Can Science Be Polarizing?
Creating a Strategic Water Supply In New Mexico
By the 1970s, many scientists were already worried about global warming. Well before contemporary debates about the subject, scientists have been trying to convince members of the public and political leaders that global warming is real, a problem, caused by humans, and thus that we can and should do something about it.
But the problem in the 70s seemed to be that atmospheric models were just too complicated. Different models gave at least slightly different conclusions, and that opened up space for doubt. But oceanographers Walter Munk and Carl Wunsch thought they had the solution. Fluctuations in the temperature of the atmosphere just have too many contributing factors. Local variations can differ a great deal based on things like local land use patterns. And temperature variations on geological time scales confounded attempts to stake the cause to greenhouse gas emissions. But what if we didn’t rely so heavily on atmospheric temperatures?
The ocean has a high heat capacity. Global currents and convection with deep water also even out variations from confounding factors. Combined, these make the ocean a potentially very stable representation of global temperature, and Munk and Wunsch were bound and determined to measure it.
Measuring it was no easy feat either. Your fish tank thermometer won’t cut it. But these scientists were clever, and realized that the speed of sound through water was temperature dependent. So a long range acoustic transmission could very accurately measure the ocean temperature and therefore the global temperature. They spent decades building up the scientific evidence for their method, working with the US Navy to perfect the devices necessary to carry out their acoustic measurements. By the 1990s they were ready to conduct their experiment.
Dubbed the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate (ATOC), Munk and Wunsch thought they could take several measurements over a decade or two to once and for all put to bed the issue of whether the globe was or was not warming.
Unfortunately, marine biologists were not as keen on this plan. They were concerned that the acoustic signals might cause harm to ocean mammals. And while Munk’s and Wunsch’s plan included extensive monitoring, biologists were concerned that the scale of the project would mean that the harm could be incredibly extensive and irreversible by the time they noticed it. But this was a scientific disagreement. Certainly whichever side was wrong could be swayed by the truth. So they did a study.
Dubbed the Marine Mammal Research Program (MMRP), the study would evaluate the effects of the acoustic signals on marine mammals. The study would be monitored by marine mammal experts to ensure its scientific validity. When the MMRP released a draft for public comment, the National Research Council (NRC) agreed that the MMRP had not found any statistically significant effects. But they also concluded that it was impossible to determine whether this was because there were no effects, or because the data wasn’t sufficient to find the effects. Marine biologists were still opposed, and in the end the project was never fully implemented. It turns out that doing more science, collecting more data, did not solve the problem. Doing more science actually made the controversy worse.
The problem in the case of ATOC was twofold. First, the question being addressed by the MMRP study was very complicated. No study is going to be good enough to be definitive, especially to experts who have the scientific understanding to poke holes in it all day long. Such a study was therefore only ever going to increase uncertainty, not decrease it. Second, the disagreement was not actually over facts, but over values. The oceanographers were concerned with getting accurate measurements of global temperature, while the marine biologists were concerned with the well being of ocean mammals. Both sides were simply concerned with very different problems.
Social scientist Daniel Sarewitz calls this phenomenon “scientization.” He argues that disagreement can get worse when we apply science to the problem because that disagreement is about divergent values rather than about missing facts. Inevitably all sides rally their own experts, point out the uncertainties in each others’ research, and the issue ends up at a worse impasse than when it began. How do we avoid such controversies?
Let us move our attention about as far away from the ocean as we can get, to the deserts of New Mexico. A water poor state, New Mexico is prone to droughts with equally severe economic impacts that also must be balanced with commitments to Texan and Mexican rights to water from the Rio Grande. New Mexico is also in an oil and gas boom at time of writing, and the state government has seen an opportunity in this boom to address the water crisis: produced waters. Between pumping out underground water to get to the oil and pumping in water to get the oil out, in New Mexico, one barrel of oil results in four to seven barrels of brackish water. What the state government wants to do is create a strategic supply of produced water for use in renewable energy and other industries. This is part of their plan for preparing the New Mexico economy for when the oil wells inevitably run dry.
