Chapter Twelve

What the Frack Is True?

If you wanted to specially design a political controversy that would make liberals—and environmentalists—emotional and outraged, you could hardly have done better than the fight over the controversial gas drilling technique known as “fracking.”

Imagine receiving a blast email from your trusted environmental group on this subject. It’s likely to contain claims like these:

• Fracking is infusing chemicals and toxins into a public resource—our drinking water—and endangering our health.
• We don’t even know what those chemicals are in many cases. The big gas and drilling companies—who are reaping huge profits off this technology—don’t have to tell us.
• One of those companies is the notorious Halliburton, which originally invented fracking to begin with.
• How are they getting away with this? Former vice president Dick Cheney, who was Halliburton’s CEO before he was in the White House, slipped a little known piece of legislation into the 2005 energy bill—the so-called “Halliburton loophole”—to protect fracking from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Reading this, liberal that you are, you’re likely to be pretty disturbed and alarmed. You may grow very engaged in the issue, and become very emotional about it.

Why is that? Liberals and environmentalists, as we’ve seen, tend to be motivated by communitarian and egalitarian values. Egalitarians don’t want the powerful (e.g., corporations like Halliburton) to have more advantages or privileges than the less powerful—the “people.” Communitarians, meanwhile, believe that societies and governments should protect their most vulnerable members—and indeed, all citizens—against harm and injurious outcomes, as would surely result from the pollution of drinking water supplies. Rather than just letting the free market rip, they think we’re all in it together.

No wonder, then, that for liberals, fracking pushes all the right buttons. It sure sounds like a case of corporations and special interests running roughshod over regulatory constraint, the public interest, and the little guy.

What happens, then, if some of these liberal impulses happen to be misguided—or if some of the charges against fracking don’t shake out, or aren’t well supported? Shouldn’t we expect liberals to have rapid-fire emotional reactions too, as well as rapid-fire moral intuitions that powerfully guide their thinking? And shouldn’t these lead them astray, cause them to twist the facts, and perhaps even lead them to generate misinformation and argue back to reinforce their beliefs about the badness (or even evilness) of fracking?

Well, let me tell you a little story about that. Let me tell you what happened when this liberal was called on to investigate fracking—and whether the claims about it were true—in a feature story for Scientific American.

I started where anybody would start. I watched the Oscar nominated 2010 documentary Gasland, by Josh Fox, and saw those classic scenes of people lighting their taps on fire after gas companies had moved into the neighborhood and started drilling. I thus began from the assumption, tacit at least, that fracking was indeed responsible for these cases of water contamination, and that the gas industry was trying to whitewash things—just as big corporations have done in other cases, like tobacco, acid rain, and global warming.

And I was going to find the science prove it.

But it didn’t turn out that way, because not all of the science was there to be found. Industry certainly wasn’t innocent; but it also didn’t appear guilty in the way that many environmentalists seem to assume. So let me tell you what I learned, and what it means for our political battles over facts.

First the basics: Fracking, or more precisely “hydraulic fracturing,” has been used in conventional-style wells since the late 1940s. When a vertical well hits a geologic formation that’s being targeted for its hydrocarbon resources (oil, gas, and so on), the drill is removed. Then—in gas drilling, anyway—chemically treated water and sand are blasted down the wellbore at high pressure to crack open the rock and liberate methane, or natural gas, which then rises back up the pipe.

The fracking technique is thus hardly new. But only recently has it been combined with a technology called directional or horizontal drilling—the ability to turn a downward-plodding drill bit as much as 90 degrees and continue drilling within the targeted geologic layer, parallel to the ground surface, for thousands of additional feet. You can then frack the entire horizontal length, and the result has been a veritable Gas Rush. Once sequestered layers of methane-rich shale can suddenly have their resources harvested in a cost-effective way. The U.S. is estimated to have 827 trillion cubic feet of this “unconventional” shale gas within reach—enough to last for decades.

The chief hurdle is that unlike the fracking of traditional, vertical wells, horizontal fracking, because of the distances involved, requires a staggering two to four million gallons of water for a single well, as well as 15,000 to 60,000 gallons of chemicals. Huge ponds or tanks are also needed to store the “flowback water” that comes back up the hole after wells have been fracked. Up to 75 percent of what’s blasted down returns again, laden not only with a cocktail of chemicals—used to help the fracking fluid flow, to protect the pipe and kill bacteria, and for many other purposes—but often with radioactive materials and salts from the underground layers. This toxic water must be stored onsite and later transported to treatment plants or reused.

