No Se Nada

You might have seen a few other SBers pick up Laurie David's WaPo op-ed from last Saturday. You might have even seen the topic appear in the SB Buzz. And by now you might have seen the NSTA response and/or Sandra Porter's post about the affair.

The episode reminds us that the more nefarious and conspiracy-theorish an opinionator makes a situation sound (and Laurie David was pulling out all the stops in her op-ed), the more likely that there is a very reasonable "other side" to the story. NSTA President Gerry Wheeler's response to David was considered, measured and mostly on-target.

Or was it? The tête-à-tête raises two issues. One is David's credibility, the other is Wheeler's. Unfortunately both diminish their own credibility in this affair.

That David didn't do much fact checking, and probably didn't give much of a rat's ass about the facts from the outset anyway, is clear after reading Wheeler's response. David's op-ed had a clear agenda to attack the NSTA for a perceived slight, and she went dumpster-diving to find some inconvenient facts with which to embarrass the NSTA. That's called a hatchet job and David tried to get everybody bloody. (See in particular David's call-out of the API video and Wheeler's response. Hey Laurie, guess what? You can't be cool without fuel. Nobody can watch your movie without fuel. You can't film it, produce it or distribute it without fuel. You can't fly around the country spewing GHG emissions while promoting Inconvenient Truth without fuel, even if you are buying up bullshit offset credits.)

But Wheeler also leaves some interesting issues unaddressed in his response. He avoids addressing the most pertinent charge in David's op-ed: that the NSTA sent David an email which said in part that NSTA didn't want to take on the distribution of An Inconvenient Truth because it might place, "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." Wheeler also sidesteps the conflict of interest issue even while raising it. He says:

The perception created by the op-ed that NSTA has a conflict of interest in dealing with corporate America is misleading. This is a very serious issue to NSTA and science education. Like many organizations, NSTA does receive support from corporate America and other organizations (in FY06 total corporate support received by NSTA was 16.4% and total support from energy companies was 3.77%). Before we accept any funds from outside groups (corporate or otherwise), and as a condition of any support, we make it clear that NSTA is solely responsible for developing, directing, and implementing the programs we offer to teachers.

Which, of course, in no way refutes the notion that NSTA would be willing to alter what it promotes on behalf of a corporate donor. In fact, that Wheeler uses all these words but still does not address related points in David's letter about the petroleum industry's intentions in child education is somewhat frightening. I assume Wheeler read David's letter over and over. He chose to ignore the sling about API and Exxon acting like the cigarette industry. Maybe he did so because he didn't want to offend NSTA's corporate donors, which is precisely the point David is harping on.

A calmer consideration of all this, though, boils down to one issue: distribution. I get a feeling from David's op-ed that her beef really lays here: Participant Productions wanted to donate 50,000 DVDs to the NSTA, obviously at some expense to Participant Productions. In return for this gesture they expected NSTA to distribute the DVDs at NSTA's expense. Wheeler implies but does not state that the issue for NSTA is that it simply doesn't want to distribute 50,000 DVDs on its own dime. If this is really the basis of the dispute, and I can only surmise this from reading between the lines in David's op-ed and Wheeler's response, then NSTA is entirely within its prerogative and David has nothing to complain about.

Now let's get back to more important topics. I said carbon offsets are bullshit. Any takers?