EDITORIALS & | ||
Blinding Us With 'Science'
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 10/8/2007
Politics: Hillary Clinton says she'll end the Bush administration'
"The Bush administration has declared war on science — the record is breathtaking" Sen. Clinton told supporters gathered at the Carnegie Institution of Washington last Friday. "When I am president, I will end this assault on science. America will once again be the innovation nation." But it is Clinton and her supporters who have declared war on science and innovation.
There's no better example than her approach to energy, where she would end incentives, which she calls "subsidies," for oil exploration to fund research on alternatives. This is an industry that has redefined innovation, finding new ways to recover oil and gas, whether from formerly "dead" fields or miles beneath the ocean surface or oil shale and tar sands. But she would leave untapped vast reserves of oil and natural gas in Alaska and the Outer Continental Shelf.
Clinton, who voted nine times to block drilling in a tiny, frozen part of ANWR, and whose husband first blocked ANWR development in 1995, would establish a $50 billion Strategic Energy Fund. It would siphon off of oil companies' "excessive" profits to promote alternative energy development. Sounds like the windfall profits tax and Jimmy Carter's long defunct SynFuels Corp.
On global warming, Hillary charged that President Bush of "muzzling" scientists who warned of impending doom and said she would "no longer place ideology ahead of science." If there are any scientists being muzzled, it is those who have shredded the mythical "consensus" she and Al Gore tout.
Some scientists, such as Timothy Ball, who has a Ph.D. in climatology from the University of London and taught at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years, have even received death threats. Ball says the belief that disastrous climate change is imminent and humans are the cause is the "greatest deception in the history of science."
After appearing in "The Great Global Warming Swindle," a documentary broadcast in Britain, he got at least five death threats by e-mail, including one that warned that if he continued to speak out, he would not live long enough to see the prophecy of global warmers come to pass.
Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also appeared in the "Great Global Warming Swindle." "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism," he said, "have seen their funds disappear, their work derided and themselves labeled as industry stooges." Who's muzzling whom?
Clinton got her warmest applause at Friday's gathering when she promised to lift the federal ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR). Except there is no such ban on federal funding or ESCR research. And it is here that she is ignoring the science and the innovation in the field in favor of ideology.
She forgets that Bush is the first and only president to fund ESCR at all, albeit on existing stem cell lines. Her husband Bill spent zero. There are no limits to private research or private funding, and maybe Hillary can get George Soros and her Hollyweird friends to fork over a few bucks.
It is in the area of adult stem cell research — a subject Democrats ignore — that new discoveries are being made every day. Fact is, today there are hundreds of conditions and diseases actually being treated using adult stem cells drawn from umbilical cord blood and other non-embryonic sources.
A team of Brazilian and American scientists have successfully weaned patients off insulin injections using stem cells from their own blood. A British research team has grown heart-valve tissue using adult stem cells drawn from bone narrow.
If there's one thing we've learned, it's that government doesn't do very well at picking winners or losers. In fact, government is to innovation what the post office is to productivity. It is Hillary and the Democrats who have their ideological blinders on, ignoring the scientific facts, approaching the issues more like an Elmer Gantry than an Albert Einstein.
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