Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right by Ken Stern

Author:Ken Stern [Stern, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: politics
ISBN: 9780062460868
Google: B2EMDgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0062460781
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

We pick and choose the science we like, based upon the signals of our peers. As Jamelle Bouie noted in Slate, “seventy-three percent of Americans age 18 to 29 accept evolution, but only 39 percent say it’s safe to eat genetically modified foods and 61 percent say scientists don’t have a clear understanding of genetically modified crops.”

You might shrug this off as “better safe than sorry,” and many do, but that’s not really the case. Real harm is caused by efforts to reduce or eliminate GMOs from the agricultural food supply. GMOs reduce soil damaging tillage, curtail carbon emissions, eliminate the need for some insecticide use, and allow the reduction of the most harmful toxic insecticides in favor of more mild ones. More important, GMOs, which tend to be far more efficiently produced, could play a critical role in expanding the global food supply, an important possibility given that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that we will need to grow 70 percent more food by 2050 to meet the demands of a hungry planet. GM crops raise the enticing prospect of growing hardier, efficient crops to feed the rapidly growing populations of Africa, Asia, and other parts of the developing world. And GM crops have, where available, had a substantial impact on farmer income; in India, the introduction of genetically modified cotton had a transformative effect on the nation’s 7 million cotton farmers, raising income by as much as 50 percent and reducing the risk that farmers would descend into hunger.11

When policy makers and elites attack GMOs and the companies, like Monsanto, that make them, the losers are not the shoppers at Whole Foods, but those who can’t afford Whole Foods here in the United States and those in the third world who couldn’t even imagine shopping at a Whole Foods.12 There is real mischief in the work of creationists, but they perhaps pale in comparison to the potential damage done by those who, without scientific foundation, seek to curtail the use of GMOs. All of this may seem a little beside the point, given the topic of this book, but it is to suggest that both parties have a fraught relationship with science and that the current alliance between Democrats and the scientific community operates under a flag of convenience.

* * *

Somewhere in this world, one might hope, science is a haven from politics. Not here. But in truth, there are limits to scientific analysis anyway; science might tell you the scope and cause of a problem like climate change, but it can’t tell you what to do about it. That is the province of policy makers, who generally seem more interested in the temper of their constituents than in the temperature of the planet. Throughout my research on climate, I was struck by what seemed like an absence of practical thinking on how to best address a very real issue. The Obama administration focused on grand gestures, like the Paris accords, and color

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