All of this poses clear hazards, and can result in accidents. “This is not a risk-free industry,” explains Terry Engelder, a hydraulic fracturing expert at Pennsylvania State University who has generally been a proponent of the process, but has occasionally criticized companies involved. In Pennsylvania, household taps have gone foul or have even been lit on fire, and companies have been cited and fined. Most recently, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection fined Chesapeake Energy more than $1 million for contaminating 16 families’ water wells with methane as a result of improper drilling practices.

But here’s the thing. These kinds of impacts (spills, drilling snafus, and so on) can really only be blamed on “fracking” if the term refers to the whole industrial process. But that won’t necessarily work if “fracking” simply means the underground water blast that fractures the rock after the drilling is done (as industry contends). And this semantic matter has very real consequences, since many environmentalists are calling for a “ban” on fracking. They’ve made it sound like the root of the problem.

Is fracking really responsible for the injuries often blamed on it? To show as much, you have to examine the alleged threat that is simultaneously the most publicized, and yet the most murky—the idea that water blasts deep underground can directly contaminate our drinking water, by creating unexpected pathways for gas or liquid to travel vertically between the deep shale layers and shallow groundwater reserves. And that turns out to be a much tougher case to make.

It’s not that gas companies haven’t polluted water supplies. They clearly have—and deserve much of the anger directed at them. But in the cases where they’ve done so, there often appears to be much more mundane cause than fracking—like, for instance, drilling the hole in the ground in the first place.

On the way down, any well has to pass through the near-surface layers that contain groundwater, and it could also pass through unknown pockets of gas. Drillers fill the gap between the gas pipe and the wall of the hole with cement so that buoyant gas cannot rise up along the outside of the pipe and possibly seep into groundwater. A steel casing failure might also allow the chemical-filled flowback water, propelled by the pressure released when the shale is cracked, to leak out.

Cementing is the obvious “weak link,” according to Anthony Gorody, a hydrogeologist and consultant to gas companies who has been a prominent defender of fracking. Other scientists emphatically agree. “If you do a poor job of installing the well casing, you potentially open a pathway for the stuff to flow out,” explains ecologist and water resource expert Robert B. Jackson of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Although many regulations govern well cementing and although industry has strived to improve its practices, the problem may not be fully fixable. “A significant percentage of cement jobs will fail,” says Anthony Ingraffea, an engineering professor and fracking expert at Cornell University. “It will always be that way. It just goes with the territory.”

So wait a minute—does that mean liberals are wrong? Is fracking innocent, and the problem just cementing and other mistakes happening at the surface, rather than at depth?

The best answer I can come up with—a typically spineless liberal one, I confess—is “it looks that way, at the moment though there may be exceptions and more research would help add clarity here.” I’m forced to take this stand because when I tried to figure out how fracking could directly pollute groundwater, and whether this was a risk that deserved to be taken seriously, I encountered many speculations and possibilities but no systematic evidence of this happening regularly. Meanwhile, I also learned there are a lot of reasons to think the chances of it are probably pretty small.

In order for fracking—which is often occurring a mile or more beneath the surface—to contaminate shallow groundwater, there would have to be a pathway, a geologic “communication,” allowing liquids and gas to travel vertically. But even then, such movement wouldn’t be assured. For as Penn State’s Terry Engelder explains, while natural gas is buoyant and will rise vertically (like air bubbles when you blow them at the bottom of a swimming pool), that’s not true of fracking fluid. “Water doesn’t travel uphill,” Engelder explains.

In fact, the study that best documents the clear risks that drilling poses to groundwater also seems to absolve fracking itself. It’s a 2011 paper on “gas migration” by Robert Jackson and his colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. The scientists analyzed samples from 60 private drinking-water wells overlying the Marcellus Shale in northeastern Pennsylvania and the Utica Shale in upstate New York. Methane existed in 51 of the 60 wells, but wells closer to drilling sites contained considerably more of it. Chemical analyses suggested that much of this methane was of deep, thermogenic origins rather than being “biogenic,” or originating from microbes nearer the surface. None of the samples contained fracking fluids, however, or salty brines consistent with deep shale layers.

