Classic Who: Will the Radical War on Science Transform America?

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Sometimes we run a story that has a certain message at the time of publication but it then takes on a different significance down the road. We saw this just last week when we re-ran our article on how alleged terrorists throughout the world seem to have one thing in common: They conveniently tend to leave behind an ID at the scene of the crime.

The following piece from Peter Dale Scott is another great example. We only ran the story half a year ago but now, with Donald Trump and his oil-friendly cabinet set to take the reins of the country, Scott’s insights take on an entirely new meaning.

The scientific confirmation of a human factor in global warming is accepted by a majority of Americans as well as scientists, yet those in power have produced only the Paris climate agreement, with fine goals but little to guarantee reaching them.

The lack of decisive leadership can be attributed to the furious counter-attack from parts of our society that are path dependent on fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine.

At the core of this counter-attack has been an effort to challenge these scientific findings themselves, sometimes referred to as a “war on science.” There have been three phases to this war: governmental (silencing scientists), corporate (challenging the findings), and now radical (seeking to restructure our society and the role of science in it).

As oil majors begin to accept the Paris goals and invest in renewable energy, leadership in the attack on science has passed to the brothers Charles and David Koch, super billionaires whose wealth is tied up with exploitation of extreme energy: the environmentally damaging Alberta tar sands. From 2008 to 2015, under Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper from Alberta, 2000 environmental scientists were fired, and decades of research were discarded, sometimes in landfill.

Scientists must take steps to insure this does not happen in America. The work of atomic scientists at international meetings like Pugwash, leading to the 1986 disarmament agreement at Reykjavik, could be a model for NASA scientists, faced with dangerous new military ventures in space, and a war at home on science itself.

Will the Radical War on Science Transform America?

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“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Donald Trump[1]

“Our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm.” Charles Koch[2]

Can one imagine an America which in two or three years has fired thousands of environmental scientists, and dumped their decades of recorded data into landfill, just to preserve a fossil fuel economy that scientists have proven to be unsustainable?

My heart, always impressed by American kindness and generosity, assures me that such a thought is nonsense. But my researches persuade me that, unless scientists mobilize urgently to defend their mission and legacy, such an outcome is in fact quite likely. After all, we have just seen such firings of scientists and destruction of records in Canada, another kind and generous country.

After many years of writing about covert wars and other aspects of deep politics, I have for the first time begun to deal with the urgent issue of global warming, and the still more immediate threat from those enemies determined to fight science, in order to preserve our society’s path dependence on fossil fuels. I am speaking specifically about the brothers Charles and David Koch, who have climate scientists in their sights.

Path Dependence in the Government and on Wall Street

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Path dependence has been defined as “a positive, self-reinforcing regime… that eventually locks in a particular process or organizational outcome that is usually considered inefficient.”[3] Path dependence is as natural as our own genes, which preserve in each of us a coccyx or tailbone, the remnant of a vestigial tail. An often-cited example is the QWERTY keyboard, entrenched in the market even though long criticized as inefficient.[4]

It is found in all large bureaucracies, which tend to be inertia-ridden and risk-averse. Without using the term, I have described in my books how path dependence has prevented the CIA and Pentagon from breaking out of their traditional responses and alliances, and thus prolonging a Cold War on which their survival has curiously come to depend.

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1990-91, for example, the CIA, against instructions, continued for at least two years to support and prolong a war it had waged using Pakistan-sponsored client terrorists, some of whom subsequently became known as al-Qaeda. The CIA did so even though, as the US Ambassador Tomsen told the CIA Station Chief in Islamabad, the CIA now “was violating fundamental U.S policy precepts agreed to in Washington.”[5]

When we look at non-governmental institutions, we also see the major problems arising from locked-in path dependence — as in the financial meltdown of 2008. A Wall Street Journal reporter, Gregory Zuckerman, has analyzed the disastrous persistence of Wall Street banks and hedge funds in seeking profits from real estate, long after the press had begun to report on the “housing bubble,” and a bestselling book by a leading financial economist, Irrational Exuberance, had warned of the dangerous consequences.[6] Only outsiders could see the writing on the wall; those trapped inside the financial giants continued to rely on the bad advice they extracted from their elaborate models.

