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"Did the EPA drop bisphenol A from the list in eight days because of lobbyists? First of all, if the EPA or any government agency reversed a decision like this in eight days it would be a grand miracle on the scale of the Genesis seven day creation myth. Or at least worthy of an Olympic gold medal. Really..."

Post Updated 2/19/10 to include new references.

The EPA, Skewered For First TSCA Action in Decades:

On December 30th, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) posted action plans for four chemicals: phthalates, perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), and short-chain chlorinated paraffins. (No really! It gets better :-) ) An action plan signals that the EPA intends possible regulation because the chemical poses a hazard. Chemical companies complained bitterly. The EPA also listed two more chemical action plans in the development process, for benzidine dyes/pigments, and bisphenol A. Scientific American commented at the time:

"This is a big deal because it is the first time since TSCA was passed in 1976 that the EPA has made such a move. To date, the agency has only successfully used TSCA to restrict or ban five of the 80,000-plus chemicals on its inventory"

However this week, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel criticized the EPA's December chemical action plans, questioning why bisphenol A wasn't on the top four list: The EPA's "move" was "drawing suspicion", explains the paper:

"the head of the Environmental Protection Agency had been talking tough in one speech after another last fall about the need to protect the public from such chemicals, particularly BPA...but when the agency's list came out Dec. 30, identifying four chemicals that would face stricter labeling and reporting requirements, BPA was not among them..."

Writes MSJ: "Critics say the Dec. 22 meeting might have been why BPA was dropped from the top of the agency's list".

BPA is on the agency's list. But to the Journal-Sentinel's question, why is it not first up in the most recent round of action plans? Did lobbyists pressure OMB/OIRA to change EPA's stance on Dec. 22?

Now, Suddenly, The EPA Turns on A Dime?

The paper cites as the deciding factor a meeting of plastic and chemical lobbyists with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA):

"Eight days after a meeting between chemical industry lobbyists and Obama administration officials, federal regulators put off including bisphenol A on a list of dangerous chemicals that would be subject to stricter regulation"

The Center For Progressive Reform also forwarded the idea that the EPA was influenced to remove BPA from its chemical action plans list in a blog posted January 22:

"on December 22, just before EPA was about to release its first four chemical action plans, activists from American Chemistry Council and representatives of a major BPA producer met with officials at OIRA to plead the case for BPA's safety."

Did the EPA drop bisphenol A from the list in eight days? First of all, if the EPA or any government agency reversed a decision like this in eight days it would be a grand miracle on the scale of the Genesis seven day creation myth. Or at least worthy of an Olympic gold medal. Really.

But, lets look back to last fall, to a much quoted speech given by Lisa Jackson to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The MSJ quoted the speech in their article. At the time, we wrote in "The EPA Speaks To Me" that Jackson's speech, like the president's sweeping public orations, promised something for everyone:

"The more I read, the more Jackson's speech looked like a veritable public relations jambalaya. She spoke to those committed to wetlands, spotted owls, to asthma sufferers, climate change, to those concerned about coal and gas emissions, to the Clean Air Act, to trash incineration, dioxins, pesticides, green chemistry, research, unions, medical professionals, public health groups, industry, environmentalism, to those who want jobs, fast food packaging, to unborn children, African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and postal workers, as well as everyone who emails public comments to the EPA or who's concerned about health care or health..."

I commented at the time that her speech was clearly a "marketing tool and conversation generator but not a public policy statement." We could get mad about a lot of things in her speech, I'm sure, if we took it as public policy commitment.

If Only Talking Made Policy

Of course, in that speech Jackson did mention bisphenol A, saying: "Every few weeks, we read about new potential threats: Bisphenol A, or BPA - a chemical that can affect brain development and has been linked to obesity and cancer..." Or, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sees it: "The first chemical on her list: BPA." But, writes MSJ: "In the end, though, her agency settled on four other chemicals to target first for the action plans." (emphasis ours)

So as MSJ says, it's true, "first" Jackson did mention BPA. Then she said "pthalates", then "dioxins, then "lead" (each once). One of the Journal-Sentinel's sources labeled EPA's stance as "curious". I'm as cynical as anyone, but lets look at Jackson's rhetorical choices.

San Francisco was the first in the nation to attempt action on bisphenol A and phthalates. Jackson was at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club talking to (I guess) some commoners -- not chemists or policy wonks. "Bisphenol A" and "pthalates", "dioxin", and "lead" would be recognizable and appreciated by the crowd. True, she didn't explicitly mention "polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) including the commercial versions of pentabromodiphenyl ether (c-pentaBDE), octabromodiphenyl ether (c-octaBDE), and decabromodiphenyl ether (c-decaBDE)" -- the flame retardants in the first batch of four EPA action plans. But had she, the crowd, eyes glazing over, probably would have slumped into trance instead of thinking the EPA was their friend and ally. Whether you view this as PR or marketing or just common sense, its elementary communication. And as an aside -- why no concern about the EPA's omission of lead or dioxin in the first batch of action plans?

Sept. 29th: EPA Announces Four Chemical "Action Plans". Sept. 30th: Names Chemicals

As for the EPA's choice of which chemicals would be targeted first, on September 29, 2009 , the EPA issued a press release" right after Jackson's speech, announcing its intention to issue four action plans in December:

"The EPA has identified an initial list of chemicals for possible risk management action and anticipates completing and posting an initial set of four action plans in December. It will complete and post additional chemical action plans in four-month intervals thereafter."

On September 30, 2009, the EPA issued another press release, naming the four chemicals of top interest, the same ones that it produced action plans for in December:

"EPA today announced a series of actions on four chemicals raising serious health or environmental concerns...The agency's actions represent its determination to use its authority under the existing Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to the fullest extent possible...In addition to phthalates, the chemicals EPA is addressing today are short-chain chlorinated paraffins, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and perfluorinated chemicals, including PFOA.

So in a September 30th press release, the EPA named the same four chemicals that were in the December 30, 2009 action plan announcement. Then did the American Chemistry Council (ACC) really sway the EPA's BPA decision in a meeting December 22nd with OMB/OIRA, eight days before the EPA's action plan announcement?

The Chemical Lobby, BPA & The EPA: Economics Factors?

To me, aside from the overly conspiratorial premise of the article, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and CPR valuably point the public's attention to some enviable industry access. The ACC sent five representatives to meet with four OMB,OIRA staff; and SABIC, a Saudi BPA manufacturer, sent two. The ACC apparently sent a letter requesting the meeting dated November 3rd. This is news: If you're a chemical lobby group or a Saudi BPA manufacturer, you can get a meeting with OMB/OIRA in a month and a half.

ACC also submitted a slim bibliography(.pdf) of research sources. The ACC submissions show the industry's dedication to a relentlessly one-sided messaging on chemical safety.

Six of fifteen studies in the bibliography have ACC's Steve Hentges (meeting attendee and ACC lobby spokesperson, who has relentlessly messaged about BPA safety) listed as the senior author (not unbiased). Three industry related studies intend to prove that BPA degrades quickly, which is an important criteria for EPA action plans. At least four other studies with various aims are authored by groups sponsored by plastics, BPA or chemical foundations. It's true, as the MSJ writes, most of the studies authors have industry affiliations. There are hundreds of other studies to choose from which wouldn't bolster the ACC's arguments one tiny little bit. (Although to be fair, the ACC is a chemical lobby group -- not an unbiased journalist, a point I'd hope the EPA recognizes)

But the ACC included one study from Ryan et al published in Toxicological Sciences (Online October, 2009), that is an EPA study conducted by EPA employees. This study concludes that low-dose bisphenol A does not alter puberty, fertility, or anatomy and sexual behavior in rats, compared to the estrogen control. Several groups dispute this study because, for one, the strain of rat is not as sensitive to low-dose estrogen" (.PDF Update 02/19/10). However the study's sponsoring author has disputed their claims (which are longstanding) to Trevor Butterworth of Stats.org, which has been doing PR on behalf of the bisphenol A industry. We previously discussed Stats.org's role in several posts.

If anything might dissuade the EPA from acting on BPA it would be its own studies (which they didn't need the ACC to highlight.) The senior author on the study, L. Earl Gray Jr., also testified before the EPA in 2008, emphasizing that his level of "concern" (an agency measure of potential harm) about bisphenol A exposure was less that his level of concern for phthalates exposure. Industry groups have touted Ryan's and Gray's work. If the Ryan and Gray's study methodology is in question, no activist has been too public about it (Update 02/19/10: A letter in Toxicological Sciences published 02/17/10 explains the problem with rat strain.) Perhaps more media focus should be placed here, on the EPA's own study.

The ACC letter requesting the meeting asks for chemical industry participation in the EPA decision making process (a request that seems rather unnecessary given the easy access industry does have). The letter also asks EPA to "be sensitive to the potential and foreseeable negative effect on the marketplace...the market impact on bisphenol A demonstrates this is a serious and real concern." Of course this is the primary goal of ACC, to urge the EPA not to impact any one of 80,000 chemicals' markets.

The EPA, in contrast, has said that its priority is to "review all chemicals against safety standards that are based solely on considerations of risk - not economics or other factors." (emphasis ours). It will be interesting to see how the EPA decides on bisphenol A, and whether its considerations to "risk" will include industry consideration to economic factors - or not. However just the fact that OMB and EPA were willing to sit with the ACC lobby group shows a willingness to listen to their (always) economic arguments.

The EPA -- Total Pushover?

I don't think I'm particularly naive in these matters, we've been following industry influence on policy for a while, especially BPA, which we've been following since 2005. We've specifically written about EPA apparently backing off of regulation under pressure from OIRA/OMB several times before.

But I'd be surprised if the EPA turned their intentions for BPA around based on this meeting. First, it appears from their press releases that they had already concluded back in September which four chemicals were first up for action plans. The idea that they would be so swayed is practically absurd, given the transparently, almost lazily, self-interested documents submitted by industry. Somehow I have more confidence in this EPA then to think they changed action plans based on those almost disrespectful pleas. But they do, now, have their own scientists saying that BPA isn't as dangerous as phthalates.

Clearly the EPA is not quite committed to regulating BPA as activists want. But it has put $30 million towards EPA research. It's also conducting its own studies. Hundreds of science studies provide evidence that BPA is harmful, but there are enough impacts from EPA decisions on industry that the agency needs to continue its BPA investigation. However, consider dioxins, another chemical the EPA mentioned in its Commonwealth Club speech. Dioxins are proven to be carcinogenic, a far more damning research finding than has to date been applied to BPA, but the EPA is still struggling to contain their use. On BPA, I'd be the first to say that there's enough research, as would many states and communities. But federal policy-making is not science. So is it more than poppycock to suggest that the EPA was singularly pressured by one ACC meeting to change its mind on BPA?

Carp, a Problem -- And The Government Solution

A couple of weeks ago we reported that scientists feared Asian carp had invaded the Great Lakes. Sure enough, scientists recently found carp DNA in Lake Michigan, an ecological problem considered so serious that the Supreme Court weighed in on the issue last week. (The Supreme Court said NO to Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Ontario, who together requested that the court allow the locks be closed to prevent the carp from impacting the $7 billion dollar fisheries industry).

Who could suggest a solution? Fortunately, the entrepreneurial government of the United States (but not SCOTUS) can tackle this kind of stuff. Now, some government go-getters suggest marketing the carp as "Silverfin" (not to be confused with the "silverfish", a revolting insect) to strengthen the filter-feeder's appeal to diners.

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries hatched the carp plan, identifying eleven "activities" to help rebrand the invasive fish as a delicacy.

