The conventional wisdom is that environmental groups are hip, on the side of the angels and, generally, are opposed only by fat, greedy capitalists, who cannot pass a pristine river or pastoral habitat without snickering – “ah, somewhere to dump the filth from my dark and lucrative satanic mill.” So it apparently came as a bit of shock to Linda Greer Ph.D, a toxicologist who has spent 28 years advocating for environmental causes, that her colleagues in toxicology – even those working in academia – thought her employer, the Natural Resources Defense Council, was polluting public debate with unwarranted panic over toxic chemicals.
Upon reading survey results which found that 79 percent of toxicologists familiar with the NRDC’s work thought it overstated chemical risks, Dr. Greer stood up and said the survey should not have been made public. It was, she averred, “very unscientific” to present the results of a survey before acceptance by a peer reviewed publication - a position, which if generally held, would delay the publication of every electoral and political poll or opinion survey until their findings were long out of date. This is possibly why the National Council on Public Polls has never issued such a requirement.
When Dr. S. Robert Lichter, President of STATS, responded by pointing this out and asking whether the NRDC ever released data before peer-review, Dr. Greer dodged “we’re an advocacy group and we don’t hold ourselves out as scientific researchers.” (Video of the exchange below).
Such is the logic of advocacy – we can say whatever we want about the science, but if scientists in a survey criticize those statements as inaccurate, they must be held to a higher (and in the case of survey data, erroneous) standard of accuracy before their criticism can be released to the public. How… um… convenient.
Still, it was obvious why Dr. Greer went on the offensive, the NRDC is urging the Obama administration to take action on a host of chemical threats; if it became widely-known on Capitol Hill that the NRDC, along with Greenpeace, Environmental Defense, and the Environmental Working Group, were widely regarded as inaccurate by scientists specializing in toxicology, their legislative recommendations might not seem so compelling.
Posted by Trevor Butterworth 
