Journalism Professor Rates Health Studies. By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
American Council on Science and Health, March 31, 2009
Here at ACSH we’ve complained for years that health-related stories in the popular media often pay scant attention to the scientific accuracy and importance of the studies they report on. For example, we’ve seen preliminary studies reported at scientific meetings given equal weight with studies that have undergone peer review and are published in respected scientific journals. As we’ve noted in several publications, problems range from misleading and alarmist headlines to a basic misunderstanding of the difference between association and causation in the results of epidemiologic studies.
Now we’ve come across some valuable help -- an Internet site published by journalism professor Gary J. Schwitzer at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Professor Schwitzer has an extensive background in journalism and puts it to good use on his Health News Review site. The good professor analyzes and critiques health-related news stories, explaining why a particular article presents its topic accurately and clearly -- or why it doesn’t. He rates stories with up to five stars, and details what the standards are for the ratings. We’re pleased to find such a useful resource and hope our readers find it valuable as well.
Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D., is Director of Nutrition at the American Council on Science and Health
Showing posts with label junk science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label junk science. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Activism in the Time of Cholera: Anti-GMO groups keep the poor from getting help
Activism in the Time of Cholera: Anti-GMO groups keep the poor from getting help. By Henry I. Miller
Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2009
The cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe has sickened more than 100,000 and killed at least 4,500, with more cases reported daily. The disease remains all too lethal elsewhere, too, having killed about 120,000 people in 2007, according to the World Health Organization. But thanks to a simple innovation, those kinds of statistics could soon be a relic of the past, like deaths from smallpox and polio -- if not for the interference of a few influential politicians and activist groups.
Cholera is a diarrheal disease caused by contamination of food and water by feces. For those of us who live in industrialized countries, diarrhea is little more than a nuisance, most often involving some discomfort and bloating. But in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Latin America and Asia with poor access to health care, clean water and other resources, diarrhea is the No. 2 infectious killer of children under the age of five, accounting for two million deaths a year.
Since the 1960s, the standard of care for childhood diarrhea in the developing world has been a glucose-based, high-sodium liquid that is administered orally and is known as a "rehydration solution." This low-tech product was revolutionary. It has saved millions of lives and reduced the need for costly -- and often unavailable -- hospital stays and sterile intravenous fluids. However, this product has done nothing to lessen the severity or duration of the condition, which over time leads to malnutrition, anemia and other chronic health risks.
The answer may be an affordable innovation that combines high and low technology. It consists of adding two human proteins, lactoferrin and lysozyme, which are produced inexpensively in genetically modified (GM) rice plants, to rice-based oral rehydration solution. Studies performed in Peru show that when this is done, the duration of children's illness is cut from more than five days to three and two-thirds. The rate of recurrence also falls. This advance could save many of those who are dying in Zimbabwe and elsewhere.
What made this approach feasible was a private company's invention of a method to produce human lactoferrin and lysozyme in gene-spliced rice, a process dubbed "biopharming." This is an inexpensive way to create the proteins necessary to fortify millions of liters of rehydration solution.
Sounds like a great success, right? Not yet; maybe not ever. The company has been trying for more than six years to get the product approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has raised no real safety concerns but has dithered over the appropriate regulatory route for approving the product. Because a panel of experts has already deemed the proteins safe, the best guess is that internal FDA politics and lobbying by NGOs and the company's competitors are causing the delays.
Virtually every biotech breakthrough brings the antitechnology, antibusiness fabulists out of the woodwork, and this one is no exception. One radical biotech opponent, Hope Shand, remonstrated, "The chance this will contaminate traditionally grown crops is great. This is a very risky business."
Nonsense. Rice is self-pollinating, so interbreeding with other rice varieties is virtually impossible. But even in the worst case, "contaminate traditionally grown crops" with what? With two human proteins normally present in tears, breast milk and saliva? The only contamination here is of public discourse, from the lies and misrepresentations of antibiotech activists.
Another miraculous product made with gene-splicing techniques, and which has also had to endure the slings and arrows of wrong-headed activists and regulators, is "Golden Rice." This collection of new rice varieties is enriched by the introduction of genes that produce beta-carotene, which the body can convert into vitamin A.
Vitamin A deficiency is epidemic among poor people in the tropics whose diet is dominated by rice (which contains neither beta-carotene nor vitamin A) or similar foods. World-wide, 200 million to 300 million children of preschool age are at risk of vitamin A deficiency, which increases susceptibility to infections such as measles and diarrheal diseases and is the leading cause of childhood blindness in developing countries. About 500,000 children become blind due to vitamin A deficiency each year, and 70% of them die within a year.
The concept is simple: Although beta-carotene is not normally found in the seeds of rice plants because of the absence of two enzymes needed to make the substance, rice plants do make it in the green portions of the plant. When GM techniques are used to introduce the two missing genes, the rice grains become capable of producing and accumulating large amounts of beta-carotene.
Like the protein additives to the rehydration solution, Golden Rice is being blocked from the market by regulatory delays -- both by unscientific, draconian requirements concocted by United Nations agencies and by regulators in several Asian countries.
Despite their vast potential to benefit humanity, and negligible likelihood of harm to human health or the environment, the gene-spliced rice varieties remain in regulatory limbo with no end in sight. Activists have spread wild tales of gene-spliced crops causing illness and baldness, and of giving rise to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. There is absolutely no evidence for such claims.
In contrast to GM plants, those constructed with older, less precise techniques for genetic improvement are subject to no government scrutiny or requirements -- or opposition from activists. As a result, companies are systematically discouraged from adopting the best technologies, and when feasible prefer to use older, inferior techniques to achieve the desired result.
In an April 2008 editorial in the journal Science, Nina Fedoroff, a plant geneticist who serves as senior scientific adviser to the U.S. secretary of state, wrote: "A new green revolution demands a global commitment to creating a modern agricultural infrastructure everywhere, adequate investment in training and modern laboratory facilities, and progress toward simplified regulatory approaches that are responsive to accumulating evidence of safety." The story of GM rice makes it clear that we do not yet have the will and the wisdom to make that happen.
Dr. Miller, a physician and fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, headed the FDA's Office of Biotechnology from 1989 to 1993.
Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2009
The cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe has sickened more than 100,000 and killed at least 4,500, with more cases reported daily. The disease remains all too lethal elsewhere, too, having killed about 120,000 people in 2007, according to the World Health Organization. But thanks to a simple innovation, those kinds of statistics could soon be a relic of the past, like deaths from smallpox and polio -- if not for the interference of a few influential politicians and activist groups.
Cholera is a diarrheal disease caused by contamination of food and water by feces. For those of us who live in industrialized countries, diarrhea is little more than a nuisance, most often involving some discomfort and bloating. But in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Latin America and Asia with poor access to health care, clean water and other resources, diarrhea is the No. 2 infectious killer of children under the age of five, accounting for two million deaths a year.
Since the 1960s, the standard of care for childhood diarrhea in the developing world has been a glucose-based, high-sodium liquid that is administered orally and is known as a "rehydration solution." This low-tech product was revolutionary. It has saved millions of lives and reduced the need for costly -- and often unavailable -- hospital stays and sterile intravenous fluids. However, this product has done nothing to lessen the severity or duration of the condition, which over time leads to malnutrition, anemia and other chronic health risks.
The answer may be an affordable innovation that combines high and low technology. It consists of adding two human proteins, lactoferrin and lysozyme, which are produced inexpensively in genetically modified (GM) rice plants, to rice-based oral rehydration solution. Studies performed in Peru show that when this is done, the duration of children's illness is cut from more than five days to three and two-thirds. The rate of recurrence also falls. This advance could save many of those who are dying in Zimbabwe and elsewhere.
What made this approach feasible was a private company's invention of a method to produce human lactoferrin and lysozyme in gene-spliced rice, a process dubbed "biopharming." This is an inexpensive way to create the proteins necessary to fortify millions of liters of rehydration solution.
Sounds like a great success, right? Not yet; maybe not ever. The company has been trying for more than six years to get the product approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has raised no real safety concerns but has dithered over the appropriate regulatory route for approving the product. Because a panel of experts has already deemed the proteins safe, the best guess is that internal FDA politics and lobbying by NGOs and the company's competitors are causing the delays.
Virtually every biotech breakthrough brings the antitechnology, antibusiness fabulists out of the woodwork, and this one is no exception. One radical biotech opponent, Hope Shand, remonstrated, "The chance this will contaminate traditionally grown crops is great. This is a very risky business."
Nonsense. Rice is self-pollinating, so interbreeding with other rice varieties is virtually impossible. But even in the worst case, "contaminate traditionally grown crops" with what? With two human proteins normally present in tears, breast milk and saliva? The only contamination here is of public discourse, from the lies and misrepresentations of antibiotech activists.
Another miraculous product made with gene-splicing techniques, and which has also had to endure the slings and arrows of wrong-headed activists and regulators, is "Golden Rice." This collection of new rice varieties is enriched by the introduction of genes that produce beta-carotene, which the body can convert into vitamin A.
Vitamin A deficiency is epidemic among poor people in the tropics whose diet is dominated by rice (which contains neither beta-carotene nor vitamin A) or similar foods. World-wide, 200 million to 300 million children of preschool age are at risk of vitamin A deficiency, which increases susceptibility to infections such as measles and diarrheal diseases and is the leading cause of childhood blindness in developing countries. About 500,000 children become blind due to vitamin A deficiency each year, and 70% of them die within a year.
The concept is simple: Although beta-carotene is not normally found in the seeds of rice plants because of the absence of two enzymes needed to make the substance, rice plants do make it in the green portions of the plant. When GM techniques are used to introduce the two missing genes, the rice grains become capable of producing and accumulating large amounts of beta-carotene.
Like the protein additives to the rehydration solution, Golden Rice is being blocked from the market by regulatory delays -- both by unscientific, draconian requirements concocted by United Nations agencies and by regulators in several Asian countries.
Despite their vast potential to benefit humanity, and negligible likelihood of harm to human health or the environment, the gene-spliced rice varieties remain in regulatory limbo with no end in sight. Activists have spread wild tales of gene-spliced crops causing illness and baldness, and of giving rise to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. There is absolutely no evidence for such claims.
In contrast to GM plants, those constructed with older, less precise techniques for genetic improvement are subject to no government scrutiny or requirements -- or opposition from activists. As a result, companies are systematically discouraged from adopting the best technologies, and when feasible prefer to use older, inferior techniques to achieve the desired result.
In an April 2008 editorial in the journal Science, Nina Fedoroff, a plant geneticist who serves as senior scientific adviser to the U.S. secretary of state, wrote: "A new green revolution demands a global commitment to creating a modern agricultural infrastructure everywhere, adequate investment in training and modern laboratory facilities, and progress toward simplified regulatory approaches that are responsive to accumulating evidence of safety." The story of GM rice makes it clear that we do not yet have the will and the wisdom to make that happen.
Dr. Miller, a physician and fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, headed the FDA's Office of Biotechnology from 1989 to 1993.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Nosophobia and Fear of Invisible Toxins
Nosophobia and Fear of Invisible Toxins. By Jack Dini
ACSH, March 27, 2009
“If it smells bad, it’s bad; if it smells good, it’s bad,” says Aileen Gagney, asthma and environmental health manager with the American Lung Association in Seattle. (1) Obviously then, the key to a healthy life is to have no smells around you. How unfortunate, since we are excellent smellers!
The tongue can detect sweetness at a dilution of one part in 200, saltiness at one in 400, sourness at one in 130,000, and bitterness at one in 2 million. (2) All of this pales when compared with our ability to detect extremely low levels of smells (i.e., in the range of 50 parts per trillion to 800 parts per billion. (3)
If you are inclined to agree with Ms. Gagney, perhaps you have nosophobia, the irrational fear of contracting a disease -- or perhaps I should say nose-ophobia, since we so often hear of people fearful of contracting a disease by smelling. Let’s talk about fragrances and smoking to provide some present-day examples.
Elizabeth Whelan reports, “Fragrances now join a growing list of allegedly harmful products -- plastic bottles, rubber duckies, shower curtains, Astroturf, traditional produce raised with agricultural chemicals, aspartame, acrylamide, etc. The list seems to be growing like…well, ‘toxic mold.’ Nosophobia is causing us to abandon safe, useful products of modern technology to avoid phantom risks while obscuring the real risks around us. While parents are fretting over BPA traces in baby bottles or phthalates in plastic toys, they may well be giving short shrift to the real threats to their children’s health, including failure to use seatbelts, bike helmets, smoke detectors, vaccinations, proper nutrition and exercise.” (4)
When University of Washington professor Anne Steinemann analyzed a variety of fragranced consumer products such as air fresheners, laundry supplies, personal care products and cleaners, she found 100 different volatile organic compounds (VOCs) measuring 300 micrograms/m3, or more. (5)
Wow, you say! Sounds scary! But, let’s look at concentrations. VOCs were identified from GC/MS headspace analysis. Only those with a headspace concentration of greater than 300 micrograms/m3 were reported. Average headspace concentrations of VOCs for the six products tested ranged from 1,000 micrograms/m3 to 74,000 micrograms/m3. In Steinemann’s work, 10 of the 100 volatile organic compounds identified qualified under federal rules as toxic or hazardous, and two of those; 1,4-dioxane and acetaldehyde are classified as Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs). (5)
What are OSHA permissible exposure limits for 1,4-dioxane and acetaldehyde? The current OSHA permissible exposure limit for dioxane is 100 ppm (350 milligrams/m3) as an 8-hour time-weighted average. Note: THIS IS 1000 TIMES THE LEVEL reported in Steinemann’s paper. A similar case can be made for acetaldehyde. The OSHA 8-hour time-weighted average for acetaldehyde is 200 ppm (360 milligrams/m3). So, for the fragrance scare we’re talking about the amounts are considerably below allowable regulations. Yet, the comment is made; “Consumers are breathing these chemicals. No one is doing anything about it.” (1) Great scare tactics!
These days scientists can find anything in any thing and as this example shows, it can lead to a problem. The minute that something is found in food, in someone’s blood, in the air, etc., some folks get very concerned and start creating a lot of fuss. The very act of being able to measure something can give the impression that if it’s quantifiable, it’s dangerous. How unfortunate, since scientists are getting more clever all the time. Folks forget the old adage that ‘the dose makes the poison,’ and act on the principle that just the fact that anything is found is cause for alarm.
Here’s another one for nosophobiasts. There is now such a thing as ‘third hand smoke.’ Dr. Jonathan Winickoff, lead author of a recent paper in Pediatrics, says the following, “If the smell of the cigarettes lingers, so does the danger. Your nose isn’t lying. If your body detects it, then it’s there,” he says. Sounds like the opening comments in this article from Aileen Gagney.
What was the scientific study, which incidentally was given great TV coverage by Dr. Nancy Snyderman of the Today Show? Dr. Winickoff and his colleagues surveyed 1,500 households across the US and asked folks if they agreed with the statements:
• Breathing air in a car today where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of babies and children.
• Breathing air in a room where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of babies and children.
Those surveyed who stated they agreed or agreed strongly were categorized as believing third hand smoke harmed the health of babies and children. This is the “evidence” that third hand smoke had been “identified” as a health danger. (6)
Think about this for a moment. You could have been called as part of this survey and had your chance to play ‘scientist’ and provide data for this analysis. You may not like third hand smoke, but is a telephone solicitation of non-scientists really scientific evidence that it is bad?
There turned out to be much more to this story. What consumers didn’t hear from reporters was that it was conducted by the National Social Climate Survey of Tobacco Control, a special interest group working to legislate bans on tobacco. The Tobacco Consortium, which sets the group’s agenda, is chaired by Dr. Winickoff of Harvard and the lead author of this paper. Makes one wonder about the review process for papers that appear in the journal Pediatrics.
For that matter, a fair number of scientists debate whether second hand smoke exposure during childhood is harmful to long-term health. Sandy Szwarc reports, “The world’s largest study ever done to examine the association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and lung cancer was conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, and published in 1998 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. (7) It included lung cancer patients up to 74 years of age, and a control group, in 12 centers from seven European countries, looking at cases of lung cancer and exposures to ETS. They found ‘no association between childhood exposure and ETS and lung cancer risk.’” (8)
The authors of the Pediatrics article suggested dangers at exposure levels far below the levels of second hand smoke -- third hand smoke exposures -- even without regard to ventilation, the number of cigarettes parents smoked, or length of exposure.
Szwarc adds, “Any exposure at all, and at levels barely detectable with modern instrumentation, is now being suggested as able to cause cancer and brain damage in children. This turns everything that science knows about toxicology on its head and denies the most fundamental law: that the dose makes the poison. In other words, there is no credible medical evidence to support the suggestion that trace exposures lingering in the air or on clothing are harming children.” (8)
In an entertaining and insightful opinion piece for the Daily Mail, Tom Utley, a smoker described what scare tactics like these, that are such obvious hoaxes, actually undermine the effectiveness of efforts to reduce smoking and exposures to children. No one is arguing that smoking is a healthful habit or would encourage young people to take up smoking, but he ‘most vehemently challenged Dr. Winickoff’s right to dress up this insulting, scaremongering, palpable drivel as science.’ Utley adds, “The very last thing I want is to encourage anybody to take up my disgusting and ruinously expensive habit, which I’m sure will be the death of me. But then I hear the latest hysterical rubbish from the anti-smoking lobby and my determination to remain silent goes the same way as my annual New Year’s resolution to give up the vile weed. Why, when there are so many excellent reasons to quit, do these fanatics feel obliged to keep on inventing new and obviously bogus ones? (9)
Szwarc concludes, “This is one of the most egregious examples of the increasingly common and unethical practice of politicizing science and using a ‘study’ to advance an agenda of a biased media failing to do its job. Neither is in the interest of the facts or truth. The healthiest thing for all of us might be a helpful dose of common sense and respect for other people’s choices. Otherwise, we may next hear about the dangers of fourth hand smoke, a term coined by John Boston of the Santa Clarita Valley Signal: someone sitting next to someone who is thinking about someone else smoking. And someone will believe it and report is as news.” (8)
References
1. Lisa Stiffler, “Fresh scent may hide toxic secret,” seattlepi.com, July 23, 2008
2. Peter Farb amd George Armelagos, Consuming Passions, (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980), 22
3. Herbert S. Rosenkranz and Albert R. Cunningham, “Environmental odors and health hazards,” The Science of the Total Environment, 313, 15, 2003
4. Elizabeth M. Whelan, “Toxics (from Seattle Post-Intelligencer)”, American Council on Science and Health, July 25, 2008
5. Anne C. Steinemann, “Fragranced consumer products and undisclosed ingredients,” Environ. Impact Asses. Rev., (2008), doi;10.1016/j.eiar.2008.05.002
6. Jonathan P Winickoff et al., “Beliefs About the Health Effects of ‘Third hand’ Smoke and Home Smoking Bans,” Pediatrics, 123, e74, January 1, 2009
7. B. P. Agudo et al., “Multicenter case-control study of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer in Europe,” J. Natl. Cancer Inst., 90, 1440, October 7, 1998
8. Sandy Szwarc, “Third hand smoke and chemtrials -- invisible toxin fears,” junkfoodscience.com, January 10, 2009
9. Tom Utley, dailymail.co.uk, January 9, 2009
Jack Dini is a scientist and science writer living in Livermore, CA.
ACSH, March 27, 2009
“If it smells bad, it’s bad; if it smells good, it’s bad,” says Aileen Gagney, asthma and environmental health manager with the American Lung Association in Seattle. (1) Obviously then, the key to a healthy life is to have no smells around you. How unfortunate, since we are excellent smellers!
The tongue can detect sweetness at a dilution of one part in 200, saltiness at one in 400, sourness at one in 130,000, and bitterness at one in 2 million. (2) All of this pales when compared with our ability to detect extremely low levels of smells (i.e., in the range of 50 parts per trillion to 800 parts per billion. (3)
If you are inclined to agree with Ms. Gagney, perhaps you have nosophobia, the irrational fear of contracting a disease -- or perhaps I should say nose-ophobia, since we so often hear of people fearful of contracting a disease by smelling. Let’s talk about fragrances and smoking to provide some present-day examples.
Elizabeth Whelan reports, “Fragrances now join a growing list of allegedly harmful products -- plastic bottles, rubber duckies, shower curtains, Astroturf, traditional produce raised with agricultural chemicals, aspartame, acrylamide, etc. The list seems to be growing like…well, ‘toxic mold.’ Nosophobia is causing us to abandon safe, useful products of modern technology to avoid phantom risks while obscuring the real risks around us. While parents are fretting over BPA traces in baby bottles or phthalates in plastic toys, they may well be giving short shrift to the real threats to their children’s health, including failure to use seatbelts, bike helmets, smoke detectors, vaccinations, proper nutrition and exercise.” (4)
When University of Washington professor Anne Steinemann analyzed a variety of fragranced consumer products such as air fresheners, laundry supplies, personal care products and cleaners, she found 100 different volatile organic compounds (VOCs) measuring 300 micrograms/m3, or more. (5)
Wow, you say! Sounds scary! But, let’s look at concentrations. VOCs were identified from GC/MS headspace analysis. Only those with a headspace concentration of greater than 300 micrograms/m3 were reported. Average headspace concentrations of VOCs for the six products tested ranged from 1,000 micrograms/m3 to 74,000 micrograms/m3. In Steinemann’s work, 10 of the 100 volatile organic compounds identified qualified under federal rules as toxic or hazardous, and two of those; 1,4-dioxane and acetaldehyde are classified as Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs). (5)
What are OSHA permissible exposure limits for 1,4-dioxane and acetaldehyde? The current OSHA permissible exposure limit for dioxane is 100 ppm (350 milligrams/m3) as an 8-hour time-weighted average. Note: THIS IS 1000 TIMES THE LEVEL reported in Steinemann’s paper. A similar case can be made for acetaldehyde. The OSHA 8-hour time-weighted average for acetaldehyde is 200 ppm (360 milligrams/m3). So, for the fragrance scare we’re talking about the amounts are considerably below allowable regulations. Yet, the comment is made; “Consumers are breathing these chemicals. No one is doing anything about it.” (1) Great scare tactics!
These days scientists can find anything in any thing and as this example shows, it can lead to a problem. The minute that something is found in food, in someone’s blood, in the air, etc., some folks get very concerned and start creating a lot of fuss. The very act of being able to measure something can give the impression that if it’s quantifiable, it’s dangerous. How unfortunate, since scientists are getting more clever all the time. Folks forget the old adage that ‘the dose makes the poison,’ and act on the principle that just the fact that anything is found is cause for alarm.
Here’s another one for nosophobiasts. There is now such a thing as ‘third hand smoke.’ Dr. Jonathan Winickoff, lead author of a recent paper in Pediatrics, says the following, “If the smell of the cigarettes lingers, so does the danger. Your nose isn’t lying. If your body detects it, then it’s there,” he says. Sounds like the opening comments in this article from Aileen Gagney.
What was the scientific study, which incidentally was given great TV coverage by Dr. Nancy Snyderman of the Today Show? Dr. Winickoff and his colleagues surveyed 1,500 households across the US and asked folks if they agreed with the statements:
• Breathing air in a car today where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of babies and children.
• Breathing air in a room where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of babies and children.
Those surveyed who stated they agreed or agreed strongly were categorized as believing third hand smoke harmed the health of babies and children. This is the “evidence” that third hand smoke had been “identified” as a health danger. (6)
Think about this for a moment. You could have been called as part of this survey and had your chance to play ‘scientist’ and provide data for this analysis. You may not like third hand smoke, but is a telephone solicitation of non-scientists really scientific evidence that it is bad?
There turned out to be much more to this story. What consumers didn’t hear from reporters was that it was conducted by the National Social Climate Survey of Tobacco Control, a special interest group working to legislate bans on tobacco. The Tobacco Consortium, which sets the group’s agenda, is chaired by Dr. Winickoff of Harvard and the lead author of this paper. Makes one wonder about the review process for papers that appear in the journal Pediatrics.
For that matter, a fair number of scientists debate whether second hand smoke exposure during childhood is harmful to long-term health. Sandy Szwarc reports, “The world’s largest study ever done to examine the association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and lung cancer was conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, and published in 1998 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. (7) It included lung cancer patients up to 74 years of age, and a control group, in 12 centers from seven European countries, looking at cases of lung cancer and exposures to ETS. They found ‘no association between childhood exposure and ETS and lung cancer risk.’” (8)
The authors of the Pediatrics article suggested dangers at exposure levels far below the levels of second hand smoke -- third hand smoke exposures -- even without regard to ventilation, the number of cigarettes parents smoked, or length of exposure.
Szwarc adds, “Any exposure at all, and at levels barely detectable with modern instrumentation, is now being suggested as able to cause cancer and brain damage in children. This turns everything that science knows about toxicology on its head and denies the most fundamental law: that the dose makes the poison. In other words, there is no credible medical evidence to support the suggestion that trace exposures lingering in the air or on clothing are harming children.” (8)
In an entertaining and insightful opinion piece for the Daily Mail, Tom Utley, a smoker described what scare tactics like these, that are such obvious hoaxes, actually undermine the effectiveness of efforts to reduce smoking and exposures to children. No one is arguing that smoking is a healthful habit or would encourage young people to take up smoking, but he ‘most vehemently challenged Dr. Winickoff’s right to dress up this insulting, scaremongering, palpable drivel as science.’ Utley adds, “The very last thing I want is to encourage anybody to take up my disgusting and ruinously expensive habit, which I’m sure will be the death of me. But then I hear the latest hysterical rubbish from the anti-smoking lobby and my determination to remain silent goes the same way as my annual New Year’s resolution to give up the vile weed. Why, when there are so many excellent reasons to quit, do these fanatics feel obliged to keep on inventing new and obviously bogus ones? (9)
Szwarc concludes, “This is one of the most egregious examples of the increasingly common and unethical practice of politicizing science and using a ‘study’ to advance an agenda of a biased media failing to do its job. Neither is in the interest of the facts or truth. The healthiest thing for all of us might be a helpful dose of common sense and respect for other people’s choices. Otherwise, we may next hear about the dangers of fourth hand smoke, a term coined by John Boston of the Santa Clarita Valley Signal: someone sitting next to someone who is thinking about someone else smoking. And someone will believe it and report is as news.” (8)
References
1. Lisa Stiffler, “Fresh scent may hide toxic secret,” seattlepi.com, July 23, 2008
2. Peter Farb amd George Armelagos, Consuming Passions, (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980), 22
3. Herbert S. Rosenkranz and Albert R. Cunningham, “Environmental odors and health hazards,” The Science of the Total Environment, 313, 15, 2003
4. Elizabeth M. Whelan, “Toxics (from Seattle Post-Intelligencer)”, American Council on Science and Health, July 25, 2008
5. Anne C. Steinemann, “Fragranced consumer products and undisclosed ingredients,” Environ. Impact Asses. Rev., (2008), doi;10.1016/j.eiar.2008.05.002
6. Jonathan P Winickoff et al., “Beliefs About the Health Effects of ‘Third hand’ Smoke and Home Smoking Bans,” Pediatrics, 123, e74, January 1, 2009
7. B. P. Agudo et al., “Multicenter case-control study of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer in Europe,” J. Natl. Cancer Inst., 90, 1440, October 7, 1998
8. Sandy Szwarc, “Third hand smoke and chemtrials -- invisible toxin fears,” junkfoodscience.com, January 10, 2009
9. Tom Utley, dailymail.co.uk, January 9, 2009
Jack Dini is a scientist and science writer living in Livermore, CA.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Does Red Meat Increase Risk of Early Death?
Does Red Meat Increase Risk of Early Death? By Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
American Council on Science and Health, March 24, 2009
Should we be wary of eating red meat? Taken at face value, a new study suggests that might be a good idea -- but a more careful consideration does not.
A report in the March 23 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine describes a very large study -- over half a million people initially aged fifty-one to seventy-one years -- who reported their diets at the study's outset and were then followed for ten years. Over 300,000 men and over 200,000 women participated in the study. During the follow-up period approximately 48,000 men and 23,000 women died.
The researchers tabulated the numbers who died from cancer, cardiovascular disease, injuries and sudden deaths, and from all other causes. When they divided the subjects according to how much red, processed, and white meat they reported eating at baseline, the researchers found some increases in the risk of death in those reporting the highest intake of red and processed meats compared to those reporting the lowest intake. Conversely, the highest intake of white meat -- chicken, turkey, and fish in various forms -- was associated with a reduced risk of dying of cancer and other causes of death.While the sheer size of the study means it should not be taken lightly, there are reasons to look askance at some of the scary stories now making the rounds that are not really supported by the science.
•First, participants in the study didn't actually measure the amount of foods they ate. While this may not be very important for foods and beverages that are purchased in discrete quantities (e.g., a fast food hamburger or a bottle of soft drink), meat can be purchased and consumed in a wide variety of forms and sizes. Thus, the accuracy of the data depends on how well participants can estimate the quantities of the various foods they consumed, as well as how accurate they are when they recall how often they ate or drank particular items. Neither of these estimates is the most reliable indicator of actual consumption.
•Second, intake of various food items was ascertained only once -- at the start of the study. There is no information about whether or not people changed their diets over the course of the follow-up period -- this may well have had an impact on any disease-diet relationships.
•Third, the increases in risk did not reach the levels that would make most epidemiologists sit up and take notice -- a relative risk of 2 (a 100% increase) or greater. In fact, the increased risk of all deaths in the men in the highest group of red meat intake was 31% and for cancer was 22%. For women, the corresponding increases were 36 and 20%.As the authors concluded, the highest intakes of red and processed meats were associated with "a modest increase in risk of total mortality, cancer, and CVD mortality in both men and women."
At best, this study supports the oft-repeated advice that a healthful diet should be based on moderation, variety, and balance. What's so new about that?
Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D., is Director of Nutrition at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org, HealthFactsAndFears.com).
American Council on Science and Health, March 24, 2009
Should we be wary of eating red meat? Taken at face value, a new study suggests that might be a good idea -- but a more careful consideration does not.
A report in the March 23 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine describes a very large study -- over half a million people initially aged fifty-one to seventy-one years -- who reported their diets at the study's outset and were then followed for ten years. Over 300,000 men and over 200,000 women participated in the study. During the follow-up period approximately 48,000 men and 23,000 women died.
The researchers tabulated the numbers who died from cancer, cardiovascular disease, injuries and sudden deaths, and from all other causes. When they divided the subjects according to how much red, processed, and white meat they reported eating at baseline, the researchers found some increases in the risk of death in those reporting the highest intake of red and processed meats compared to those reporting the lowest intake. Conversely, the highest intake of white meat -- chicken, turkey, and fish in various forms -- was associated with a reduced risk of dying of cancer and other causes of death.While the sheer size of the study means it should not be taken lightly, there are reasons to look askance at some of the scary stories now making the rounds that are not really supported by the science.
•First, participants in the study didn't actually measure the amount of foods they ate. While this may not be very important for foods and beverages that are purchased in discrete quantities (e.g., a fast food hamburger or a bottle of soft drink), meat can be purchased and consumed in a wide variety of forms and sizes. Thus, the accuracy of the data depends on how well participants can estimate the quantities of the various foods they consumed, as well as how accurate they are when they recall how often they ate or drank particular items. Neither of these estimates is the most reliable indicator of actual consumption.
•Second, intake of various food items was ascertained only once -- at the start of the study. There is no information about whether or not people changed their diets over the course of the follow-up period -- this may well have had an impact on any disease-diet relationships.
•Third, the increases in risk did not reach the levels that would make most epidemiologists sit up and take notice -- a relative risk of 2 (a 100% increase) or greater. In fact, the increased risk of all deaths in the men in the highest group of red meat intake was 31% and for cancer was 22%. For women, the corresponding increases were 36 and 20%.As the authors concluded, the highest intakes of red and processed meats were associated with "a modest increase in risk of total mortality, cancer, and CVD mortality in both men and women."
At best, this study supports the oft-repeated advice that a healthful diet should be based on moderation, variety, and balance. What's so new about that?
Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D., is Director of Nutrition at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org, HealthFactsAndFears.com).
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China
Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China. By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post, Sunday, March 9, 2008; A01
GAOLONG, China -- The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he couldn't believe what happened. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their compound without a word.
This ritual has been going on almost every day for nine months, Li and other villagers said.
In China, a country buckling with the breakneck pace of its industrial growth, such stories of environmental pollution are not uncommon. But the Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., here in the central plains of Henan Province near the Yellow River, stands out for one reason: It's a green energy company, producing polysilicon destined for solar energy panels sold around the world. But the byproduct of polysilicon production -- silicon tetrachloride -- is a highly toxic substance that poses environmental hazards.
"The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place. . . . It is like dynamite -- it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it," said Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei Industrial University.
The situation in Li's village points to the environmental trade-offs the world is making as it races to head off a dwindling supply of fossil fuels.
Forests are being cleared to grow biofuels like palm oil, but scientists argue that the disappearance of such huge swaths of forests is contributing to climate change. Hydropower dams are being constructed to replace coal-fired power plants, but they are submerging whole ecosystems under water.
Likewise in China, the push to get into the solar energy market is having unexpected consequences.
With the prices of oil and coal soaring, policymakers around the world are looking at massive solar farms to heat water and generate electricity. For the past four years, however, the world has been suffering from a shortage of polysilicon -- the key component of sunlight-capturing wafers -- driving up prices of solar energy technology and creating a barrier to its adoption.
With the price of polysilicon soaring from $20 per kilogram to $300 per kilogram in the past five years, Chinese companies are eager to fill the gap.
In China, polysilicon plants are the new dot-coms. Flush with venture capital and with generous grants and low-interest loans from a central government touting its efforts to seek clean energy alternatives, more than 20 Chinese companies are starting polysilicon manufacturing plants. The combined capacity of these new factories is estimated at 80,000 to 100,000 tons -- more than double the 40,000 tons produced in the entire world today.
But Chinese companies' methods for dealing with waste haven't been perfected.
Because of the environmental hazard, polysilicon companies in the developed world recycle the compound, putting it back into the production process. But the high investment costs and time, not to mention the enormous energy consumption required for heating the substance to more than 1800 degrees Fahrenheit for the recycling, have discouraged many factories in China from doing the same. Like Luoyang Zhonggui, other solar plants in China have not installed technology to prevent pollutants from getting into the environment or have not brought those systems fully online, industry sources say.
"The recycling technology is of course being thought about, but currently it's still not mature," said Shi Jun, a former photovoltaic technology researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Shi, chief executive of Pro-EnerTech, a start-up polysilicon research firm in Shanghai, said that there's such a severe shortage of polysilicon that the government is willing to overlook this issue for now.
"If this happened in the United States, you'd probably be arrested," he said.
An independent, nationally accredited laboratory analyzed a sample of dirt from the dump site near the Luoyang Zhonggui plant at the request of The Washington Post. The tests show high concentrations of chlorine and hydrochloric acid, which can result from the breakdown of silicon tetrachloride and do not exist naturally in soil. "Crops cannot grow on this, and it is not suitable for people to live nearby," said Li Xiaoping, deputy director of the Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences.
Wang Hailong, secretary of the board of directors for Luoyang Zhonggui, said it is "impossible" to think that the company would dump large amounts of waste into a residential area. "Some of the villagers did not tell the truth," he said.
However, Wang said the company does release a "minimal amount of waste" in compliance with all environmental regulations. "We release it in a certain place in a certain way. Before it is released, it has gone through strict treatment procedures."
Yi Xusheng, the head of monitoring for the Henan Province Environmental Protection Agency, said the factory had passed a review before it opened, but that "it's possible that there are some pollutants in the production process" that inspectors were not aware of. Yi said the agency would investigate.
In 2005, when residents of Li's village, Shiniu, heard that a new solar energy company would be building a factory nearby, they celebrated.
The impoverished farming community of roughly 2,300, near the eastern end of the Silk Road, had been left behind during China's recent boom. In a country where the average wage in some areas has climbed to $200 a month, many of the village's residents make just $200 a year. They had high hopes their new neighbor would jump-start the local economy and help transform the area into an industrial hub.
