By William S. Becker, opinion contributor - 09/03/24

Many important issues get swept aside in election years. Everyone focuses on hot-button topics, the headlines, and the excitement of the quadrennial “horse race.” The candidates consign long-term and complex issues to party platforms and position papers most voters don’t read.

However, we ignore some of these issues at our peril.

Science, which plays a crucial role in governance and public policy, should not be a partisan issue. Yet it has become one.

Donald Trump contradicted and vilified public health experts whose advice he didn’t like during his time in office, substituting his own dangerous, unsubstantiated suggestions for individuals dealing with COVID. Asked about medical credentials, Trump said he was genetically qualified to make medical judgments because his uncle was a famous scientist.

The diagnosis of medical experts writing in Scientific American was that Trump’s “incompetent and malevolent response to the COVID-19 pandemic capped a presidency suffused with health-harming policies and actions.”

On the issue of global warming, Republican Party orthodoxy for many years has been to ignore discredit, and deny the inconvenient truths revealed by climate science. But this wasn’t always the case. In 2008, the Republican Party Platform declared that “measured and reasonable steps” to reduce fossil-fuel pollution would be “good for our national security, our energy independence, and our economy.” Four years later, climate change disappeared entirely from the platform.

The change signaled that Republicans in Congress had formed an unholy alliance with the fossil fuel industry. Even today, with weather disasters providing tragic real-life evidence that climate science has been correct, 123 Republicans in the current Congress are still documented climate-change deniers. Trump famously dismisses climate science as a “hoax.”

No elected official in memory has done more than Trump to defame and damage the federal government’s science capabilities.

In 2006, during the George W. Bush administration, the Union of Concerned Scientists surveyed federal scientists and found 73 percent were aware of “inappropriate interference” with climate research in the previous five years. Nearly half knew of pressure to eliminate the words “climate change” or “global warming” from their work. Two in five knew of alterations of science reports to change their meaning, and one in three knew of cases where the administration misrepresented their findings. In 2018, the Union of Concerned Scientists found similar interference during the Trump administration.

Trump’s war against science will resume if he regains the presidency, and it’s sure to escalate. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s ultra-conservative playbook for a second Trump administration, recommends that he dump climate-related research and programs at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Space Administration. It refers to these programs as “climate alarmism.”

According to an analysis in Scientific American, eliminating these programs “would significantly hinder researchers’ ability to understand climate change’s many impacts on our daily lives.” Trump’s plan to replace civil servants with acolytes would almost certainly include many of the 175,000 scientists working in national government in roles ranging from pollution prevention and national defense to environmental protection and public health.

Trump’s willful disregard for science has been lethal. I use that word advisedly. In 2021, a formal assessment of Trump’s impact on public health, published in the respected medical journal The Lancet, concluded that his “hostility for environmental regulations” resulted in 22,000 additional deaths in 2019 alone, while his “disdain for science” and cuts to public health agencies “impeded the response to the COVID-19 epidemic, causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.”

His contempt for climate science and environmental science in general will have long-lasting effects nationwide. Government scientists reported last year that the U.S. is warming faster than the global average, with Americans suffering “far-reaching and worsening” consequences and “increasingly harmful impacts.” The most frequent victims are those least able to defend themselves against climate change or afford its impacts: the very old, very young, ill, and families with low incomes suffer the most.

Already, consumer costs have been rising because of global warming. But for many Americans, worries about the cost of living are eclipsed by worries about survival. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 2,325 Americans died from extreme heat last year, more than twice the number from 24 years ago. The National Safety Council says weather-related deaths and injuries have gone up 124 percent in the last five years. Health experts warn that infectious diseases are spreading because of global warming.

Greed, pure and simple, is behind the oil industries’ long campaign to undermine confidence in climate science. Lost lives, homes and communities are merely the cost of doing business.

The most despicable type of cynicism seems to be at play in Trump’s and the GOP’s disdain. Members of Congress want campaign dollars. By the end of July in this campaign cycle, the average Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate had received more than $80,000 from the oil and gas industry, compared to $12,500 for the average Democrat. The average Republican House candidate had received over $53,000 compared to less than $10,000 for the average Democrat.

Trump wants power. He displayed his callousness recently when he offered oil industry executives his support for “drill, drill, drill’ in exchange for a $1 billion campaign donation. He has a special animus for science, the courts and mainstream news media because they generate facts that give lie to his fictions.

As we saw in COVID and continue witnessing with climate change, science saves lives, whereas ignorance kills. When ignorance is deliberate and lives are at stake, it becomes immoral. We shouldn’t elect politicians who are guilty of it.

William Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy.