Dear Jeanne:
In your comment on plastic bags, you mentioned a comment by Todd Myers of the Washington Policy Center. As the tone of his reported comment took the standard approach of science deniers, I went to WPC's website and looked around. That site has all the earmarks of a corporate-funded group to sow confusion about science.
I separately Googled each Todd Myers and WPC, and sure enough, they are listed as climate deniers funded by huge interests.
Here is part of DesmogBlog's entry on Myers: "Myer's books include Eco-Fads: How the Rise of Trendy Environmentalism is Harming the Environment, Five Years of Environmental Policy: Are We Making a Difference; Promoting Personal Choice, Incentives and Investment to Cut Greenhouse Gases, among others. Myers does not have a scientific background, and a search for his name on Google Scholar does not return any articles published in peer-reviewed journals."
The information for WPC's funding sources is missing on their site, but DesmogBlog has this information: http://www.desmogblog.com/washington-policy-center-background-and-history
To me, the funding list reads like a Who's Who of science destroyers for corporate barons. For instance, the George C. Marshall Institute is one of the most influential groups that kept confusion about the relationship between tobacco and cancer foremost in people's minds for about 40 years, even though the scientific proof was overwhelming. They are one of the leaders in climate denial, and are effective at making people believe there is controversy among climate scientists--there is not.
WPC, Marshall Institute, and their ilk do not publish peer-reviewed articles. They will also cherry-pick quotes from various papers to create the appearance of conflict. They use the word 'theory' frequently as they know the average person has no idea that in scientific circles it means well-established fact. Science always allows that new evidence may appear to invalidate a hypothesis. Once a hypothesis has withstood years of study, and consistently conforms to observations, it is promoted to 'theory.' Darwin's theory of evolution is not expected to be overturned into the far away future by conflicting evidence, hence it is a theory, not a hypothesis.
I know that your job running a newspaper is to report the news, and if Myers presents at a hearing, that is part of the news. However, when you are commenting on an article, I hate to see industry flacks receive credibility by being quoted, especially when the quote has no factual basis behind it. Not all comments (including this one) are equally valid, nor newsworthy. The position that there are alternative truths and that various views are equally valid is total baloney that has been pushed by science deniers for years, to further bolster their constituencies' ongoing rapaciousness.
In the '70s environmentalists worked to ban DDT. The public was bombarded with reports of how without DDT, modern agriculture would collapse, malaria would kill us all, and god(s) would abandon us all in fits of pique.
Further, the cause of demise of raptors was totally unrelated to DDT, etc. On a regular basis, I now see eagles, and ospreys used to nest across from my office. Ag business is booming, we still make cars, even though seat belts destroyed the auto industry. DDT is still banned, but the world hasn't ended. I vote that the environmental scientists were correct, the industry apologists were wrong.
Bob McCoy