The Luoyang Zhonggui factory grew out of an effort by a national research institute to improve on a 50-year-old polysilicon refining technology pioneered by Germany's Siemens. Concerned about intellectual property issues, Siemens has held off on selling its technology to the Chinese. So the Chinese have tried to create their own.
Last year, the Luoyang Zhonggui factory was estimated to have produced less than 300 tons of polysilicon, but it aims to increase that tenfold this year -- making it China's largest operating plant. It is a key supplier to Suntech Power Holdings, a solar panel company whose founder Shi Zhengrong recently topped the list of the richest people in China.
Made from the Earth's most abundant substance -- sand -- polysilicon is tricky to manufacture. It requires huge amounts of energy, and even a small misstep in the production can introduce impurities and ruin an entire batch. The other main challenge is dealing with the waste. For each ton of polysilicon produced, the process generates at least four tons of silicon tetrachloride liquid waste.
When exposed to humid air, silicon tetrachloride transforms into acids and poisonous hydrogen chloride gas, which can make people who breathe the air dizzy and can make their chests contract.
While it typically takes companies two years to get a polysilicon factory up and running properly, many Chinese companies are trying to do it in half that time or less, said Richard Winegarner, president of Sage Concepts, a California-based consulting firm.
As a result, Ren of Hebei Industrial University said, some Chinese plants are stockpiling the hazardous substances in the hopes that they can figure out a way to dispose of it later: "I know these factories began to store silicon tetrachloride in drums two years ago."
Pro-EnerTech's Shi says other companies -- including Luoyang Zhonggui -- are just dumping wherever they can.
"Theoretically, companies should collect it all, process it to get rid of the poisonous stuff, then release it or recycle. Zhonggui currently doesn't have the technology. Now they are just releasing it directly into the air," said Shi, who recently visited the factory.
Shi estimates that Chinese companies are saving millions of dollars by not installing pollution recovery.
He said that if environmental protection technology is used, the cost to produce one ton is approximately $84,500. But Chinese companies are making it at $21,000 to $56,000a ton.
In sharp contrast to the gleaming white buildings in Zhonggui's new gated complex in Gaolong, the situation in the villages surrounding it is bleak.
About nine months ago, residents of Li's village, which begins about 50 yards from the plant, noticed that their crops were wilting under a dusting of white powder. Sometimes, there was a hazy cloud up to three feet high near the dumping site; one person tending crops there fainted, several villagers said. Small rocks began to accumulate in kettles used for boiling faucet water.
Each night, villagers said, the factory's chimneys released a loud whoosh of acrid air that stung their eyes and made it hard to breath. "It's poison air. Sometimes it gets so bad you can't sit outside. You have to close all the doors and windows," said Qiao Shi Peng, 28, a truck driver who said he worries about his 1-year-old son's health.
The villagers said most obvious evidence of the pollution is the dumping, up to 10 times a day, of the liquid waste into what was formerly a grassy field. Eventually, the whole area turned white, like snow.
The worst part, said Li, 53, who lives with his son and granddaughter in the village, is that "they go outside the gates of their own compound to dump waste."
"We didn't know how bad it was until the August harvest, until things started dying," he said.
Early this year, one of the villagers put some of the contaminated soil in a plastic bag and went to the local environmental bureau. They never got back to him.
Zhang Zhenguo, 45, a farmer and small businessman, said he has a theory as to why: "They didn't test it because the government supports the plant."
Researchers Wu Meng and Crissie Ding contributed to this report.
Washington Post, Sunday, March 9, 2008; A01
GAOLONG, China -- The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he couldn't believe what happened. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their compound without a word.
This ritual has been going on almost every day for nine months, Li and other villagers said.
In China, a country buckling with the breakneck pace of its industrial growth, such stories of environmental pollution are not uncommon. But the Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., here in the central plains of Henan Province near the Yellow River, stands out for one reason: It's a green energy company, producing polysilicon destined for solar energy panels sold around the world. But the byproduct of polysilicon production -- silicon tetrachloride -- is a highly toxic substance that poses environmental hazards.
"The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place. . . . It is like dynamite -- it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it," said Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei Industrial University.
The situation in Li's village points to the environmental trade-offs the world is making as it races to head off a dwindling supply of fossil fuels.
Forests are being cleared to grow biofuels like palm oil, but scientists argue that the disappearance of such huge swaths of forests is contributing to climate change. Hydropower dams are being constructed to replace coal-fired power plants, but they are submerging whole ecosystems under water.
Likewise in China, the push to get into the solar energy market is having unexpected consequences.
With the prices of oil and coal soaring, policymakers around the world are looking at massive solar farms to heat water and generate electricity. For the past four years, however, the world has been suffering from a shortage of polysilicon -- the key component of sunlight-capturing wafers -- driving up prices of solar energy technology and creating a barrier to its adoption.
With the price of polysilicon soaring from $20 per kilogram to $300 per kilogram in the past five years, Chinese companies are eager to fill the gap.
In China, polysilicon plants are the new dot-coms. Flush with venture capital and with generous grants and low-interest loans from a central government touting its efforts to seek clean energy alternatives, more than 20 Chinese companies are starting polysilicon manufacturing plants. The combined capacity of these new factories is estimated at 80,000 to 100,000 tons -- more than double the 40,000 tons produced in the entire world today.
But Chinese companies' methods for dealing with waste haven't been perfected.
Because of the environmental hazard, polysilicon companies in the developed world recycle the compound, putting it back into the production process. But the high investment costs and time, not to mention the enormous energy consumption required for heating the substance to more than 1800 degrees Fahrenheit for the recycling, have discouraged many factories in China from doing the same. Like Luoyang Zhonggui, other solar plants in China have not installed technology to prevent pollutants from getting into the environment or have not brought those systems fully online, industry sources say.
"The recycling technology is of course being thought about, but currently it's still not mature," said Shi Jun, a former photovoltaic technology researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Shi, chief executive of Pro-EnerTech, a start-up polysilicon research firm in Shanghai, said that there's such a severe shortage of polysilicon that the government is willing to overlook this issue for now.
"If this happened in the United States, you'd probably be arrested," he said.
An independent, nationally accredited laboratory analyzed a sample of dirt from the dump site near the Luoyang Zhonggui plant at the request of The Washington Post. The tests show high concentrations of chlorine and hydrochloric acid, which can result from the breakdown of silicon tetrachloride and do not exist naturally in soil. "Crops cannot grow on this, and it is not suitable for people to live nearby," said Li Xiaoping, deputy director of the Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences.
Wang Hailong, secretary of the board of directors for Luoyang Zhonggui, said it is "impossible" to think that the company would dump large amounts of waste into a residential area. "Some of the villagers did not tell the truth," he said.
However, Wang said the company does release a "minimal amount of waste" in compliance with all environmental regulations. "We release it in a certain place in a certain way. Before it is released, it has gone through strict treatment procedures."
Yi Xusheng, the head of monitoring for the Henan Province Environmental Protection Agency, said the factory had passed a review before it opened, but that "it's possible that there are some pollutants in the production process" that inspectors were not aware of. Yi said the agency would investigate.
In 2005, when residents of Li's village, Shiniu, heard that a new solar energy company would be building a factory nearby, they celebrated.
The impoverished farming community of roughly 2,300, near the eastern end of the Silk Road, had been left behind during China's recent boom. In a country where the average wage in some areas has climbed to $200 a month, many of the village's residents make just $200 a year. They had high hopes their new neighbor would jump-start the local economy and help transform the area into an industrial hub.
The Luoyang Zhonggui factory grew out of an effort by a national research institute to improve on a 50-year-old polysilicon refining technology pioneered by Germany's Siemens. Concerned about intellectual property issues, Siemens has held off on selling its technology to the Chinese. So the Chinese have tried to create their own.
Last year, the Luoyang Zhonggui factory was estimated to have produced less than 300 tons of polysilicon, but it aims to increase that tenfold this year -- making it China's largest operating plant. It is a key supplier to Suntech Power Holdings, a solar panel company whose founder Shi Zhengrong recently topped the list of the richest people in China.
Made from the Earth's most abundant substance -- sand -- polysilicon is tricky to manufacture. It requires huge amounts of energy, and even a small misstep in the production can introduce impurities and ruin an entire batch. The other main challenge is dealing with the waste. For each ton of polysilicon produced, the process generates at least four tons of silicon tetrachloride liquid waste.
When exposed to humid air, silicon tetrachloride transforms into acids and poisonous hydrogen chloride gas, which can make people who breathe the air dizzy and can make their chests contract.
While it typically takes companies two years to get a polysilicon factory up and running properly, many Chinese companies are trying to do it in half that time or less, said Richard Winegarner, president of Sage Concepts, a California-based consulting firm.
As a result, Ren of Hebei Industrial University said, some Chinese plants are stockpiling the hazardous substances in the hopes that they can figure out a way to dispose of it later: "I know these factories began to store silicon tetrachloride in drums two years ago."
Pro-EnerTech's Shi says other companies -- including Luoyang Zhonggui -- are just dumping wherever they can.
"Theoretically, companies should collect it all, process it to get rid of the poisonous stuff, then release it or recycle. Zhonggui currently doesn't have the technology. Now they are just releasing it directly into the air," said Shi, who recently visited the factory.
Shi estimates that Chinese companies are saving millions of dollars by not installing pollution recovery.
He said that if environmental protection technology is used, the cost to produce one ton is approximately $84,500. But Chinese companies are making it at $21,000 to $56,000a ton.
In sharp contrast to the gleaming white buildings in Zhonggui's new gated complex in Gaolong, the situation in the villages surrounding it is bleak.
About nine months ago, residents of Li's village, which begins about 50 yards from the plant, noticed that their crops were wilting under a dusting of white powder. Sometimes, there was a hazy cloud up to three feet high near the dumping site; one person tending crops there fainted, several villagers said. Small rocks began to accumulate in kettles used for boiling faucet water.
Each night, villagers said, the factory's chimneys released a loud whoosh of acrid air that stung their eyes and made it hard to breath. "It's poison air. Sometimes it gets so bad you can't sit outside. You have to close all the doors and windows," said Qiao Shi Peng, 28, a truck driver who said he worries about his 1-year-old son's health.
The villagers said most obvious evidence of the pollution is the dumping, up to 10 times a day, of the liquid waste into what was formerly a grassy field. Eventually, the whole area turned white, like snow.
The worst part, said Li, 53, who lives with his son and granddaughter in the village, is that "they go outside the gates of their own compound to dump waste."
"We didn't know how bad it was until the August harvest, until things started dying," he said.
Early this year, one of the villagers put some of the contaminated soil in a plastic bag and went to the local environmental bureau. They never got back to him.
Zhang Zhenguo, 45, a farmer and small businessman, said he has a theory as to why: "They didn't test it because the government supports the plant."
Researchers Wu Meng and Crissie Ding contributed to this report.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
ACSH: Likely FDA Appointees Will Face Scaremongers
Likely FDA Appointees Will Face Scaremongers
The American Council on Science and Health, March 13, 2009
Scientists and physicians at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) call for the reform of a broken regulatory system -- one that now tries to appease advocates of junk science who pressure the Food and Drug Administration.
These advocates routinely demand that the FDA take unnecessary -- and possibly heath-threatening -- action against alleged environmental risks that have little or no scientific basis. The agency's time is thus wasted chasing phantom risks instead of dealing with real ones, thus indirectly imperiling Americans' health.
Non-risks that (non-science-based) environmental advocates will likely bring to the attention of new senior FDA staff include: bisphenol A in baby bottles, lead in lipstick, formaldehyde in baby shampoo, and pesticide residues in imported foods. These are just a few examples.
Putting these alleged risks in scientific perspective will be one of the most important challenges facing likely FDA Commissioner nominee Dr. Margaret Hamburg and intended Deputy Administrator Dr. Joshua Sharfstein:
•"It's high time, for example, for FDA to take aggressive action to assure people of the safety of bisphenol A in baby bottles, infant formula, and other products that infants and young children come in contact with on a daily basis," stated Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, President and Founder of the American Council on Science and Health. "These products are safe -- and FDA officers should give assurance to consumers -- in spite of the constant attacks by environmental activist groups."
"The mere fact that we can detect trace levels of BPA in plastic bottles or lead in lipstick does not mean a health hazard exists. Indeed, with today's sophisticated chemistry, you can find anything in anything at miniscule levels," stated Dr. Gilbert Ross, Medical Director of ACSH.
•Dr. Whelan noted that although groups including "Health Care Without Harm" have had a petition before the FDA for over two years, asking the agency to require labeling of medical devices containing diethyl hexyl phthalate (DEHP), an ACSH blue ribbon panel chaired by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop concluded that phthalates as used in medical devices and other products pose no health risk. "Banning these flexible plastic medical devices would set back medicine fifty years," Dr. Whelan noted.
ACSH scientific advocates are hopeful that Hamburg and Sharfstein will address the myth that dangerous chemicals have been allowed on the market. There is no evidence whatsoever that trace amounts of chemicals are linked to the very real health problems the FDA must consider, such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, and reproductive and neurodevelopmental health problems.
The American Council on Science and Health, March 13, 2009
Scientists and physicians at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) call for the reform of a broken regulatory system -- one that now tries to appease advocates of junk science who pressure the Food and Drug Administration.
These advocates routinely demand that the FDA take unnecessary -- and possibly heath-threatening -- action against alleged environmental risks that have little or no scientific basis. The agency's time is thus wasted chasing phantom risks instead of dealing with real ones, thus indirectly imperiling Americans' health.
Non-risks that (non-science-based) environmental advocates will likely bring to the attention of new senior FDA staff include: bisphenol A in baby bottles, lead in lipstick, formaldehyde in baby shampoo, and pesticide residues in imported foods. These are just a few examples.
Putting these alleged risks in scientific perspective will be one of the most important challenges facing likely FDA Commissioner nominee Dr. Margaret Hamburg and intended Deputy Administrator Dr. Joshua Sharfstein:
•"It's high time, for example, for FDA to take aggressive action to assure people of the safety of bisphenol A in baby bottles, infant formula, and other products that infants and young children come in contact with on a daily basis," stated Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, President and Founder of the American Council on Science and Health. "These products are safe -- and FDA officers should give assurance to consumers -- in spite of the constant attacks by environmental activist groups."
"The mere fact that we can detect trace levels of BPA in plastic bottles or lead in lipstick does not mean a health hazard exists. Indeed, with today's sophisticated chemistry, you can find anything in anything at miniscule levels," stated Dr. Gilbert Ross, Medical Director of ACSH.
•Dr. Whelan noted that although groups including "Health Care Without Harm" have had a petition before the FDA for over two years, asking the agency to require labeling of medical devices containing diethyl hexyl phthalate (DEHP), an ACSH blue ribbon panel chaired by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop concluded that phthalates as used in medical devices and other products pose no health risk. "Banning these flexible plastic medical devices would set back medicine fifty years," Dr. Whelan noted.
ACSH scientific advocates are hopeful that Hamburg and Sharfstein will address the myth that dangerous chemicals have been allowed on the market. There is no evidence whatsoever that trace amounts of chemicals are linked to the very real health problems the FDA must consider, such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, and reproductive and neurodevelopmental health problems.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Dispatch from day two of the International Conference on Climate Change in New York
What Planetary Emergency? By Ronald Bailey
Dispatch from day two of the International Conference on Climate Change in New York
Reason, March 10, 2009
March 9, New York—Assume that man-made global warming exists. So what? That was the premise of a fascinating presentation by Indur Goklany during the second day of sessions at the International Conference on Climate Change. Goklany, who works in the Office of Policy Analysis of the U.S. Department of the Interior and is the author of The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, made it clear that he was not speaking on behalf of the federal government.
Goklany's talk looked at three common claims: (1) Human and environmental well-being will be lower in a warmer world than it is today; (2) our descendants will be worse off than if we don't stop man-made global warming; and (3) man-made global warming is the most important problem in the world. Goklany assumed that the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) consensus view on future temperature trends is valid. For his analysis, he used data from the fast track assessments of the socioeconomic impacts of global climate change sponsored by the British government, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, global mortality estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), and cost estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
From the Stern Review, Goklany took the worst case scenario, where man-made global warming produces market and non-market losses equal to 35 percent of the benefits that are projected to exist in the absence of climate change by 2200. What did he find? Even assuming the worst emissions scenario, incomes for both developed and developing countries still rise spectacularly. In 1990, average incomes in developing countries stood around $1,000 per capita and at aroud $14,000 in developed countries. Assuming the worst means that average incomes in developing countries would rise in 2100 to $62,000 and in developed countries to $99,000. By 2200, average incomes would rise to $86,000 and $139,000 in developing and developed countries, respectively. In other words, the warmest world turns out to be the richest world.
Looking at WHO numbers, one finds that the percentage of deaths attributed to climate change now is 13th on the list of causes of mortality, standing at about 200,000 per year, or 0.3 percent of all deaths. High blood pressure is first on the list, accounting for 7 million (12 percent) of deaths; high cholesterol is second at 4.4 million; and hunger is third. Clearly, climate change is not the most important public health problem today. But what about the future? Again looking at just the worst case of warming, climate change would boost the number of deaths in 2085 by 237,000 above what they would otherwise be according to the fast track analyses. Many of the authors of the fast track analyses also co-authored the IPCC's socioeconomic impact assessments.
Various environmental indicators would also improve. For example, 11.6 percent of the world's land was used for growing crops in 1990. In the warmest world, agricultural productivity is projected to increase so much that the amount of land used for crops would drop to just 5 percent by 2100, leaving more land for nature. In other words, if these official projections are correct, man-made global warming is by no means the most important problem faced by humanity.
Next up on the impacts panel was Paul Reiter, head of the insects and infectious disease unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Members of the global warming fraternity frequently worry that climate change will exacerbate the spread of tropical diseases like malaria. Reiter began his talk by pointing out that malaria was endemic in Yakutsk, the coldest city on earth, until 1959. In 1935, the Soviets claimed that malaria killed nearly 4,000 people in Yakutsk, a number that dropped to just 85 in 1959, the year that the disease was finally eradicated, in part by using the insecticide DDT.
