On Sunday, Stephen Moore of the Koch, etc-funded Heritage Foundation published a real peach of a column about following the money over at the Washington Times (itself owned by some weird Korean cult).
The column follows the standard lie, which earned Moore some brief fame, that climate scientists are in it for money. He lists out some of the billions spent on climate change research, and acts like that money just goes straight to scientists’ bank accounts instead of being used to actually do research.
In the middle of it, though, Moore makes a startling (and inadvertent) admission: “Apparently, if you take money from the private sector to fund research, your work is inherently biased, but if you get multimillion-dollar grants from Uncle Sam, you are as pure as the freshly fallen snow.”
...Yes, Stephen. That is exactly the point. Funding bias is real. It’s such a basic concept it even has its own Wikipedia page. Scientific studies tend to support the interests of its funders, and the Wiki highlights examples with chemicals, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, sugar, soda, and many others.
And it’s not like Moore doesn’t recognize that this phenomenon is real: his whole argument is that climate scientists are biased by their funding. But funding from the public is done with the express intent of protecting the public, so if public funding introduces bias, that bias is in favor of protecting the public. Government funding is for research that private companies won’t fund because it serves the public rather than private good.
When Uncle Sam gives a grant, it’s specifically to benefit the public. How funding will be used for research that benefits the public is often a part of these grants. And benefiting the public is a good thing--unless, of course, you’re a polluter making money off of a product that kills people.
On the other hand, private sector research is for the benefit of the private sector. So yes, if you get private sector funding for your work, it is inherently biased. That doesn’t mean it’s unusable, wrong, or even bad. Some inherent bias doesn’t completely invalidate research, and there are certainly plenty of researchers doing good work with private funding.
But almost all of those doing bad work are doing it with private money, to advance private aims, all too often at the public expense. On the other hand, public funding often discovers things private interests may not like.
And trying to make those two things seem the same? Well it doesn’t get much Moore stupider than that.