Fossil fuel’s comical hypocrisy
Comment on the Wall Street Journal article on Cornell Professor Robert Howarth, “The Climate Scientist Fossil-Fuel Companies Can’t Stand” (read full text)
There is something comically absurd about a fossil fuel pawn from EQT making the following statement: "It’s a problem when the purpose of scientific research shifts from gaining understanding to influencing.”
Ahem. Cough cough. (Tucks $350K dollars into Harvard "climate researcher's" pocket.)
After criticizing Howarth for transparently accepting some funding from The Park Foundation, this EQT employee is quick to cite a research project allegedly showing the advantages of methane gas -- a study by academics "partially funded by EQT."
It's hard to get more hypocritical, unless of course you're The Independent Petroleum Association of America, one of the industry’s largest lobbying groups, criticizing Howarth's research as “biased and agenda-driven." Surely that distinguished body had no bias or agenda in (falsely) arguing that divestment will harm pension funds.
Alleging that a climate scientist's research is "biased" because it advocates for policies to protect a habitable planet is akin to calling a cancer expert's research "biased" because it advocates for policies to prevent cancer.
Um. Duh.
In her wildest dreams, would the cancer researcher's work put oncologists out of business? Yes. And we would celebrate. In our planet's best-case-scenario, would climate scientists' work put fossil fuels out of business? Yes, and not a moment too soon.
Of course, the idea that any research can be unbiased and "objective" is entirely baseless. There is no research without bias. Often, those bias are precisely what makes the research worthwhile in the first place: for instance, the bias to survive as a species or as a planet.
As one of us keeps telling our students in all the courses we teach: pretending that science can (let alone should) be conducted in an ethical vacuum is a pernicious attitude, which plays into the hands of all the worst people.
