https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-crank-realignment-is-bad-for
For reasons that sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists are probably better-situation to explain, if you work in an environment where all your colleagues and peer reviewers and people you talk things over with in a seminar are left-wing, you are going to get biased results. Again, not necessarily because anyone is trying to bias the results, but because each individual person has their own biases and when almost all of those biases are mutually reenforcing, you get a bad outcome.
A related issue is that once an expert community obtains a sharp political skew, it’s easy to confuse the interests of the expert community with an ideological vision of the public interest. It’s important to make energy policy in a way that aligns with scientific facts about climate change and public health. But that’s not the same as saying that “the science” dictates specific policy measures. We saw this really clearly during Covid when “defer to public health academics” became constitutive of progressive politics, but public health academics also seemed to feel considerable pressure to align their recommendations with the progressive policy priorities of the moment. Ideally, we’d live in a world where empirical information “pulls sideways” in a way that’s orthogonal to values-based ideological conflict. But we’re not even close.