Shawn Otto

Science creates knowledge about reality, that knowledge creates power, and that power is political because it either confirms or disrupts vested interests. Right now the vested interests in academia, religion, and industry are all being threatened in various ways by what science is telling us about the world, and they are fighting back by attacking science.

We need to fix our broken media and education systems, renew our value of science being important to freedom and democracy, call authoritarianism what it is, and create a stigma and penalties for those who use public relations campaigns to defraud investors, their followers, and the public into supporting policies that run counter to the evidence.

Not great. The leading Republicans deny climate change and other science, and the media do little to hold them accountable. I spent hours negotiating with the Democratic campaigns, trying to get them to attend a primary debate dedicated to the science issues impacting everyone’s lives, to no avail. I had a network producer, but the campaigns said they would do it if the DNC pushed it, and the DNC said they would do it if the campaigns wanted, and it was the chicken and the egg. There’s something wrong when you have Leonardo DiCaprio using his Oscar speech to talk about climate change but journalists and presidential candidates are largely ignoring science. There were two debates following the Paris accord—a massive international accord involving nearly 200 countries discussing how to remake the world’s economy and get us off carbon—and not one of the journalists in either debate asked a single question about climate change. And that’s just one example.

Because policymakers are increasingly influenced by the spending of vested interests. Most of them don’t have science advisors and in America they have closed their science advisory body, the Office of Technology Assessment, so policymakers largely rely on lobbyists and the Internet for their science information, neither of which are very reliable sources. They sometimes have scientists in to present in committee, but in the end it’s about getting reelected for many of them. It’s hard for them to say, “I’m going to do what the evidence suggests even if it’s not popular with the people that could run ads and PR campaigns against me.”