a specific person’s political views, solutions might be very different, but we would like the conversation to start at a facts-based level so we at least have a conversation based upon a consensus about what the scientific facts say and what the evidence says. Then, there can be several policy solutions to a given challenge. So we are really trying to emphasize what has been historically true in the US; if you go back all the way to the founding fathers they were from the enlightenment era and they really talked about how science belongs in the democratic process and how we should think about the principles of science and the value of evidence-based decision making. That is the kind of thinking we want to bring back through the work of the Center and try to make citizens more aware of what science has done for the public, how science and technology play a part in everyday lives and then gain vocal support for science-based decision making. J H: And what methodology are you proposing to use? P P: That is the hard part because it is such an ambitious undertaking and the problems that we are facing are enormous. Some of the biggest issues at play in this area are political agendas, corporate interference in politics and the influence of money, and these are really huge issues. An organization like ours
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cannot claim to say that we can solve them all, and I would say that this is a work in progress because it is a new initiative, but one of the things that we are thinking about is holding 2 or 3 problemsolving public forums across the country. They would not be purely academic in nature but will include experts from academia, but also several kinds of stakeholders. They will address a problem that is affecting a community or a problem that is science based and requires policy solutions. We want to involve the public in informing what the problem is, and then bring in experts to interface with the public. We want to include media and people from the business community, from faith communities, and youth, to really diversify the people who have a voice in talking about one specific problem. This would be a 2 to 3 day forum and really have a public nature to it, and at the end it would come up with actual solutions for the problem that was identified and then use the media and citizen action to take it forward. Over the last couple of months we have been brainstorming about what the follow on of a gathering like this should be. And how should we institutionalize the forum setting so that we have the barebones of the forum in place, which can then be used in service of different issues as they present themselves? We want to have the basic structure to say these are the wide range of stakeholders that we want to bring to the table, these are the different elements that we want to have within the forum and these are several kinds of follow up activities that follow from it. Some of these are more obvious than others, it depends on what stage that specific problem is at. If you are looking at fracking, for example, in a particular geographic area that topic might be more immediate than say the teaching of evolution in classrooms, that might require engaging educators from K through 12 and that might not necessarily have an immediate obvious action associated with it. We would hope to come up with solutions however that would then be released back into the community and into the decision making process. J H: You have done some forums before haven’t you? P P: Yes, we have done 2 forums that specifically inform the work of the Center, so we are going to use them to inform how we design this whole program. Again, this is one element of what the center will try to do but the better defined than the other elements at this point. We recently held two forums that will inform the future forums of the Center. One was on the challenges facing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and discussed policy considerations tied to the upcoming reauthorization of the prescription drug user fee act in congress. The other was using the advances in the social science research to communicate about risks of climate change to people. There is a big divide as you know in this country between
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people who believe in climate change and those who don’t, and this forum really targeted stakeholders from different communities. It brought business leaders who have understood that climate change is happening and that we need to do something about it. It brought policy leaders from both sides of the isle, democrats and republicans. It brought leaders from the faith community who view people as stewards of the Earth, responsible for preserving it, from a faith-based perspective. We had a public event where we brought in social scientists who talked about why it is hard to communicate about the challenges in thinking about the risks associated with climate change. So those were some of our initial forums that will inform the way we go forward, and what we have learned, and will help in the design of what we do in the future.
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The Role of Politics in the Global Warming Debate J H: Global warming or climate change is a political problem here. If you come from outside the US global warming is a political debate but here it fundamentally seems to be a political debate, why is that? P P: Well in some ways it goes back to the influence of money. Science used to serve the interests of industry and corporations a long time back, and that relationship has evolved over the years. The kinds of changes that addressing climate change needs today requires action from the business community which is not that easy for them to undertake. It comes with some real costs but it comes with a long term benefit, but both the political community (our leaders in Washington DC) and the corporate leaders are looking at short term gains. The culture today is to look for immediate gains as opposed to long term gains for society. Also over the years there has also been this evolving philosophy and ideology that sees all government regulation as a bad thing. The minute you say ‘regulation’, there is instant opposition, and that has a lot to do with the problems that we are facing in climate change. The instant repulsion to anything that government does in terms of regulation quickly ignores the fact that so many sciencebased regulations in the past have improved our standard of living today. LA used to be a city in which people could not breathe, there was a time when there was smog all over the city, and the fact that today people can go on morning and evening walks without thinking about it is due to the environmental regulations that were put in place there. I think that it will need a kind of ideological change for us to get back to our roots and say that we have to have a longer term vision. We have to give up on short term gains, be they monetary or political. The rift between people who believe in climate change and those who actively reject it is really one of ideology and financial interest. J H: It doesn’t seem to me that rejection is a realistic argument. P P: Neither to us (laughter), but it is actively out there. Over 95% of the scientific community agrees that there is climate change. I think the media has to play a greater role in this. Part of the problem also lies in the fragmentation of the media. There are so many voices out there that it is easy to drown the signal in the noise. If I am a lay person trying to find out what is happening with
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global warming or climate change and I am not an informed citizen, it is very easy to say that there are 5 people saying one thing and 5 people denying it so it must not be true. That plays into the work of our Center. Not specifically regarding climate change, which is one of the issues that we will be concerned with, but how to have a more informed citizen community that can determine that not all voices are equal. Every voice does not carry the same weight, and experts who have been working on this topic for a very long time, maybe over decades, and who have to go through a very rigorous peer review process, carry a bit more weight that a commentator on the radio for example who has just picked up a sensational news piece and has a personal agenda to promote. A lot of people both in media and in politics are funded by corporations that want to advance their agenda and I think that we need the public to be aware of these intricacies and interferences and to ask why a certain community is saying something. What is the evidence behind it? And I think that the work of the centre will be a success if we can get people to question the origins of arguments a little bit more.
