Democrats’ Increasingly Tenuous Relationship With “The Science”

Amid alarming reports of declining student test scores at public schools throughout the country, along with chronic absenteeism, Eric Adams, the ostensibly moderate Democrat mayor of New York City, issued a mandate last week that all public schools must offer two to five minutes of “mindful breathing” every day, claiming that the rule rests on “science.” The puzzling new policy has again called into question just what contemporary liberals or progressives mean when they invoke “the science” to defend their policy preferences.

According to Adams, “breathing calms your nervous system” (to say nothing of keeping you alive). He explained, “It is a valuable low-cost tool that is proven to improve mental health and well-being.”

While a healthy skepticism is in order regarding such new-agey thinking, one wonders whether Adams also wants students to learn that human exhalation – not just cow flatulence or automobile exhaust – is a major source of carbon dioxide emissions.

If one takes the threat of global warming with utmost seriousness as many of the mayor’s supporters do, might it not be better to teach the students to breathe less? After all, celebrities like Nicole Kidman and Mark Wahlberg already espouse a “no-eat” diet, which requires practitioners to confine their daily eating to an eight-hour period. As one might expect, the diet lacks any scientific foundation, as a University of Colorado study recently confirmed, since it simply encourages people to gorge themselves during the allotted eating period.

OK, the reduce-your-breathing suggestion is a joke, but one no less silly, from this writer’s point of view, than mandatory classes on how to breathe. However, under the mayor’s direction, New York is indeed pioneering in the quest to reduce carbon emissions.

The city’s Department of Environmental Protection has drafted new rules that would require pizzerias, which for decades have used coal- and wood-fired ovens to lend their product a distinctive flavor, to reduce their carbon emissions by up to 75 percent by purchasing expensive emission-control devices.

According to one pizzeria owner, that dictum will not only “cost us a fortune,” but, “ruin the taste of the pizza,” which derives from precisely designed pipes and chimneys.

A city official dismissed such concerns by claiming that the regulations would affect fewer than 100 restaurants. But as one astute customer – a Brooklyn Heights resident who had brought her family, visiting from India, for their first pizza slice at a well-known emporium – observed, “I’m all for responsible environmental practice, but tell Al Gore to take one less private jet or something.”

As a New York Post columnist pointed out, while the pizza ovens’ so-called carbon footprint “is barely measurable,” it would take one such oven 849 years to equal a year’s carbon emissions from the private jet of Gore’s partner-in-climate-hysteria, President Joe Biden’s “climate envoy” John Kerry.

But let’s take a further look at Gore, winner of a Nobel Prize and millions of dollars for his climate-change advocacy and investments, with repeated dire warnings (never vindicated) over the past three decades of the ominous fate that confronts the world in the near future if his recommendations are ignored.

Like Kerry, Gore has indeed traveled many thousands of miles by private jet to make his case at prestigious conferences. In a recent essay, Claremont Institute fellow William Voegeli pointed out that Gore is not only “the most prominent global-warming Cassandra, but also the owner of a 10,000-square-foot Nashville home that uses 14 times as much electricity as the average American residence.” Indeed, “the electricity required to heat just its outdoor swimming pool exceeds the amount six typical households consume for all purposes.”

But progressives’ selective application of “the science” runs deeper than this.

Take, for instance, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s now-infamous claim in November of 2021 that anyone who criticized his views on the origins of COVID was “really criticizing science, because I represent science.” While Fauci had enjoyed a long and estimable career in public service prior to the COVID outbreak, he should have known as well as anyone that no single person or group of people “represents” science, since the scientific enterprise depends on never-ending inquiry, and it is always possible that future research will demonstrate that a widely held scientific “consensus” was wrong.

This case was proof positive of that fact. While Fauci insisted that COVID originated spontaneously in a Chinese “wet market” and then spread naturally, mounting evidence has cast serious doubt on that theory. Instead, multiple government sources have now concluded that a leak from a Chinese military virology lab in Wuhan, near the wet market, is the most likely origin of the pandemic.

In fact, a 2015 article in the authoritative British journal Nature had already described the conduct of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab generating an artificial virus that was more lethal and contagious than its natural cousins, with a follow-up article warning of its dangers. But the articles were apparently ignored by most scientists and commentators when COVID broke out.

Thus Fauci, who accused his critics of “politicizing” science, was apparently doing that himself – not wanting to alienate the Chinese government and possibly endanger future scientific “cooperation” with it. Subsequent revelations have indicated that Fauci had a direct role in helping to fund the Wuhan lab’s research – again raising serious questions about the reasons for his dismissal of the lab-leak theory.

But while Fauci’s claim to “represent” science is absurd, no serious person can deny that he has major scientific achievements to his credit. Other recent developments, however, call into question to what extent America’s establishment “liberals” – who customarily accuse Republicans of being anti-science –understand science.

Consider, for instance, the testimony of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during her Senate confirmation hearing, where she said she could not define what a woman is because she was “not a biologist.” Former Olympian Eli Bremer, a female pentathlete who had competed at the 2008 Beijing Olympics before unsuccessfully running for the Senate in 2022, judged that Jackson’s public agnosticism on the issue had the potential to “send the women’s rights movement back [for] decades,” since it opened the door to the claims of ostensibly “trans” or “non-binary” (but biologically male) athletes to compete in and consequently dominate women’s sports.

One might wonder whether, if Jackson was being honest about her ignorance, she had never taken a high-school biology course, in which she would have learned that the two sexes are set apart by nature depending on whether they were born with XX or XY chromosomes.

But maybe teaching such facts doesn’t belong in the school curriculum at all, if some progressive partisans are to be believed. According to a lawsuit initiated by the First Liberty Institute, a law firm that defends religious liberty, Dr. Johnson Varkey, who had taught biology as an adjunct professor at St. Phillip’s College in San Antonio for 22 years, was dismissed from his position in January of this year for inserting his supposedly “religious” views into the curriculum.

Varkey’s “religious” judgment was his explanation that human sex is determined by one’s chromosomes, and that reproduction must occur between a biological male and a female if the species is to continue.

Although Varkey had been making this point, by his account, throughout his career at St. Phillip’s, without any complaints, when he did it this time, four students stormed out and protested to the college administration, leading to his dismissal. It will be interesting to see whether the First Liberty Institute’s claims are vindicated in court.

Perhaps the American people would be better served if prominent tycoons like Gore and Kerry used their enormous wealth and status to finance improved, rigorous, genuinely fact-based science education – in place of the climate-change and “trans” indoctrination that currently pervades the curriculum from kindergarten through college. Then, perhaps, more Americans would learn, from the works of fair-minded scholars, to be skeptical of climate ideologues, and inclined (unlike New York’s would-be climate guardians) to appreciate the value of cost-benefit analysis in weighing alternative policies.

Maybe they will even re-learn the biological difference between men and women.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.