Today “nothing fundamental has changed,” according to Mervin King, the former governor of the Bank of England, and banks continue to convert deposits into risky long-term investments. Thus to prevent another meltdown “requires radical reforms,” including obliging major banks to maintain enough equity to cover losses without taxpayer support.^[7]

These radical reforms are not going to happen, as long as we have the problem of gridlock in Washington. Instead we are likely to see a further increase in income disparity, concentrating more and more wealth and power in the hands of a few super billionaires like the Kochs. All large societies (as in Russia, India, and China) tend to produce these concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of a few. The results can be can be threatening to the social equilibrium and stability of society as a whole, as the examples of tsarist Russia and Weimar Germany should persuade us.[8]

I hope to show that these problems of political gridlock and income disparity are now part of, and aggravated by, the crisis we face from global warming.

Path Dependence and the Global Warming Challenge

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A major factor in the problem of global warming is the failure of our society, as a whole, to break out of its unsustainable path dependence on fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine.[9]

Thanks to the energetic efforts of scientists at NASA and elsewhere, Gallup was able to report this March that “65 of percent of Americans believe global warming is caused primarily by human activities, and that 59 percent believe the effects of climate change have already begun.”[10] These majorities are of course far higher among professional scientists, and growing.[11]  

[1] Tweet by Donald Trump, 2012, https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/265895292191248385?lang=en.

[2] Charles Koch, quoted in Jane Mayer, Dark Money (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 3.

[3] Trevor Waddell, “Institutional path dependence in NASA’s human spaceflight program: a case study of technological evolution and persistence,” Essay Submitted to Oregon State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Public Policy, May 21, 2013, 5.

[4] E.g. Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza, Whose Rights?: Counterterrorism and the Dark Side of American Public Opinion (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013), 11.

[5] Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 67; quoting Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 406-07. Steve Coll agrees with Ambassador Tomsen that “by early 1991, the Afghan policies pursued by the State Department and the CIA were in open competition with each other” (Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 [New York: Penguin Press, 2004], 225).

[6] Gregory Zuckerman, The Greatest Trade Ever (New York: Broadway Books, 2009), 116; referring to Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). In the second edition of 2005, Shiller included real estate in his analysis of market volatility, marshalling evidence that housing prices were dangerously inflated as well, a bubble that could soon burst, leading to a “string of bankruptcies” and a “worldwide recession.”

[7] “THE INVESTMENT STRATEGY LETTER #704,” https://investmentstrategiesblog.com/; cf. New Yorker, May 2, 1016, 77.

[8] The rise of Nazism in Germany is usually attributed to the resentment and alienation resulting from the wiping out of middle-class savings in the great inflation of 1921-22. But the decline of the middle class left the German “one percent” feeling isolated and threatened, leading some of them to fund the once-marginal Nazi Party.

[9] Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate,” New York Times, June 24, 1988.

[10] Sammy Roth, “Most Americans say climate changing, humans to blame,” Desert Sun, April 18, 2016, http://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2016/04/18/most-americans-say-climate-changing-humans-blame/81928650/.

[11] John Abraham, “New survey finds a growing climate consensus among meteorologists: 96% of AMS members realize climate change is happening, and most understand humans are responsible,” Guardian, March 28, 2016,

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/mar/28/new-survey-finds-a-growing-climate-consensus-among-meteorologists: “Nearly every meteorologist (96%) agrees that climate change is happening, and the vast majority are confident in their opinion. Only 1% felt that climate change isn’t happening (3% did not know). Next, a large majority feel that climate change is being caused by humans. For instance, 29% believe that the change is largely or entirely human caused; 38% think most of the change is from humans; 14% answered that humans and natural factors are about equally responsible. Only 5% felt that climate change is mainly natural.”

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