Ronald Reagan's Star Wars was a $1 trillion dollar program marrying politics and science that went nowhere. When politics meets hard science, we get a lot of poor people and soviet-era economies who can no longer maintain their armaments and there's never anything left to distill or even reuse as a paperweight. Take the neoconservative ousting and arming of iraq for instance, where they dumped or misappropriated some of the latest and greatest technology in warfare so they could appropriate the newest stuff, all the while simple things like humvees were continually under-armored or disposed of by being blown up or driven into makeshift landfills to make room for the latest gadgets. This turned many soldiers against Bush Jr and fueled the 9/11 movement. Science and politics did nothing but blow through money.

Liberals on the other hand, funded community reinvestment and opening economic trade with the east. Both of which were undermined by hedge fund managers of a certain persuasion. Real hard science has never ever in the history of liberalism been their M.O. It's not relevant whether individual liberals are pro-science or not.

If we're talking global warming, it was a term appropriated not unlike capitalism in the mid to late 1800s that has never been updated or changed. There are plenty of scientific elite who use the term global warming to maintain the status quo, as compared to, say, particulate waste vs. solid waste. Even now with the internet, this difference is not really debated or talked about and is instead framed as a global warming vs. alternatives to global warming ie nuclear options, solar, wind; etc.

What are the hard scientists really doing politically that benefits anyone outside themselves? Fucking nothing, not a martyr amongst them which is even less than the politicians can claim.