The origins of the term “junk science” are murky. In 1991, Peter W. Huber, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, published his book Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom, which describes the unscrupulous use of expert witnesses to manufacture legal actions. It wasn’t the first pairing of the words “junk” and “science” in popular discourse, although at the time it might have seemed so, given the stir the book caused in American legal circles. But in the scientific community, the term had been in the vernacular for years — always, of course, as a pejorative. “Junk science” was how legitimate scientists described shoddy or sham science. Only recently has it been taken up by lobbyists to discredit scientific evidence that threatens their corporate or political interests.
In the 1990s, Philip Morris created the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition to assert that efforts to regulate smoking, like those that targeted food additives, automobile emissions, and other, more politically correct products, were based on junk science. The organization wasn’t exclusively focused on tobacco, often preferring to denounce government actions to control water pollution and industrial activities linked to global warming. But its goal was clear: to manufacture uncertainty. As one cigarette manufacturer put it, “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.” And it worked. While real science eventually and inevitably won the day, this well-funded crusade postponed the tobacco industry’s day of reckoning for decades.
For a time, TASSC was run by Steven J. Milloy, who operates a website called JunkScience.com (“All the Junk That’s Fit to Debunk”), where he attacks environmentalists, health and food safety regulators, anti-nuclear and animal rights activists, and others he accuses of using junk science to advance agendas with which he disagrees. In a recent post, he took aim at Michelle Obama, who had announced that with help from some local fifth graders she was going to plant a vegetable garden at the White House. The “Obama-smitten mainstream media lapped [it] up,” he wrote, although it’s “more about raising green ideologues than green vegetables.” It would be easy to dismiss people like Milloy as nuts, if they weren’t so influential. “The Junkman,” as he calls himself, is a columnist for foxnews.com.
This is the noisy, combative arena David Hughes, a fifty-eight-year-old Calgary geologist, stepped into in 2002 when he decided to tell anyone who’d listen that the world is running out of hydrocarbons, and that the imminent collapse of the world’s energy supply is a more urgent problem than global warming. Anyone who has attended his Al Gore–like lecture — he refers to it as “The Talk,” and he has delivered it more than 150 times — could be forgiven for wondering about the reliability of his calculations. Could this be junk science? The question must have crossed the mind of Chris Turner when he decided to tell David Hughes’s remarkable story (“An Inconvenient Talk,” page 22).
Turner is a Calgary journalist and author whose book The Geography of Hope: A Guided Tour of the World We Need made the Globe and Mail’s list of the best books of 2007. Born in Moose Jaw, he grew up a military brat in Canada, the American Midwest, and Germany. He graduated from Queen’s with an honours degree in history, and subsequently added a journalism degree from Ryerson. In addition to The Walrus, for which his most recent article was an account of the legislation that has made Germany a world leader in the generation of green energy (“Feed-in Frenzy,” January/February 2009), he has written for the Globe and Mail, Azure, the Independent, Canadian Geographic, Time, and Adbusters. His work for Shift magazine earned him four National Magazine Awards.
About Dave Hughes’s credibility, he says, “I was never concerned with his data. He’s a numbers geek. And his sources are the same ones the industry uses. I mean, if BP can’t be trusted on the subject of fossil fuels, who can? Also, he’s given his lecture to rooms full of smart people with an intimate knowledge of the energy business, and as far as I know he’s never been strongly refuted. Still, I wondered if there was something I was missing. Had he juxtaposed the numbers to make the problem seem more dire than it actually is? If not, how could everyone from energy bureaucrats to oil company CEOs be so unconcerned? Then again, the fact that the global banking system very nearly collapsed between the first and second times I saw him speak went a long way to assuaging those worries. Because if what’s happened on Wall Street hasn’t wholly discredited the idea that those in power generally understand the long-term consequences of the things they’re doing for short-term gain, then it never will be.”
Dave Hughes, as Turner points out, is the classic whistle-blower — “a guy with knowledge but no vested interest, a guy whose job no longer depends on agreeing with the boss.”