The Media Could Actually Be Helpful

Number one on the list is surprisingly obvious: "determine if silver and bighead carp are suitable for human consumption". Apparently Chef Phillipe Parola (famous for trying to push other distasteful creatures on diners, like alligator and nutria) already tested the fish with consumers, and found that the only barrier to epicurean success is "a series of floating bones that are not easily separated from the flesh". The US Geological Survey got right on it, promptly producing a video to teach chefs and sports fisherman how to clean the invasive fish.

The agency also planned various promotional activities, and here's where journalists play an important role. In a series of events, producers plan to: "present the fish products to the media...", who will be "given samples of fish and fish products to eat". Providing no journalist chokes on a bone and dies, apparently the US Geological Survey will move on to Stage II Clinical Trials.

The Geological Survey also suggests "large media events", where attendees will be habituated to the idea as carp as food, since "videos showing the fish and cleaning methods will be continuously playing".

And Scientist Could Help Too, Doing What They Usually Do -- Research

When the Supreme Court chooses to be unhelpful, maybe scientists can aid the cause. Salon Magazine interviewed "the energetic Parola", who's pushing hard to change the fish's name from "carp" to "silverfin".

Parola illustrates how some government agencies work at cross-purposes -; as he explains how the carp got its undelicious name:

Parola: "Some clown from the USDA classified it as a carp. Carps are a bottom feeders and this is a filter feeder. The shape of the fish, the way it grows, the color: Literally there is no similarity to the carp. There's no other species named the silverfin, so what's the problem?"

Salon: "Well, off the top of my head, shouldn't it be up to scientists to name the fish?"

Parola: "But what I'm saying to you -- very loudly - is that this fish doesn't have any similarity with the carp. I want somebody out there to redo that research and help us out."

There you go. Team effort. Scientists? Change the research. Do what you need to do, whatever it takes, call in the IPCC (no!! little joke)...what do ichthyologists think?

Bisphenol A, Trees on Mars, and Riveting Headlines

Headlines can be deceiving, as well all know. But we often fall for them anyway. "Are Those Trees on Mars?" asked FoxNews and 150 other news outlets last week. So I squinted at the photo, trying to imagine how those could possibly be trees...maybe if a small city like Le Mars, Iowa shipped all the old Christmas trees collected on January 8th to Le Other Mars, instead of chipping them?

A fool I was, but you can't imagine my disappointment when the article attached to the NASA photo explained that there were No Trees On Mars, only dark sand illuminated differently than the surrounding carbon dioxide ice(1) -- (Tricky editors! - 'HA, made you look'). I guess readers' attention was elsewhere last week because closer to home, more subtly, but equally misleading, news headlines announced: The FDA "reverses" its position on bisphenol A (BPA), the FDA "backtracks" on BPA, the FDA advises consumers to "limit exposure" to BPA.

These headlines seemed like real news, since the FDA has for years faiiled to come out with either actions or public statements reflecting the growing research evidence for BPA toxicity. During the Bush administration the glaring gap between the FDA's position and BPA research propelled scientists to publicly criticized the relationship between the FDA and the industries it was supposed to be regulating. Acronym Required wrote about the fraught regulatory environment in the FDA vis-à-vis BPA, in "Scientists Criticize FDA Methods on BPA", in "Conflict of Interest in the FDA?", in "FDA Panel Offers Corrections to BPA Draft", in "Bisphenol A, The FDA, Industry -- Whassup?", and others.

Given the FDA's lackluster BPA regulation history, plus the fact that BPA is almost a household word, the newest headlines on BPA and the FDA attracted everyone's attention. The New York Times listed its story "F.D.A. Concerned About Substance in Food Packaging", as one of the "most e-mailed" articles one day. But underneath the headlines, what did the stories really report?

FDA -- Aging Cheerleader?

Despite the headlines, the FDA announced no "guidelines", and no new news. The LA Times quoted a statement from FDA Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein under the title "FDA issues BPA guidelines". "For the present", Sharfstein said", the FDA does support the use of baby bottles with BPA.'" (emphasis ours)

So in essence, the FDA has offered the same counsel for years, ever since it started studying BPA. In 1995 for instance, FDA scientists found that BPA migrated from heated plastic containers. The agency remained unalarmed. In 1997 the FDA began pondering how to change regulation to reflect evidence that endocrine disruptors altered physiology at low doses -- but barely flinched.

In 1999 several consumer groups, environmental safety groups, and scientists, petitioned the FDA to ban BPA in plastic baby bottles, because research then showed without a doubt that the chemical could leach out of polycarbonate, and indicated that BPA caused sex organ problems for male babies of exposed pregnant mice. At the time, the FDA deployed Dr. George Pauli to quell rising consumer concerns and Pauli assured families that polycarbonate bottles didn't leach under 'everyday' conditions, only at high temperatures; infant formulas required only mild heating, he said. (Although, alarmingly, parents typically microwaved the bottles.)

Now, over a decade later, despite dozens more studies, the FDA is still equivocating on baby bottles, although bottles present one of the riskiest sources of BPA because of babies' vulnerability to endocrine disruptors during development.

The FDA's statement becomes all the more difficult to swallow when you know that all on their own, without any encouragement from the agency, manufacturers voluntarily pulled polycarbonate bottles for babies and adults off the shelves.

The FDA did manage to bring its assessment -- that there is "some concern" about BPA health risks -- in line with the National Toxicology Program's (NTP) assessment. Although this is no small feat given the FDA's history, the agency didn't do much else, despite delaying this announcement three times.

From the FDA website, here's what the FDA committed to:

• "supporting industry actions" to stop making BPA containing baby bottles
• "faciliting the development" of BPA alternatives for formula cans
• "supporting efforts" to replace BPA in food can linings

Such mealy-mouthed statements give the impression that the FDA has little more persuasive authority than Acronym Required. The agency also said it would work with other agencies like the National Toxicology Program (NTP) in the NIEHS/NIH, and with foreign governments (legislators have aggressively questioned the FDA why it hasn't taken action when the Canada has banned BPA).

What Should Consumers Think?

The FDA is also seeking "external input" on the "science surrounding BPA", and will solicit "further public comment". Acronym Required commented on public comment periods used by agencies before. We wouldn't want to appear cynical in saying you can never have too much "public comment" or assume that the FDA is using the comment period to stall regulatory action. But since the FDA is now working with the National Toxicology Program in the NIH (NTP), it could review the numerous public comments solicited by the NTP during its assessments of the chemical in February, 2006; April, 2007; November, 2007; and April, 2008. (2)

The FDA is also "supporting a shift to a more robust regulatory framework for oversight of BPA". The FDA explains that a 40 year rule limits the FDA's ability to regulate BPA (as a food additive). The FDA can regulate new substances under a 2000 rule, but that doesn't help with BPA. So the agency will "encourage manufacturers to voluntarily submit a food contact notification for their currently marketed uses of BPA-containing materials." This is interesting because for years the FDA has been researching BPA and has declined to regulate the chemical because the agency found the science unconvincing; for some reason it hasn't brought a lot attention to its legal inabilities to regulate.

Does the FDA's latest announcement clarify its previous confusing position? What should consumers do? As my favorite headline, by "Beforeitsnews.com" byline has it: "It's in Your Urine But Is It Safe?".

More to the point, what should citizens do that they haven't done already? They've stopped buying polycarbonate, so much so that manufacturers have pulled bottles off the shelves, they've sued, they've urged local and state ordinances. By all measures, consumers have made the most credible effort to regulate BPA.

The FDA -- Nudging Itself Out of a Job? Drowning Itself In the Bathtub?

Other non-governmental organizations have responded with none of the ambiguity of the FDA. For instance spokespeople from the Breast Cancer Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Consumers Union, Clean New York, Center for Health Environment & Justice, and others, all urge the FDA to ban the chemical.

Even the National Council of Churches offers a suggestion for the FDA, saying, "As we celebrate the Christmas season, we are reminded of Jesus' commitment to those in poverty. We hope that the FDA will take measures to ensure that canned food is BPA-free through the use of safe alternatives in the future."

The FDA has been researching the chemical for over a decade. Their most recent statement followed delays -- not just three delays, but years of delays. Naturally the FDA, along with the CDC and NIH will support further research, in addition to supporting a new regulatory framework. The research will add to the already substantial body of research showing BPA dangers. And I guess that's how it is. The FDA is obviously hesitant to impact a multi-billion dollar industry, so the research needs to be far more conclusive than, say, if you were putting a potentially profitable pharmaceutical drug on the market.

In the meantime, as the FDA maintains relevancy by "supporting", "facilitating", and "encouraging" -- cities, towns and states across the US will continue to be at the forefront of 'patchwork' BPA regulation, pushing manufacturers to use alternatives.

--------------------------------

¹ From NASA: "At that time, dark sand on the interior of Martian sand dunes became more and more visible as the spring Sun melted the lighter carbon dioxide ice. When occurring near the top of a dune, dark sand may cascade down the dune leaving dark surface streaks -- streaks that might appear at first to be trees standing in front of the lighter regions, but cast no shadows."

² As a side note, the progression of public comments is interesting because it also shows growing awareness of BPA. In 2006 the only public comment was from the American Plastics Council. By 2008 almost 50 individuals and agencies commented.

The Chemical Lobby Finds Their Man:

Back when the momentum for banning bisphenol A (BPA) hadn't quite built up to its current fervor, BPA lobbyists used to denigrate everyone who questioned the safety of bisphenol A. Male, female, old, young, it didn't matter, they were 'internet moms' who'd worked themselves into a blind tizzy about bisphenol A, which was 'perfectly safe'.

But things were a little more tense last May for industry leaders who met to discuss a strategy for fighting back against the growing movement to limit consumer exposure to risky levels of BPA. As we quoted the Wall Street Journal in our post back then:

"industry executives huddled for hours Thursday trying to figure out how to tamp down public concerns over the chemical bisphenol A, or BPA. The notes said the executives are particularly concerned about the views of young mothers, who often make purchasing decisions for households and who are most likely to be focused on health concerns."

In addition to crafting clever lines to scare consumers, like "do you want to have access to baby food anymore?", the industry group discussed getting the right spokesman for their cause. A scientist might be difficult they acknowledged, they had reputations to preserve, but a pregnant woman would be "the Holy Grail".

Now it looks like they found their man in a public relations expert named "Joe Householder" -- his real name. This isn't the first challenging public relations assignment for Mr. Householder. He worked with, among others, Enron's law firm, baseball player Roger Clemons, Hillary Clinton, various other politicians, and Public Strategies Inc. Now he's with Purple Strategies Inc., apparently heading a group called "Coalition for Chemical Safety". The Coalition for Chemical Safety works with American Chemical Council (ACC) and other businesses. To date, those businesses are known more for not putting the safety and health of consumers before corporate profits.

So we look skeptically at "The Coalition for Chemical Safety". Indeed, it's described by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) as an BPA astroturfing organization. But it takes different tactics then previous BPA astroturfing campaigns. Mr. Householder and the Coalition for Chemical Safety take a warmer approach to BPA and chemicals, astroturfing-wise, then representatives in the past have.

In step with the times, the everyone_together_at_the_same_table age of Obama rhetoric, as opposed to the more acrimonious Bush era rhetoric, the Coalition is 'educating' consumers about chemicals. Instead of saying bluntly that BPA is safe, the mother in this Coalition sound clip talks about banning BPA in baby bottles, but encourages consumers and public health advocates to always work with the chemical companies (mp3 from EDF). This is the more subtle approach to controlling the public perception of chemicals. And who better to assure "young mothers" making "purchasing decisions for households", than a guy named Joe Householder?

In keeping with this new, more collegial approach to marketing/public relations, Householder has directly engaged Dr. Richard Denison, EDF's sometimes scathing Senior Scientist, in a mano-a-mano on Denison's blog. This is Householder's "purple" strategy, I think, not red, not blue, purple -- get it? That's where we all agree that chemicals are indeed wonderful (they are) and that we love regulation, just the "right" regulation, and "reasonable" regulation. Look out for that.

