The Republican Brain (42 page)

Which is not to say that scientists see
zero
risks from people being exposed to ionizing radiation. As usual, they're much more nuanced than that. (Warning: explaining that nuance will require getting a bit wonky for a moment.)

Obviously, radiation at high doses is dangerous. But when it comes to radiation risks at very low doses, the experts are largely divided between two interpretations: The so-called “Threshold Model” and the “Linear No-Threshold” model. The Threshold position, the view subscribed to by the majority of scientists, means that there is a degree of radiation exposure below which damaging health effects aren't very likely to occur. The Linear No-Threshold position, more of a minority view but certainly not one that can be ruled out at this time, posits that there is no truly safe dose of radiation, and harms will be proportional to the dose, even at very minimal doses.

The difference between the two views really matters in the case of a nuclear accident, like the one at Fukushima Daiichi—for in such accidents there is radiation traveling considerable distances, but in very low amounts. It also matters in setting safety standards for nuclear waste disposal and in many other areas.

The debate between scientists on these two interpretations—the Threshold Model and the Linear No-Threshold Model—currently remains unresolved. But here's the thing. Surveys by Jenkins-Smith and his colleagues have also shown that among scientists, even if you accept one model of radiation risk, you also tend to think that
public policymakers
should adopt a more stringent standard, just in case. Thus, scientists who think that the Threshold view is correct nevertheless tend to think that policy—for nuclear power plants, for nuclear waste disposal and sequestration, and so on—should be set based on the Linear No-Threshold standard. In other words, precisely because they understand the nature of scientific uncertainty and know that they might be wrong (and tend toward being integratively complex), scientists generally default to the “precautionary principle.” They want to build in an added margin of safety around nuclear power plants and nuclear waste disposal plans.

So in this context, to hear that scientists who are prone to the precautionary principle, and to want to build in a strong margin of safety,
still
think nuclear risks are overblown is really very telling.

Why do scientists end up feeling this way? By far the most powerful consideration is that while they would never argue that radiation exposure carries no risk—and while they continue to argue among themselves about precisely how much risk it carries—they can see plainly that in the real world, it carries nothing like the kind of risks that other forms of energy use do.

The most compelling counterargument to nuclear concerns? It's all about coal—a rival energy source that, on top of its vast greenhouse gas emissions (nuclear power does not
directly
produce such emissions, though there is surely a greenhouse gas “footprint” from the industry as a whole), also happens to be much more deadly to humans. It is estimated that in the year 2010 alone, particulate air pollution from coal fired power plants killed 13 thousand people in the U.S. (alone).

If you then compare this to nuclear power, it is pretty hard to make the case that it's anywhere near as deadly or dangerous. Nuclear radiation risks chiefly arise in the case of accidents, which are very scary but also relatively rare. And even when they occur, there are reasons to think they take a considerably lower toll.

The 1986 Chernobyl reactor meltdown in the Soviet Union is far and away the most extreme case, and surely caused a substantial present (and future) cancer death toll. In 2005, the International Atomic Energy Agency and a group of other organizations, including the World Health Organization, estimated that toll at about four thousand cancer deaths. With Fukushima-Daiichi, where the radiation release was lower, a recent estimate of future cancer deaths is in the neighborhood of 1,000. And with the U.S.'s worst domestic nuclear crisis—Three Mile Island in 1979—the death toll is likely the lowest of all. According to Dr. David Brenner of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University, there were probably some health hazards but “they were small enough that you couldn't detect them” in epidemiological studies.

Add together this track record from the
worst
nuclear disasters with the fact that all energy sources have their risks and drawbacks, and frankly, it gets pretty hard to be very anti-nuclear.

And correspondingly, despite liberals' negative predisposition towards nuclear power, you certainly see no monolithic resistance to it today. President Obama has even called for a nuclear power expansion, as did Democratic Senator John Kerry in the context of trying to find a compromise on cap and trade legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions (though this gambit ultimately failed). Many other liberals still remain opposed to expanding nuclear power, but have shifted away from making questionable scientific or health arguments to focus on the economic cost of building new power plants.

And most importantly: Liberals themselves have doggedly fought left wing misinformation on this issue. In the wake of Fukushima, liberal environmentalists and climate policy mavens like
Guardian
columnist George Monbiot and Mark Lynas (author of the book
High Tide
) absolutely eviscerated left-wing Green Party nuclear opponents for exaggerating nuclear risks, and directly likened them to climate change deniers.