Reiter then described a vast new research program that he is participating in, the Emerging Diseases in a Changing European eNvironment, or EDEN project. Sponsored by the European Union, the EDEN project is evaluating the potential impacts of future global warming on the spread of disease in Europe. The EDEN researchers have been assessing outbreaks of various diseases to see if they could discern any impact climate change may be having on their spread.
Reiter cited a recent analysis of the outbreak of tick-borne encephalitis in the early 1990s in many eastern European countries. The epidemic occurred shortly after the fall of communism, when many former Soviet bloc countries went into steep economic decline. After sifting through the data, it became apparent that the tough economic situation forced many eastern Europeans to spend more time in forests and farms trying to either find wild foods or grow more food on farms and in gardens. This meant that their exposure to deer ticks increased, resulting in more cases of encephalitis. Since the epidemic was coincident with the fall of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War, one of Reiter's colleagues quipped that it was caused by "political global warming." Reiter noted that 150 EDEN studies have been published so far and that "none of them support the notion that disease is increasing because of climate change."
Finally, Reiter pointed out that many of the claims that climate change will increase disease can be attributed to an incestuous network of just nine authors who write scientific reviews and cite each other's work. None are actual on-the-ground disease researchers and many of them write the IPCC disease analyses. "These are people who know absolutely bugger about dengue, malaria or anything else," said Reiter.
The final presenter of the panel was Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Hurricane Research Division in Miami, Florida. Again, he stressed that his views were his won, not that of any government agency. Goldenberg is particularly annoyed by former Vice President Al Gore's repeated claim that man-made global warming is making hurricanes more numerous and/or more powerful. For example, at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland in December, Gore flat out stated, "The warming ocean waters are also causing stronger typhoons and cyclones and hurricanes."
Goldenberg acknowledged that hurricanes have been more numerous in the North Atlantic in the last decade. But when one looks at the data from the 20th century two, factors stand out. First, the number of hurricanes has increased So have sea surface temperatures. QED: global warming causes more hurricanes, right? Not so fast, says Goldenberg. The perceived increase in the number of hurricanes is actually the result of observational biases. With the advent of satellites, scientists have become much better at finding and identifying hurricanes. In the first half of the 20th century, he pointed out, if a storm didn't come close to land, researchers would often miss it.
The second factor is that researchers have identified a multi-decadal pattern in the frequency of hurricanes in the North Atlantic. There was a very active period between 1870 and 1900, a slow-down between 1900 and 1925, another active period between 1926 and 1970, a period of fewer storms between 1970 and 1995, and the beginning of a new active period around 1995. According to Goldenberg, this new active period will probably last another 20 to 30 years. Goldenberg was a co-author of a 2001 study published in Science which concluded:
Tropical North Atlantic SST [sea surface temperature] has exhibited a warming trend of [about] ) 0.3°C over the last 100 years; whereas Atlantic hurricane activity has not exhibited trend-like variability, but rather distinct multidecadal cycles....The possibility exists that the unprecedented activity since 1995 is the result of a combination of the multidecadal-scale changes in the Atlantic SSTs (and vertical shear) along with the additional increase in SSTs resulting from the long-term warming trend. It is, however, equally possible that the current active period (1995-2000) only appears more active than the previous active period (1926-1970) due to the better observational network in place.
Since this study was published, much more data on hurricane trends has been collected and analyzed. "Not a single scientist at the hurricane center believes that global warming has had any measurable impact on hurricane numbers and strength," concluded Goldenberg. He also suggested that some proponents of the idea that global warming is exacerbating tropical storms have backed off lately. Clearly the former vice president hasn't gotten the news yet.
Yesterday, Bailey walked among the climate change skeptics and reported on talks given by Czech Republic and European Union president Vaclav Klaus and MIT climatologist Bruce Lindzen. Read about it here.
Tomorrow: The last day of the International Conference on Climate Change will feature presentations on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation's effect on global temperature trends, the economic impacts of carbon rationing, and how policymakers deal with scientific information.
Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.
Dispatch from day two of the International Conference on Climate Change in New York
Reason, March 10, 2009
March 9, New York—Assume that man-made global warming exists. So what? That was the premise of a fascinating presentation by Indur Goklany during the second day of sessions at the International Conference on Climate Change. Goklany, who works in the Office of Policy Analysis of the U.S. Department of the Interior and is the author of The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, made it clear that he was not speaking on behalf of the federal government.
Goklany's talk looked at three common claims: (1) Human and environmental well-being will be lower in a warmer world than it is today; (2) our descendants will be worse off than if we don't stop man-made global warming; and (3) man-made global warming is the most important problem in the world. Goklany assumed that the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) consensus view on future temperature trends is valid. For his analysis, he used data from the fast track assessments of the socioeconomic impacts of global climate change sponsored by the British government, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, global mortality estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), and cost estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
From the Stern Review, Goklany took the worst case scenario, where man-made global warming produces market and non-market losses equal to 35 percent of the benefits that are projected to exist in the absence of climate change by 2200. What did he find? Even assuming the worst emissions scenario, incomes for both developed and developing countries still rise spectacularly. In 1990, average incomes in developing countries stood around $1,000 per capita and at aroud $14,000 in developed countries. Assuming the worst means that average incomes in developing countries would rise in 2100 to $62,000 and in developed countries to $99,000. By 2200, average incomes would rise to $86,000 and $139,000 in developing and developed countries, respectively. In other words, the warmest world turns out to be the richest world.
Looking at WHO numbers, one finds that the percentage of deaths attributed to climate change now is 13th on the list of causes of mortality, standing at about 200,000 per year, or 0.3 percent of all deaths. High blood pressure is first on the list, accounting for 7 million (12 percent) of deaths; high cholesterol is second at 4.4 million; and hunger is third. Clearly, climate change is not the most important public health problem today. But what about the future? Again looking at just the worst case of warming, climate change would boost the number of deaths in 2085 by 237,000 above what they would otherwise be according to the fast track analyses. Many of the authors of the fast track analyses also co-authored the IPCC's socioeconomic impact assessments.
Various environmental indicators would also improve. For example, 11.6 percent of the world's land was used for growing crops in 1990. In the warmest world, agricultural productivity is projected to increase so much that the amount of land used for crops would drop to just 5 percent by 2100, leaving more land for nature. In other words, if these official projections are correct, man-made global warming is by no means the most important problem faced by humanity.
Next up on the impacts panel was Paul Reiter, head of the insects and infectious disease unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Members of the global warming fraternity frequently worry that climate change will exacerbate the spread of tropical diseases like malaria. Reiter began his talk by pointing out that malaria was endemic in Yakutsk, the coldest city on earth, until 1959. In 1935, the Soviets claimed that malaria killed nearly 4,000 people in Yakutsk, a number that dropped to just 85 in 1959, the year that the disease was finally eradicated, in part by using the insecticide DDT.
Reiter then described a vast new research program that he is participating in, the Emerging Diseases in a Changing European eNvironment, or EDEN project. Sponsored by the European Union, the EDEN project is evaluating the potential impacts of future global warming on the spread of disease in Europe. The EDEN researchers have been assessing outbreaks of various diseases to see if they could discern any impact climate change may be having on their spread.
Reiter cited a recent analysis of the outbreak of tick-borne encephalitis in the early 1990s in many eastern European countries. The epidemic occurred shortly after the fall of communism, when many former Soviet bloc countries went into steep economic decline. After sifting through the data, it became apparent that the tough economic situation forced many eastern Europeans to spend more time in forests and farms trying to either find wild foods or grow more food on farms and in gardens. This meant that their exposure to deer ticks increased, resulting in more cases of encephalitis. Since the epidemic was coincident with the fall of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War, one of Reiter's colleagues quipped that it was caused by "political global warming." Reiter noted that 150 EDEN studies have been published so far and that "none of them support the notion that disease is increasing because of climate change."
Finally, Reiter pointed out that many of the claims that climate change will increase disease can be attributed to an incestuous network of just nine authors who write scientific reviews and cite each other's work. None are actual on-the-ground disease researchers and many of them write the IPCC disease analyses. "These are people who know absolutely bugger about dengue, malaria or anything else," said Reiter.
The final presenter of the panel was Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Hurricane Research Division in Miami, Florida. Again, he stressed that his views were his won, not that of any government agency. Goldenberg is particularly annoyed by former Vice President Al Gore's repeated claim that man-made global warming is making hurricanes more numerous and/or more powerful. For example, at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland in December, Gore flat out stated, "The warming ocean waters are also causing stronger typhoons and cyclones and hurricanes."
Goldenberg acknowledged that hurricanes have been more numerous in the North Atlantic in the last decade. But when one looks at the data from the 20th century two, factors stand out. First, the number of hurricanes has increased So have sea surface temperatures. QED: global warming causes more hurricanes, right? Not so fast, says Goldenberg. The perceived increase in the number of hurricanes is actually the result of observational biases. With the advent of satellites, scientists have become much better at finding and identifying hurricanes. In the first half of the 20th century, he pointed out, if a storm didn't come close to land, researchers would often miss it.
The second factor is that researchers have identified a multi-decadal pattern in the frequency of hurricanes in the North Atlantic. There was a very active period between 1870 and 1900, a slow-down between 1900 and 1925, another active period between 1926 and 1970, a period of fewer storms between 1970 and 1995, and the beginning of a new active period around 1995. According to Goldenberg, this new active period will probably last another 20 to 30 years. Goldenberg was a co-author of a 2001 study published in Science which concluded:
Tropical North Atlantic SST [sea surface temperature] has exhibited a warming trend of [about] ) 0.3°C over the last 100 years; whereas Atlantic hurricane activity has not exhibited trend-like variability, but rather distinct multidecadal cycles....The possibility exists that the unprecedented activity since 1995 is the result of a combination of the multidecadal-scale changes in the Atlantic SSTs (and vertical shear) along with the additional increase in SSTs resulting from the long-term warming trend. It is, however, equally possible that the current active period (1995-2000) only appears more active than the previous active period (1926-1970) due to the better observational network in place.
Since this study was published, much more data on hurricane trends has been collected and analyzed. "Not a single scientist at the hurricane center believes that global warming has had any measurable impact on hurricane numbers and strength," concluded Goldenberg. He also suggested that some proponents of the idea that global warming is exacerbating tropical storms have backed off lately. Clearly the former vice president hasn't gotten the news yet.
Yesterday, Bailey walked among the climate change skeptics and reported on talks given by Czech Republic and European Union president Vaclav Klaus and MIT climatologist Bruce Lindzen. Read about it here.
Tomorrow: The last day of the International Conference on Climate Change will feature presentations on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation's effect on global temperature trends, the economic impacts of carbon rationing, and how policymakers deal with scientific information.
Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Belief in conspiracy theories and government cover-ups
Are Americans Superstitious? By Karlyn Bowman
A small number of survey questions point to something worrisome: a belief in conspiracy theories and government cover-ups.
AEI, Monday, March 9, 2009
Officially, the term "ides" refers to the 15th day of certain months in the old Roman calendar. But March 15 has a special, inopportune significance--as every reader of Julius Caesar knows.
In an attempt to quantify how superstitious Americans are, pollsters have explored our beliefs about prophecies like the soothsayer's warning about Caesar's imminent death. They've also studied what we think about all things supernatural and fantastical.
Gallup began a battery of questions this way: "Some people are superstitious and try to behave in such a way as to avoid bad luck or jinxing themselves, and others are not. How superstitious are you?" One percent of respondents admitted to being very superstitious, 24% somewhat so, 28% not very and 47% not at all.
The follow-up questions revealed that around a quarter of us are superstitious about knocking on wood, 13% about a black cat crossing a path, 12% about walking under a ladder, 11% about breaking a mirror, 9% about the number 13--and 9% of respondents believed that speaking ill of a person makes it come true.
A small collection of questions on paranormal phenomena exist in the survey archives. Again, turning to Gallup's findings, 63% of respondents to one poll indicated they believe in déjà vu.
In questions asked in 1996 and then a decade later, slightly more than four in 10 believed in ESP, around 30% in telepathy and about a quarter in clairvoyance. Sixty percent said they had had the feeling of déjà vu, and 18% in another question said they had felt they were in touch with someone who had already died.
In November, Harris updated a broader question about "various things some people believe in." Substantial majorities believed in God (80%), miracles (75%) and heaven (73%)--to name just a few of the religious items the polling firm included. But significant numbers also believed in ghosts (44%) and witches (31%). The responses have held steady since Harris first asked the questions in 2005.
In a Gallup question, a third said houses could be haunted, 16% said they had been in such a house and 9% said they had been in the presence of a ghost.
Just 31% told Harris interviewers they believed in astrology, but in answer to a National Opinion Research Center question, a much larger proportion, 57%, admitted having read a horoscope or personal astrology report. Thirty-one percent said they thought astrology was "very" or "sort of" scientific. Seventeen percent told Gallup surveyors they had consulted a psychic or fortune teller.
Responding to a question from Yankelovich, a third said they believed intelligent beings from other planets have visited the U.S. In Harris' survey, 36% of people surveyed believed in UFOs, 25% weren't sure and 39% didn't believe.
These beliefs seem relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things--but a small number of survey questions point to something more worrisome: a belief in conspiracy theories and government cover-ups.
Sixty percent or more of respondents in six surveys taken by different polling organizations between 1988 and 2003 believe there was an official cover-up to keep the public from learning the truth about John F. Kennedy's assassination. Eighteen percent answered a Scripps Howard and Ohio University question from 1997 saying they thought it was very likely the government had been involved in the assassination of JFK, and another third found this somewhat likely.
After the Air Force issued a report in 1997 saying people who reported seeing UFOs and bodies of aliens in Roswell, N.M., actually saw the remains of weather balloons that were part of military experiments, nearly four in 10 told Fox News/Opinion Dynamics pollsters that the Air Force was covering up the UFO crash. A third told Gallup aliens had actually landed.
Further, nearly half of that poll's respondents say the government covered up information about the Waco, Texas, fire in 1993, in which 74 people died, and about the real cause of TWA Flight 80's crash over the Atlantic in 1996. In two other polls, 9 and 4% said the federal government bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in order to blame extremist groups.
These deep suspicions--and the others many Americans hold--may reflect historical concern about federal government power. But, especially around the Ides of March, they are unsettling nonetheless.
Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow at AEI.
A small number of survey questions point to something worrisome: a belief in conspiracy theories and government cover-ups.
AEI, Monday, March 9, 2009
Officially, the term "ides" refers to the 15th day of certain months in the old Roman calendar. But March 15 has a special, inopportune significance--as every reader of Julius Caesar knows.
In an attempt to quantify how superstitious Americans are, pollsters have explored our beliefs about prophecies like the soothsayer's warning about Caesar's imminent death. They've also studied what we think about all things supernatural and fantastical.
Gallup began a battery of questions this way: "Some people are superstitious and try to behave in such a way as to avoid bad luck or jinxing themselves, and others are not. How superstitious are you?" One percent of respondents admitted to being very superstitious, 24% somewhat so, 28% not very and 47% not at all.
The follow-up questions revealed that around a quarter of us are superstitious about knocking on wood, 13% about a black cat crossing a path, 12% about walking under a ladder, 11% about breaking a mirror, 9% about the number 13--and 9% of respondents believed that speaking ill of a person makes it come true.
A small collection of questions on paranormal phenomena exist in the survey archives. Again, turning to Gallup's findings, 63% of respondents to one poll indicated they believe in déjà vu.
In questions asked in 1996 and then a decade later, slightly more than four in 10 believed in ESP, around 30% in telepathy and about a quarter in clairvoyance. Sixty percent said they had had the feeling of déjà vu, and 18% in another question said they had felt they were in touch with someone who had already died.
In November, Harris updated a broader question about "various things some people believe in." Substantial majorities believed in God (80%), miracles (75%) and heaven (73%)--to name just a few of the religious items the polling firm included. But significant numbers also believed in ghosts (44%) and witches (31%). The responses have held steady since Harris first asked the questions in 2005.
In a Gallup question, a third said houses could be haunted, 16% said they had been in such a house and 9% said they had been in the presence of a ghost.
Just 31% told Harris interviewers they believed in astrology, but in answer to a National Opinion Research Center question, a much larger proportion, 57%, admitted having read a horoscope or personal astrology report. Thirty-one percent said they thought astrology was "very" or "sort of" scientific. Seventeen percent told Gallup surveyors they had consulted a psychic or fortune teller.
Responding to a question from Yankelovich, a third said they believed intelligent beings from other planets have visited the U.S. In Harris' survey, 36% of people surveyed believed in UFOs, 25% weren't sure and 39% didn't believe.
These beliefs seem relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things--but a small number of survey questions point to something more worrisome: a belief in conspiracy theories and government cover-ups.
Sixty percent or more of respondents in six surveys taken by different polling organizations between 1988 and 2003 believe there was an official cover-up to keep the public from learning the truth about John F. Kennedy's assassination. Eighteen percent answered a Scripps Howard and Ohio University question from 1997 saying they thought it was very likely the government had been involved in the assassination of JFK, and another third found this somewhat likely.
After the Air Force issued a report in 1997 saying people who reported seeing UFOs and bodies of aliens in Roswell, N.M., actually saw the remains of weather balloons that were part of military experiments, nearly four in 10 told Fox News/Opinion Dynamics pollsters that the Air Force was covering up the UFO crash. A third told Gallup aliens had actually landed.
Further, nearly half of that poll's respondents say the government covered up information about the Waco, Texas, fire in 1993, in which 74 people died, and about the real cause of TWA Flight 80's crash over the Atlantic in 1996. In two other polls, 9 and 4% said the federal government bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in order to blame extremist groups.
These deep suspicions--and the others many Americans hold--may reflect historical concern about federal government power. But, especially around the Ides of March, they are unsettling nonetheless.
Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow at AEI.
Science Magazine: Remembering a Rare Energy Realism Essay (Best Article Award?)
Science Magazine: Remembering a Rare Energy Realism Essay (Best Article Award?). By Robert Bradley
Master Resource, March 8, 2009
Today, there is much more political science than science in the editorial content of the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AAAS has become just another special-interest, at the trough of special government favor. So why not, for example, tilt toward exaggeration on big-money research issues like the prospective impact of the human influence on climate?