Mr. Household has invited Dr. Denison to join the Coalition for Chemical Safety, and although Denison hasn't posted a public response, I think with their combined gregariousness and magnetism, it's just a matter of time before they're hanging out together, Richard educating Householder on bisphenol A and Joe sharing public relations tactics and the use of his very apropos name. Isn't that how things get done these days?

Update: 02/14/09 Dr. Denison did continue to engage Joe Householder on the EDF blog. In a February post, Denison continued to ask Householder what his funding sources were, and what PR tactics he had used to get certain sectors so riled up about the Toxic Chemical Safety Act (TCSA):

"What exactly are you telling lawn services and landscaping companies they need to worry about in TSCA reform? And just what tortuous scenario are you weaving to convince police associations that better chemicals management will compromise their safety on the job?"

Denison wants some transparency from Householder. We don't know how/if Householder responded.

Acronym Required has written extensively on BPA science and regulation. We also wrote about individuals hired by industry, the acrimony they stir up, and the possibility of wonderful relationships blossoming between players on either side of the chemical divide in BPA Rhetoric and Reaction

In his most recent column, Thomas Friedman marshals ideas from Ron Suskind, Dick Cheney and Cass Sunstein in calling for action on climate change. By the end of his column, Friedman has reminded readers of decades of research showing that greenhouse gases make the planet warmer, with the "potential to unleash 'catastrophic' warming." Which risk should we take, he asks? Should we increase our efficiency and mitigation efforts, then in the unlikely event that climate change weren't critical, "as a country we would be stronger, more innovative and more energy independent"? Or should we risk not preparing, then if climate change were a catastrophe, "life on this planet" would become "living hell"?

Before we get to these arguments in "Going Cheney on Climate", though, you must grapple with Friedman's interpretation of Dick Cheney, Rons Suskind and Cass Sunstein. It's unclear why Friedman chose them, perhaps to convince the GOP, or any deniers, or those who are swayed by deniers, to support climate change action? Anyhow, using their ideas makes his argument confusing.

The One Percent Solution and Climate Change

Friedman refers to Ron Suskind's book "The One Percent Doctrine", titled after a comment Dick Cheney made in 2001:

"If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response..."

That part Friedman gets right. But Suskind was actually extremely critical of Cheney and the "Cheney Doctrine". Why? Here's the rest of Cheney's comment:

"...It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence...It's about our response""

As Suskind wrote, Cheney's new world order demanded action despite evidence:

"Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to "evidence", the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply." If there was even a one percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction- and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time -- the United States must now act as if it were a certainty. This was a mandate of extraordinary breadth...

Cheney's new US policy direction meant commitments from citizens and libraries as well as all levels of government -- the the CIA, the Army, the NSA, the Treasury. The costs were stupendous. As Suskind wrote:

"all parties took a vow of sorts on Sept. 12...vowed to work each day and every night...They'd stop at nothing...Global accords on everything from greenhouse gases to international courts...now were seen as constraints...Such agreements were for lesser countries. They were to be shaken off...

Suskind criticized the Cheney Doctrine precisely because its framers willfully disregarded evidence about the negligible risks of Al Queda gaining nuclear capability. They charged into war despite the evidence.

The situation with climate change is the opposite, the evidence for climate change is substantial. A cartoon in the Atlantic Constitution this week summarizes the folly of the deniers. A woman, speaking sometime in the future, says: "The North Pole melted. Polar bears are extinct. Asia's under water. Africa's a desert." The guy next to her responds: "Hey I never said the global warming hoax wasn't elaborate."

Adding to the confusion of Friedman's line of persuasion, the Cheney Doctrine leaves no doubt about that administrations sentiments on climate change, since according to Suskind the US took greenhouse gases off the negotiating table under the Cheney Doctrine.

Friends or Foes? Friedman's Folly

In addition to Suskind and Cheney, Friedman pulls in Cass Sunstein to wrap it all up, saying

"Sunstein wrote in his blog: 'According to the Precautionary Principle, it is appropriate to respond aggressively to low-probability, high-impact events -- such as climate change. Indeed, another vice president -- Al Gore -- can be understood to be arguing for a precautionary principle for climate change (though he believes that the chance of disaster is well over 1 percent)."

Here, Sunstein was actually criticizing the Precautionary Principle, and by extension the Cheney Doctrine, and most likely Cheney and company would bristle at being compared to Gore. According to Sunstein the Precautionary Principle muddles and stalls appropriate action on climate change. ideas he spelled out in papers, articles and books like Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle", and "Risk and Reason: Safety, Law, and the Environment", his 2002 book.

Sunstein uses social science research to show that individuals are susceptible to faulty conclusions based on irrational fear and errors in judgement like "availability heuristics". Sunstein argues that instead of the Precautionary Principle, the risks and benefits of action on suspected perils should be evaluated empirically. On global warming, he suggests cap-and-trade agreements and incentives to motivate players to make choices to limit emissions, rather than regulation. In a 2008 Boston Globe essay, Throwing Precaution to the Wind, Sunstein specifically uses the example of Bush's Iraq War as a precautionary tale for dealing with global warming:

"the Bush administration justified the war on explicitly precautionary grounds - that even the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iraq was so threatening that it demanded action. Indeed, the idea of "preemptive war" articulated by President Bush is a kind of precautionary principle. The nation went to war on the chance that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But this precaution is imposing a heavy price and creating serious risks for the future."

Sunstein warns against regulation, saying that regulation can invoke unforseen risks or even death -- banning DDT he says caused deaths from malaria -- a spurious argument, but one he uses along with others to warn people off the Precautionary Principle.

The "Cheney-Thing" on Climate - Something to Get Behind?

In the end, Friedman says:

"When I see a problem that has even a 1 percent probability of occurring and is "irreversible" and potentially "catastrophic," I buy insurance. That is what taking climate change seriously is all about.""

Cheney might use the one-percent argument to go to war, but he did so to invoke fear in the American public in order to gain their support. Suskind did not support the Cheney Doctrine, because it wasn't based in evidence and fact. Sunstein also criticized the Cheney Doctrine, comparing it unfavorably to the Precautionary Principle. Now Friedman incongruously corrals the whole mix to support: "doing the Cheney-thing on climate -- preparing for 1 percent." I'm not sure quite what to make of this kind of endorsement.

Alberta Tar Sands

Last year we reported that the Alaskan gas pipeline, touted as necessary for American energy independence, would actually be transporting a lot of the gas to Canada's Alberta tar sands", where the gas would fuel oil extraction from bitumen, an energy intensive, elaborate process for getting oil. The oil will eventually help fuel US needs.

Extracting oil from the tar sands is difficult, expensive, and dirty.¹ But as oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, extraction from the tar sands becomes a more economical option. Bitumen production increased from 482,000 barrels in 1995, to 1.3 million barrels a day in 2008, and is expected to reach 2 to 2.9 million barrels a day by 2020.² Extraction operations increased in area to 530km² (205mi²) in 2007.

Now a study from University Alberta released in the online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), finds that the tar sand extraction projects are dirtier than thought.² Previous surveys done by the industry found that the tar sand operations didn't increase downstream levels of polycyclic aromatic compounds (PACs) -- chemicals (some carcinogenic) released both naturally and through mining operations.

Schindler et al independently investigated water pollution from the tar sands. Testing water from the Athabasca River, Lake, Delta and tributaries, their findings contradict previous studies by showing increased PACs. The authors found that the levels of polycyclic aromatic compounds (PACs) are higher downstream of mining activity, and greater in the summer than winter months. They also sampled snowpack, where they found significant particulate deposits.

Currently, the industry monitors itself, and the Alberta government somewhat audits the reports. Schindler observed to the journal Nature ³ what many recognize as problems with industry self-monitoring, it's "sort of like abolishing the police and asking people to pull over if they see they're speeding and report themselves." The PNAS authors recommend that the federal government take over monitoring pollution from the bitumen extraction operations.

Reports of like this are bad news to some Canadians who are worried about impressions and bad publicity around the tar sands, especially with the increased international attention due to Copenhagen. As University of Alberta energy economist Joseph Doucet put it: put it, "God help us if this becomes like baby seals."

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¹ To get a sense of it, I recommend Elizabeth Kolbert's article in the New Yorker, "Unconventional Crude."

² Schindler DW et al "Oil sands development contributes polycyclic aromatic compounds to the Athabasca River and it tributaries" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0912050106

³ Jones, N. "Tar sands mining linked to stream pollution" Nature www.nature.com | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1127

When "Effective EPA" is No Longer an Oxymoron?

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the agency's finding last April that greenhouse gases "(GHGs) endanger public health and welfare. Jackson reminded viewers that the Bush administration EPA had found that greenhouse gases endangered health and welfare, action compelled by the 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, but had "regrettably" stalled on moving forward with the agency's recommendation offering only "excuses" and "delay". Said Jackson: "this administration will not ignore science or the law any longer, nor will we avoid the responsibility we owe to our children and grandchildren."

Having finalized the Endangerment Finding, Jackson announced some first steps:

"Next month, large emitters in the U.S. will begin working with EPA to monitor their emissions. Beginning in 2011, large emitters will - for the first time - submit publicly available information that will allow us to meaningfully track greenhouse gas emissions over time....And starting next spring, large emitting facilities will be required to incorporate the best available methods for controlling greenhouse gas emissions when they plan to construct or expand."

The agency noted that it had no intention of putting burdens on small businesses.

The Indefensible Status Quo and Republicans Think They're Deep Throat(?)

Last weekend we wrote about a group of GOP Republicans who asked the EPA to withdraw the Endangerment Finding because of the CRU emails. We noted their tone of desperation, for instance that they tried to make their case by quoting an infamous, non-sensical UK climate denier. Jackson addressed the skeptics, and noted that the EPA's action was based on decades of research.

"We know that skeptics have and will continue to try to sow doubts about the science. It's no wonder that many people are confused. But raising doubts - even in the face of overwhelming evidence - is a tactic that has been used by defenders of the status quo for years. Those tactics have only served to delay and distract from the real work ahead, namely, growing our clean energy economy and freeing ourselves from foreign oil that endangers our security and our economy."

True to form, last week Representative James Sensenbrenner(R-WI) had said that CRU emails were "evidence of scientific facism". Today, having worn out facism, communism and nazism and Hitler references, EPA letter writer Representative Richard Issa (R-CA) summoned fellow Republican the deceased Richard Nixon for his incoherent campaign. Responding to Jonathan Pershing's (U.S. deputy special envoy for climate change) observation that the emails were inconsequential and the science on climate change was "incredibly robust", Issa declared: "Richard Nixon said that about what Deep Throat had outed about the break-in."

Green Jobs, Pragmatism and Details

Jackson noted that today's action would also assure the American people, scientists, and the world that the EPA is serious, after eight years of inaction, about acting on the challenge of climate change. She hoped that recent EPA action would restore the "credibility and the trust of the American people" by taking an "enduring" and "pragmatic"

"step[s] towards innovation, investment and implementation of technologies that reduce harmful emissions...green jobs, reduced dependence on foreign oil, and a better future for our children."

These are great steps for the EPA, although we recognize the devil is in the details. Just as the work wasn't over once Obama won the election, the work isn't over now that the waiver is finalized.

"We can only marvel at the disarray." - Jeffrey Sachs on climate policy.

The CRU Emails - Fool's Gold:

Like glittering treasure, the emails hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU) beckon Republicans and climate change deniers who paw through the loot like pirates with fool's gold, pulling out one little nugget or another from the 1000+ email trove. I'm sure there's more than a lifetime's worth of out of context quotes to be mined.