A laudable goal, the success of which will, in large part, rely on avoiding unintended consequences. What are the potential environmental consequences? Could it effect wildlife? If used for farming does it have any negative health effects? Could it leach into the groundwater or into the Rio Grande? Will interdependence between industries using produced water and the oil and gas industry that produces it increase reliance on a growing oil and gas sector in the state? Who will regulate this new resource, and how?
But when so many of the potential risks are uncertain, a greater risk can be *how* we go about trying to resolve the controversies that may arise. It can be tempting to apply the rational framework of scientific studies to solve these problems. But, just as that backfired on oceanographers, it may backfire here too. There is also a risk of “scientizing” disagreements around these produced waters.
Produced waters, as a technology, goes beyond its technical characteristics. It has political characteristics too, which are assigned meaning by the values and interests of the relevant actors. For example, for the state of New Mexico, produced waters are a way of easing the strain on the limited potable water resources in the state. They are also a way to make up for the environmental degradation that goes along with reliance on fossil fuels, a sort of silver lining if you will. Or perhaps just a way to make the states economic reliance on oil and gas feel more palatable to the state’s many environmentally conscious democrats. But for fossil fuel companies, produced waters can be a way of making their activities more environmental, reframing fracking as “green.”
It’s clear that, like with nearly any policy, how New Mexico might use produced waters is open to disagreement. Those disagreements, in turn, are not going to be about the facts of the matter, but are instead going to be about the different values that various groups hold. When rBGH was first introduced in cows, opposition wasn’t just concerned with potential health effects. They were also concerned about the potential unfairness to small scale dairy farms. Opponents to nuclear energy aren’t just concerned with the raw numbers of people harmed. They care about things like how catastrophic failures are, and how much control they have over the risks. People’s opinions of technology differ because they have differing values which they use to assign those technologies differing meanings.
Relevant legal frameworks can work to favor some of those meanings and values over others. I’ve already discussed how poorly handled values disagreements can result in intractable political polarization.
Let's look at Kern county, California as an example. Produced waters there provide a substantial source of irrigation for local farmers. Oil companies and farmers both benefit. Chevron gets to make money off of what would otherwise be a waste product they have to pay to dispose of. Farmers get cheap water in an area where water is scarce. But consumers are concerned about the accumulation of contaminants in their food and locals are concerned about contaminants leaking into groundwater. In response, the Cawelo Water District issued a toxicology study that found contamination so low the water could be used as drinking water. But a study in response to citizen concerns by the State Regional Water Quality Board disputed those findings, calling the study “short-term” and “poorly designed.”
There is no scientific way of resolving such a conflict. Each side could continually find experts to support their own conclusions until there are no more experts to be had. Much like with ATOC, studies don’t help because they can only address those issues which are easily quantifiable.
A question New Mexico should be prepared to answer, then, is how will people in the state interpret the strategic supply of produced waters?
Ten years ago, towns like Roswell and Carlsbad were relatively sleepy towns mostly supported by alien and caving tourists respectively. Today they can barely keep up with the boom in population as roughnecks from (mainly) Texas have begun to strain public infrastructure. But the roughnecks are New Mexicans now, like any other. Might they interpret using produced waters to attract renewable energy industries as another example of the state using the wealth *they* generated to put them out of a job?
New Mexico has used the recent oil money to expand social programs in many ways. The state recently used it to provide free college for all state residents. But progressives who might otherwise be unreservedly supportive of state funded higher education were quite tepid in their response. Many were concerned that tying free college to oil and gas revenue might introduce a moral hazard. Such a response might be even more pronounced with an environmental issue like produced waters. Environmentalists are likely to be more sensitive to oil and gas than progressives more focused on other issues.
Creating a strategic supply of produced water is hardly as contentious as issues like abortion or immigration. And yet we ignore the risk of scientization leading to polarization at our own risk. It can be tempting to issue some studies on environmental safety and health and call it a day. But at the end of that day even an issue as technical as this one is still a political issue, and its going to require political processes to navigate it successfully.
What do different groups hope such a policy could accomplish? What risks are they concerned about? What are the values they are bringing to bear on their thinking, and how can the state craft a law that respects those values and, in so doing, contributes to its own legitimacy? New Mexico will have to answer these questions as surely as it will have to answer questions about salinity and groundwater leaching.
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