Jackson therefore thinks the likeliest cause of the contamination was faulty cementing and casing of wells. He notes another possibility: fracking may create at least some cracks that extend upward in the rock beyond the shale layer itself. If so, those cracks could link up with other preexisting fissures or openings, allowing gas to travel farther upward. Northeastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York are “riddled with old abandoned wells,” Jackson observes. “And decades ago people didn’t case wells, and they didn’t plug wells when they were finished. Imagine this Swiss cheese of boreholes going down thousands of feet—we don’t know where they are.”

That’s an important point: If hydraulic fractures could connect with preexisting fissures or old wells, the gas and chemicals could clearly pose a groundwater risk. And fracking “out of zone” can certainly happen. Kevin Fisher, an engineer who works for Pinnacle, a Halliburton service firm, examined thousands of fractures in horizontal wells in the Barnett and Marcellus Shale formations, using microseismic monitoring equipment to measure their extent. Fisher found that the most extreme fractures in the Marcellus Shale were nearly 2,000 feet in vertical length. That still leaves a buffer, “a very good physical separation between hydraulic fracture tops and water aquifers,” according to Fisher. But you can also read the evidence in a more worried way: After all, the farther the fractures extend the more preexisting pathways they could encounter.

No one is saying, then, that fracking has never directly polluted an aquifer. In fact, there are several alleged cases of this actually occurring—one in 1984, in West Virginia (long before the current Gas Rush), and another in Wyoming that emerged as this book went to press. At the same time, however, this hardly seems the most likely route to contamination.

When you consider the weight of the evidence, then, it seems likely that most of the cases of water contamination that get blamed on fracking are actually the result of poor surface drilling practices—well cementing and casing—as well as leaking containment structures and poor disposal practices for flowback water. These are, after all, precisely the things that companies have been repeatedly cited for. The idea that fluids are regularly traveling vertically through what is sometimes over a mile of rock, is more implausible.

To be sure, no one can rule out that it may occur in some minority of cases. That possibility surely ought to be studied further. For the moment, though, the evidence above suggests that those liberals and environmentalists who position themselves as anti-fracking are either unaware of the nuances of the issue or, if they are aware, exploiting a semantic ambiguity. They’re really opposed to reckless and inadequately regulated unconventional gas drilling—the entire Gas Rush—but not to a technology that, in and of itself, may be one of the least risky parts of the whole process.

So why not just say as much? Well, as the fracking fight goes on, becomes more familiar, and garners more attention, that’s precisely what is starting to happen.

My colleagues at DeSmogBlog.com, a site dedicated to tracking misinformation about global warming, are very critical of gas drilling in general. While we do not always agree, it is notable that their chief report on this subject does not treat deep underground fracking as the key problem—rather, it lists an array of problems, such as poor drilling and casing practices, and indicts the industrial process of “unconventional gas drilling” as a whole.

Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, acknowledged that in 2011 there were no known cases of fracking directly polluting groundwater (as of that time). In the meantime, the agency has launched a comprehensive study of fracking to make sure of this.

Not waiting for the EPA, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation has already weighed the science and come to the same basic conclusion: that the most publicized threat from unconventional gas drilling is actually fairly unlikely. The department is moving forward on allowing fracking in New York State—with a bevy of new regulations to address the causes of concern that have arisen in other states. But the department wants to address actual risks, not hypothetical ones that seem unlikely to manifest themselves.

On fracking, then, the nuanced position, the deliberatively complex one, would run something like this:

While there are certainly risks (and inadequately regulated companies have made a lot of careless mistakes in Pennsylvania and other states) natural gas is still a better fuel than oil or coal if you’re worried about greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, fracking itself is likely not the main source of groundwater contamination—it’s doubtful that fractures a mile beneath the surface will connect back up to groundwater—so most instances of contamination are probably the result of shoddy well construction at the surface, surface spills of flowback water, and cutting corners. Therefore, natural gas and drilling companies need to be more tightly regulated, so that safe drilling can continue—even as more scientific research continues so that we can more precisely delineate all the risks involved.

