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Last week, I took to task a really poor USA Today op-ed making the following claim:

"In short, for every anti-science Republican that exists, there is at least one anti-science Democrat. Neither party has a monopoly on scientific illiteracy. Indeed, ignorance has reached epidemic proportions inside the Beltway."

I accused the author, Alex Berezow, of constructing a false equivalence between right and left wing science abuse. The latter does occur sometimes, and I’ve given many examples (ionizing radiation risks, vaccines, GMOs, etc). But it has relatively little mainstream influence today—and can hardly compare with the sweeping denial of huge bodies of knowledge (e.g., all climate science, all evolutionary science) that we see on the right.

Joe Romm also reposted my post and weighed in, further trashing Berezow’s weak argument, and particularly on the nuclear power front. Paul Raeburn also weighed in at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, noting Berezow’s conservative media connections.

In the comments on my post (no longer available, as the blog has just moved to a new URL—please update!), and then in a subsequent post, another conservative—Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute—weighed in. Who is Kenneth Green?

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PolluterWatch is serving up a great tongue-in-cheek “memo to the Koch PR team” tonight, noting the obvious blunders from Koch Industries’ astroturfing and attack squad lately. The Kochtopus keeps revealing just how highly coordinated its media and blogger network is, mysteriously generating defensive and offensive pieces in quick succession at the drop of a billionaire’s hat.

If it weren’t so blatantly obvious in slinging the same mud and honey around the media Koch-o-sphere, perhaps Koch’s ever-ready defender squad might be worthy of compensation? Oh wait, New Media Strategies does get paid by Koch to blatantly and disastrously attempt to edit the Koch profile on Wikipedia. 

And even if Koch’s friends in media claim to rush to the company’s defense out of pure ideological zealotry and not for compensation, there are a few instances where that argument fails to impress.  As PolluterWatch points out, Koch’s PR team recently posted on the company’s Facebook page about a piece written by Steven Hayward that seemed to support Koch’s anti-science position on climate change and predictably tooted the old Climategate dud.

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The most vocal organizations around the University of East Anglia hacked email story (aka. “climategate”) have been involved in a decade-plus campaign to delay action on climate change.

The goal of this campaign, which began around the time of the first Kyoto Protocol negotiations, was to assemble a group of like-minded “free-market” think tanks and pseudo-experts that would bring into question the scientific realities of climate change, create doubt with the public and politicians and effectively delay the introduction of clean energy policy in the United States.

It’s no coincidence that the groups pushing this story the hardest have a long history of taking money from oil and coal companies to attack the conclusions made by climate scientists.

What I wouldn’t do to have a few of these organizations private emails over the years!

Here’s a few of the groups I’m talking about and a very brief background on their previous activities, as well as funding sources:

Center for a Constructive Tomorrow: owns and operate ClimateDepot.com, which has been a main clearinghouse for the right-wing climategate echo chamber. ClimateDepot.com is managed by Marc Morano, former aide to Republican Senator James Inhofe. CFACT has received grants from Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and well-known right-wing foundations like the Carthage Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.

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House GOP leaders intend to stage a “mock climate hearing” to attack the Waxman-Markey “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009” currently being debated by Congress.  Led by Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Indiana), the “hearing” might as well be called the Summit of Dirty Fuels Industry Apologists. 

Pence has invited John Engler, former Governor of Michigan and current president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and a slew of oil and coal industry apologists to slam the cap-and-trade legislation as harmful to consumers and the economy during the mock event to be held in the new Capitol Visitor Center.  Among the “handful of other experts,” according to Politico, are unnamed “scholars from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, the president of Laredo Petroleum and a former official at the Environmental Protection Agency.”

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At some level, it’s hard not to feel an ounce of sympathy for global warming skeptics. Surely it must take a lot of resolve and perseverance to keep pushing an idea that everyone else (presumably, they, too) knows is blatantly false. That is, until you actually start reading some of the material they try to pass off as sober-minded research.

What I find pathetic is not so much the content, which, as we all know, is easily disprovable, but the fact that their views have barely evolved over the years – even as the science has progressed and become less vague. A perfect example of this regressive mentality is a speech that was recently given by Kenneth P. Green, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

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Slavish devotees to the free market must be mourning the news today as the U.S. government steps in to rescue the insurance giant AIG and (we're still hoping) to forestall a worldwide financial crisis.

This is what government does: it saves us from ourselves and from disasters we cannot anticipate. Good governments try to get ahead of that curve, setting policies and regulations that prevent totally stupid or predictable crises. I think its fair to say that this event suggests that good government has, recently, been in short supply.