ellther

Hi Senator, thanks for the discussion.

I believe the Australian Greens are facing increasing pressure at the ballot box today as a growing number of Australians - particularly STEM professionals, researchers and academics - identify the Greens as "the anti-science party".

What do you think about that?

Part of that is due to silly anti-biotechnology policies such as "ban genetic engineering of animals" without qualification (of course in medicine and life sciences genetically engineered animals such as knockout mice are used everywhere every day) as well as Bob Brown's support of the Anti-Vaccination Network (recorded in hansard!), but a large part of that is also due to the party's fervent opposition to nuclear anything - and you are the main public face of this fervor.

Without going into a deep discussion of this issue, suffice to say this fanaticism is all but indefensible to a technically literate, scientifically literate audience.

Statements such as "Without nuclear power stations - there can be no nuclear weapons, no possibility of fuels being stolen to build ‘dirty bombs', no possibility of a nuclear power station being hit by a conventional bomb and setting off a nuclear explosion." make you - and the party, more generally - a scientific laughing stock.

What can the Greens do to correct this course and improve their scientific respectability?

PS: I fully agree with and love your work with regards to support for Labor's NBN, standing up against Conroy's "you're either with us or you're with pedophiles" rhetoric on Internet censorship, etc. :)

The science behind whether or not genetically engineered organsims or byproducts are safe for people or dispersal into the wider environment is so corrupted it no longer deserves the name: the corporations who are trying to monetise these products are conducting a vast and irreversable experiment that I strongly oppose.

So all the published, credible scientific research out there that disagrees with your pre-decided ideology is just dismissed out of hand because all the research (except anything that might agree with the ideology) is just a big corrupted corporate conspiracy?

The process of post-publication peer-review and open scientific enquiry detects anti-vaccine or anti-GMO quackery like Wakefield or Seralini with no scientific integrity, but you think it somehow allows corruption to go undetected when the ideological shoe is on the other foot because of some big research conspiracy?

It's excellent to hear that you don't support this call for an inquiry - which I should note was called for by the NSW Greens branch but not by the Greens at a federal level.

"The peer-reviewed evidence says that there are no adverse health consequences but the community on the north coast is concerned about mass fluoridation and we owe it to them to review the evidence again to be sure if it's the right way to go", as MP John Kaye said.

But if we applied that same logic consistently to every Northern Rivers science-denialist out there we'd be reviewing the "evidence" from the Australian Vaccination Network, anti-chemtrails kooks, "wind turbine syndrome" activists, and yes, denialists of anthropogenic contributions to radiative forcing, and you just know they'd send you reams and reams of pseudoscience printouts from conspiracy websites. So it's good to hear that you understand how silly this is, Adam.

However, I'll put something else on the table for all the readers to contemplate. (Although it may be controversial to some, that's ok.)

I put it to you that in fact there is nothing to scientifically "debate" about (a) the safe, productive use of recombinant genes (of various functions) in various agricultural crops, within a working and well enforced, sensible regulatory framework which Australia has and (b) the use of nuclear power as a very safe, very environmentally friendly, very effective replacement for fossil-fuel energy generation in a large-scale, reliable, technologically mature fashion (with a sensible, effective radiological safety regulatory body, which our government has.) But in these cases, the relationship between Greens policy and settled science is more tenuous and uncomfortable.

PS: You have fine taste in fiction literature, Adam. :)

I see it's been accepted, following rigorous peer review, feedback, and additional editing and data from the authors, into the eminent Journal of YouTube.

And if you look at, say, Olympic Dam in SA we have a very large copper mine, and we spend lots of effort and energy mining that copper ore, grinding it up, extracting the copper with froth floation, and smelting the copper with natural gas, and putting the millions of tonnes of waste rock in a tailings dam.

But, as it turns out, we can also recover useful amounts of gold and uranium from the tailings waste from that copper mine - the additional chemical extraction that purifies the gold and uranium from what would otherwise be this waste stream costs little, involves minimal additional water or energy or material inputs - most of the effort has already been done - and provides a substantial value-add to the mine, including an enormous clean energy resource. And this is done with no environmental impact on top of the existing copper mine - in fact, you might argue that it's less environmental impact, since all that uranium and gold you're shipping is gold and uranium that would otherwise be included in the waste and tailings stream, in case you're concerned that material represents an environmental impact.