(Graph: Instrumental Global Surface Temperature Measurements from >150 stations; image from Wikipedia Commons. More info)

It's a lesson some of us know and others are just learning, that given the slightest excuse, the deniers will get louder and louder by the day, despite 30 years of accumulated evidence showing anthropogenic climate change. And so post CRU email events and protagonists continue to gather momentum. This week the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and four members of Congress demanded that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) halt all rule-making to reduce man-made carbon emissions on account of the CRU emails. In their letter, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) requested that the EPA-

"conduct a thorough and transparent investigation" into the "questions raised by the emails". "Additionally, the EPA "should withdraw the Proposed Endangerment Finding, as well as the Light Duty Vehicle Rule, and the Greenhouse Gas Tailoring Rule....."

It was an over-the-top response to the CRU emails, but Sensenbrenner et al have been bombarding the EPA with this kind of stuff long before the CRU emails. Sensenbrenner is the former Chairman of the House Science Committee and ranking Republican on the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming, a committee that he vehemently opposed before its formation, at which point he saw that he couldn't stop it so he got on board to undermine it anyway he could.

The EPA's Endangerment Finding, gives the agency the authority to regulate greenhouse gases affecting US citizens health and welfare. We wrote about endangerment in a number of posts ( here, here, here, here, here, and here), describing the protracted negotiations between the states, the Bush and Obama administrations, and the courts, including the Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA.

The four legislators demand that the EPA withdraw the Endangerment Finding decision of last April and halt Light Duty Vehicle and the Greenhouse Gas Tailoring Rules, just when the EPA, after eight years of Bush administration shenanigans, takes baby steps to try and slow down our human contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. The letter might as well request the agency drown itself in a bathtub. ¹

If A "Climate Change Bullshit" Prize Bears Your Name, It Makes Sense That Republicans Would Quote You In A Letter To The EPA...?

"The content of the emails raises serious questions that demand your attention", write the four congressmen. To emphasize the erroneous climate science potentially informing their request, they quote from three newspaper essays - an editorial from the Wall Street Journal, a column from the New York Times, and a column from the British newspaper the Telegraph.

It's the job of Representatives and Senators to get information for their constituents. But what's their line of reasoning and who does it benefit? To anchor their letter, they reference UK Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker, presumably to give EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson good reason to consider their demands. Booker wrote that the CRU emails' "importance cannot be overestimated". US readers may not be familiar with the conservative Telegraph papers and they may not know Christopher Booker, but here's a sampling of his ideas (HT Wikipedia):

• Asbestos "poses no risk to human health and is chemically identical to talcum powder" [2]
• "Scientific evidence to support the belief that inhaling other people's smoke causes cancer simply does not exist" [3]
• Intelligent Design is valid and evolutionary scientists "rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions" [4]
• "2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved" and more, in columns, and a book "The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is The Obsession With 'Climate Change' Turning Out To Be The Most Costly Scientific Blunder In History" [5]

The UK Health and Safety Executive has rebuked Booker multiple times for his "misinformed" statements on asbestos. His false assertions on climate change are so well recognized in the UK that before George Monbiot wobbled uncertainly about the wisdom of casting his lot with climate scientists, he established the "Christopher Booker Prize for Climate Change Bullshit" with The Guardian.

The Christopher Booker Prize for Climate Change Bullshit awards the person who serves up the most climate falsehoods in a single article. That bullshitter gets a trophy made from what looks to me like a tin can and paper/styrofoam cup decorated with a magic marker - have a look for yourself. The "trophy" is made in "mid-Wales".⁶ You get a feel for Christopher Booker's authority.

The winner also gets an invitation from Monbiot to take a "one-way solo kayak trip to the North Pole" to "see for him or herself the full extent of the Arctic ice melt." (The Arctic video showing global warming here is actually in our last post.) The Guardian generously offers excursion support in the form of a little bit of mint chocolate.

The Gall (and Fatal Flaw?) of the GOP

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) don't offer the most countable untruths, so technically they're not even eligible for Monbiot's prize as defined, although Sensenbrenner has made such career out of hassling the EPA that he might be considered for a lifetime achievement award. Two styrofoam cups.

On the other hand, maybe we could redefine the award, given that everything is in "disarray", and all topsy-turvy anyway. Think about it. The EPA, after being thrown out to pasture for eight years, is now being served up demands by a foursome who cite as evidence the most egregious of science deniers, capable of provoking George Monbiot's most venomous contempt. But Monbiot himself fears that no sooner did he stake his reputation on climate science then the scientists left him standing on an ice floe.

Actually, there's too much evidence for global warming, no cache of CRU emails can undermine that, therefore the Republicans are reduced to sending a letter full of nothing. So perhaps Monbiot could redefine the prize and the four intrepid lawmakers could capture the "trophy" simply for offering the most nothing? The four would look very sporty upgraded from a kayak to a little round rowboat. But will Monbiot stand by his prize offer? Or will he throw the whole styrofoam cup and little bit of mint chocolate thing overboard...and throw back a pint with Booker?

The Myth of the Republican Rhetoric Machine?

Marvel that the Republicans cite Booker's opinion in a letter to the EPA. They do offer longer quotes from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times that would also be facile to refute; however, I was most impressed with the audacity of opening a letter to the EPA administrator with a quote from such a clown. Such is the sad state of Republican intellectual rigor in 2009. When scientists fret about their ability to counteract deniers, they sometimes overestimate the GOP as some well-oiled rhetorical wonderboat. It's not always so.

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1. Grover Norquist said said: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

2. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1381270/Christopher-Bookers-Notebook.html
3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1556118/Christopher-Booker%27s-notebook.html
4. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1495664/Christopher-Bookers-notebook.html
5.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3982101/2008-was-the-year-man-made-global-warming-was-disproved.html

6. I bet if these four won we could commission some Hackensack, NJ, USA made trophies, because I know that's important to some camps. Hackensack is nice now, like Brooklyn, they say.

Of Course Denial Is Not The River In Africa:

The upheaval over the climate e-mails is business as usual for the climate science deniers or denialists - not "skeptics", and just a word on that first. Scientists are by nature "skeptics" and consider skepticism a valid approach to analysis. Merriam Webster says "skeptic" derives from the Greek skeptikos thoughtful, or skeptesthai to look. However, unfortunately for all of us, the climate data needs to be denied to be disbelieved. There's too much of it over too many years from too many different fields -- too much evidence to be skeptical about. Meanwhile, while some deniers happily call themselves deniers, others deniers take extreme offense, saying calling them deniers is dismissive or denigrating. But that's not the goal here. I'm not saying deniers don't have feelings, they have valid feelings, and they may also have issues facing reality or other problems.

For instance, just as people who don't recycle may sincerely have difficulty separating cans from cardboard, climate deniers may be incapable of swimming. We can empathize. Swimming may become an even more vital skill in the future. Deniers may fear being seen driving an electric car, fear heatstroke, fear malaria, fear fire, fear tornadoes, fear heatstroke, or fear moving from Florida, which could be affected most by impending climate change with rising sea waters, temperatures and incidence of malaria. Fear may incapacitate deniers reasoning faculties or propel them to convince themselves and others that no change is necessary. We empathize some more.

But if we chance-it, do nothing because of deniers' fears, so we can talk about emails in the UK some more, then we're making a choice that has the potential for far scarier outcomes than facing the mounds of evidence and choosing to do something. And we can do something, we can change, we can support industries that solve climate problems. Or we can do business as usual, and suffer the economic consequences of that. There are all sorts of innocent reasons why deniers are in denial. Only some of them nefarious like fear of losing the vote. But denial for any reason thwarts problem solving.

Rearranging The Deck Chairs on The Titanic. Well..?

We don't necessarily understand their reasons, but we recognize the deniers' rhetoric. If decades of ice core data, Antarctica data, arctic data, temperatures, sea levels, temperatures and, corral bleaching, tree ring data, and more, all show global warming over decades, they'll say "but today is cold out - global warming? Hahaha". If there's noise in a 30 year graph showing an up or down trend, they focus on a one year time period that shows the opposite trend, and throw that out as "proof" that the graph is false.

Here's one video, just one piece of evidence in mountains of available data, showing the decrease in perennial sea ice (seconds ~25-50):

Deniers will ignore all the evidence, focus on a bunch of emails and call it ClimateGate, and get everyone to run over to the starboard side of the ship, when there's an iceberg forward (although, actually, eventually that won't be a problem anymore.) Or they'll say the problem is that the scientists weren't communicating and weren't being transparent with the data. Of course last year the Wall Street Journal was complaining about "too much" global warming evidence. We're not saying that scientists shouldn't have thought twice about pouring vents and frustration into emails, but this is the sideshow which keeps us all spinning, keeps us doing nothing.

Meanwhile, if the sea level of the Mediterranean Sea rose 1 meter, the Nile River Basin, home to millions and cultivated to feed more millions, would lose 6.1 million people to displacement. Where would they all go? 4,500 square kilometers of Nile River Basin cropland would be lost, and the World Bank estimates a 6% loss in GDP to Egypt, and direct GDP losses for about 10 other countries. 6% GDP impact would raise to 16% with a 5 meter rise of sea level. That's one area of the world and one river basin, there's many others. Louisiana and Florida will be lost to rising seas. California and Australia will have more forest fires.

And while many results of climate change are known, other possible changes could be even more catastrophic if they happened. This is the case with The Great Ocean Conveyor Belt or thermohaline circulation. Scientists don't know what the outcome of the collapse of the thermohaline circulation would be. They don't know how that would further change climate, which areas would be warmer, how it would effect ocean salinity. Would the ocean become a pond? Scientists can't predict, but there's a chance that it could be catastrophic. There's never absolute surety in science, but the outcomes can be different both ways, better, or a lot worse.

Deniers like Inhofe would be brandishing threats about emails if he were in hip-waders up to his waist in sea water, rather than accept the evidence. That's the way its always been and that's the way it will always be. Fighting against mult-million dollar "pro-industry" campaigns by oil companies and the people they corral with their ideas, like Inhofe, has occupied scientists as much as the science. So when some people, (including scientists) now turn around and say that scientists need to be more transparent, if doesn't ring true. The data has been there and still is. These 'scientists aren't talking right' distractions only derail scientists from looking for solutions.

What should we do when the world is in overshoot? An article in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books looks at depletion of natural resources in a world of ever increasing demand.

John Terborgh reviews "Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery", by Steve Nicholls. Nicholls is an entomologist and wildlife film producer who became alarmed at the progressive devastation of nature he saw in his perennial travels across America. "The World Is in Overshoot" communicates its message

"...on two levels, emotional and philosophical. The emotion is a restrained outrage at the wanton and often savage slaughter of wildlife -- cod, salmon, seabirds, curlew, beaver, bison, passenger pigeons, sea turtles, oysters, seals, walrus, and on and on. One feels it viscerally. And that drives home the philosophical point that all the excess and destruction were ensured by the cast of mind of the European colonists, the conviction that God created the wealth of nature expressly for man's benefit."

The plight of Grand Banks cod fisheries illustrates the problem that many species face. John Calbot discovered the Grand Banks in 1497, and today the adult cod population of the Grand Banks is 3% of what it was then, an outcome that Thomas Huxley certainly didn't predict. In 1883 Huxley wrote about the fish he called "Darwin's bulldog":

"I still believe the cod fishery...and probably all the great fisheries are inexhaustible; that is to say nothing we do seriously affects the number of fish"

Garrett Hardin popularized the "Tragedy of the Commons" concept in 1968, but the Grand Banks pillage started long before that, and would not be stopped by increased awareness of the issue. For over five hundred years the Grand Banks were fished by Europeans and Americans. Technology improved over the centuries and catches increased with each improvement, hand lines to long lines to gill nets to larger nets; wind to steam to factory ships; the "inexhaustible" bounty grew more precarious. Although the Canadian government imposed a moratorium on cod at tremendous cost to the fishing economy, for many reasons 17 years later, even the moratorium hasn't allowed the cod to recover.

