| Summary: | Part of a special issue on politics, science, and public policy. When an issue becomes the focus of partisan political debate, the value of scientific or technical input into the discussion declines. Policymakers have treated scientific and technical information on environmental issues differently to that offered on energy matters. In some cases, this is because their constituents view these two issues as affecting them in different ways and demand different approaches to dealing with them. In other cases, the issues have taken on a political importance that begins to shape the nature of the scientific debate instead of the scientific information shaping the political debate. Scientific and technical information has often been seen as more important in environmental policymaking and has therefore attracted more rigorous debate than in energy policymaking.
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