Not exactly a troop-rallying message, perhaps; and not what you’re going to get in an email from most environmental groups. But this nevertheless strikes me as a proper adjustment of one’s views to the current reality of the situation. And it’s a position increasingly being taken by mainstream liberals, Democrats, and environmentalists—and the Obama administration—because it is a position that science and the facts allow them to take.

For the most part, these liberals won’t lose sleep if the most prominent charge against fracking doesn’t pan out. There are other charges to be reckoned with, and an industry that still has to be better regulated—although not shut down entirely.

And there are many other worthy ways to try to save the world.

And that, in miniature, helps explain why the left doesn’t cling to misinformation in the way that the right does. Far too many liberals simply don’t need to. They’re flexible: They can move on to other concerns, and they can adjust their arguments in the old areas of concern. Meanwhile, even the most ideological and emotional among them remain allied with scientists, who just aren’t going to put up with any nonsense in their fields of expertise. It is hard, psychologically, for liberals to buck what scientists say, and to withstand the intellectual beating that is sure to follow if they do.

That is not to say that on such issues, particular individuals or organizations on the left never misstate science or facts, or make wrong claims, or cling to them, for emotional and motivated reasons. This does indeed happen. And it is happening right now on fracking.

But when this occurs, scientists, journalists, bloggers, and liberal political elites invariably strike back, keeping us honest, defending scientific accuracy and the weight of the evidence. For these folks, it isn’t about obedience, or group solidarity, or sticking up for those on your side of the aisle—it’s about getting it right, dammit. We don’t have Ronald Reagan’s “Eleventh Commandment”: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. We will tear those on our own side to bits if they’re wrong.

In this, whether we know it or not, we fractious liberals and scientists are also acting on behalf of the core values to which we are deeply and emotionally attached—in this case, the Enlightenment belief that if you can’t get the facts right, you can’t solve the problem and make the world better. And in doing so, we’re satisfying our own psychological needs, which often include the need for cognition and the need for accuracy, as well as the need to distinguish oneself from others and stand out, to be unique rather than part of the herd (a characteristic of the Open personality).

And how do you do that? Often, it means criticizing one’s own peers, taking them to task.

On the left, then, you certainly do encounter some who attack science and the facts. But you also see them devastatingly rebutted by their own presumed allies—especially scientists and other academic experts, but also liberal journalists, and science journalists. That makes it very hard for the political mainstreaming of denial and factual intransigence to occur.

Fracking isn’t the only issue where we see this pattern. Another such case is nuclear power, where the left has long been accused of being dogmatically anti-science, even though many scientists and liberal policymakers today, including President Obama, are pretty solidly pro-nuclear. That’s because they realize that while the risks certainly aren’t nonexistent, in the broader scheme of things they’re not all that terrible, either. When all the information gets integrated together in their heads, liberals and scientists often wind up being nuclear power supporters—especially if they are more mathematically and scientifically attuned.

Yet another such issue is vaccination, where liberals and celebrities who overstated the science—like Jenny McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—have been absolutely pilloried by scientists, science journalists, science bloggers, and now just liberals in general. In this last case, precisely because anti-vaccine claims are so incredibly weak, and also because the greater harm to children and society comes not from vaccines but from the failure to use them to protect against deadly diseases, we’re now at the point where these claims are anathema to any thinker who wants to be taken seriously—much like claims that humans don’t cause global warming. Childhood vaccines do not cause autism. And while some highly emotional parent autism activists refuse to give up on this claim—and hotbeds of Internet denial and wagon-circling around the issue remain—the notion that they do has, at this point, been all but vanquished from the realm of polite discourse.

I won’t spend as long on the nuclear and vaccine case studies as I did on fracking—in part because they’re simpler to explain. But let’s dive in.

Even more than fracking, nuclear power is scary. The alleged risk is invisible and one you simply can’t protect yourself against: ionizing radiation, sometimes traveling over very long distances. It can pose a risk of cancer later in life, even though you’ll probably never even know you were exposed to it.

Nuclear power is also another corporate story—private utility companies like Exelon and Entergy reap large profits off it—which makes the egalitarian-communitarian left inherently distrustful. In two separate ways, then, nuclear power pushes liberal buttons.

