Democrats’ Latest Break With “The Science”

Last week, the Biden administration announced what the New York Times called its “most aggressive move yet to protect federal land from oil and gas exploration,” not only banning drilling in 13 million acres of what the Times termed “pristine” wilderness in Alaska, but also canceling the remaining drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) issued by the Trump administration.

While “young environmentalists,” according to the Times, were still “angered” by Biden’s decision in March to allow the $8 billion Willow project to proceed, calling it a betrayal of the president’s campaign promise of “no new drilling, period” on federal lands and waters, the administration has stressed that its ban on other projects along with the lease cancellation will substantially “reduce the carbon emissions that result from burning oil and gas that are driving climate change.”

The legality of the administration’s cancellation of previous leases will undoubtedly be challenged in court. Beyond that fact, its anti-drilling policy ignores a vast array of problems resulting from the war on fossil fuels: rapidly rising energy costs, large subsidies to manufacturers of electric cars that few consumers want, increasing America’s reliance on oil imports from unreliable suppliers with despotic regimes like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, bans on fracking that leave oil-rich areas like western New York suffering from widespread unemployment, and so on.

Biden’s climate change rhetoric also ignores the continuing debate around claims that burning fossil fuels is causing a dangerous rise in world temperatures. (See, for instance, the distinguished climate scientist and former Obama energy department official Steven Koonin’s 2021 book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, as well as several books by the head of the Copenhagen Consensus Bjorn Lomborg.) It also disregards the infinitesimal contribution that drilling in Alaska would make to world CO2 emissions – particularly in contrast with China, which keeps constructing many new (“dirty”) coal-burning power plants each year, even while pledging to start reducing its emissions “in the future.”

All this calls into question the boast made by Democrats, beginning with the first Obama administration, that they, unlike Republicans, believe in following “the science,” not just on climate change, but a whole host of other issues.

President George W. Bush was mocked for restricting the use of fetal tissue in stem cell research to prevent any reliance on aborted fetuses for this purpose. In Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address, he promised to “restore science to its rightful place,” by not only “rais[ing] health care’s quality” and “lower[ing] its cost,” but “harness[ing] the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories” – in implied contrast to Republicans who resisted expanding government control over the medical system or expressed doubt about both the near-term feasibility or the necessity of hastening the abandonment of fossil fuels in favor of wind and solar power.

Democrats’ crooning about “the science” reached a new crescendo during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci accordingly became a saint-like figure for the left, proudly declaring that anyone who questioned his stated views on the origins of the pandemic was “really criticizing science, because I represent science.”

Of course, Fauci has since been compelled to walk back some of his ostensibly “scientific” claims regarding not only COVID’s origin but the effectiveness of masks and lockdowns in combating its spread – still without acknowledging that he was wrong.

In other ways as well, things have not worked out as Obama, Biden, and their Democrat colleagues promised. For instance, the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA) enacted at Obama’s demand in 2010, by the smallest of margins and with little deliberation (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said, “we have to pass it to find out what’s in it”) added incredible complexity to health care’s delivery, for the sake of achieving “universal” insurance coverage.

Here’s an example I recently discovered: while the ACA levied a substantial fine on adults who failed to purchase health insurance (unless they were covered by the greatly expanded Medicaid program), it turns out that just obtaining health insurance through one’s employer isn’t sufficient to avoid the fine once you turn 65. Instead, if your employer has fewer than 20 workers, even if the health plan it offers is linked to a large network, you will be required to join Medicare (or Medicare Advantage) and pay the program’s hefty fees.

This is just the sort of restriction that the ACA’s army of bureaucratic designers slipped into it in order to limit its overall contribution to the budget deficit: it compels younger seniors, even those who haven’t retired, to contribute to Medicare, thus adding to its net revenues since they are less likely on average than their elders to need expensive medical treatments.

There’s no reason for it, other than to gain revenue in ways that few would notice. As the ACA’s chief architect, MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, subsequently explained, it had to be “written in a tortured way” in order to pass muster with the Congressional Budget Office, and in enacting innovating legislation, “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” given “the stupidity of the American voter.”

This is hardly reflective of a scientific attitude, let alone one that is respectful of the intelligence of a democratic electorate. Yet Americans were sold the ACA on the supposition that its provisions were based in a “scientific” analysis of the healthcare situation in America.

This brings us back to the revocation of the previously-issued drilling leases in Alaska. In one particularly eye-catching admission, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland justified the cancellation on the grounds that the leases had been issued on the basis of “insufficient analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act,” including a supposedly insufficient analysis of the effects of additional drilling on greenhouse gas emissions.

But while the National Environmental Policy Act to which she alluded doesn’t require any such analyses, Haaland maintained that the administration’s actions were “based on the best available science and in recognition of the Indigenous Knowledge” on the subject, citing a 2022 memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directing agencies to “include Indigenous Knowledge as an aspect of the best available science.”

The memo encouraged agencies to consult native “spiritual leaders” before making policy decisions, instead of relying on “methodological dogma” – that is, established scientific procedures. As the Wall Street Journal (which highlighted these facts in an editorial) remarked: “No joke.”

Indigenous Alaskans, like all Americans, certainly deserve their spiritual beliefs to be respected. However, no one, Democrat or Republican, would suggest that leaders of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any other major religion should be consulted on the environmental impacts of drilling projects.

A December 2021 story in Smithsonian Magazine on the Gwich’in people who inhabit the ANWR, titled “For the Gwich’in People, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Isn’t a Political Issue, It’s Home,” reports that some Gwich’in oppose drilling out of fear that it “will interfere with the migration of the caribou on which they depend for their subsistence.” They contend that roads, drill rigs, pipelines, and other infrastructure would “drive the caribou away from their calving grounds and trigger a population decline that would, by extension, upset the balance of the wider ecosystem and upend the Gwich’in way of life.”

But the Smithsonian article also mentions that out of the 7,000 Gwich’in, “only a few hundred” still dwell in traditional communities, the others having moved to larger towns and cities in Alaska, northern Canada, and elsewhere. Kara Moriarty, president and CEO of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, has also offered assurances that drilling companies have installed many mitigation measures designed to protect the caribou.

Moreover, drilling has raised the living standard of indigenous Inupiat communities who inhabit the northern Alaskan coast, some of whom therefore (according to the Smithsonian piece) support further exploration in the coastal plain. But then, what would self-interested oil companies and their trained engineers and biologists know about mitigation measures, compared to G’Wichin elders? And how can America’s national need for additional oil and gas be prioritized over the wishes of a few hundred indigenous Alaskans?

So here we are. A Democratic administration, beholden to the climate-change lobby, will reach so far in trying to justify its decisions (based purely on executive-branch edicts), even when they entail violating government-issued contracts, as to cite the authority of indigenous “spiritual leaders” while disparaging findings based on established scientific methodology as mere “dogma.”

Even if a future Republican administration offers to reissue the canceled leases, what energy company is likely to bid on them, knowing that the government can’t be trusted to honor its commitment should the administration change hands again? Is this what Barack Obama meant by restoring science to its rightful place in the government’s decisions?

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