Recent evidence of the political nature of the scientific community was produced when Al Gore received a standing ovation at the conclusion of his presentation at the annual convention of AAAS in Chicago. Yet Gore has gone far beyond mainstream science to sound the climate alarm, and scientists know it. They just like his politics, because it allows them to act as rent-seekers rather than truth-seekers. Roger Pielke Jr. has blogged on this unfortunate particular episode.
It is also hard for the energy realists to break into the pages of Science, either in the articles or letters section—a subject for another day. But now and then, energy realism breaks through. And in the name of such realism, I want to honor this article as one of the best ever in Science (yes, it is seven years old):
Martin Hoffert et al., “Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet,” Science, November 1, 2002, available here.
Provided below are some quotations from this essay that remain relevant to today’s debate over energy sustainability and climate-change public policy.
CO2 is a combustion product vital to how civilization is powered; it cannot be regulated away (p. 981).
Paradoxically, Kyoto is too weak and too strong: Too strong because its initial cuts are perceived as an economic burden by some (the United States withdrew for this stated reason); too weak because much greater emission reductions will be needed and we lack the technology to make them (p. 981).
Renewables are intermittent dispersed sources unsuited to baseload without transmission, storage, and power conditioning. Wind power is often available only from remote or offshore locations. Meeting local demand with [photovoltaic] arrays today requires pumped-storage or battery-electric backup systems of comparable or greater capacity (p. 984).
“Energy is critical to global prosperity and equity (p. 986).
All renewables suffer from low area power densities (p. 984).
Sound scholarship passes the test of time. This essay certainly qualifies.
Master Resource, March 8, 2009
Today, there is much more political science than science in the editorial content of the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AAAS has become just another special-interest, at the trough of special government favor. So why not, for example, tilt toward exaggeration on big-money research issues like the prospective impact of the human influence on climate?
Recent evidence of the political nature of the scientific community was produced when Al Gore received a standing ovation at the conclusion of his presentation at the annual convention of AAAS in Chicago. Yet Gore has gone far beyond mainstream science to sound the climate alarm, and scientists know it. They just like his politics, because it allows them to act as rent-seekers rather than truth-seekers. Roger Pielke Jr. has blogged on this unfortunate particular episode.
It is also hard for the energy realists to break into the pages of Science, either in the articles or letters section—a subject for another day. But now and then, energy realism breaks through. And in the name of such realism, I want to honor this article as one of the best ever in Science (yes, it is seven years old):
Martin Hoffert et al., “Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet,” Science, November 1, 2002, available here.
Provided below are some quotations from this essay that remain relevant to today’s debate over energy sustainability and climate-change public policy.
CO2 is a combustion product vital to how civilization is powered; it cannot be regulated away (p. 981).
Paradoxically, Kyoto is too weak and too strong: Too strong because its initial cuts are perceived as an economic burden by some (the United States withdrew for this stated reason); too weak because much greater emission reductions will be needed and we lack the technology to make them (p. 981).
Renewables are intermittent dispersed sources unsuited to baseload without transmission, storage, and power conditioning. Wind power is often available only from remote or offshore locations. Meeting local demand with [photovoltaic] arrays today requires pumped-storage or battery-electric backup systems of comparable or greater capacity (p. 984).
“Energy is critical to global prosperity and equity (p. 986).
All renewables suffer from low area power densities (p. 984).
Sound scholarship passes the test of time. This essay certainly qualifies.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Conservative view: "Global Warming: Using the Polar Bear to Impose Costly Measures"
Global Warming: Using the Polar Bear to Impose Costly Measures. By Ben Lieberman
Heritage, March 2, 2009
WebMemo #2319
Full text w/references here.
In 2008, the Bush Administration, responding to litigation from an environmental group, listed the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Bush Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne also made some changes to the implementation of the ESA in order to limit the adverse consequences. But now, the omnibus appropriations bill, first passed by the House and now being debated in the Senate, seeks to reverse these common sense limitations.
If successful, this revised polar bear policy would greatly threaten economic growth and serve as a powerful anti-stimulus measure, not just in the polar bears' Alaskan habitat but throughout the United States. These rule changes are a costly and unnecessary form of backdoor global warming policy and have no business in a massive spending bill that is headed for quick passage with limited debate. With such drastic implications for the nation, the Senate should, at a minimum, fully debate the pros and cons of such a policy.
History of the ESA: More Economic Harm Than Environmental Good
Enacted in 1973, the ESA authorizes the Department of the Interior (DOI) to create a list of species considered endangered or threatened. Once a new species is listed, the statute requires DOI, working with other federal agencies, to formulate a recovery plan that includes any and all actions deemed necessary to protect the species and its habitat. Broad citizen suit provisions allow environmental activist groups to force DOI to enjoin any activity alleged to be in violation of the provisions of the ESA, to list additional species, or to expand provisions for already-listed species.
Notwithstanding its laudable goal of protecting species, the ESA has proven to be a flawed approach that has only gotten worse after three decades of judicial interpretation. Some 1,300 species are listed, but very few have actually recovered to the point of being de-listed, and only 5 percent are more than 50 percent recovered.[1]
While doing little to protect species, the ESA's provisions have been highly successful in curtailing economic activity in the vicinity of the designated habitat for the 1,300 species.
The ESA, Global Warming, and Polar Bears
Such ulterior motives are clearly a part of the push to list the polar bear. Its global numbers have actually doubled, from an estimated 8,000–10,000 in 1965–1970 to 20,000–25,000 today.[2] Unfortunately, the requirements for listing have never been rigorous. In the case of polar bears, listing was based on speculation that, according to computer models, continued global warming will reduce the future amount of Arctic summer ice upon which the bears rely.[3] In this way, the ESA is being used to implement global warming policy.
Among its many requirements, the ESA states that "each federal agency shall, in consultation with and with the assistance of the Secretary, insure that any action authorized, funded, or carried out by such agency is not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of any endangered species or threatened species or result in the destruction or adverse modification of habitat."[4] These so-called Section 7 consultations routinely add delays to economic activities near endangered species and sometimes block them entirely.
Most directly, the polar bear listing could curtail energy production in Alaska. This would be unfortunate, as Alaskan oil and natural gas potential is tremendous. A 2008 U.S. Geological Survey study estimated there are 40 billion barrels of undiscovered oil above the Arctic circle—which would nearly double America's proven reserves—as well as tremendous volumes of natural gas.[5]
The impacts of the polar bear listing stretch well beyond Alaska, though locking up Alaskan energy would be bad enough. Carbon dioxide, the ubiquitous byproduct of fossil fuel combustion, is the agent DOI blames for the warming that supposedly shrinks the ice and thus harms the bears. Consequently, any activity producing or using energy—building a new bridge in Alabama, opening a factory or power plant in Arizona, expanding a dairy operation in New York, constructing a school in Idaho—could invoke the Section 7 consultation process. Bottom line: Environmental activists could use the ESA to hold up any of thousands of projects across the U.S. This would include many if not all of the "shovel ready" projects that are funded in the stimulus package.
Anticipating these adverse economic impacts, Secretary Kempthorne took several steps to address them. This included a rule to limit the Section 7 consultations to those where the cause and effect between the activity in question and the harm to species is not tenuous (thus excluding carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from any individual source) and a rule specifically exempting new global warming considerations with regard to the polar bear listing.
Congressional Attempts to Undo These Regulations
Now, Section 429 of the House-passed Omnibus Appropriations Act would allow DOI to reverse these rules for the polar bear listing and, worse, to do so without the customary notice and comment rulemaking. In other words, the provisions here would allow DOI to make the change and do so with even less transparency and accountability than usual.
If this is done, then every activity that involves energy—from expanding a power plant to starting a farm—could get caught up in ESA red tape. The long-term economic impacts would be severe, and ironically the shorter-term effects would undercut the thrust of the stimulus package to spur an economic recovery.
Consider all new construction projects as well as efforts to create or expand all but the very smallest of businesses—the very kinds of things that are both a part of the stimulus package and that in any event are necessary for economic growth. Assuming the proposed changes are enacted, then all of the federal agencies involved in one way or another in such projects—for example, the Environmental Protection Agency for the many things that require EPA permits—will have to engage in Section 7 consultations with the Department of the Interior over the global warming implications. At the very least, such projects will be held up by bureaucratic delays, thereby creating opportunities for environmental groups and others to initiate litigation against them. Aside from delays, which could stretch into years in some cases, some projects could end up being scaled back in an effort to mitigate the supposed adverse impact, and others could be stopped entirely.
Beyond being bad policy in itself, the very fact that this complicated and far-reaching change is being done in an omnibus bill with precious little opportunity for debate strongly urges that these provisions should not be rushed into law.
Backdoor Extremism
The American people do not need a costly backdoor global warming policy implemented through the misuse of preexisting ESA authority never intended for that purpose. But at no time is such a policy more harmful than in the midst of a severe recession. The adverse economic impacts of ill-advised global warming measures are clear and are a big part of the reason why Congress has yet to directly enact any such measures. Doing it indirectly via the ESA and quietly tucking it into the massive omnibus appropriations bill now moving through the Senate would be just as damaging. The Senate should allow and encourage a full debate on this pernicious policy rather than cramming this legislation through with little to no discussion of the economic perils it would bring to the nation's future.
Ben Lieberman is Senior Policy Analyst in Energy and the Environment in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Heritage, March 2, 2009
WebMemo #2319
Full text w/references here.
In 2008, the Bush Administration, responding to litigation from an environmental group, listed the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Bush Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne also made some changes to the implementation of the ESA in order to limit the adverse consequences. But now, the omnibus appropriations bill, first passed by the House and now being debated in the Senate, seeks to reverse these common sense limitations.
If successful, this revised polar bear policy would greatly threaten economic growth and serve as a powerful anti-stimulus measure, not just in the polar bears' Alaskan habitat but throughout the United States. These rule changes are a costly and unnecessary form of backdoor global warming policy and have no business in a massive spending bill that is headed for quick passage with limited debate. With such drastic implications for the nation, the Senate should, at a minimum, fully debate the pros and cons of such a policy.
History of the ESA: More Economic Harm Than Environmental Good
Enacted in 1973, the ESA authorizes the Department of the Interior (DOI) to create a list of species considered endangered or threatened. Once a new species is listed, the statute requires DOI, working with other federal agencies, to formulate a recovery plan that includes any and all actions deemed necessary to protect the species and its habitat. Broad citizen suit provisions allow environmental activist groups to force DOI to enjoin any activity alleged to be in violation of the provisions of the ESA, to list additional species, or to expand provisions for already-listed species.
Notwithstanding its laudable goal of protecting species, the ESA has proven to be a flawed approach that has only gotten worse after three decades of judicial interpretation. Some 1,300 species are listed, but very few have actually recovered to the point of being de-listed, and only 5 percent are more than 50 percent recovered.[1]
While doing little to protect species, the ESA's provisions have been highly successful in curtailing economic activity in the vicinity of the designated habitat for the 1,300 species.
The ESA, Global Warming, and Polar Bears
Such ulterior motives are clearly a part of the push to list the polar bear. Its global numbers have actually doubled, from an estimated 8,000–10,000 in 1965–1970 to 20,000–25,000 today.[2] Unfortunately, the requirements for listing have never been rigorous. In the case of polar bears, listing was based on speculation that, according to computer models, continued global warming will reduce the future amount of Arctic summer ice upon which the bears rely.[3] In this way, the ESA is being used to implement global warming policy.
Among its many requirements, the ESA states that "each federal agency shall, in consultation with and with the assistance of the Secretary, insure that any action authorized, funded, or carried out by such agency is not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of any endangered species or threatened species or result in the destruction or adverse modification of habitat."[4] These so-called Section 7 consultations routinely add delays to economic activities near endangered species and sometimes block them entirely.
Most directly, the polar bear listing could curtail energy production in Alaska. This would be unfortunate, as Alaskan oil and natural gas potential is tremendous. A 2008 U.S. Geological Survey study estimated there are 40 billion barrels of undiscovered oil above the Arctic circle—which would nearly double America's proven reserves—as well as tremendous volumes of natural gas.[5]
The impacts of the polar bear listing stretch well beyond Alaska, though locking up Alaskan energy would be bad enough. Carbon dioxide, the ubiquitous byproduct of fossil fuel combustion, is the agent DOI blames for the warming that supposedly shrinks the ice and thus harms the bears. Consequently, any activity producing or using energy—building a new bridge in Alabama, opening a factory or power plant in Arizona, expanding a dairy operation in New York, constructing a school in Idaho—could invoke the Section 7 consultation process. Bottom line: Environmental activists could use the ESA to hold up any of thousands of projects across the U.S. This would include many if not all of the "shovel ready" projects that are funded in the stimulus package.
Anticipating these adverse economic impacts, Secretary Kempthorne took several steps to address them. This included a rule to limit the Section 7 consultations to those where the cause and effect between the activity in question and the harm to species is not tenuous (thus excluding carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from any individual source) and a rule specifically exempting new global warming considerations with regard to the polar bear listing.
Congressional Attempts to Undo These Regulations
Now, Section 429 of the House-passed Omnibus Appropriations Act would allow DOI to reverse these rules for the polar bear listing and, worse, to do so without the customary notice and comment rulemaking. In other words, the provisions here would allow DOI to make the change and do so with even less transparency and accountability than usual.
If this is done, then every activity that involves energy—from expanding a power plant to starting a farm—could get caught up in ESA red tape. The long-term economic impacts would be severe, and ironically the shorter-term effects would undercut the thrust of the stimulus package to spur an economic recovery.
Consider all new construction projects as well as efforts to create or expand all but the very smallest of businesses—the very kinds of things that are both a part of the stimulus package and that in any event are necessary for economic growth. Assuming the proposed changes are enacted, then all of the federal agencies involved in one way or another in such projects—for example, the Environmental Protection Agency for the many things that require EPA permits—will have to engage in Section 7 consultations with the Department of the Interior over the global warming implications. At the very least, such projects will be held up by bureaucratic delays, thereby creating opportunities for environmental groups and others to initiate litigation against them. Aside from delays, which could stretch into years in some cases, some projects could end up being scaled back in an effort to mitigate the supposed adverse impact, and others could be stopped entirely.
Beyond being bad policy in itself, the very fact that this complicated and far-reaching change is being done in an omnibus bill with precious little opportunity for debate strongly urges that these provisions should not be rushed into law.
Backdoor Extremism
The American people do not need a costly backdoor global warming policy implemented through the misuse of preexisting ESA authority never intended for that purpose. But at no time is such a policy more harmful than in the midst of a severe recession. The adverse economic impacts of ill-advised global warming measures are clear and are a big part of the reason why Congress has yet to directly enact any such measures. Doing it indirectly via the ESA and quietly tucking it into the massive omnibus appropriations bill now moving through the Senate would be just as damaging. The Senate should allow and encourage a full debate on this pernicious policy rather than cramming this legislation through with little to no discussion of the economic perils it would bring to the nation's future.
Ben Lieberman is Senior Policy Analyst in Energy and the Environment in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Libertarian on Caroline Smith DeWaal for FDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service
Will the “food police” be nationalized?, by Fran Smith
Open Market/CEI, March 02, 2009 @ 5:25 pm
In this bizarre Washington world, it can’t possibly be true, but it is: a top staffer at the lobbying organization often pejoratively referred to as the “Food Police” is one of two candidates in line to be the nation’s top food safety guru.
According to news reports, Caroline Smith DeWaal, a top food alarmist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), may be named head of the FDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).
CSPI is the group that railed against food irradiation even when just about every major international and domestic food group and public health official extolled its virtues in helping to prevent food-borne disease outbreaks. This is the group that campaigns against fat yet waged a scientifically inaccurate campaign against the fat substitute Olestra. This is also the group that opposes carnivore eating habits, yet hyperventilated about Quorn, a meat substitute. Again, CSPI is the group that tried to terrify people about acrylamide — a naturally occurring substance formed in starches cooked at high temperatures.
Their lack of scientific evidence for much of their fear-mongering, however, doesn’t stop them from attacking sugar, caffeine, saccharin alcohol, whole milk – and any other substance that doesn’t suit their lifestyle choices.
Next to CSPI’s founder, Michael Jacobson, Smith DeWaal is the leading food alarmist at the group, and, according to the Washington Times, has lobbied–
Smith DeWaal previously worked for Public Voice for Food and Health Policy and a subgroup of the Ralph Nader-founded group, Public Citizen.
Check out what Reason columnist Jacob Sullum has written about CSPI. Also check out this and the many articles critiquing the group by the American Council on Science and Health.
Open Market/CEI, March 02, 2009 @ 5:25 pm
In this bizarre Washington world, it can’t possibly be true, but it is: a top staffer at the lobbying organization often pejoratively referred to as the “Food Police” is one of two candidates in line to be the nation’s top food safety guru.
According to news reports, Caroline Smith DeWaal, a top food alarmist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), may be named head of the FDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).
CSPI is the group that railed against food irradiation even when just about every major international and domestic food group and public health official extolled its virtues in helping to prevent food-borne disease outbreaks. This is the group that campaigns against fat yet waged a scientifically inaccurate campaign against the fat substitute Olestra. This is also the group that opposes carnivore eating habits, yet hyperventilated about Quorn, a meat substitute. Again, CSPI is the group that tried to terrify people about acrylamide — a naturally occurring substance formed in starches cooked at high temperatures.
Their lack of scientific evidence for much of their fear-mongering, however, doesn’t stop them from attacking sugar, caffeine, saccharin alcohol, whole milk – and any other substance that doesn’t suit their lifestyle choices.
Next to CSPI’s founder, Michael Jacobson, Smith DeWaal is the leading food alarmist at the group, and, according to the Washington Times, has lobbied–
. . . the White House, Congress, the USDA, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Interior, Treasury, Health and Human Services, and Justice on matters concerning food safety.
The center spent $610,000 in the past two years, according to Senate records, to lobby the House and Senate.
Smith DeWaal previously worked for Public Voice for Food and Health Policy and a subgroup of the Ralph Nader-founded group, Public Citizen.