No wonder there is a long history of left-wing anti-nuclear activism, going back to the very early days of the industry, and closely tied to the left’s wartime and draft-time fight against the “military-industrial complex” during the 1960s and 1970s. No wonder public opinion surveys suggest that liberals, more than conservatives, tend to oppose the building of more nuclear reactors. We would therefore expect the left, more than the right, to react strongly and emotionally on the nuclear issue, especially in the wake of a disaster like the one seen at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in March of 2011.

But here’s the thing—worrying a lot about nuclear power puts liberals at odds with scientists, who tend to think the risks have been overblown, especially in comparison to other risks that inevitably arise from the need to power our societies (like the greenhouse gas emissions that result from burning fossil fuels). “Amongst nuclear experts, you get a distinct sense that society has overestimated these risks, overplayed them, wasted in some cases resources in pursuing reductions in risk where money would be better spent elsewhere,” says Hank Jenkins-Smith, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma who studies scientists’ views on the nuclear issue, and why they diverge from those of the public.

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.

Misinformation isn’t going to prevail in these realms, however, any more than it will on fracking, nuclear power, or vaccines. That’s because while individuals and small groups may go astray, there’s a deliberative structure set up on the left that ensures they will be debunked if they’re wrong. And there’s a psychology of disobedience and anti-authoritarianism on the left that ensures that those making these claims will be challenged, sometimes quite vigorously or even viciously.

Does such infighting and boat-rocking ever happen on the right? Sure it does. A great example would be the group of intellectually honest (and moderate) conservatives who have formed around former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, and who are constantly trying to keep conservatives accurate on global warming, the debt ceiling, and much more. Another example would be Bruce Bartlett. I’m making statements about general tendencies here, not about absolutes.

But everything we’ve seen about liberal and conservative psychology suggests such disloyal behavior ought to be less common on the right, and to be punished more—and indeed, real world observations confirm that this is indeed the case. Consider not only Bartlett but Frum, who charges that he was dismissed from the conservative American Enterprise Institute and is no longer invited to appear on Fox News for his heresies, particularly on health care. As Frum put it to me, “There are real consequences in the conservative world to people’s livelihoods to being on the wrong side of some question that has become conservative orthodoxy.”

And that is one core part of the left-right difference.

But to adequately probe the problem of irrationality on the left, I need to push the argument a bit further still.

After all, I’ve clearly shown that some on the left can go emotionally astray on issues like fracking, nuclear power, and vaccination. There is a powerful counterweight to such biased reasoning in the scientific community and those allies who embrace its Enlightenment values—but the biased reasoning itself clearly does happen. That’s impossible to deny.

In fact, although many of the psychology studies that I’ve surveyed seem to capture conservatives engaging in more intense motivated reasoning, liberals have been caught in the act too. I’ve shown that the best predictor of liberal bias, in a controlled motivated reasoning experiment, seems to be egalitarianism—e.g., liberals tend to be biased in favor of disadvantaged groups.

University of California-Irvine social psychologist Peter Ditto captured this tendency in the trolley problem study discussed in Chapter 4. And he captured a more modest version of it another motivated reasoning study that involved gay rights.

In this case, subjects who either accepted or rejected anti-gay stereotypes (e.g., that gays and lesbians show cross-gender behavior, or that they have psychological problems) were shown descriptions of two fake scientific studies, one that confirmed and one that denied the validity of such stereotypes. It’s a classic design for detecting motivated reasoning, because all the studies used in the experiment were fake. And in this case, when respondents were asked to rate how convincing the studies were, the bias turned out to be slightly bigger among those egalitarians who rejected anti-gay stereotypes. These defenders of gay rights were somewhat more likely to call fake studies that supported their view convincing (and those that refuted their views as unconvincing) than those who accepted such stereotypes.

In other words, those who support gay rights on an emotional level seem to engage in motivated reasoning when confronted with evidence pertinent to this question—and may even do so a bit more than those who are anti-gay. In a controlled experiment, they appear to have strong emotional reactions that, in turn, drive their assessments of evidence—at least in one sitting or during one encounter.

So are liberals inherently more “rational” than conservatives? Certainly they’re not in this particular case. And yet they nevertheless end up more correct about science, policy facts, economics, history, and much else. How could that be?

