I always like digging around in the academic literature for insights about todayโs politicized science battles. Now that social scientists have begun to apply themselves to public fights over the hard sciences, I find that they have a great deal to offer. The latest exhibit: The work of Andrew J. Hoffman, Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University ofย Michigan.ย
Hoffman is an โorganizational theorist.โ As such, he believes that โfailing to attend to the deeper social and cultural forces within the climate conflict, and in particular the counter-movements that resist the dominant logic,โ is a bigย mistake.
So he went and studied the โculture and discourseโ of climate skepticsโwhich involved attending their conferences and eventsโand describes some of the preliminary results in a recentย paper in Strategic Organization. As a result, Hoffman argues that three themes are dominant in the movement. And hereโs where, to me, it gets really interesting.
1.ย Stealth Attack on Personal Freedom. Skeptics, write Hoffman, think concern over global warming just a ruse to curtail personal libertiesโby increasing the power of government to interfere in the market. This of course carries over to a deep distrust of the U.N. At a climate skeptic conference, writes Hoffman, one presenter โwent so far as to suggest that a binding international agreement on climate change would end with individuals being required to carry โcarbon ration cardsโ on theirย person.โ
2.ย Free Marketeers. Relatedly, the skeptics have a โstrong faithโ in the free market. Renewable energy is distrusted because it needs to be subsidized. Huhโwhat do they think of fossil fuel subsidies, then? Hoffman does not discuss what seems to me one plausible outcome of this free market commitment: The belief that markets could not really create a problem like climate change, or if they do, markets also will solveย it.
3.ย Distrust of Peer Review. To me, this was the most intriguing finding. Skeptics, write Hoffman, โargue that public funding of science in the post-Second World War era through organizations like the National Science Foundation (NSF) corrupted the scientific process.โ Um, such funding also made us the worldโs science superpowerโbut I digress. The point would seem to be that skeptics distrust all government, publicly funded science because they believe the peer review system has been corrupted and incestuousโafter all, itโs not a free market systemโand the โClimateGateโ brouhaha just served as a confirmation to them of this deeperย distrust.
So if youโre one of those people who asks yourself, โhow can they believe this stuff?โ Well, thatโsย how.
Whatโs surprising to me is that none of this is, at base, scientific. Itโs all about distrusting some kind of power associated with the government, while very much trusting other kinds of power that areย unregulated.
In other words, itโs about how societyโnot the atmosphereโis organized. ย ย