The NY Review of books author talks about the alterations in Grand Bank's species like snow crabs, shrimp, lobster, skate and dogfish, and the damaged ecosystem affecting cod populations. Another damaged ecosystem exists in the "political tragedy of the 'commons'", says Terborgh. The fisherman of course maximize profit today we know that, but the politicians are also guilty of failing to pass effective regulations:

"The reluctance of official bodies to protect natural resources manifests a failure of political systems, particularly of modern democracy."

The article is accompanied by an Albert Bierstadt painting, "Among the Sierra Nevada". The painting is an interesting choice for the article. Bierstadt made trips to Western United States in the latter 19th century, then composed over 500 paintings, many of them depicting idealized western landscapes dominated by lush forests, plentiful wildlife, and majestic mountains, all bathed in surreal golden light. This particular painting was painted while Bierstadt was in Europe, nine years after the artist visited the Sierra Nevada in California, Critics say the mountains look more like the Alps than the Sierra Nevada, as Bierstadt

"painted the West as Americans hoped it would be, which made his paintings vastly popular and reinforced the perception of the West as either Europe or sublime Eden."¹

Other critics say his paintings resemble not Europe, but Arcadia. Either way, Bierstadt paints a seductive west, free of unwelcoming animals and indians, free of hostile mountain passes, and labeled blatant propaganda by some critics. His paintings encouraged people to go West, according to the more extreme view, which inevitably contributed to the destruction of the wilderness.

Terborgh, however, writes:

"The diminution of nature is a price to be paid by a society obsessively dedicated to unending economic growth. To lay the blame on the past obscures the lesson for our own time."

Terborgh rightly points out the weakness in pinning resource depletion on past actions. Past actions can't absolve us of the pressing need to act today. The pairing of the painting with the essay - perhaps inadvertently - also points out that sometimes we give in to temptations to paint the past more idyllically then it really was. Other artists depict the west much more harshly then Bierstadt's commercial aims ever allowed him to. Terborgh writes that Nicholls-

"turned to writing to lay out a sweeping panorama of what North America has lost in the centuries since the first explorers wrote back to their European sponsors of an exuberant nature so bountiful we can no longer imagine it."

Nature was bountiful, but some depictions like Bierstadt's were over-imagined to begin with. And as sometimes we overestimate nature back then, what environmental tradeoffs do we make for economic security that we may be overvaluing today? In relentlessly choosing short term economic security, are we also suffering from a bias, where the value of the most technically accessible solution which provides any modicum of economic security obscures the value of the environment, to our long term detriment?

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¹ Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West (New York, 1974), 51058, 149-50; Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt, 74-77, in Hyde, A., Cultural Filters: The Significance of Perception in the History of the American West, The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol 24, No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp 351-374.

Photo courtesy of WikiCommons: here.

Acronym Required sometimes writes about the environment, and we critiqued a proposal that applied the Tragedy of the Commons parable to antibiotics here.

The past couple of weeks have been filled with stories about scientists' public dust-ups, intriguing to all, especially non-scientists. Why are they so interesting? Maybe such sordid tales offer something beyond dry research results sexed-up by editors desperate to grab readers weaned on YouTube? Maybe the stories make scientists seem not quite so pocket-protector laden and boring? (We're not boring, really!) But since we all know people who slow down to gawk at accidents, others who link lavishly to tales of disease, distress, death, and dismal demises, perhaps those people are just as enamored, in the same schadenfreude way, to science bickering and wave-making?

• Ice Floes and Climate Woes: Antarctica is losing ice from the eastern side as well as the west, according to a study in Nature Geoscience, an event that could significantly increase sea levels. But that's not the news everyone's focusing on these days. What interests them are the emails exchanged between a few scientists, stolen from a server at East Anglia University in England and broadcast on the internet.

  Fox News and the usual suspects are gleeful of course, oiling up for a long campaign of undermining science and swaying wishy-washy people. Everyone else spectates, eagerly leaning into the ropes. The Financial Times avidly quoted 'both sides', first the "free-market think tank" CEI spokesperson who called the emails "global warming house of cards", then the scientist whose email revealed that he wanted to "beat the crap out of" a certain scientist, a phrase that one person sincerely explained as "a common pleasantry" among high-calibre scientists. Optimistic climate deniers are talking "smoking guns" and ClimateGate. But as Real Climate: put it in one of their posts:

  "if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn't much to it."

  "Probably" is understatement. Somehow the media constantly gets away with quoting 'both sides' without signaling to readers the truer story: One side has hundreds of studies - the scientists; whereas the other side is lobbying for some corporation, or out of desperate laziness. The science is depressingly convincing on climate change. But obviously people don't all embrace change, and to that end, the deniers have proven time and time again that hammering away with their fraudulent message will keep people consuming petroleum products.

  My take is that if you unearthed the email trove of any group - government, academic or corporate - you'd find some nasty, flaming emails, but not everyone sees it the way I do of course. Some scientists are calling for increased transparency.

• Personal Genomics, What Risk? Researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute and Scripps Translational Science Institute compared the results of two personal genomics companies for five individuals and found discrepancies in the disease risk predictions. The two companies, 23andMe and Navigenics DTC, responded to the paper in a recent issue of Nature. The two companies agreed with the criticism on some points and offered explanation on other points -- for instance about the differences between population risk and individual risks, and the importance of doctors' communication about genetic risks to patients.

  In other personal genomics news, Iceland's deCode Genetics went out of business, leaving it ambiguous, although we're assured that the genetic information will be protected, where their vast genetic data bank will end up.

• Curly-haired Science Populizers Spar: Steven Pinker popularizes cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. Malcolm Gladwell popularizes sociology and social psychology. They both have Canadian roots and very curly hair. Now they're sparring. Pinker critiqued Gladwell's, "What the Dog Saw" in a recent issue of "New York Times. Like any good manager or professor, Pinker offers four paragraphs of compliments before he breaks out the sharp red pen. Gladwell is a "minor genius", Pinker writes, but "unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures", and "frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring."

  Pinker says that Gladwell provides "misleading definitions", and furthermore, he mistakenly calls an eigenvalue an "igon value." The criticism may seem idiosyncratic to the lay person, but subject area experts see things differently. They're more likely to believe that imprecise definitions and simplification lead to public confusion. What's interesting is that such criticism comes from Pinker, who, being a popularizer like Gladwell, must certainly recognize the necessity of selectively choosing what to include in rhetorical writing for huge non-science audiences.

  Gladwell responds that Pinker "is unhappy with my spelling (rightly!) and with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism." Clever defense and countercharge - in other words, "Igon value" was a typo not a misunderstanding, intimates Gladwell; and Pinker is more or less an intellectual pariah. Gladwell also denigrates Pinkers' sources for being bloggers or online denizens: "our differences owe less to what can be found in the scientific literature than they do to what can be found on Google." Ouch, ouch and ouch.

• Fantastic FOXP2 - The Speech Gene? David Shenk provides his blog at The Atlantic as a forum for a scientist and a New York Times journalist to spar about the journalist's presentation of science. Shenk posts a letter from University of Iowa neuroscientist and Behavioral Neuroscience Editor-in-Chief Mark Blumberg, to Nicholas Wade's about his New York Times story, "Speech gene shows its bossy nature." Blumberg takes Wade to task for calling FOXP2 the "speech gene".

  "the distinct possibility that the mutation influenced a myriad of other brain and body functions that, in turn, affected speech. Indeed, given all that we know about how genes work - as well as our sad history with grandiose claims about single-gene effects on behavior - wouldn't it be wise for all of us to be more cautious when communicating these findings to the public?

  In turn, Wade writes:

  "The role of this article was to update readers on a new finding, not to review the history of ideas about FOXP2. So there's no space to go into the argument about the gene's precise involvement with speech and language, much of which we have covered in earlier articles."

  Of all our notes, and all the other dust-ups in play in the news recently, I really enjoyed this presentation by Shenk because it gets to the heart of challenges with science communication and the work that scientists and writers must do to get science across to non-scientist audiences without generalizing or leading readers astray. Definitely worth reading.

• Do Names Portend Profession? Yes, we're joking. But if you're into astrology and anti-vaccination, if you think global warming is a giant hoax, you may steer clear of certain girls' given names. "Isabella", for instance, is a pretty name, second in popularity for girls in 2008, but, like Arabelle, Anabelle, Belinda, Elizabeth, Isabel, Isabella, Mirabel, Rosabel, Sybil or Mabel, it comes with troublesome nicknames, like "Bella"" or "Belle", which can also stand alone. Bella is the wan female protagonist of new popular movie, "The Twilight Saga: New Moon". Bella loses her mind (according to reviews) when her vampire boyfriend goes missing. OK there may be worse things then your daughter mooning around for months over her missing vampire boyfriend...but what are they again?

  "Belle" of course, was the nom de plume of the anonymous British scientist, named after the movie, not the name "Isabelle", who blogged about her second life as a prostitute. News of the scientist blogger outed as "Belle de Jour" elicited delighted and scurrilous musings online and in real life. Online, BoingBoing posed a "takeaway debate", asking: "Is this good or bad for scientists/science bloggers?" In real life one scientist acquaintance told me that he'd read that women with Asperger's syndrome were often "loose" because they could compartmentalize (we didn't check his source). He then continued, thinking aloud, that "of course they might be scientists too", and his eyes lit up at his connection and all the potential relationships he would have previously discounted. So in that case, to BoingBoing's question, it might be good for scientists.

  But "good or bad" is not necessarily the only takeaway, as British columnists tell us. Rowan Pelling wrote: "Interviewers have been asking me breathily what I thought of Belle when I met her, as if my eyes must have been out on stalks at the idea of a PhD student turning tricks." Actually, it wasn't her "trade", but the excellent "quality of her writing", that "shocked" Pelling.

  To be honest, the parts of Belle de Jour that I read I found about as captivating as reading a Martha Stewart description on how to stuff pillows with barley husks, so clearly I'm not the best judge of this sort of thing. But columnists babbled on and there seemed to be no debate about her "writing" prowess. Clive James of the BBC gushed:

  "And what a female...she was Ernest Hemingway...a woman of outstanding beauty and brilliance...student of informatics, epidemiology and forensic science...a student of military strategy...the thinking man's dream girl...There is nothing this woman can't do, and you can tell by the history of her blogging...She knows everything. She even knows what informatics is. I looked it up, and basically it means information theory.

  Yikes. Chill, pal. Perhaps they edited my Scribner Classics Hemingway edition, but I don't recall Hemingway writing such doozies (albeit rare) as Belle's 'my pussy makes men cry'. So now then, (and speaking of names, we won't even go into the name "Brook[e]), back to BoingBoing, what's the takeaway for scientists? Actually, I would debate, not much with this flash in the pan story.

  But here's my takeaway from Brooke Magnanti. Magnanti works for the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health and studies toxicology, most recently on organophosphate chloropyrifos (CPF) used in pesticides. An abstract in Toxicology Letters by Magnanti et al, (Volume 189, Supplement 1, 13 September 2009, Pages S268-S269) suggests the EU policies on CPFs be changed to the more restrictive one of the US which limits indoor use. I find this interesting. Many people, myself included, tend to think of US policies for environmental hazards as laxer than EU policies -- but be careful about generalizations. Acronym Required wrote about US and EU policies, and the EU's REACH protocol here and here and here, and here. I know, science, far less interesting, sigh.