The most minimalist explanation would simply suggest that they have the right friends. “There’s an argument you could make where liberals are right by accident, because they put their faith in the right people,” says Ditto—where the right people would be the scientists and experts who are heavily weighted towards the liberal camp. “If scientists all came out and said something crazy,” Ditto continues, “I think liberals would believe them.”

This limited explanation—liberals listen to their friends, and they just happen to have more reliable ones; or in another related version, liberal elites are far more intellectually responsible than conservative elites—might be sufficient to account for much of the divide over reality in American politics. The dramatic left-right imbalance in expertise that we see today, and that has been well documented in previous chapters, would in and of itself be enough to fuel a large reality gap.

But the view advanced in this book remains that the causes are probably deeper than that. I’ve suggested—and furnished considerable evidence to show—that there may be a reason why liberals and scientists are usually aligned. It turns on the Open personality and its curiosity, tolerance and flexibility—and conversely, on the psychological tendencies that accompany the Closed personality (need for closure, lower integrative complexity, intolerance of ambiguity, and so on). This affinity itself suggests that overall, liberals will be less likely to cling to particular cherished beliefs and argue back in defense of them—and more willing to change their minds (even if buttons can clearly get pushed in motivated reasoning studies). In sum, they will behave more like their own allies and psychological kin—scientists.

So it’s not just that liberals have trustworthy friends to listen to on complex and contested issues; it’s that there’s something about who they are that makes them less defensive and more open-minded, in general. And is that really true?

That’s what (with a massive amount of help) I set out to figure out, in the fall of 2011 at Louisiana State University.

The findings will be explained, in detail, in the next chapter.

Notes

220 feature story for Scientific American Chris Mooney, “The Truth About Fracking,” Scientific American, October 2011. Available online at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-truth-about-fracking. This book presents a much shortened and also edited version of the article. All interviews were conducted for the article.

221 enough to last for decades Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2011, April 2011. Available online at http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/0383(2011).pdf.

221 “flowback water” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Draft Plan to Study the Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing on Drinking Water Resources, February 2011. Available online at http://water.epa.gov/type/groundwater/uic/class2/hydraulicfracturing/upload/HFStudyPlanDraft_SAB_020711–08.pdf.

221 “This is not a risk free industry” Interview with Terry Engelder, May 22, 2011.

222 cited and fined Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Environmental Protection, Consent Order and Agreement in the matter of Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation, November 4, 2009. Available online at http://s3.amazonaws.com/propublica/assets/natural_gas/final_cabot_co-a.pdf.

222 fined Chesapeake Energy Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Environmental Protection, News Release, “DEP Fines Chesapeake Energy More than $ 1 Million,” May 17, 2011. Available online at http://www.bradfordtoday.com/local-regional-news/dep-fines-chesapeake-energy-more-than-1-million.html.

222 “weak link” Interview with Anthony Gorody, April 27, 2011.

222 “poor job of installing” Interview with Rob Jackson, April 21, 2011. All quotations of Jackson from this interview.

223 “It just goes with the territory” Interview with Anthony Ingraffea, April 20, 2011.

223 “Water doesn’t travel uphill” Interview with Terry Engelder, May 22, 2011.

223 “gas migration” Stephen G. Osborn et al, “Methane contamination of drinking water accompanying gas-well drilling and hydraulic fracturing,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 9, 2011. Available online at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/02/1100682108.full.pdf+html.

224 “a very good physical separation” Kevin Fisher, “Data Confirm Safety of Well Fracturing,” The American Oil and Gas Reporter, July 2010.

225 “chief report on this subject” DeSmogBlog.com, “Fracking the Future: How Unconventional Gas Threatens Our Water, Health and Climate.” Available online at http://www.desmogblog.com/fracking-the-future/.

225 fairly unlikely New York Department of Environmental Conservation, “Revised Draft SGEIS [Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement] on the Oil, Gas, and Solution Mining Regulatory Program,” September 2011. See Potential Environmental Impacts, Part A, 6.1.6.2., “Subsurface Pathways.” Available online at http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/materials_minerals_pdf/rdsgeisch6a0911.pdf.