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The Information Problem J H: Do you know anything about the Mapping Controversies project? P P: Yes I do, and one of the challenges of any project such as Mapping Controversies is how to get information into the hands of people who do not want to look at information very analytically and in an unbiased way? The Internet is a great thing but it has also empowered us to seek information that we want to seek, so how do you reach communities who won’t necessarily come to the MIT or the Union of Concerned Scientists website and have their own sources of seeking information. That is the really a big challenge for any sort of project of this type, how do we push information to people who won’t necessarily go seeking that type of information? It is a very logical project that says here are the different arguments surrounding an issue so let me synthesize these arguments for myself but how do you reach the very far flung sectors of society? J H: They are not even far flung, they are the 99% that read newspapers and use other sources of news. P P: Yes and a question that I constantly pose is that beyond the people who support us, beyond the people who already believe in this, champions of science etc, how do we reach out to those people who don’t think about this on a daily basis? That is a problem to solve, because people have a lot of power, and if exercised properly we could actually bring about changes that benefit society for years to come, but just the donside of the possibilities that media and internet have given us for seeking out our own information is a challenge to solving a lot of the big problems that we face today. J H: Do you think that educating the population into the ways of science, an idea behind various project today, would be efficient? P P: It can be efficient to a certain extent but I think we need something more and different. There are all kinds of polls that people have done to assess who is a true believer in (for example) climate change, and it is not that certain that a population with more degrees will certainly believe in climate change and those who do not go to college will not. So it is not completely a given that the more educated you are the more open minded you are to different view points or that you seek information in a logical or balanced way.
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It might solve some of our problems but I don’t think it will resolve everything. Also when we talk about educating in science and technology we have to be mindful about when we are reaching out to people, at what point in their lives, at what age. If they have already formed all of their opinions at home, probably before they even reach school then any amount of science and technology education teaching is not necessarily going to change their cultural or ideological beliefs, particularly if they have someone who is completely denying it at home. So I think we have to diversify when we reach people, not only say educate everyone to a PhD, that is not going to work, it requires a cultural mind shift. I don’t think that just getting more scientists or engineers out there will solve everything, it would be great but people have values and cultures that they hold on to no matter what they study. J H: There seems to be a lot to do with power, political power, media power, monetary power, probably more so than scientific argument. P P: Yes, and media does have a very large role to play here. I think that there is another thing that we should be mindful of. This philosophy in journalism schools for example, of covering both sides of the story. This is the way that we have trained this wave of journalists to cover a story, to say well here are both sides. So this is not necessarily a power of the media argument rather a media coverage argument. I think that is a practice that has really hurt the climate debate. Journalists traditionally try to cover both sides of a story but how do you cover a story that has such lopsided ends? So you say well I am covering both sides but 5% of scientific disagreement does not equate 95% of scientific consensus. Say, if I am watching local news at 6 in the evening I might not know what the difference is if expert A says well this is happening and expert B says no this is not happening and I don’t know the difference between expert A and expert B. The Wall St Journal recently carried an editorial piece that was signed by “16 scientists” who were talking against climate change and the kinds of actions that we have to take. They are all scientists and but if you looked at the credentials of the people who had signed that opinion piece they came from all kinds of unrelated scientific disciplines. Then look at the credibility of people at the National Academies and IPCC and what they have been saying for so many years,the numbers of scientists and kind of peer review they go through and compare it to somebody from computer science making an argument about climate change. It is not the same. So you can always find dissenting voices but as an informed citizen the weight that you assign to them is extremely important. We published a response to the WSJ piece on our blog ‘The Equation’ which was picked up in a lot of media outlets.
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Concluding Remarks J H: Is there anything else you would like to add in conclusion? P P: I would like to say that through the Center we are also trying to reach people we traditionally have not been able to reach, the youth communities, science educators, people in the media who have a very large following and are actually in a position to influence how people think about certain issues. We are limited as a relatively small organization in how much undertake ourselves so we have to be careful about the expectations that we set up for ourselves and for others with this initiative. Therefore, we are actively looking for partnerships in trying to engage the public, engage the media, engage scientists and policy makers to really bring back science and science based decision making into the American democracy. This means we are seeking partnerships with all kinds of people that are either already working in this field or a component of it or have already done it in a successful way, so that we can catalyze, we can build upon it and propagate their work. These can be museums, science cafĂŠs, federal agencies, anyone who believes in the notion that science is integral to solving the problems of the future. We are open and keen to talk to people about these issues and talk about partnerships that we can forge. J Thank you very much.
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Acknowledgements On behalf of the Bassetti Foundation I would like to thank Pallavi for her time and wish her and the Union of Concerned Scientists the greatest success with their new center.
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