Chris Mooney says cynically using science to stall policy is the research equivalent of filing frivolous legal motions.
That’s a question sharply posed by a reading of The Polluters, a history of the American struggle for environmental protection before the triumphal 1970s, when Congress passed the Clean Air Act and many other landmark environmental laws. America’s outlook on pollution went through a dramatic transformation, beginning around 1962 with Rachel Carson‘s Silent Spring and carrying on through the early 1970s, when under a Republican president, Richard Nixon, the federal government created the Environmental Protection Agency and finally acquired the necessary scientific expertise and legal authority to regulate pollution.
