Showing posts with label Repost 5/20/13. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Repost 5/20/13. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Documenting The Canadian War on Science - John Dupuis 

In my previous post I commented on the latest substantial right-wing conservative attack aimed at climate research efforts, this time it's the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) of Australia who are in the bullseye.  In my introduction to that post I mentioned the carnage inflicted by Canada's faith-based Harper Administration.

This post is intended to support my claim with facts.  Towards that end I'm sharing the following collection put together by John Dupuis of 'Confessions of a Science Librarian" fame.  There's nothing else to add, except for: read it and weep.  Of course, for Australia it's not too late, yet. Can you help?

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By John Dupuis | May 20, 2013 - last update - October 24, 2014 | http://scienceblogs.com

This is a brief chronology of the current Conservative Canadian government’s long campaign to undermine evidence-based scientific, environmental and technical decision-making. It is a government that is beholden to big business, particularly big oil, and that makes every attempt to shape public policy to that end. It is a government that fundamentally doesn’t believe in science. It is a government that is more interested in keeping its corporate masters happy than in protecting the environment.

As is occasionally my habit, I have pulled together a chronology of sorts. It is a chronology of all the various cuts, insults, muzzlings and cancellations that I’ve been able to dig up. Each of them represents a single shot in the Canadian Conservative war on science. It should be noted that not every item in this chronology, if taken in isolation, is necessarily the end of the world. It’s the accumulated evidence that is so damning.

Most of the items come from various links I’ve saved over the years as well as various other media articles I’ve dug up over the last week or so. This series at The Huffington Post has been particularly useful as has this article at the Wastershed Sentinal.

A long list of various environmental programs that the Harper government has discontinued or slashed funding to is here. I haven’t found individual media stories about all of them, so they aren’t in the list below. If you can help me find stories about some of those programs, etc, please let me know. As well, some stories are treated multiple times, with perhaps an initial story telling the big picture or introducing a large series of cuts and later stories fleshing out details.