Chris Mooney has a great post about a conservative attempt to undermine scientific research :

The House Committee on Resources’ “sound science” hearing I attended yesterday represented, in my view, a fairly stunning attempt by Republican legislators to cast themselves as the party of “science,” while pushing proposals that would actually deemphasize science conducted by federal agencies while privileging scientific claims coming from the private sector. This pro-industry bias was never more clear than when GOP Rep. Jim Gibbons, of Nevada, called government science an “oxymoron”–or something to that effect. I don’t have the quote exactly right, but some jaws dropped in the room when he said it.
We can, apparently, expect more scientific grandstanding from the GOP in the future. Gibbons already lists his membership in something called the House’s “Sound Science Caucus,” and GOP Rep. Chris Cannon, of Utah, repeatedly plugged this newly formed group at the hearing. It’s not hard to guess what the caucus would do: Try to get agencies like EPA to use “sound science” and “peer review” in setting regulatory policy. Unfortunately, these buzzwords mean something very different from what you might expect if you were coming to this subject uninitiated.

Rep. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, had what I thought was the wisest statement about the GOP’s “sound science” push. This is the same party, Markey noted, that in 1995 did away with Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). Comprised of non-partisan scientific experts, OTA used to be responsible for ensuring that federal policy was informed by so-called “sound science.” The new “sound science” movement, by contrast, seems to consist entirely members of Congress–”almost never scientific experts,” noted Markey–who arrogantly seek to legislate the definition of what science is and what it isn’t.

That should make us all wary. And Markey’s right: If you want good scientific analyses, bring back something like OTA. The fact that most Republicans (there are exceptions) don’t want to do this opens up their “sound science” campaign to serious charges of hypocrisy.

The most infuriating part of all this is the Republican insistence that everything done by the government is “bad” while everything done by the private sector is “good”. This really needs to be challenged.

Why is scientific data funded by the government less valid? Because they’re inefficient or biased? If so, I’d love to see some side-by-side examples that compare those results against similar studies does by the private sector (who we can thank for such revelations as “cigarettes aren’t addictive!” and “global warming doesn’t exist!”).

If any side should be held up to increased scrutiny, it should be the private sector. The fact is, businesses (from ma and pop stores to mega-corporations) have only one goal : to make as much money as possible. I don’t mean that in a negative way. I’m just paraphrasing the defense that is often given for corporate misdeeds from polluting the environment, to laying off thousands while making record profits, to setting up tax shelters, to cutting workers benefits all while making record profits. In this line of reasoning (which is constantly pushed forward by conservatives of all stripes), businesses shouldn’t have to care about any “greater good” because that isn’t their job.

Okay, fine. Then why are these businesses to be trusted to provide unbiased scientific research???