You Ought to Have a Look: Big Science, Carbon Taxes, and the Clean Power Plan’s Day in Court

Cato At Liberty highlights Bill Frezza's interview with Dr. Daniel Sarewitz on Real Clear Radio Hour. 

First up is an excellent post “Climate Modeling: Settled Science or Fool’s Errand?” by Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Bill Frezza in which he discusses the development of climate models and the reliability of the future that they project. But Bill’s post is really just to provide some background for his Real Clear Radio Hour interview with Arizona State University’s Dr. Daniel Sarewitz, who is the co-director of ASU’s Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes. Sarewitz has a lot of interesting things to say about “Big Science” and the problems that result. Frezza summarizes his interview:

Sarewitz, who was trained as an earth scientist, is terrified that “science is trapped in a self-destructive vortex” that is endangering both science and democracy. In his blockbuster analysis mentioned above, he nails his thesis to the laboratory door, challenging Big Science to get its act together. Politicizing science, he argues, leads to debates about science being substituted for debates about politics. So we end up fighting over unverifiable forecasts about what might happen in the future, rather than wrestling with the complex tradeoffs that attend political decisions on what we should – or could – do about carbon emissions under all the potential future scenarios.

But rather than get discouraged, Sarewitz believes there is a way out of this conundrum. His advice is, “Technology unites while science divides.” He recommends that science “abdicate its protected political status and embrace both its limits and its accountability to the rest of society.” Despite calling long-range climate forecasting “a fool’s errand,” he thinks dumping too much CO2 in the atmosphere will make anthropogenic global warming a long term problem that will eventually require the decarbonization of our energy industries. But he sees this as a process taking many decades, one that can be best addressed not with politicized science, but by letting adaptation, innovation, wealth creation, and economic growth lead the way.

If you have a free 20 minutes or so and are interested in how the quest for policy has derailed the pursuit of science, listening to Frezza’s full Sarewitz interview will be time well spent.

Read the full article at Cato At Liberty.