Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #312414 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Does the Bush administration ignore or deny mainstream research to please its conservative base? Have business groups and certain religious lobbies helped it do so? Does Bush-era treatment of scientists differ from that of Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Reagan? Has a Republican Congress passed laws designed to disable clean air and water efforts, and has it dismantled safeguards, such as the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, meant to give legislators unbiased advice? Mooney's passionate, thoroughly researched volume answers these questions with an urgent "yes." A former American Prospect writer who is making his book debut, Mooney uses interviews and old-fashioned document-digging to explain how, over two decades, right-wing politicians built institutions designed to discredit working scientists; how some energy companies have allied themselves with powerful Republicans (such as Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma) to block or reverse U.S. steps to curb global warming; and how the present administration defies expert consensus on climate change, on mercury pollution, even on how to read statistics. Mooney tracks Bush White House efforts to spread misinformation about stem cells; the work of religious right regulators like Dr. David Hager (formerly on the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs advisory committee) in restricting access to birth control; and the attempts of the Discovery Institute (and other think tanks linked to the Bush base) to fight the teaching of evolution. In the past five years, Mooney documents, many formerly apolitical physicists, biologists and doctors have come to believe there is a "pattern" of science abuse under Bush, a push back against the methods of science itself. Conservatives may react with indignation; liberals, moderates and working scientists will find few surprises,but Mooney's very readable, and understandably partisan, volume is the first to put the whole story, thoroughly documented, in one place.
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Customer Reviews

Insolent fight against scientific conceptions of the world
The Bush administration (enslaved to on the one hand religious lobbies, on the other hand commercial interests) improves their insolent fight against a scientific conception of the world spectacularly. Darwin's evolution theory as a component of the biology lesson in schools is fought by creationism or the slogan of an "intelligent designer" (God?), obedient, at this point unruly teachers are threatened with dismissal. The scientific fight for a reduction of the global warming is represented crazily as an allegedly jealous attack on the energy consumption standard of the American population. Like the tobacco industry suffocated the warning cries against smoking, so the oil industry lets slip the warning on resource wasting. The industry interested in armed forces orders undermines pacifist efforts, embryonic stem cell research is blocked for religious reasons. The attack on the scientific critical conception of the world of renowned research institutes by the present right-wing conservative Republicans around the Pseudo evangelist George W. Bush is perhaps worse than sporadic threats by Islamistic terrorists: because a systematic attack on the human reason stabilizes himself in Washington, continuously more and more effectively. Scientific progress, won within the last 400 years, seems to dissolve into air in view of the right-wing conservative Christian fundamentalist banding together. An air though, in which Air Force bombers are still be able to fly fantastically. The author of the book, Chris Mooney, who writes for the respected science magazine SEED, has summarized in a really good way, what, at present, unfortunately in Europe increasingly is contaminating politics production processes, too...

The games ideologues play
Mooney's book is an excellent review of the manipulation of science by the Right in America. From denial and manipulation of consensus scientific opinion about climate change to the "intelligent design" lunacy, he covers the right-wing attack on science over the past 25 years thoroughly.

Mooney raises a very important point about science and its treatment in the media. The conventional "he-said, she-said" journalistic coverage of scientific matters by journalists who seldom have any comprehension of the scientific method is sadly misleading. Science, through the mechanisms of peer review and independent replication of observations, is an inherently self-correcting enterprise. Trying to achieve journalistic balance by comparing a view from a consensus of scientific experts against a (usually politically-driven) contrarian does not reflect the true nature of scientific debate. It gives the fringe deniers of climate change, effects of tobacco smoke, or the decidedly unscientific creationists far more influence than their marginal ideas warrant.

If you care about science in North America, I strongly urge you to buy this book.