06 Aug Dal science prof OK with angry, aggressive youth ignoring science

The Halifax Examiner yesterday featured an op-ed piece by Thomas J. Duck, professor of Physics and Atmospheric Science at Dalhousie, about the province’s controversial fracking review panel. Publisher Tim Bousquet promo-ed the piece with the headline, “Climate change: the elephant in the room during fracking debate.”

Unfortunately, Duck’s piece is behind the Examiner’s paywall—no complaint implied; even journalists are entitled to make a living—but [Duck’s piece has is no longer behind a paywall] I don’t feel the piece, which devoted only one of its 12 paragraphs to climate change, lived up to the headline. Here is a response I posted on the Examiner’s provocative website.

I was hoping this article would fulfill Tim Bousquet’s teaser, and present a thoughtful commentary by Tom Duck about “the elephant in the room,” Global warming. I agree this is the fundamental issue, an existential threat that trumps technical questions about whether fracking technology has reached the point where we can trust it to protect aquifers. Instead, most of the piece was a rehashing of the completely unsupported, and frankly incredible, claim that the panel is “a sham.”

Clearly, there is a lot of opposition to fracking in Nova Scotia. Many boisterous opponents turned out for some of the panel meetings, and some of them were, as Duck acknowledged, “overly loud and aggressive.” He dismisses this as the exuberance of youth.

Sure, it’s great to see young people engaged and active, but if the issue is as important as Tom Duck and I think it is, is it too much to ask young people to actually read and critique the material the panel has produced, pointing out where it has overlooked evidence and reached faulty conclusions? Can they not do that in a firm but civil fashion? Is it really good enough for young people to show up with their minds closed to any counter-arguments, to shout down the panel, and to denounce Wheeler as a patsy for the oil and gas industry (a risible proposition, if you know anything about his record)? Is encouraging and applauding this sort of know-nothing behaviour the best we can expect from a university professor? I don’t think so.

Come on, Professor Duck. Give it another try. Stop defending anti-science bully tactics of the sort you rightly condemn when Stephen Harper employs them, and tell us why climate change should be at the centre of the fracking debate. Leave the histrionics aside and get back to the substance of the debate.

(For the record, I oppose the use of natural gas, because I actually believe climate change is an existential threat, and the fugitive emissions problem appears to wipe out the modest carbon advantage attributed to gas over coal. But I want environmental decisions based on solid science, not yelling and ad hominem attacks by overindulged youngsters.)

To which Bousquet has responded:

People use the resources they have available to them. ExxonMobil uses their billions in profits to buy ads, pay for fake science, and fund anti-denialist astroturf orgs. Youngsters generally don’t have billions of dollars to compete on that field, so they use their voices instead.

It’s astonishing seeing the claim that a handful of college kids are the bad guys in the room with ever-so-polite Big Oil.

Always happy to astonish.