Check out what Reason columnist Jacob Sullum has written about CSPI. Also check out this and the many articles critiquing the group by the American Council on Science and Health.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
FDA Says Ranbaxy Plant Falsified Data, Results
FDA Says Ranbaxy Plant Falsified Data, Results. By Jennifer Corbett Dooren and Jared A Favole
WSJ, Feb 26, 2009
The Food and Drug Administration said a manufacturing plant owned by Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. falsified data and test results in approved and pending drug applications.
The agency said it was halting the review of drug applications made at Ranbaxy's Paonta Sahib plant in India. Last September, the FDA banned Ranbaxy from importing more than 30 generic drugs into the U.S. because of manufacturing violations it found at two company plants in India, including Paonta Sahib, making it likely that most products made at that plant are no longer on U.S. shelves. Such drugs include generic versions of the cholesterol-lowering drug Zocor and the heartburn treatment Zantac.
The Justice Department had been investigating whether Ranbaxy made false claims and fabricated data to get FDA approval for generic drugs. It's unclear whether the probe is continuing.
Deborah Autor, the director of the FDA's Office of Compliance, said most of the falsified data involves required tests to prove drugs are stable over a certain time period.
The FDA said it hasn't identified any health problems with drugs made at the Paonta Sahib site and said consumers shouldn't stop taking medications made by Ranbaxy. "To date the FDA has no evidence that these drugs do not meet their quality specifications," the agency said in a statement.
Agency officials said they have tested about 80 drugs made by Ranbaxy and so far haven't found any problems with the drugs themselves. They also said they have conducted more than 20 inspections of four Ranbaxy facilities in India and U.S. facilities since 2005.
In a statement, the company said: "Ranbaxy will continue to co-operate with the USFDA," adding "no effort or action will be spared" to protect some pending drug applications before the agency from the Paonta Sahib plant.
The problems were uncovered during a 2006 inspection of the Paonta Sahib plant. Among other things, FDA inspectors found hundreds of drug samples meant for required stability testing stored in refrigerators even though the samples should have been stored at room temperature.
FDA inspectors found that logbooks didn't identify which samples were in the refrigerator or how long they had been there. The FDA issued a June 15, 2006, warning letter to the company.
The FDA also said it found problems with signatures on records during a March 2008 inspection for a drug. and found that some records submitted to the FDA contained signatures or initials of Ranbaxy employees who weren't present in the facility on the dates mentioned in the records.
WSJ, Feb 26, 2009
The Food and Drug Administration said a manufacturing plant owned by Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. falsified data and test results in approved and pending drug applications.
The agency said it was halting the review of drug applications made at Ranbaxy's Paonta Sahib plant in India. Last September, the FDA banned Ranbaxy from importing more than 30 generic drugs into the U.S. because of manufacturing violations it found at two company plants in India, including Paonta Sahib, making it likely that most products made at that plant are no longer on U.S. shelves. Such drugs include generic versions of the cholesterol-lowering drug Zocor and the heartburn treatment Zantac.
The Justice Department had been investigating whether Ranbaxy made false claims and fabricated data to get FDA approval for generic drugs. It's unclear whether the probe is continuing.
Deborah Autor, the director of the FDA's Office of Compliance, said most of the falsified data involves required tests to prove drugs are stable over a certain time period.
The FDA said it hasn't identified any health problems with drugs made at the Paonta Sahib site and said consumers shouldn't stop taking medications made by Ranbaxy. "To date the FDA has no evidence that these drugs do not meet their quality specifications," the agency said in a statement.
Agency officials said they have tested about 80 drugs made by Ranbaxy and so far haven't found any problems with the drugs themselves. They also said they have conducted more than 20 inspections of four Ranbaxy facilities in India and U.S. facilities since 2005.
In a statement, the company said: "Ranbaxy will continue to co-operate with the USFDA," adding "no effort or action will be spared" to protect some pending drug applications before the agency from the Paonta Sahib plant.
The problems were uncovered during a 2006 inspection of the Paonta Sahib plant. Among other things, FDA inspectors found hundreds of drug samples meant for required stability testing stored in refrigerators even though the samples should have been stored at room temperature.
FDA inspectors found that logbooks didn't identify which samples were in the refrigerator or how long they had been there. The FDA issued a June 15, 2006, warning letter to the company.
The FDA also said it found problems with signatures on records during a March 2008 inspection for a drug. and found that some records submitted to the FDA contained signatures or initials of Ranbaxy employees who weren't present in the facility on the dates mentioned in the records.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Greens, population policies, global warming and liberal democracy
All the Leaves are Brown, by Steven F Hayward
Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2008
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1588/article_detail.asp
Full article w/correct format here.
Books discussed in this essay:
The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, edited by Bill McKibben, Foreword by Al Gore
How We Can Save the Planet: Preventing Global Climate Catastrophe, by Mayer Hillman, Tina Fawcett, and Sudhir Chella Rajan
The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, by David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith
The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty, by Robyn Eckersley
Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, by Matthew Connelly
Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
Where We Stand: A Surprising Look at the Real State of Our Planet, by Seymour Garte
Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future, by Orrin H. Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis
"On what principle is it," wondered Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1830, "that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?" Environmentalism didn't exist in its current form in Macaulay's time, or he would easily have discerned its essential pessimism bordering at times on a loathing of humanity. A trip down the environment and earth sciences aisle of any larger bookstore is usually a tour of titles that cover the narrow range from dismay to despair.
On the surface this is not exceptional. Titles predicting decline, decay, and disaster are just as numerous in the real estate, economics, and social science shelves, though, ironically, not so much in the religion book racks, where one would expect to find apocalypticism well represented. This is an important distinction: unlike the eschatology of all major religions, the eco-apocalypse is utterly without hope of redemption for man or nature. The greens turn purple at the suggestion that most environmental conditions in rich nations are actually improving, and they bemoan the lack of "progress" toward the transformation of the human soul that is thought necessary for the planet's salvation. Yet some cracks are starting to appear in their dreary and repetitive story line. Although extreme green ideology won't go away any time soon—the political and legal institutions of the environmental movement are too well established—there are signs that the public and a few next-generation environmentalists are ready to say goodbye to all that. There are even some liberal authors with environmentalist sympathies who are turning against the environmental establishment. But it is necessary to claw our way through the deepening slough of green despondency to see this potential turning point.
More than 30 years ago political scientist Anthony Downs wrote in the Public Interest of a five-step "issue-attention cycle" through which public enthusiasm for an issue gradually diminishes as we come to recognize the high cost of drastic action, and that the nature of the problem was exaggerated or misconceived. The environment, he wrote, would have a longer cycle than most issues because of its diffuse nature, but it appears that the public is finally arriving at the late stages of Downs's cycle. Opinion surveys show that the public isn't jumping on the global warming bandwagon despite a multi-million dollar marketing campaign and full-scale media hysteria. More broadly there are signs that "green fatigue" is setting in. Magazine publishers recently reported that their special Earth Day "green" issues generated the lowest newsstand sales of all issues published in 2008. "Suddenly Being Green Is Not Cool Any More," read a London Times headline in August.
This has been building for a long time. Three years ago New York Times green-leaning columnist Nicholas Kristof lamented that the environmental movement was losing credibility because of its doomsaying monomania, with the result that "environmental alarms have been screeching for so long that, like car alarms, they are now just an irritating background noise." Environmental leaders did not take well to his wandering from the reservation. In response to the popular indifference to green alarms, conventional environmentalists have ratcheted up their level of vitriol against humanity and democratic institutions. One of the most popular books of 2007 among environmentalists was The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which projects a "thought experiment" about what would occur if human beings were suddenly removed entirely from the planet. Answer: nature would reassert herself, and ultimately remove nearly all traces of human civilization within several millennia—a mere blink of an eye in the planetary timescale. Environmentalists cheered Weisman's vivid depiction of the resilience of nature, but what thrilled them was the scenario of a humanless earth. Weisman made sure to stroke his audience's self-loathing with plenty of boilerplate about resource exhaustion and overpopulation. The book rocketed up the best-seller list, the latest in a familiar genre stretching back at least to Fairfield Osborn's Our Plundered Planet in 1948, arguably the first neo-Malthusian doomsday tract of modern environmentalism. Time magazine named The World Without Us the number one non-fiction book of 2007.
Rethinking Democracy
The same view of environmentalism is on display in the Library of America's American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. This collection, though worthy in some respects, has to be judged a disappointment compared to many other fine Library of America offerings—a shortcoming entirely attributable to the selection of Bill McKibben as editor. (The easier clue is the Foreword by Al Gore.) McKibben is another in the sad line of environmentalists who became bores by endlessly reprising the one-hit wonders of their youth (in McKibben's case, his mildly interesting 1989 book, The End of Nature). He begins and ends with Henry David Thoreau—"a Buddha with a receipt from the hardware store"—because he thinks environmental writing is to be distinguished from nature writing. Environmental writing, McKibben explains, "takes as its subject the collision between people and the rest of the world."
It was probably too much to expect that McKibben would balance the usual suspects such as Rachel Carson, Lynn White, Paul Ehrlich, and Garrett Hardin with such intelligent dissenters as Julian Simon, Terry Anderson, Frederick Jackson Turner, and R.J. Smith. But McKibben's adherence to environmental correctness is so narrowly conceived that he excludes a number of American authors who offer worthy reflections on man and nature. His tacit premise that man is not part of nature, or is opposed to the rest of nature, necessarily constricts the range of perspectives that can be brought to bear on the broad idea of "the environment." So though his collection includes Theodore Roosevelt, by representing American environmental writing as beginning with Thoreau, it excludes worthy earlier reflections such as Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (or any of Jefferson's other agrarian reflections that can be read as precursors to Wendell Berry, who is included in McKibben's reader), or Tocqueville's prescient observations on American wilderness, our emerging attitudes toward it, and its relation to our democratic character.
McKibben and many other environmental writers affect an indifference toward, or transcendence of, politics in the ordinary sense, but ultimately cannot conceal their rejection of the liberal tradition. Here we observe the irony of modern environmentalism: the concern for the preservation of unchanged nature has grown in tandem with the steady erosion in our belief in unchanging human nature; the concern for the "rights of nature" has come to embrace a rejection of natural rights for humans. McKibben is one of many current voices (Gore is another) who like to express their environmentalism by decrying "individualism" (McKibben calls it "hyperindividualism"). Finding that individualism is "the sole ideology of a continent," he explains:
Fighting the ideology that was laying waste to so much of the planet demanded going beyond that individualism. Many found the means to do that in the notion of ‘community'—a word almost as fuzzy and hard to pin down as ‘wild,' but one that has emerged as an even more compelling source of motive energy for the environmental movement.
This is not a new theme for McKibben. Al Gore employed the same "communitarian" trope in his first and most famous environmental book, Earth in the Balance (1992), where, in the course of arguing that the environment should be the "central organizing principle" of civilization, he suggested that the problem with individual liberty is that we have too much of it. This preference for soft despotism has become more concrete with the increasing panic over global warming in the past few years. Several environmental authors now argue openly that democracy itself is the obstacle and needs to be abandoned. A year ago a senior fellow emeritus at Britain's Policy Studies Institute, Mayer Hillman, author of How We Can Save the Planet, told a reporter, "When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it. This [rationing] has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not." (Hillman openly advocates resource rationing.) Another recent self-explanatory book is The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy by Australians David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith. Shearman argued recently that
[l]iberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most extreme case, the U.S.A., unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of the collective needs of the citizens.... There must be open minds to look critically at liberal democracy. Reform must involve the adoption of structures to act quickly regardless of some perceived liberties.
Whom does Shearman admire as an example of environmental governance to be emulated? China, precisely because of its authoritarian government: "[T]he savvy Chinese rulers may be first out of the blocks to assuage greenhouse emissions and they will succeed by delivering orders.... We are going to have to look at how authoritarian decisions based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse emissions." Separately, Shearman has written:
To retain an inhabitable earth we may have to compromise the eternal vicissitudes of democracy for an informed leadership that directs. There are countries that fall within this requirement and we should use them to initiate more active mitigation.... The People's Republic of China may hold the key to innovative measures that can both arrest the expected surge in emissions from developing countries and provide developed nations with the means to alternative energy. China curbs individual freedom in favour of communal need. The State will implement those measures seen to be in the common good.
Perhaps the film version will be called An Inconvenient Democracy.
Academic political theorists who take up what might be called "green constitutionalism" understand that Lockean liberalism has to be overturned and replaced. In The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty, Australian political scientist Robyn Eckersley offers up an approach that, despite being swathed in postmodern jargon, is readily transparent. The "ecocentric," transnational "green state" Eckersley envisions is represented as an explicit alternative to "the classical liberal state, the indiscriminate growth-dependent welfare state, and the increasingly ascendant neoliberal competition state." Achieving a post-liberal state requires rethinking the entire Enlightenment project:
By framing the problem as one of rescuing and reinterpreting the Enlightenment goals of autonomy and critique, it is possible to identify what might be called a mutually informing set of "liberal dogmas" that have for too long been the subject of unthinking faith rather than critical scrutiny by liberals. The most significant of these dogmas are a muscular individualism and an understanding of the self-interested rational actor as natural and eternal; a dualistic conception of humanity and nature that denies human dependency on the biological world and gives rise to the notion of human exceptionalism from, and instrumentalism and chauvinism toward, the natural world; the sanctity of private property rights; the notion that freedom can only be acquired through material plenitude; and overconfidence in the rational mastery of nature through further scientific and technological progress.
Every traditional liberal or "progressive" understanding is up for grabs in this framework. This passage does not require much "parsing" to grasp its practical implications—the establishment of institutions and governing regimes that are not answerable to popular will, or that depend on transforming popular will in a specified direction. Eckersley makes this clear in a passage about the "social learning" function of "deliberative democracy," which she describes as "the requirement that participants be open and flexible in their thinking, that they enter a public dialogue with a preparedness to have their preferences transformed through reasoned argument." (Emphasis added.) In practice, of course, Eckersley's "reasoned argument" would resemble nothing so much as the infamous "ideology struggle" sessions of Mao's Cultural Revolution. This outlook gives new meaning to the old cliché about rulers selecting the people, rather than vice versa.
Yesterday's Crisis Mongers
Is there any respite from this dreary despotic nonsense? Here and there, a few authors of sufficient independence of mind can be found who have broken with green orthodoxy in significant ways. The first of note is Matthew Connelly of Columbia University, whose brilliant new history of the population control movement, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, is useful not simply on its theme but for the light it sheds on the political corruption that inevitably accompanies these world-saving enthusiasms. The "population bomb" can be seen as a precursor to the global warming crisis of today: as far back as the early decades of the 20th century the population crisis was put forward as the justification for global governance and coercive, non-consensual rule.
Connelly recounts one of the first major international conferences on world population, held in Geneva in 1927, where Albert Thomas, a French trade unionist, asked, "Has the moment yet arrived for considering the possibility of establishing some sort of supreme supranational authority which would regulate the distribution of population on rational and impartial lines, by controlling and directing migration movements and deciding on the opening-up or closing of countries to particular streams of immigration?" Connelly also describes the 1974 World Population Conference, which "witnessed an epic battle between starkly different versions of history and the future: one premised on the preservation of order, if necessary by radical new forms of global governance; the other inspired by the pursuit of justice, beginning with unfettered sovereignty for newly independent nations." (Emphasis added.)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N.-sponsored body that is the juggernaut of today's climate campaign, finds its precedent in the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP), spawned at the 1927 World Population Conference. A bevy of NGOs, most prominently the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and Zero Population Growth (ZPG), later sprang into being, working hand-in-glove with the same private foundations (especially Ford and Rockefeller) and global financial institutions, such as the World Bank, that today are in the forefront of the climate campaign.
As Connelly lays out in painstaking detail, population control programs, aimed chiefly at developing nations, proliferated despite clear human rights abuses and, more importantly, new data and information that called into question many of the fundamental assumptions of the crisis mongers. Connelly recalls computer projections and economic models that offered precise and "scientifically grounded" projections of future global ruin from population growth, all of which were quickly falsified. The mass famines and food riots that were predicted never occurred; fertility rates began to fall everywhere, even in nations that lacked "family planning" programs.
The coercive nature of the population control programs in the field was appalling. India, in particular, became "a vast laboratory for the ultimate population control campaign," the chilling practices of which Connelly recounts:
Sterilizations were performed on 80-year-old men, uncomprehending subjects with mental problems, and others who died from untreated complications. There was no incentive to follow up patients. The Planning Commission found that the quality of postoperative care was "the weakest link." In Maharashtra, 52 percent of men complained of pain, and 16 percent had sepsis or unhealed wounds. Over 40 percent were unable to see a doctor. Almost 58 percent of women surveyed experienced pain after IUD insertion, 24 percent severe pain, and 43 percent had severe and excessive bleeding. Considering that iron deficiency was endemic in India, one can only imagine the toll the IUD program took on the health of Indian women.
These events Connelly describes took place in 1967, but instead of backing off, the Indian government—under constant pressure and lavish financial backing from the international population control organizations—intensified these coercive programs in the 1970s. Among other measures India required that families with three or more children had to be sterilized to be eligible for new housing (which the government, not the private market, controlled). "This war against the poor also swept across the countryside," Connelly notes:
In one case, the village of Uttawar in Haryana was surrounded by police, hundreds were taken into custody, and every eligible male was sterilized. Hearing what had happened, thousands gathered to defend another village named Pipli. Four were killed when police fired upon the crowd. Protesters gave up only when, according to one report, a senior government official threatened aerial bombardment. The director of family planning in Maharashtra, D.N. Pai, considered it a problem of "people pollution" and defended the government: "If some excesses appear, don't blame me.... You must consider it something like a war. There could be a certain amount of misfiring out of enthusiasm. There has been pressure to show results. Whether you like it or not, there will be a few dead people."
In all, over 8 million sterilizations, many of them forced, were conducted in India in 1976—"draconian population control," Connelly writes, "practiced on an unprecedented scale.... There is no way to count the number who were being hauled away to sterilization camps against their will." Nearly 2,000 died from botched surgical procedures. The people of India finally put the brakes on this coercive utopianism, at the ballot box: the Congress Party, which had championed the family planning program as one of its main policies, was swept from office in a landslide, losing 141 of 142 contested seats in the areas with the highest rate of sterilizations. At least the people of India had recourse to the ballot box; the new environmental constitutionalism will surely aim to eliminate this remedy.