228 liberals, more than conservatives Hank C. Jenkins-Smith et al, “Beliefs About Radiation: Scientists, The Public and Public Policy,” Health Physics, November 2009, Vol. 97, No. 5.

229 “society has overestimated these risks” Interview with Hank Jenkins-Smith, July 14, 2011.

229 the experts are largely divided Carol Silva, Hank Jenkins-Smith, and Richard Barke. 2007. “From Experts’ Beliefs to Safety Standards: Explaining Preferred Radiation Protection Standards in Polarized Technical Communities,” Risk Analysis, Vol. 27, No. 3, 755–773

230 public policymakers should adopt a more stringent standard Carol Silva, Hank Jenkins-Smith, and Richard Barke. 2007. “From Experts’ Beliefs to Safety Standards.”

230 particulate air pollution Clean Air Task Force, “The Toll from Coal: An Updated Assessment of Death and Disease From America’s Dirtiest Energy Source,” September 2010. Available online at http://www.catf.us/resources/publications/files/The_Toll_from_Coal.pdf.

230 about four thousand cancer deaths Chernobyl Forum, Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental, and Socio-Economic Impacts, available online at http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf.

231 in the neighborhood of 1,000 Frank N. von Hippel, “The radiological and psychological consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi accident,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol 67, No. 5, 27–36, 2011.

231 “small enough that you couldn’t detect them” Chris Mooney interview with David Brenner on Point of Inquiry podcast, April 11, 2011. Available online at http://www.pointofinquiry.org/nuclear_risk_and_reason_david_brenner_and_david_ropeik/.

231 absolutely eviscerated George Monbiot,“The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all,” The Guardian, April 4, 2011. Available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world. Mark Lynas, “Time for the Green Party—and the Guardian—to ditch anti-nuclear quackery,” April 21, 2011. Available online at http://www.marklynas.org/2011/04/time-for-the-green-party-and-guardian-ditch-nuclear-quackery/.

231 a million people Helen Caldicott, “Unsafe at Any Dose,” New York Times, April 30, 2011. Rebuttals available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/opinion/l09caldicott.html?_r=1.

231 international conspiracy theory Democracy Now, ““Prescription for Survival”: A Debate on the Future of Nuclear Energy Between Anti-Coal Advocate George Monbiot and Anti-Nuclear Activist Dr. Helen Caldicott,” March 30, 2011. Transcript online at http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/30/prescription_for_survival_a_debate_on.

232 less skeptical of nuclear power, not more Kahan et al, “The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change,” Cultural Cognition Working Paper No. 89, 2011, available online at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503.

232 vaccine-autism issue My reporting on this topic can be found in Chris Mooney, “Why Does the Vaccine/Autism Controversy Live On?” Discover, June 2009. Available online at http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jun/06-why-does-vaccine-autism-controversy-live-on.

233 pesky little problem called scientists Institute of Medicine, “Immunization Safety Review: Vaccines and Autism,” May 14, 2004. Available online at http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2004/Immunization-Safety-Review-Vaccines-and-Autism.aspx.

233 empediological studies For a very readable account of the epidemiological research and its findings, see Paul Offit, Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, Chapter 6.

233 polling data at the national level See Chris Mooney, “More Polling Data on the Politics of Vaccine Resistance,” Discover Magazine (“Intersection Blog”), April 27, 2011, available online at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/04/27/more-polling-data-on-the-politics-of-vaccine-resistance/.

234 it’s already happening See Paul Offit, Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All, New York: Basic Books, 2011.

235 dismissed from the conservative American Enterprise Institute David Frum, “When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality,” New York Magazine, November 20, 2011. Available online at http://nymag.com/print/?/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011–11/.

235 motivated reasoning study that involved gay rights Geoffrey D. Munro and Peter H. Ditto, “Biased Assimilation, Attitude Polarization, and Affect in Reactions to Stereotype-Relevant Scientific Information,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1997, Vol. 23, pp. 636–653.

236 “real consequences” Chris Mooney interview with David Frum and Kenneth Silber, Point of Inquiry podcast, August 1, 2011. Available online at http://www.pointofinquiry.org/david_frum_and_kenneth_silber_conservatives_and_science/.

236 “I think liberals would believe them” Interview with Peter Ditto, August 26, 2011.