• Progress on South Africa's New Stance on AIDS? Ten years ago, former South African president Thabo Mbeki told the National Council of Provinces that it would be "irresponsible" for the state to endorse antiretroviral drugs, noting a "large volume of scientific literature" attesting to the toxicity of ARV medicines. We've written about South Africa's HIV/AIDS denialism and obfuscation over years, when, despite international and national pressure on behalf of millions dying from AIDS, Mbeki's health policies never budged and the African National Congress (ANC) leadership failed.

  Now, President Jacob Zuma has eased concerns about his intentions for controlling the pandemic by articulating a new path for the country. He recently told the National Council of Provinces that he would fight the AIDS crisis, and warned that the "real danger that the number of deaths will soon overtake the number of births." Treatment Action Committee (TAC), hailed the new administration's stance.

  Acronym Required previously wrote about South Africa's new health minister and her stance on AIDS treatment in "New Minister of Health For South Africa. Change Afoot?"; and AIDS in South Africa in "Mbeki's AIDS Legacy and Ours", Public Health, AIDS, Mbeki, and the Media, "South Africa: Peddling Beetroot, Courting AIDS", ""Not in Paradise Anymore - AIDS in Africa - Reason for Optimism?", Zuma Dodges Corruption Charges", and others.

• When Opposition is de Rigeur: In 2004, after the publication of "Mountains Upon Mountains", Partners in Health founder Jim Yong Kim moved to the World Health Organization to lead the HIV-AIDS program, where he initiated the 3 by 5 HIV/AIDS treatment plan with a goal to treat 3 million people by 2005.

  From the time that antiretrovirals became available in the 1990's, people in Western countries like the US and countries like Brazil, that endorsed universal public health, increasingly had access to retrovirals, which made an AIDS diagnosis for those people more manageable and less often lethal.

  But there was huge opposition to treating large scale AIDS pandemics in places like sub-Saharan Africa. The various reasons people gave for not treating ranged from logistical (transport over inhospitable terrain), to patient non-compliance, to high rates of fraud, to fear of Western drugs. South Africa's example was publicized and shocking but not isolated. However, by 2004 drug prices had dropped and the tone of objectors had softened, if only slightly. Here's Kim in 2004, urging the world respond to the AIDS epidemic quickly "at its own pace", that is, at a pace comparable to the rapidly advancing viral pandemic. The 3 by 5 plan allowed 1 million people to be on treatment by 2005, and today, more than 4 million are being treated.

  "For the activists, you must hold all of our collective feet to the hottest possible fire because large organizations and the powerful have a way of finding reasons to not take action. If you don't continue to push us, we will falter."

  A good message. Jim Yong Kim is now the president of Dartmouth College.

• Problems in National Health: 17,000 kids in the U.S. Die each Year Because They Lack Insurance: John Hopkins Children's Center researchers studied data from more than 23 million children's hospitalizations in 37 states from 1988 to 2005. Compared with insured children, uninsured children faced a 60 percent increased risk of dying, the researchers found. The analysis attributed 16,787 of some 38,649 children's deaths nationwide during the period analyzed to lack of insurance.

• Polls, Spin, Memos, and the Public Option: We previously wrote about Frank Luntz, whose healthcare memo urged defeat of the public option via specific spin doctoring and tested rhetoric last July. Well, of course with Congress chewing over healthcare, Luntz has been at it again. Luntz purports to have talked to some Americans who told him they want still worse healthcare with no public option -- the "massively expensive" option he opines with false, if resonant authority. The new memo reiterates much of the old one and it contains all the same language aimed at preserving the healthcare status quo. When invited to talk shows, he says that his polling shows that Americans are "mad as hell". And Luntz isn't the only one lobbying against healthcare reform.

• Evidence Based Policy - Abstinence Funding Halted Decades After Proving Ineffective (Sometimes Time Wins): The Obama administration cut abstinence-only funding, after multiple studies showed that it doesn't work -- abstinence doesn't change sexual behavior, pregnancy, STD rates, or age of first sexual activity. Furthermore, studies showed that abstinence programs routinely dole out incorrect or incomplete information about condoms and contraception, causing confusion and misperceptions among the very vulnerable populations the programs claim to protect. (Abstinence-only doesn't work in HIV/AIDS programs either.)

  A recent Newsweek article focuses on the sudden funding decrease affecting those organizations which burgeoned during the last couple of decades because of the federal money. According to Newsweek's article, some U.S. programs like Kids Eagerly Endorsing Purity (K.E.E.P), in the South still manage to get lots of private funding, whereas other programs are at "in a race against time to keep these people in business."

• "Beyond Yottabytes" -- The NSA Will Know Who's Been Naughty and Who's Been Nice: The New York Review of Books reports on the government's information quest:

  "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report..."the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named."

  NYRB continues: "Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be--or may one day become--a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story."

• FedThread: FedThread A newly launched Federal register where you can annotate documents, customize feeds, and search the Federal Register back to 2000. Not to be confused with Threadfed, an embroidery site.

• Health Map: Allows you to see various outbreaks like H1N1, and recalls like salmonella, by geographic area.

• Open Access How-To: SPARC issued a guide for publishers wanting to support open access, along with supply and demand side revenue models.

• Government is an Arm of the Banks: We know that the banks have a phone line to Tim Geithner. But in case you doubted the effect of that on bank behavior, or if you trusted there were no future implications of that relationship for regulation, watch Bill Moyers' show last week with Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (Ohio-9) and Simon Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Don't read the transcript. Watch the show.

• Telecoms are Agencies Within The Government?: The banks aren't the only ones with a disconcertingly close relationship with the White House. Wired reports that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is investigating the influence of telecom lobbying on the Justice Department's coup of winning retroactive immunity for AT&T and others accused of spying on citizens. EFF requested related documents under the Freedom of Information Act and the government refused, arguing that the documents were protected because they were "intra-agency", that is, telecoms were an arm of government.

  Last month U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White reversed that decision, ruling for the EFF that the Justice Department was obligated to release the names of telecom employees who contacted the Justice Department and White House.

• Is Transparency Is Over-rated? Is Lessig The Fifth Column?: Lawrence Lessig used to argue that culture needed to be free. People should be able to mash it up, he said, make what they wanted out of songs and books and writing. He founded Creative Commons, whereby people can use your work for free, with attribution if they feel like it. He started what turned into the Google Books settlement when he legally challenged copyright laws by pursuing the release from copyright of "orphan" books. At the time, he was at Stanfords' Center for the Internet and Society, funded by 2 million dollars from Google.

  Now Lessig is pursuing a different cause while he is at Harvard and on the board of the excellent Sunlight Foundation (biased, maybe, but I have no stakes), which funds projects to make government more transparent. Paradoxically, perhaps, Lessig argues in The New Republic this month that transparency is dangerous because people have short attention spans and mashing up the data will connect money to politicians in seemingly nefarious ways when in fact none may exist. The citizens, simple as they are, will become cynical, and government will fall apart. Something like that. The Sunlight Foundation disagrees. More later.

• Google's Fast Flip: You can browse multiple sites simultaneously. Small print. To note: Google chooses which sites participate.

• States Can Sue Utilities: States had tried to sue utilities for being a "public nuisance", releasing CO2 which creates global warming and the court had ruled against them. Now, as the NYT reports: "a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled that eight states -- California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin -- as well as New York City and three land trusts could proceed with a suit" against American Electric Power, Southern Corporation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Xcel Energy and Cinergy Corporation, all large coal-burning utilities."

• Economist Changes User Access: The Economist will remove much of the online content for perusal by non-paying subscribers, including the Table of Contents of the print edition - clever. Subscribers will get access to an audio version, archives and all content.

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Image from Wikipedia Commons

Better than Chicago 2016: ""Who will win?", they wondered: "Morgan Tsvangirai, the Zimbabwean opposition leader; two Chinese dissidents, Hu Kia and Wei Jingsheng; Afghan: Human rights activist Seema SamarSo; Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad of Jordan; the Western-educated Islamic scholar; Eighty-year-old Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Do; Colombian senator Piedad Cordoba?"

Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. The reaction, needless to say, was mixed, with the Taliban, Syria and Hamas weighing in, and praises from folks like the Mandela Foundation and Desmond Tutu. And where are the photos of the Weekly Standard staff members, who cheered when Obama's entreaty to the Olympic Committee failed to bring the games to Chicago? Snapshots of them crying into their coffee cups?

We think it's all working out for the best though. Olympics in Chicago would have no doubt snared and infuriated millions of people at the O'Hare airport we know and hate. Chicago 2016 would not have been peaceful.

Nobel Prize To Push the World In a Direction We Norwegians Can Endorse

But if you're feeling like Nicholas Kristof, who thinks that perhaps a prize for Obama would be more apt at the end of his eight years, "after he has actually made peace somewhere", whereas someone else should have won this year, know that all those left out are in good company. Foreign Policy lists other deserving candidates who failed to win in the past.

One committee member said that the prize should be viewed as "support and a commitment for Obama." In a way, the Nobel Peace Prize given to Al Gore and the IPCC in 2007 was a similar statement in its overt political support for one side of the contentious arguments about whether climate change was real.

Obama, charming, said:

"Malia walked in and said, "Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo's birthday!" And then Sasha added, "Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up." So it's good to have kids to keep things in perspective"

He said he doesn't see the prize as recognition for his accomplishments, rather as recognition for the goals he's set. The committee therefore rewards Obama for being very Obama...and nudges him to do more?

The EPA and Me

Last week Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson addressed the issue of chemical regulation at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The speech, posted on the EPA's website, succinctly addressed some of the EPA concerns we've had over the years at Acronym Required. First, Jackson reviewed the EPA's accomplishments in the last eight months:

"[A]s EPA Administrator, I was proud to be able to bring the California waiver back from the dead - more Obama environmental health care...We've hit the ground running on priority issues: first-ever national initiatives to confront climate change; restoring the rightful place of science as our cornerstone and rebuilding public trust in our work; revitalizing protections from toxic chemicals, smog, water pollution; and expanding the conversation on all of these issues, so that communities most affected by environmental degradation have a voice."

All these things we like. Jackson cited the EPA's dedication to science, public trust, protection from chemicals, smog, pollution, and she promised to listen to affected communities. Of course she listed these things as both short-term accomplishments as well as long term goals because quite a few of these "accomplishments" aren't quite accomplished yet -- but oh well. Her speech, anyway, followed the goals she set out for the EPA. She warmed the audience up with her likable personality and her biography of typical Obama-era public trust credentials -- dedicated, hard working family, public service orientation, significantly accomplished career.

And how she spoke to our concerns! She talked about about the EPA's recent response to the Supreme Court's endangerment finding. She recounted her mother's losses in Hurricane Katrina and how it affected her attitude towards public service. We covered Katrina (here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here). She spoke of the failure of the Toxic Substance Chemical Act to adequately protect us from chemicals, which we last wrote about here. She spoke about bisphenol A, a popular topic at AR -- one of our latest posts is here, and pthalates.

The guts of her talk involved chemical safety and again she spoke to us. Evaluation of risks must be based on risks, not economics, she said, eluding to cost-benefit analysis debates. Jackson asserted the EPA's need for authority to take action when necessary to enforce the rules. She spoke of the mishaps of Love Canal and Superfund sites, reassuring gestures since people like Cass Sunstein, head of OIRA, has disconcertingly denied the toxic dangers of Love Canal (Chapter 4: "Risk and Reason", Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002). Jackson noted the uneven burden on the EPA over industry to generate and pay for information and resources. We agree, the agencies are overburdened.

The EPA and Everyone

However, while at first buoyed by Jackson's upbeat announcements and the pleasant departure from the Bush EPA's Administrator Johnson, as I read on I began to question my naively egocentric notion that Jackson spoke to me, to us. Indeed, what will be the place of science? Should science really be the "cornerstone" of public policy, as she said? No, despite what many scientists clamor, it neither can nor should be. Granted, this very real point is too subtle for her speech, but she reiterated the very popular sentiment to approving nods, I'm sure, from the crowd in San Francisco.