A System without a Brain
One reason why enthusiasms and programs maintain their forward momentum in the face of changing facts and circumstances is the culture of corruption that inevitably comes to envelope self-selecting leadership groups organized around a crisis. Connelly ably captures this seamy side of the story:
Divided from within and besieged from without, leaders created a "system without a brain," setting in motion agencies and processes that could not be stopped. The idea of a "population crisis" provided the catalyst. But this was a system that ran on money. Earmarked appropriations greased the wheels of balky bureaucracies, and lavish funding was the fuel that drove it forward. But so much poured in so fast that spending became an end unto itself. The pressure to scale up and show results transformed organizations ostensibly dedicated to helping people plan their families into tools for social engineering.... Rather than accept constraints or accountability, they preferred to let population control go out of control. (Emphasis added.)
Corruption extended on a personal level to the New Class directing these world-saving crusades, what Connelly calls "the new jet set of population experts."
The lifestyle of the leaders of the population control establishment reflected the power of an idea whose time had come as well as the influence of the institutions that were now backing it.... Alan Guttmacher was in the habit of beginning letters to the Planned Parenthood membership with comments like "This is written 31,000 feet aloft as I fly from Rio to New York." He insisted on traveling with his wife, first class, with the IPPF picking up the tab. Ford [Foundation] officials flew first class with their spouses as a matter of policy. One wonders why Douglas Ensminger [the Ford Foundation's India officer] ever left his residence in Dehli—he was served by a household staff of nine, including maids, cooks, gardeners, and chauffeurs. He titled this part of his oral history "The ‘Little People' of India." Ensminger insisted on the need to pay top dollar and provide a plush lifestyle to attract the best talent, even if the consultants he recruited seemed preoccupied with their perks. One of these strivers ran his two-year old American sedan without oil just so that the Ford Foundation would have to replace it with the latest model....
For population experts this was the beginning of constantly expanding opportunities. The budgets, the staff, the access were all increasing even more quickly than the population growth their programs were meant to stop. There was "something in it for everyone," Population Association of America President John Kantner later recalled: "the activist, the scholar, the foundation officer, the globe-circling consultant, the wait-listed government official. World Conferences, a Population Year, commissions, select committees, new centers for research and training, a growing supply of experts, pronouncements by world leaders, and, most of all, money—lots of it."
Sounds rather like the moveable feast that is the IPCC's annual meetings, often held in hardship locales such as Bali, to press ahead with anti-global warming efforts. The magnitude of the traveling circus of the climate campaign has come to dwarf the population crusade. Prior to the arrival of climate change as a crisis issue, the largest single U.S. government science research project was the acid rain study of the 1980s (the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project, or NAPAP for short), which cost about $500 million, and concluded that the acid rain problem had been vastly overestimated. (Public opinion polls in the late 1970s rated acid rain the most significant environmental problem of the time.) Today the U.S. government is spending multiple billions each year on climate research—so much through so many different agencies and budget sources that it is impossible to estimate the total reliably.
With so much money at stake, and with so many careers staked to the catastrophic climate scenario, one could predict that the entire apparatus would be resistant to new information and reasonable criticism. This is exactly what happened in the population crusade. When compelling critics of the population bomb thesis arose—people who might be called "skeptics," such as Julian Simon—the population campaign reacted by circling the wagons and demonizing its critics, just as global warming skeptics today are subjected to relentless ad hominem attacks. Connelly again:
Leaders of the population control movement responded...by defending their record and fighting back. They lined up heads of state, major corporations, and international organizations behind a global strategy to slow population growth. But they also worked more quietly to insulate their projects from political opposition by co-opting or marginalizing critics, strengthening transnational networks, and establishing more free-standing institutions exempt from normal government oversight.
This is exactly the playbook of the climate campaign today. Nevertheless, it is likely to follow the same trajectory as the population control movement—gradual decline in salience to the point that even the United Nations, in the early 1990s, officially downgraded the priority of the issue. This is likely to happen to climate change even if dramatic predictions of climate change turn out to be true.
Liberal Environmentalists
A few environmentalists on the left understand the profound defects of the radical green approach to politics, along with the conventional green approach to global warming. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, self-described "progressives" and authors of one of the most challenging recent books on the environment, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, recognize and lament the authoritarianism of conventional environmentalism. "Environmental tales of tragedy begin with Nature in harmony and almost always end in quasi-authoritarian politics," Nordhaus and Shellenberger observe. While environmentalists like Eckersley embrace the postmodern language of "privilege" to denigrate traditional individual rights, Nordhaus and Shellenberger point up the obvious irony that it is environmentalism that is making the boldest claim to be given the most privileged position in politics: "The problem is not simply that it is difficult to answer the question ‘Who speaks for nature?' but rather that there is something profoundly wrong with the question itself. It rests on the premise that some people are better able to speak for nature, the environment, or a particular place than others. This assumption is profoundly authoritarian."
Above all, they reject the "limits to growth" mentality that has been near the center of environmental thought for two generations:
Environmentalists...have tended to view economic growth as the cause but not the solution to ecological crisis. Environmentalists like to emphasize the ways in which the economy depends on ecology, but they often miss the ways in which thinking ecologically depends on prospering economically.... Few things have hampered environmentalism more than its longstanding position that limits to growth are the remedy for ecological crises.
For this very reason, Nordhaus and Shellenberger insist that constraints on greenhouse gas emissions as contemplated by the Kyoto process will never work and should be abandoned. Instead they advocate massive research (with government paying for the largest share) into post-carbon energy systems. With due caveats about government-funded research, this seems a better approach than Gore's hair-shirt agenda. They may underestimate the sheer technical and economic difficulties of energy technology, but Break Through is not primarily a policy tome—it is intended to reorient our general thinking about the environment. In the second half of their book it becomes clear that Nordhaus and Shellenberger aren't just trying to save environmentalism; they are trying to save contemporary liberalism, which they regard as nearly as intellectually dead as environmentalism. "[E]nvironmentalism is hobbled by its resentment of human strength and our desire to control nature, and liberalism by its resentment of wealth and power," they write. This part of the book is less successful though no less serious and thoughtful. In arguing that liberals need to be more philosophical (hear, hear!), Nordhaus and Shellenberger deploy a number of philosophical categories that are problematic, at the very least, and embrace the core principles of postmodernism—though, happily, that overused term does not appear in their generally clear, direct prose. The duo are against Platonic essentialism when it comes to conceiving nature (including, it would seem, human nature), and for a revival of Deweyite pragmatism as well as empowering individual "authenticity." The reader gets dizzy at times following the back and forth between Richard Rorty, Thomas Kuhn, Francis Fukuyama, the "metaphysics of becoming," and more down-to-earth wonkish discussions of gas mileage standards for automobiles.
But despite these flaws, Break Through is still a refreshing departure from most environmental discourse, and the young authors probably aren't done, either, rethinking fundamental aspects of political life and man's relation to nature. Their rude treatment from fellow "progressives" (the American Prospect dismissed the book as containing "a lot of wasted ink") will surely encourage more reflection.
A Green Reformation?
Even in academia there are a few lonely voices who've noticed that the conventional green outlook is badly defective and in need of revision. Seymour Garte, professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public Health, makes his bid to become the next "skeptical environmentalist" (after Bjorn Lomborg) with his book Where We Stand: A Surprising Look at the Real State of Our Planet. Garte recalls his surprise, and the surprise of fellow experts attending a professional conference in Europe, when presented with data from a speaker showing steadily declining air pollution trends along with the claim, "everyone knows that air pollution levels are continually decreasing everywhere." "I looked around the room," Garte writes:
I was not the only nonexpert there. Most of my other colleagues were also not atmospheric or air pollution scientists. Later I asked one of them, a close friend, if he had known that air pollution levels were constantly decreasing throughout Europe and the United States on a yearly basis. "I had no idea," he said. It was certainly news to me. Even though I was a professor of environmental health and had been actively involved in many aspects of pollution research for many years, that simple fact had somehow escaped me.... I had certainly never seen it published in the media.
Garte goes on to argue that excessive pessimism about the environment undermines good scientific investigation and distorts our understanding of important environmental challenges. He displays the frequent naïveté of a scientist observing the political world: "I have never understood why pessimism has for so long been associated with a liberal or progressive political world view." He criticizes anti-technological biases prevalent among environmentalists, but is also skeptical that market forces alone will suffice to continue our environmental progress in the future. He is guardedly optimistic that the creativity and adaptability of the human species will enable us to confront surprises and new problems. "We should pay attention to our successes as much as to our failures," Garte writes, "because in order to know where to go next, it is just as important to know where (and how) we went right as it is to know where we have gone wrong."
One of the persistent problems with environmentalism is its bait-and-switch character. The essentially political character of the movement cloaks itself with the seemingly objective authority of modern science, as though science were immune from politicization, or led to self-evident political or policy conclusions. Laying aside the value-laden premises of the ways science is used and misused in environmental controversies, it is startling to discover how limited our scientific grasp of many environmental conditions really is. The worst abuse of science comes in the almost daily predictions of future environmental conditions based on sophisticated computer models that often lack a solid empirical grounding for their assumptions and are seldom validated or back-tested with any rigor. Orrin Pilkey of Duke University and his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a government geologist, note these failings in Useless Arithmetic: Why
Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future.
The most famous prediction racket these days is climate modeling, but Useless Arithmetic mostly avoids the Super Bowl of enviro-modeling in favor of tackling more limited prediction modeling exercises, such as fishery management or forecasting coastal erosion, invasive species, and nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. Environmental forecasting is a classic case of being hoist by one's own petard. The inherent weakness of most exercises stems precisely from the core principle of modern pop environmentalism—that everything is connected to everything else. As the Pilkeys point out,
[p]erhaps the single most important reason that quantitative predictive mathematical models of natural processes on earth don't work and can't work has to do with ordering complexity. Interactions among the numerous components of a complex system occur in unpredictable and unexpected sequences.
Contrary to the usual process of science in which defects and errors become the platform for refinement and new approaches to the problem, environmental science finds itself caught in the grip of "politically correct modeling" (the authors' emphasis) in which there is enormous pressure on scientists, many of whom discover "that modeling results are easier to live with if they follow preconceived or politically correct notions." The models take on a life of their own, and become obstacles to conducting serious field studies that might strengthen our empirical grasp of ecosystem dynamics. "Applied mathematical modeling has become a science that has advanced without the usual broad-based, vigorous debate, criticism, and constant attempts at falsification that characterize good science," the Pilkeys conclude.
Neither Garte nor the Pilkeys are full-blown green skeptics; to the contrary—they are global warming believers who lean slightly left-of-center in their politics. But they represent a gathering backlash among academic scientists against the straightjacket of orthodox environmentalism. There are a number of others like them whose names never appear in the media or before congressional hearings. The prospect that a new generation of environmentalists such as Nordhaus and Shellenberger, along with academic dissenters such as Garte and the Pilkeys, can work a reformation of the movement may not seem very bright. But such voices were virtually unheard of even ten years ago. Stay tuned: a new shade of green might yet emerge.
This essay is part of the Taube American Values Series, made possible by the Taube Family Foundation.
Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2008
http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1588/article_detail.asp
Full article w/correct format here.
Books discussed in this essay:
The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, edited by Bill McKibben, Foreword by Al Gore
How We Can Save the Planet: Preventing Global Climate Catastrophe, by Mayer Hillman, Tina Fawcett, and Sudhir Chella Rajan
The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, by David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith
The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty, by Robyn Eckersley
Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, by Matthew Connelly
Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
Where We Stand: A Surprising Look at the Real State of Our Planet, by Seymour Garte
Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future, by Orrin H. Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis
"On what principle is it," wondered Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1830, "that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?" Environmentalism didn't exist in its current form in Macaulay's time, or he would easily have discerned its essential pessimism bordering at times on a loathing of humanity. A trip down the environment and earth sciences aisle of any larger bookstore is usually a tour of titles that cover the narrow range from dismay to despair.
On the surface this is not exceptional. Titles predicting decline, decay, and disaster are just as numerous in the real estate, economics, and social science shelves, though, ironically, not so much in the religion book racks, where one would expect to find apocalypticism well represented. This is an important distinction: unlike the eschatology of all major religions, the eco-apocalypse is utterly without hope of redemption for man or nature. The greens turn purple at the suggestion that most environmental conditions in rich nations are actually improving, and they bemoan the lack of "progress" toward the transformation of the human soul that is thought necessary for the planet's salvation. Yet some cracks are starting to appear in their dreary and repetitive story line. Although extreme green ideology won't go away any time soon—the political and legal institutions of the environmental movement are too well established—there are signs that the public and a few next-generation environmentalists are ready to say goodbye to all that. There are even some liberal authors with environmentalist sympathies who are turning against the environmental establishment. But it is necessary to claw our way through the deepening slough of green despondency to see this potential turning point.
More than 30 years ago political scientist Anthony Downs wrote in the Public Interest of a five-step "issue-attention cycle" through which public enthusiasm for an issue gradually diminishes as we come to recognize the high cost of drastic action, and that the nature of the problem was exaggerated or misconceived. The environment, he wrote, would have a longer cycle than most issues because of its diffuse nature, but it appears that the public is finally arriving at the late stages of Downs's cycle. Opinion surveys show that the public isn't jumping on the global warming bandwagon despite a multi-million dollar marketing campaign and full-scale media hysteria. More broadly there are signs that "green fatigue" is setting in. Magazine publishers recently reported that their special Earth Day "green" issues generated the lowest newsstand sales of all issues published in 2008. "Suddenly Being Green Is Not Cool Any More," read a London Times headline in August.
This has been building for a long time. Three years ago New York Times green-leaning columnist Nicholas Kristof lamented that the environmental movement was losing credibility because of its doomsaying monomania, with the result that "environmental alarms have been screeching for so long that, like car alarms, they are now just an irritating background noise." Environmental leaders did not take well to his wandering from the reservation. In response to the popular indifference to green alarms, conventional environmentalists have ratcheted up their level of vitriol against humanity and democratic institutions. One of the most popular books of 2007 among environmentalists was The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which projects a "thought experiment" about what would occur if human beings were suddenly removed entirely from the planet. Answer: nature would reassert herself, and ultimately remove nearly all traces of human civilization within several millennia—a mere blink of an eye in the planetary timescale. Environmentalists cheered Weisman's vivid depiction of the resilience of nature, but what thrilled them was the scenario of a humanless earth. Weisman made sure to stroke his audience's self-loathing with plenty of boilerplate about resource exhaustion and overpopulation. The book rocketed up the best-seller list, the latest in a familiar genre stretching back at least to Fairfield Osborn's Our Plundered Planet in 1948, arguably the first neo-Malthusian doomsday tract of modern environmentalism. Time magazine named The World Without Us the number one non-fiction book of 2007.
Rethinking Democracy
The same view of environmentalism is on display in the Library of America's American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. This collection, though worthy in some respects, has to be judged a disappointment compared to many other fine Library of America offerings—a shortcoming entirely attributable to the selection of Bill McKibben as editor. (The easier clue is the Foreword by Al Gore.) McKibben is another in the sad line of environmentalists who became bores by endlessly reprising the one-hit wonders of their youth (in McKibben's case, his mildly interesting 1989 book, The End of Nature). He begins and ends with Henry David Thoreau—"a Buddha with a receipt from the hardware store"—because he thinks environmental writing is to be distinguished from nature writing. Environmental writing, McKibben explains, "takes as its subject the collision between people and the rest of the world."
It was probably too much to expect that McKibben would balance the usual suspects such as Rachel Carson, Lynn White, Paul Ehrlich, and Garrett Hardin with such intelligent dissenters as Julian Simon, Terry Anderson, Frederick Jackson Turner, and R.J. Smith. But McKibben's adherence to environmental correctness is so narrowly conceived that he excludes a number of American authors who offer worthy reflections on man and nature. His tacit premise that man is not part of nature, or is opposed to the rest of nature, necessarily constricts the range of perspectives that can be brought to bear on the broad idea of "the environment." So though his collection includes Theodore Roosevelt, by representing American environmental writing as beginning with Thoreau, it excludes worthy earlier reflections such as Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (or any of Jefferson's other agrarian reflections that can be read as precursors to Wendell Berry, who is included in McKibben's reader), or Tocqueville's prescient observations on American wilderness, our emerging attitudes toward it, and its relation to our democratic character.
McKibben and many other environmental writers affect an indifference toward, or transcendence of, politics in the ordinary sense, but ultimately cannot conceal their rejection of the liberal tradition. Here we observe the irony of modern environmentalism: the concern for the preservation of unchanged nature has grown in tandem with the steady erosion in our belief in unchanging human nature; the concern for the "rights of nature" has come to embrace a rejection of natural rights for humans. McKibben is one of many current voices (Gore is another) who like to express their environmentalism by decrying "individualism" (McKibben calls it "hyperindividualism"). Finding that individualism is "the sole ideology of a continent," he explains:
Fighting the ideology that was laying waste to so much of the planet demanded going beyond that individualism. Many found the means to do that in the notion of ‘community'—a word almost as fuzzy and hard to pin down as ‘wild,' but one that has emerged as an even more compelling source of motive energy for the environmental movement.
This is not a new theme for McKibben. Al Gore employed the same "communitarian" trope in his first and most famous environmental book, Earth in the Balance (1992), where, in the course of arguing that the environment should be the "central organizing principle" of civilization, he suggested that the problem with individual liberty is that we have too much of it. This preference for soft despotism has become more concrete with the increasing panic over global warming in the past few years. Several environmental authors now argue openly that democracy itself is the obstacle and needs to be abandoned. A year ago a senior fellow emeritus at Britain's Policy Studies Institute, Mayer Hillman, author of How We Can Save the Planet, told a reporter, "When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it. This [rationing] has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not." (Hillman openly advocates resource rationing.) Another recent self-explanatory book is The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy by Australians David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith. Shearman argued recently that
[l]iberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most extreme case, the U.S.A., unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of the collective needs of the citizens.... There must be open minds to look critically at liberal democracy. Reform must involve the adoption of structures to act quickly regardless of some perceived liberties.