Does such exaggeration happen on the nuclear issue? Absolutely. In the wake of any nuclear disaster, there is a radical left old guard that goes around trying to find a dramatic body count. Possibly the leading transgressor is Helen Caldicott, the Australian anti-nuclear activist. For instance, in a 2011
New York Times
op-ed that drew numerous high-level scientific rebukes, she suggested that a million people may have already died as a result of the radiation spread by the Chernobyl meltdown. In a radio debate with Monbiot on “Democracy Now” with Amy Goodman, meanwhile, Caldicott described an international conspiracy theory to cover up the real consequences of Chernobyl, calling it—to Monbiot's astonishment—“the biggest medical conspiracy and cover-up in the history of medicine,” and implicating the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

But as soon as such extreme claims are made, liberals and scientists lash back. A conflict erupts between those who follow egalitarian and communitarian impulses emotionally—and engage in motivated reasoning and confirmation bias on this basis—and those whose Enlightenment values require them to set the record straight, and demand that we not overhype problems when we lack evidence that they actually exist (and where hyping risks will scare people, thus bringing about other harms). Therefore, individual anti-nuclear leftists may make mistakes, air false claims, and even cling to them—but the disobedient and fractious left as a whole doesn't follow their lead.

Indeed, we even have evidence suggesting that unlike intellectually sophisticated climate change deniers, better educated liberals
do not
become more convinced that nuclear power is dangerous. In Dan Kahan's research (previously discussed in chapter 2), they behave just the opposite: With more mathematical and scientific literacy, those who have egalitarian and communitarian value systems tend to become
less skeptical
of nuclear power, not more. In other words, they move in the opposite direction from where you would expect their initial impulses to push them—and more into line with what scientists actually think.

Far from being smart idiots, they're just . . . smart. They're apportioning their beliefs to the weight of the evidence, which is what we're all supposed to strive to do—even if we so often fail at it.

But if you wanted to find a case where the left has literally eaten alive those within its own ranks who misstated and exaggerated science, nuclear power isn't the best example. No: look instead to the vaccine-autism issue.

Once again, here is a case where you might think that liberal values and subconscious moral intuitions—spurred by egalitarianism and communitarianism—would fuel anti-science behavior and the denial of reality. After all, vaccine makers are large pharmaceutical companies with deep pockets, while the alleged victims are innocent children, damaged shortly after birth by the needles meant to protect them. And once again, some Hollywood celebrities and environmentalists (Jenny McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) have indeed lined up behind the claim that childhood vaccines cause autism. What's more, one key liberal constituency, the plaintiff's bar, had a strong incentive in this case to try to reap big profits by suing companies that were alleged to have poisoned children and wrecked families, hopes, and dreams.

But alas, there was this pesky little problem called scientists—including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine. These experts looked into the allegations, pushed by Kennedy Jr., McCarthy, and many others, that childhood vaccines were causing autism and, in particular, that the mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal is the trigger for the explosion of autism cases that we're seeing today.

And they found the case to be astonishingly weak—now, in fact, completely discredited.

The scientists' most powerful tool was epidemiological studies, surveying large populations in multiple countries to try to detect a relationship between thimerosal and the incidence of autism. Again and again, these studies—appearing in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
, the
New England Journal of Medicine
,
Pediatrics
, and many other leading medical publications—refuted the idea of a causal connection.

Another tool was logic: In the early 2000s, as the vaccine scare gained momentum, thimerosal was phased out of most childhood vaccines as a safety precaution—just in case. But autism cases continued to increase; the “epidemic” raged unabated. Clearly, whatever the cause or causes, it wasn't thimerosal.

Do vaccine deniers persist in the face of all this evidence? Absolutely—and they're a threat to us all. Their emotional and motivated reasoning patterns are particularly intense, too. They circle the wagons every time a new research result comes out vindicating vaccines, or undermining their few sympathetic scientific experts. They tighten ranks and attack the inconvenient information.

What's more, although polling data at the national level show no clear political leaning among vaccine skeptics—they pop up across the political spectrum, though surveys on the question aren't very good—they do seem to be most concentrated in traditional left-wing “granola” cities like Boulder, Colorado, and Ashland, Oregon. And concentration is what makes them most dangerous. It is in such places, we must fear, that so-called “herd immunity” will break down because there are too many unvaccinated children running around, allowing once vanquished diseases to get a foothold again—devastating and vaccine-preventable ones like pertussis (whooping cough) and measles. In fact, it's already happening.

So in the vaccine case, egalitarian and communitarian values did play a key role in generating a baseless scare that has, in turn, led to a major public health threat—as well as a network of science deniers who are intransigent and will not change their minds. But at the same time, it is scientists and liberals who have denounced these ideologues. And for good reason: They're endangering us all.

The vaccine case, therefore, yet again shows the power of liberal self-correction, evidence-following, and belief-updating.

There are other cases, similar to these, that we might also probe: left-wing exaggerations of the risks of genetically modified organisms, for instance; or the bizarre case of some Northern California liberals claiming that “smart meters” pose health risks. In these instances, too, false claims by
some
on the left can be traced to egalitarian and communitarian values.