A new opinion piece in Nature says that President Joe Biden has mostly followed the science and he is a lot better than President Trump - but how much of that is filtered through the reality that one is in their political tribe and the other guy a Republican muddles the issue. Academics said the same thing about Obama over Bush and it was so clearly partisan (and scientifically wrong) we wrote a whole book on it.

Yes, President Biden says he is a firm believer in climate change, but has he done anything to mitigate it? Not in ways beyond photo ops. The number one source of human-derived CO2 emissions is wood and dung burned for fuel in developing nations. With a sweep of his pen, he could have reduced that and gotten 2 billion poor people on the road to centralized energy. Literally anything, coal, natural gas, you name it, in a power plant would be cleaner and therefore better for the world than individual home cooking fires but he is sticking with the President Obama plan of only agreeing to help poor countries if they use solar or wind. Which is both useless for them and too expensive.

So, yes, he says the right things about climate change, but isn't doing them. He is instead doing the opposite of what science shows will work because it matches the political beliefs of his party - endorsing solar and wind.

On COVID-19, his results are even murkier but the authors of the op-ed again instead choose to go by what he says and ignore everything else. When President Trump said COVID-19 was a real worry and we needed to cut travel from China, Democrats in New York, California, and in journalism departments everywhere said he was racist. The World Health Organisation, they noted, hadn't declared it a pandemic. Yet it turned out WHO had simply repeated what China told them to say and Trump was actually right. Eventually the world did just as he had recommended. New York was devastated by the pandemic because they refused to cut travel early. New York City even had a mayor who thought he'd stick it to Trump by telling everyone to go to bars one last time because Trump was making him close them. A few weeks later, the Navy, ironically controlled by Trump, had to send in a hospital ship due to the overflow in NYC ICUs. 

In actual behavior during his first year, Biden was working the phones to get a trillion-dollar stimulus plan that would almost entirely go into the hands of government employees and their allied contractors and dismissive the idea of giving Americans COVID-19 testing kids. He ridiculed it in October and in December his press liaison, Jen Psaki, was so derisive toward a journalist who asked about it that she could have been part of the Trump administration. 

What he was doing was weaponizing science for his political agenda. Using the CDC, he attempted to use COVID-19 to create a regulation saying that no one could be evicted during the pandemic. The courts struck it down. An agency stuffed with career bureaucrats so intent on getting more raises by inventing new pandemics to 'prevent' were found to be completely unprepared for a real crisis, but they believed themselves to be experts on property rights. He then attempted to end-run Congress and mandate that his OSHA could put corporations in the nanny government business and force employees to get the COVID-19 vaccine. The Supreme Court struck that one down.

It's certainly expected that Democrats in academia want to believe he is better, and it is no surprise they attempt to wrap their politics in the flag of science, but it is not evidence-based.

The missteps of POTUS in other areas may not be fixable but let's hope the next three years for science gets better. Until then, we're going to be told by people in politicization of science they already are.