But wait, before your applaud her endorsement of science defining public policy. Further along in her speech, she brought the point up again, but subtly changed it, saying that Americans wondered whether EPA decisions were guided by "science and law". Appealing to lawyers in the crowd, perhaps. But law is different from science, and with different outcomes often at odds with environmental science -- as anyone who follows the Supreme Court decisions on science will know. Here, the Supreme Court doesn't really understand the environmental argument that the Navy and whales can co-exist while national security is insured. Here we talked about legally influenced decision that forsook whales, as well as the legal finaglings of the Exxon Valdez settlement. The EPA under Bush used the law to effectively stall in every direction on the environment. Use science to inform policy? Yes. Use the law as needed? Yes. But, in our edgy post-Bush, trying not to be cynical phase, we'd prefer them separated by periods not conjunctions.

The EPA's Public Relations Jambalaya

The more I read, the more Jackson's speech looked like a veritable public relations jambalaya. She spoke to those committed to wetlands, spotted owls, to asthma sufferers, climate change, to those concerned about coal and gas emissions, to the Clean Air Act, to trash incineration, dioxins, pesticides, green chemistry, research, unions, medical professionals, public health groups, industry, environmentalism, to those who want jobs, fast food packaging, to unborn children, African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and postal workers, as well as everyone who emails public comments to the EPA or who's concerned about health care and health.

It sounds like public relations to me. Not that we don't want to believe in the EPA's intentions. And the EPA should be far more visible with its message. But we know that promises on a podium cannot foretell the outcome of all the very hard policy work that needs to be done before something can be called an accomplishment.

We felt like we had our expectations in line when we reported on Obama's ambitious announcements for the environment, in which we jestingly placed the fairy and wand image to the right above. Our realism last November (no, not cynicism), assured that we were not disappointed with the Obama administration as so many others now are. We know that Obama administration speeches are not promises -- they're just speeches.

So we see Jackson's speech as a marketing tool, and conversation generator but not a public policy statement. The goals of business were largely missing from the speech, perhaps because business doesn't need reassuring or because they're already sitting at the EPA's table. (Cynical or realistic?)

In keeping with the goal to restore public trust and provide information, after the speech, the EPA sent out another press release about Jackson's talk. "Leaders Praise EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson's Plans for Chemical Reform", the agency applauded.

• In the Beginning...Mini-T: Before Homo sapiens, before meteors annihilated Tyrannosaurus rex, before that massive dinosaur bounded over the earth, a smaller, similar looking dinosaur existed. Raptorex kriegsteini had 1/90th the body mass of the ~2.5 ton T.rex and lived about 65 million years earlier. A raptorex fossil found in China had the same body features as T. rex and scientists think that the specialized predatory morphology -- large jaw, small front legs, powerful back legs -- grew larger in future generations, evolving to become T. rex. The photo is of a T. rex is from Wikipedia Commons.

New Science Journalism: Futurity formally launched September 15. Futurity, not to be confused with "Singularity", is a collective on-line publication effort by leading research universities. The universities will promote their science accomplishments and fill the gaps of dwindling newspaper science coverage. Articles will be submitted by members of the Association of American Universities (AAU), with Stanford, University of Rochester, and Duke leading the effort. Critics point out that aggregating news generated by University PR departments (20% fact, 80% big story?) won't provide readers the same unbiased perspective as proper journalism coverage. True, but we can't ignore the fact that a significant amount of science coverage consists of press releases anyway.

• Swine Flu Fallout: The H1N1 pandemic not only causes havoc for humans who fall ill, college campuses trying to manage the illnesses, and health workers. The pandemic effects society and economy in ways you don't necessarily think of. Consider, for instance:

  1.) Egypt can't keep up with its street garbage. As we wrote earlier this year, Egypt set out to kill all the pigs in the country, an unwarranted action. Many belonged to Christian herders whose pigs cleaned the streets of millions of tons of organic waste per year. Now parts of Cairo are knee deep in garbage.

  2.) Pork belly futures, which fell from 89 in April 2009 to 40 in August 2009, have now rebounded to their previous high.

• A Chance To Recalculate the Bush Ozone Ruling?: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced last week that it would reexamine the standard set by the Bush administration for ozone which had motivated states to sue the EPA. Ozone is a health hazard at certain levels, and in 2008, the agency set a new standard at 75 parts per billion (ppb), down from 84 ppm. The EPA heralded this as a life-saving improvement, but according to science advisors of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), only 60-70 ppm will prevent deaths.

  Susan Dudley headed the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in 2008 when the Bush administration decision was made. OIRA influenced the outcome of Bush's ozone ruling by sending a series of memos to the EPA impeding the ozone ruling and killing a secondary standard which would have triggered certain safety measures in some weather conditions. We wrote last year how Susan Dudley had argued on behalf of industry prior to her tenure at OIRA, that "smog was beneficial because it protected individuals from ultraviolet radiation, and that since asthma rates were associated with poverty, a smog ruling would have the 'perverse effect' of costing communities money, which would in turn increase poverty and asthma." Her's was a twisted cost-benefit analysis.

  Now Cass Sunstein heads OIRA. According to the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the EPA has calculated the benefits to society from the now thriving environmental industry and determined that those monetary benefits outweigh the costs of the standard. So is cost-benefit ok when the outcome favors the politics you prefer?

• Team Players: Researchers at Oxford University published a paper in Biology Letters reporting that more elevated endorphin levels associated with team sports like rowing than single player activities.

• Justice Department On Proposed Google Books Settlement The Justice Department said Friday that the settlement needed changes to address copyright, class-action and antitrust issues, and urged the Federal Court to reject the settlement. However, the government added that current discussions between the parties were productive and should continue.

• EPA and NHTSA, Together At Last, Overlapping: The EPA also proposed new carbon dioxide emissions this week, in concert with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The new rule would lower fleet standards to 35.5 mpg by 2016. As well, cars would be allowed to emit 250 grams of CO2/mile by 2012, as opposed to the current rule of 265 grams of CO2/mile. The Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, Inc. (AIAM), and Senator Markey praised the agencies for their collective effort.

  A coordinated effort from the two agencies that oversee automobile emissions and mileage efficiency has long been a goal of industry and policy makers, though a goal sometimes cynically pursued. We also wrote about EPA/NHTSA overlap here and here. The standards will cover model years 2012 through 2016, and as the Obama administration bills it: "the automobile manufacturers would be able to build a single, light-duty national fleet that satisfies all federal requirements as well as the standards of California and other states."

• Migraines: McCain's Bane: Cindy McCain is heading to Congress, reports the New Yorker, to lobby for money to study migraine headaches. And you thought perhaps you'd heard the last of McCain science research jokes? She told the American Headache Society (AHS):

  "For the first time in my life, I'm going to go to Congress, and I'm going to be tenacious and be forceful and be honest and tell them that it's time. If you can give five million dollars to study flatulence in cows and its effects on the ozone layer, you can give me some money for migraine research."

  Migraines are, of course, a debilitating problem -- that's no joke. As McCain details in her talks, migraine headaches are sometimes set off by "triggers" -- foods like chocolate, or particular odors or chemicals. McCain reports that her company's beer, Stella Artois, contains sulfites "out the wazoo" that trigger her headaches. Travel is full of trouble. Sometimes a perfume bottle breaks and the debilitating noxious fumes cause her to repack her bags and fly home. Foreign food smells prove treacherous too, she says: "...like...forgive me, but the scent of cooking dog"

  She didn't say which countries serve the offensive "dog", often a subject of nasty rumors, or how one can tell that it's not chicken, water buffalo, or frog. But fortunate she is then, that her role is the ambassador of headaches not the ambassador of smoothing international relations with her would-have-been President husband.

Update: 9/11/09: Cass Sunstein, subject of the note below, was nominated to the OIRA post. The list of Yeas and Nays from yesterday's vote is here.

• Scientist says Nerds are Happy: The New York Times Sunday op-ed section featured advice from educators to students. Nancy Hopkins wrote:

  "Passion is the mysterious force behind nearly every scientific breakthrough. Perhaps it's because without it you might never be able to tolerate the huge amount of hard work and frustration that scientific discovery entails...For the next four years you will get to poke around the corridors of your college, listen to any lecture you choose, work in a lab...You may be the person who constructs a new biological species, or figures out how to stop global warming, or aging. Maybe you'll discover life on another planet..." More here.

• China Surges Ahead With Solar: Inner Mongolia in China will be the location of the world's largest solar facility. China is working with the US company First Solar. The new solar farm is due for completion in 5 years and will generate 2 gigawatts of energy by 2019. Plans are also in the works in India and the US for other giant solar facilities.

• Awesome Hubble Photos: NASA upgraded the 19 year old Hubble telescope this summer and released photos that showed impressive improvements due to the upgrade. Compare the Omega Centauri starfield from 2002 to a recent one taken after the scientists completed the Hubble renovations. The photo to the left is a from the planetary nebula NGC 6302 -- a dying star in the middle -- also known as the "Butterfly Nebula".

• Phoenicopterus ruber falsus: Madison, Wisconsin has named the pink plastic flamingo the city's bird, in honor of a college prank from 30 years ago which Alderwoman Marsha Rummel said "signifies something that makes us a very special place" and "captured in our imaginations forever." Why worry about endangered species when there's plastic so real politicians lose their minds?

• Constitution Day: Federal law now requires that schools receiving federal funding offer an education day to celebrate the signing of the Constitution. September 17th, which used to be called Citizenship Day, was renamed Constitution Day and the education requirement added to the 2004 Omnibus Spending Act by Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV). Wikipedia suggests that the holiday began as I Am American Day, a May holiday designated by Congress in 1940 after being championed by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Now that newspapers are dying and some Americans are going cuckoo, it seems like a fine time to reinvigorate the holiday. It's a shame that some hosts on certain television networks aren't required to take a refresher course.

• Nudge in Action Despite Opposition to Sunstein: We previously wrote about the preposterous protest of Cass Sunstein's nomination not because of his cost-benefit analysis views (.pdf), but because hunting enthusiasts fear he's too enthusiastic about animal rights. They continue to foam at the mouth oppose his nomination for the same ill-conceived reasons we noted before. But yesterday, despite efforts of Glenn Beck to derail the Obama administration and move the "conversation" to the right towards McCarthyism, Democrats pushed Sunstein's nomination forward.

  Even as opposition foot-dragging continues (an anonymous third Senator has apparently placed another hold on the nomination), Sunstein isn't languishing idle. With more two books published since his nomination, his influence can also be seen in Obama administration policy changes such as the retirement savings plan changes, announced by the President on Labor Day.

• Media Wars: A number of "11th-hour filers" are challenging the Google book deal, including Germany and France. The head of the US copyright office expressed reservations. At a recent Google Books conference, James Love said that Google benefits from people's perception that if Google makes it it must be free and good, and if it were called (I paraphrase) AnyOtherCorporation Book Deal, it would have never progressed this far. People aren't consoled by the Google image as the lovable, do no evil, benevolent adopter of just a small number of orphan books. But was copyright really meant to extend life plus 70 years? In the interest of the public, hopefully they'll settle on the "right" book deal.

• Clues to Potato Blight: Scientists collaborating from 36 institutions across the globe completed sequencing the water mold responsible for late blight and the Irish Great Famine of 1840's-1850's. Phytophthora infestans consumes the plant's leaves and tubers and just as it wiped out potato crops in the 19th century, today the mold causes ~$6.7 billion dollars of damage annually to tomatoes, potatoes and other crops.