Whom does Shearman admire as an example of environmental governance to be emulated? China, precisely because of its authoritarian government: "[T]he savvy Chinese rulers may be first out of the blocks to assuage greenhouse emissions and they will succeed by delivering orders.... We are going to have to look at how authoritarian decisions based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse emissions." Separately, Shearman has written:
To retain an inhabitable earth we may have to compromise the eternal vicissitudes of democracy for an informed leadership that directs. There are countries that fall within this requirement and we should use them to initiate more active mitigation.... The People's Republic of China may hold the key to innovative measures that can both arrest the expected surge in emissions from developing countries and provide developed nations with the means to alternative energy. China curbs individual freedom in favour of communal need. The State will implement those measures seen to be in the common good.
Perhaps the film version will be called An Inconvenient Democracy.
Academic political theorists who take up what might be called "green constitutionalism" understand that Lockean liberalism has to be overturned and replaced. In The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty, Australian political scientist Robyn Eckersley offers up an approach that, despite being swathed in postmodern jargon, is readily transparent. The "ecocentric," transnational "green state" Eckersley envisions is represented as an explicit alternative to "the classical liberal state, the indiscriminate growth-dependent welfare state, and the increasingly ascendant neoliberal competition state." Achieving a post-liberal state requires rethinking the entire Enlightenment project:
By framing the problem as one of rescuing and reinterpreting the Enlightenment goals of autonomy and critique, it is possible to identify what might be called a mutually informing set of "liberal dogmas" that have for too long been the subject of unthinking faith rather than critical scrutiny by liberals. The most significant of these dogmas are a muscular individualism and an understanding of the self-interested rational actor as natural and eternal; a dualistic conception of humanity and nature that denies human dependency on the biological world and gives rise to the notion of human exceptionalism from, and instrumentalism and chauvinism toward, the natural world; the sanctity of private property rights; the notion that freedom can only be acquired through material plenitude; and overconfidence in the rational mastery of nature through further scientific and technological progress.
Every traditional liberal or "progressive" understanding is up for grabs in this framework. This passage does not require much "parsing" to grasp its practical implications—the establishment of institutions and governing regimes that are not answerable to popular will, or that depend on transforming popular will in a specified direction. Eckersley makes this clear in a passage about the "social learning" function of "deliberative democracy," which she describes as "the requirement that participants be open and flexible in their thinking, that they enter a public dialogue with a preparedness to have their preferences transformed through reasoned argument." (Emphasis added.) In practice, of course, Eckersley's "reasoned argument" would resemble nothing so much as the infamous "ideology struggle" sessions of Mao's Cultural Revolution. This outlook gives new meaning to the old cliché about rulers selecting the people, rather than vice versa.
Yesterday's Crisis Mongers
Is there any respite from this dreary despotic nonsense? Here and there, a few authors of sufficient independence of mind can be found who have broken with green orthodoxy in significant ways. The first of note is Matthew Connelly of Columbia University, whose brilliant new history of the population control movement, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, is useful not simply on its theme but for the light it sheds on the political corruption that inevitably accompanies these world-saving enthusiasms. The "population bomb" can be seen as a precursor to the global warming crisis of today: as far back as the early decades of the 20th century the population crisis was put forward as the justification for global governance and coercive, non-consensual rule.
Connelly recounts one of the first major international conferences on world population, held in Geneva in 1927, where Albert Thomas, a French trade unionist, asked, "Has the moment yet arrived for considering the possibility of establishing some sort of supreme supranational authority which would regulate the distribution of population on rational and impartial lines, by controlling and directing migration movements and deciding on the opening-up or closing of countries to particular streams of immigration?" Connelly also describes the 1974 World Population Conference, which "witnessed an epic battle between starkly different versions of history and the future: one premised on the preservation of order, if necessary by radical new forms of global governance; the other inspired by the pursuit of justice, beginning with unfettered sovereignty for newly independent nations." (Emphasis added.)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N.-sponsored body that is the juggernaut of today's climate campaign, finds its precedent in the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP), spawned at the 1927 World Population Conference. A bevy of NGOs, most prominently the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and Zero Population Growth (ZPG), later sprang into being, working hand-in-glove with the same private foundations (especially Ford and Rockefeller) and global financial institutions, such as the World Bank, that today are in the forefront of the climate campaign.
As Connelly lays out in painstaking detail, population control programs, aimed chiefly at developing nations, proliferated despite clear human rights abuses and, more importantly, new data and information that called into question many of the fundamental assumptions of the crisis mongers. Connelly recalls computer projections and economic models that offered precise and "scientifically grounded" projections of future global ruin from population growth, all of which were quickly falsified. The mass famines and food riots that were predicted never occurred; fertility rates began to fall everywhere, even in nations that lacked "family planning" programs.
The coercive nature of the population control programs in the field was appalling. India, in particular, became "a vast laboratory for the ultimate population control campaign," the chilling practices of which Connelly recounts:
Sterilizations were performed on 80-year-old men, uncomprehending subjects with mental problems, and others who died from untreated complications. There was no incentive to follow up patients. The Planning Commission found that the quality of postoperative care was "the weakest link." In Maharashtra, 52 percent of men complained of pain, and 16 percent had sepsis or unhealed wounds. Over 40 percent were unable to see a doctor. Almost 58 percent of women surveyed experienced pain after IUD insertion, 24 percent severe pain, and 43 percent had severe and excessive bleeding. Considering that iron deficiency was endemic in India, one can only imagine the toll the IUD program took on the health of Indian women.
These events Connelly describes took place in 1967, but instead of backing off, the Indian government—under constant pressure and lavish financial backing from the international population control organizations—intensified these coercive programs in the 1970s. Among other measures India required that families with three or more children had to be sterilized to be eligible for new housing (which the government, not the private market, controlled). "This war against the poor also swept across the countryside," Connelly notes:
In one case, the village of Uttawar in Haryana was surrounded by police, hundreds were taken into custody, and every eligible male was sterilized. Hearing what had happened, thousands gathered to defend another village named Pipli. Four were killed when police fired upon the crowd. Protesters gave up only when, according to one report, a senior government official threatened aerial bombardment. The director of family planning in Maharashtra, D.N. Pai, considered it a problem of "people pollution" and defended the government: "If some excesses appear, don't blame me.... You must consider it something like a war. There could be a certain amount of misfiring out of enthusiasm. There has been pressure to show results. Whether you like it or not, there will be a few dead people."
In all, over 8 million sterilizations, many of them forced, were conducted in India in 1976—"draconian population control," Connelly writes, "practiced on an unprecedented scale.... There is no way to count the number who were being hauled away to sterilization camps against their will." Nearly 2,000 died from botched surgical procedures. The people of India finally put the brakes on this coercive utopianism, at the ballot box: the Congress Party, which had championed the family planning program as one of its main policies, was swept from office in a landslide, losing 141 of 142 contested seats in the areas with the highest rate of sterilizations. At least the people of India had recourse to the ballot box; the new environmental constitutionalism will surely aim to eliminate this remedy.
A System without a Brain
One reason why enthusiasms and programs maintain their forward momentum in the face of changing facts and circumstances is the culture of corruption that inevitably comes to envelope self-selecting leadership groups organized around a crisis. Connelly ably captures this seamy side of the story:
Divided from within and besieged from without, leaders created a "system without a brain," setting in motion agencies and processes that could not be stopped. The idea of a "population crisis" provided the catalyst. But this was a system that ran on money. Earmarked appropriations greased the wheels of balky bureaucracies, and lavish funding was the fuel that drove it forward. But so much poured in so fast that spending became an end unto itself. The pressure to scale up and show results transformed organizations ostensibly dedicated to helping people plan their families into tools for social engineering.... Rather than accept constraints or accountability, they preferred to let population control go out of control. (Emphasis added.)
Corruption extended on a personal level to the New Class directing these world-saving crusades, what Connelly calls "the new jet set of population experts."
The lifestyle of the leaders of the population control establishment reflected the power of an idea whose time had come as well as the influence of the institutions that were now backing it.... Alan Guttmacher was in the habit of beginning letters to the Planned Parenthood membership with comments like "This is written 31,000 feet aloft as I fly from Rio to New York." He insisted on traveling with his wife, first class, with the IPPF picking up the tab. Ford [Foundation] officials flew first class with their spouses as a matter of policy. One wonders why Douglas Ensminger [the Ford Foundation's India officer] ever left his residence in Dehli—he was served by a household staff of nine, including maids, cooks, gardeners, and chauffeurs. He titled this part of his oral history "The ‘Little People' of India." Ensminger insisted on the need to pay top dollar and provide a plush lifestyle to attract the best talent, even if the consultants he recruited seemed preoccupied with their perks. One of these strivers ran his two-year old American sedan without oil just so that the Ford Foundation would have to replace it with the latest model....
For population experts this was the beginning of constantly expanding opportunities. The budgets, the staff, the access were all increasing even more quickly than the population growth their programs were meant to stop. There was "something in it for everyone," Population Association of America President John Kantner later recalled: "the activist, the scholar, the foundation officer, the globe-circling consultant, the wait-listed government official. World Conferences, a Population Year, commissions, select committees, new centers for research and training, a growing supply of experts, pronouncements by world leaders, and, most of all, money—lots of it."
Sounds rather like the moveable feast that is the IPCC's annual meetings, often held in hardship locales such as Bali, to press ahead with anti-global warming efforts. The magnitude of the traveling circus of the climate campaign has come to dwarf the population crusade. Prior to the arrival of climate change as a crisis issue, the largest single U.S. government science research project was the acid rain study of the 1980s (the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project, or NAPAP for short), which cost about $500 million, and concluded that the acid rain problem had been vastly overestimated. (Public opinion polls in the late 1970s rated acid rain the most significant environmental problem of the time.) Today the U.S. government is spending multiple billions each year on climate research—so much through so many different agencies and budget sources that it is impossible to estimate the total reliably.
With so much money at stake, and with so many careers staked to the catastrophic climate scenario, one could predict that the entire apparatus would be resistant to new information and reasonable criticism. This is exactly what happened in the population crusade. When compelling critics of the population bomb thesis arose—people who might be called "skeptics," such as Julian Simon—the population campaign reacted by circling the wagons and demonizing its critics, just as global warming skeptics today are subjected to relentless ad hominem attacks. Connelly again:
Leaders of the population control movement responded...by defending their record and fighting back. They lined up heads of state, major corporations, and international organizations behind a global strategy to slow population growth. But they also worked more quietly to insulate their projects from political opposition by co-opting or marginalizing critics, strengthening transnational networks, and establishing more free-standing institutions exempt from normal government oversight.
This is exactly the playbook of the climate campaign today. Nevertheless, it is likely to follow the same trajectory as the population control movement—gradual decline in salience to the point that even the United Nations, in the early 1990s, officially downgraded the priority of the issue. This is likely to happen to climate change even if dramatic predictions of climate change turn out to be true.
Liberal Environmentalists
A few environmentalists on the left understand the profound defects of the radical green approach to politics, along with the conventional green approach to global warming. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, self-described "progressives" and authors of one of the most challenging recent books on the environment, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, recognize and lament the authoritarianism of conventional environmentalism. "Environmental tales of tragedy begin with Nature in harmony and almost always end in quasi-authoritarian politics," Nordhaus and Shellenberger observe. While environmentalists like Eckersley embrace the postmodern language of "privilege" to denigrate traditional individual rights, Nordhaus and Shellenberger point up the obvious irony that it is environmentalism that is making the boldest claim to be given the most privileged position in politics: "The problem is not simply that it is difficult to answer the question ‘Who speaks for nature?' but rather that there is something profoundly wrong with the question itself. It rests on the premise that some people are better able to speak for nature, the environment, or a particular place than others. This assumption is profoundly authoritarian."
Above all, they reject the "limits to growth" mentality that has been near the center of environmental thought for two generations:
Environmentalists...have tended to view economic growth as the cause but not the solution to ecological crisis. Environmentalists like to emphasize the ways in which the economy depends on ecology, but they often miss the ways in which thinking ecologically depends on prospering economically.... Few things have hampered environmentalism more than its longstanding position that limits to growth are the remedy for ecological crises.
For this very reason, Nordhaus and Shellenberger insist that constraints on greenhouse gas emissions as contemplated by the Kyoto process will never work and should be abandoned. Instead they advocate massive research (with government paying for the largest share) into post-carbon energy systems. With due caveats about government-funded research, this seems a better approach than Gore's hair-shirt agenda. They may underestimate the sheer technical and economic difficulties of energy technology, but Break Through is not primarily a policy tome—it is intended to reorient our general thinking about the environment. In the second half of their book it becomes clear that Nordhaus and Shellenberger aren't just trying to save environmentalism; they are trying to save contemporary liberalism, which they regard as nearly as intellectually dead as environmentalism. "[E]nvironmentalism is hobbled by its resentment of human strength and our desire to control nature, and liberalism by its resentment of wealth and power," they write. This part of the book is less successful though no less serious and thoughtful. In arguing that liberals need to be more philosophical (hear, hear!), Nordhaus and Shellenberger deploy a number of philosophical categories that are problematic, at the very least, and embrace the core principles of postmodernism—though, happily, that overused term does not appear in their generally clear, direct prose. The duo are against Platonic essentialism when it comes to conceiving nature (including, it would seem, human nature), and for a revival of Deweyite pragmatism as well as empowering individual "authenticity." The reader gets dizzy at times following the back and forth between Richard Rorty, Thomas Kuhn, Francis Fukuyama, the "metaphysics of becoming," and more down-to-earth wonkish discussions of gas mileage standards for automobiles.
But despite these flaws, Break Through is still a refreshing departure from most environmental discourse, and the young authors probably aren't done, either, rethinking fundamental aspects of political life and man's relation to nature. Their rude treatment from fellow "progressives" (the American Prospect dismissed the book as containing "a lot of wasted ink") will surely encourage more reflection.
A Green Reformation?
Even in academia there are a few lonely voices who've noticed that the conventional green outlook is badly defective and in need of revision. Seymour Garte, professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public Health, makes his bid to become the next "skeptical environmentalist" (after Bjorn Lomborg) with his book Where We Stand: A Surprising Look at the Real State of Our Planet. Garte recalls his surprise, and the surprise of fellow experts attending a professional conference in Europe, when presented with data from a speaker showing steadily declining air pollution trends along with the claim, "everyone knows that air pollution levels are continually decreasing everywhere." "I looked around the room," Garte writes:
I was not the only nonexpert there. Most of my other colleagues were also not atmospheric or air pollution scientists. Later I asked one of them, a close friend, if he had known that air pollution levels were constantly decreasing throughout Europe and the United States on a yearly basis. "I had no idea," he said. It was certainly news to me. Even though I was a professor of environmental health and had been actively involved in many aspects of pollution research for many years, that simple fact had somehow escaped me.... I had certainly never seen it published in the media.
Garte goes on to argue that excessive pessimism about the environment undermines good scientific investigation and distorts our understanding of important environmental challenges. He displays the frequent naïveté of a scientist observing the political world: "I have never understood why pessimism has for so long been associated with a liberal or progressive political world view." He criticizes anti-technological biases prevalent among environmentalists, but is also skeptical that market forces alone will suffice to continue our environmental progress in the future. He is guardedly optimistic that the creativity and adaptability of the human species will enable us to confront surprises and new problems. "We should pay attention to our successes as much as to our failures," Garte writes, "because in order to know where to go next, it is just as important to know where (and how) we went right as it is to know where we have gone wrong."
One of the persistent problems with environmentalism is its bait-and-switch character. The essentially political character of the movement cloaks itself with the seemingly objective authority of modern science, as though science were immune from politicization, or led to self-evident political or policy conclusions. Laying aside the value-laden premises of the ways science is used and misused in environmental controversies, it is startling to discover how limited our scientific grasp of many environmental conditions really is. The worst abuse of science comes in the almost daily predictions of future environmental conditions based on sophisticated computer models that often lack a solid empirical grounding for their assumptions and are seldom validated or back-tested with any rigor. Orrin Pilkey of Duke University and his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a government geologist, note these failings in Useless Arithmetic: Why
Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future.
The most famous prediction racket these days is climate modeling, but Useless Arithmetic mostly avoids the Super Bowl of enviro-modeling in favor of tackling more limited prediction modeling exercises, such as fishery management or forecasting coastal erosion, invasive species, and nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. Environmental forecasting is a classic case of being hoist by one's own petard. The inherent weakness of most exercises stems precisely from the core principle of modern pop environmentalism—that everything is connected to everything else. As the Pilkeys point out,
[p]erhaps the single most important reason that quantitative predictive mathematical models of natural processes on earth don't work and can't work has to do with ordering complexity. Interactions among the numerous components of a complex system occur in unpredictable and unexpected sequences.
Contrary to the usual process of science in which defects and errors become the platform for refinement and new approaches to the problem, environmental science finds itself caught in the grip of "politically correct modeling" (the authors' emphasis) in which there is enormous pressure on scientists, many of whom discover "that modeling results are easier to live with if they follow preconceived or politically correct notions." The models take on a life of their own, and become obstacles to conducting serious field studies that might strengthen our empirical grasp of ecosystem dynamics. "Applied mathematical modeling has become a science that has advanced without the usual broad-based, vigorous debate, criticism, and constant attempts at falsification that characterize good science," the Pilkeys conclude.
Neither Garte nor the Pilkeys are full-blown green skeptics; to the contrary—they are global warming believers who lean slightly left-of-center in their politics. But they represent a gathering backlash among academic scientists against the straightjacket of orthodox environmentalism. There are a number of others like them whose names never appear in the media or before congressional hearings. The prospect that a new generation of environmentalists such as Nordhaus and Shellenberger, along with academic dissenters such as Garte and the Pilkeys, can work a reformation of the movement may not seem very bright. But such voices were virtually unheard of even ten years ago. Stay tuned: a new shade of green might yet emerge.
This essay is part of the Taube American Values Series, made possible by the Taube Family Foundation.
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