  Researchers identified genes that may help the organism evade scientists fight against the costly blight, and also found that about 75% of the genome contained repeat sections of DNA called transposons. Transposons duplicate and jump from one section of the genome to another, where they can disrupt genes and introduce mutations. This could allow the organism to adapt and evolve more quickly and continue to cause havoc in potato crops despite scientists' best efforts to engineer blight resistant crops.

  The part of the genome that contains the transposons also contains genes that code proteins responsible for virulence. Researchers theorize that the instability of this greatly expanded and rapidly changing part of the genome gives P. infestans its lethal power. The sequence data will help scientists understand the mold in order to prevent the destructive blight. Nature published the report: 9 September 2009 | doi:10.1038/nature08358.

REACH in the EU: Model for TSCA?

Governments regulate chemicals to help keep citizens safe from toxins that would otherwise pollute their food, drink, and air. But such regulations are difficult to pass because of course some parties will always claim that the regulation will cost taxpayers, will cost jobs, and will inflict mortal wounds to the economy. In this challenging environment, EU and US agencies are now working to strengthen historically weak chemical oversight. Press recently covered a Nature article that projected much higher costs for the EU's oversight plan and predicted the necessity of extraordinary numbers of lab animals for toxicity tests. Nature is a respected science journal, not predictably partisan venue like, say, the Wall Street Journal editorial page or the Socialist Worker. But critics including an EU agency and the Environmental Defense Fund point out flawed reasoning and familiar marks of bias in this Nature paper, flaws not highlighted in the popular press. ¹

As we wrote in our last post, efforts to regulate bisphenol A may be in process, but a larger issue persists in the number of chemicals with unknown safety profiles that we're subjected to. In the US, some chemicals can enter the market with minimal government testing and 60,000 chemicals were grandfathered in under the US Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976. To be clear, not all of these grandfathered chemicals are on the market, and many are safe -- but some aren't -- which ones?

Toxicologists have long argued for an overhaul of TSCA, known in some circles as the "Toxic Substances Conversation Act" by those who think it serves the needs of the chemical industry all too well. Asbestos, for instance, remains on the market because the EPA can not use TSCA (.doc download) to ban most asbestos products, regardless of documented health risks.

On the European front, a newer regime for testing chemicals called REACH (registration, evaluation,authorization and restriction of chemical substances) promises more complete oversight of chemicals in the EU than TSCA in the US. But REACH has its own complex goals and challenges, as we described here and here. And like TSCA in the US, the European program has its foes.

REACH: Smelling A Rat in the EU?

REACH underwent significant changes in the face of the chemical industry pressure before its implementation. Companies continue to agitate about the costs of REACH and the European Chemical Agency (ECHA) and the European Commission continue to reassure the public by reiterating their cost estimates.

Recently, toxicologists introduced a new wrinkle. Thomas Hartung, from John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and chemisty consultant Costanza Rovida caused a stir by estimating not only huge unpredicted costs for REACH, but for predicting that REACH regulations would require millions more lab animals than the EU had calculated. Their Nature article referred to their analysis in the less well known journal ALTEX. They claim most REACH overruns would stem from reproductive testing, and said the program would use:

"54 million vertebrate animals and cost 9.5 billion... This is 20 times more animals and 6 times the costs of the official estimates. By comparison, some 90,000 animals are currently used every year for testing new chemicals in Europe, costing the industry some 60 million per year."

You don't need to be an animal activist to recoil at costly regulations that might waste every last vertebrate lab animal in Europe and more -- a reaction that their study could provoke. But suppose the authors didn't calculate correctly?

The Environmental Defense Fund's Richard Denison et al. comb through the Nature and ALTEX calculations and dispute pretty much every the calculation Hartung and Rovida make, starting with the estimates of the number of chemicals in use, moving on to the numbers for chemicals pre-registered, likely to be registered, the numbers of rats needed, and the associated costs. Denison concludes:

"As noted at the start, this study has used numerous demonstrably false or highly questionable assumptions, one piled on another, to grossly inflate the number of chemicals requiring testing under REACH, and the number of animals involved."

ECHA comes to basically the same conclusion, and notes that "the real figures are more likely to be the ones assessed and published when the new chemicals legislation (REACH) was prepared and negotiated."

The Opportunities of Lax Oversight?

Given that Denison's estimates and the numbers originally estimated by ECHA were a fraction of Hartung's estimates, the reader may ask -- "Which is it? Are there hundreds of thousands of unknown chemicals that need to be tested? Tens of thousands? Thousands? Why don't scientists know?" And that's the point. As REACH progresses EU citizens will get better grip on which chemicals they're being exposed to and in what quantities. The current level of public ambiguity indicates the extent to which the risks to citizens are now unknown. But ECHA estimates that about 16,000 chemicals will be be registered by the first two deadlines, and that less than 6,000 of these will need full testing. The picture will get clearer as the chemical registrations are assessed through REACH.

In the meantime, the years of lax oversight provide the authors the opportunity to shock everyone. 54 million animals, some might ask (gasping)? The Nature article prompts that loaded question -- to which organizations like ECHA and EDF, dedicated to protecting people from say, being blinded by eyelash dyes, must reply with the uncomfortable answer: "No, actually it's only 9 million animals, not 54 million".

In truth, REACH is already committed to alternative testing like cell-based assays, and cheaper toxicology testing methods such as high-throughput screening. Decreasing the number of animals used in testing is a goal shared by all -- by the EU, by EDF, the EPA, etc.

When Chemical Companies Ally with The Humane Society, It Means?

Based on their estimates, Hartung and Rovida conclude that REACH is unfeasible and recommend halting aspects of it. They also recommend increased funding, especially in the US, for non-animal testing methods. While it's impossible to discern any motive for their study other than science progress and animal welfare, it's nevertheless interesting to look at some background.

Hartung runs John Hopkin's Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT), which aims to develop methods to replace animals testing. He left his position at the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM) saying, among other things, that chemical companies weren't involved enough (via Alttox.com). He moved to John's Hopkins in 2008.

Chemical companies are involved now. EDF's Denison points out that although the ALTEX study claims to have been peer reviewed, 5 of the 6 "peers" were actually industry representatives. Also of note, ALTEX is a publication of John's Hopkins'. Co-author Hartung sits on the journal's board and was assigned the position of North American editor in February. ALTEX is not exactly a neutral publication venue for Hartung.³

Chemical companies have historically argued that chemicals are safe without testing, that REACH is unnecessary, and that TSCA is good as is. But their cooperation is important to the success of toxicology programs, so in this case we'd hope that they've come around, that their concern for animals is genuine, and that their commitment to REACH steadfast.

But Denison thinks otherwise. He points out that the chemicals targeted by REACH effect animals in the wild too. So why the huge concern for lab rats, but not for eagles? Denison also notes "a strongly shared interest between the chemical industry and animal welfare advocates in undercutting chemical testing programs".

EDF has a long history of working with companies to achieve market friendly environmental compromises. Denison himself has substantial history with chemical companies who have been less than cooperative (.pdf) in collaborations with the EPA. There may well be a need for increased funding of alternative toxicology testing methods. But given the background of EDF and Denison it's hard to ignore their criticism, despite Hartung's excellent credentials and expressed support for REACH.

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¹Nature 460, 1080-1081 (27 August 2009) | doi:10.1038/4601080a; Published online 26 August 2009, Chemical regulators have overreached, Thomas Hartung & Costanza Rovida

² Even the chemical, pharmaceutical and personal products industries are dedicated to reducing animal testing.Alttox, an on-line forum for alternatives to animal testing, is cosponsored by the Humane Society, Proctor and Gamble, and the American Chemical Council.

³ We previously criticized the journal "Risk Analysis" which we called vanity press for Sciences International Inc..

Back when PCBs and benzopyrenes would "neutralize" BPA

Evidence about the health risks of the endocrine disruptor bisphenol A (BPA) woke people up to the fact that chemicals like BPA could be manufactured and used for decades in myriad everyday products like baby bottles, food can linings, dental resins, CDs -- without being safe. But what does it take for knowledge of potential risks of a certain chemical to enter the public awareness?

If you talk to people today, many think that the public quickly learned about and understood the risks of bisphenol A. In fact a small number of researchers worked for years to bring attention to the risks of BPA. Chemistry trade magazines were vigilant in following this growing body of research, as were manufacturers and chemical companies. But the mainstream news media only sporadically reported on the research, and when they did they weren't above exaggerating the dangers. Neither were scholarly science journals above down-playing the risks.

In 1994 Sharon Begley wrote about environmental estrogens in Newsweek. Her article ""Estrogen Complex", reported on research linking environmental estrogens to cancer, feminized fish, lower sperm counts, and species declines in some ecosystems. The tagline? -- "Sperm Counts Down? Penises Shriveled? Hey, Rush, Don't Blame It On Feminists. It May Be From Chemical Pollutants In Water And Food".

Despite the hyperbole, the bottom line of the Newsweek article was the quite true but still ambiguous conclusion: scientist disagree about the risks involved with exposure to estrogenic chemicals in small doses. The ambiguity was real. In addition to leaching from the products we buy, estrogens are found in plants, food, and body fat. Since we're more or less bathed in the hormone, some scientists in 1994 questioned why, if low-dose estrogens were so dangerous, more people didn't show deleterious affects like cancer?

Dueling Hyperbole Fails to Ignite Public Interest

"Talk about an attention-grabber, the journal Science said about the Newsweek's tagline on decreasing sperm counts, shrunken penises, Rush Limbaugh, and feminists. Science then showed its own mastery of hyperbole by referring to the debate over hormone-modulating pollutants as "a towering thundercloud sucking energy from the humid air around it".¹

Science quoted those who disputed any cause for concern, like Dr. Stephen Safe, who "fumed" to their reporter: "This has been blown way out of proportion". To be fair, Science also highlighted the growing number of animal studies that drew warnings about environmental estrogens from scientists. But many experts the journal interviewed thought the risks from environmental estrogens were negligible.

The Science author offered creative theories to comfort worriers, for instance that "anti-estrogens" in the environment such as "PCBs-compounds being phased out from use as industrial coolants--and benzo[a]pyrene, a combustion byproduct of foods and cigarettes", might balance estrogens, by "blocking activity of the estrogen receptor or reducing the number of receptors".

Despite the alarming headlines in Newsweek, and Science's description of a thunderous debate, the production of endocrine disruptors increased unabated from 1994 to 2009. There was no outcry. It took 15 more years for bisphenol A to attract meaningful attention from politicians and voters. By then BPA had been on the market for 50 years.

The Meteorology of Chemical Safety Debates: "Towering Thunderclouds Sucking Energy"

In 1994 there was no clear consensus on BPA. Now that the public is significantly alert to the risks of bisphenol A, there is still no clear route to regulatory policy. Although some states and cities have ordered restrictions on the use of bisphenol A, the widely watched California regulatory board recently decided that there wasn't enough evidence against BPA to list it as a toxin. Board member Dr Carl Keen offered the odd consolation that the same organization had at first not judged second-hand smoke to be a toxin either.

Bisphenol A has many uses and is a significant industry in the US. As consumers take it upon themselves to replace polycarbonate with metal or other plastic, will the push for regulation recede? Will politicians be able to get off the hook? Will self-determined citizens allow chemical lobbies to pressure politicians to ease back on regulation?

For now, there seems to be continued momentum in some quarters to control the use of BPA. The California State Senate, for instance, has voted to ban BPA. The bill requires bisphenol A above certain concentrations to be replaced, starting in 2011, with the "least toxic option".

Not to be negative, but this begs the question: What is the "least toxic" option? Beyond bisphenol A, the bigger, looming, far more pertinent issue, is that for ease of life and great convenience, we use thousands of chemicals. But many have unknown health profiles. It took five decades of science and lobbying for a chemical with fairly disturbing effects in cells and animals to accumulate enough evidence that people chose not to use it. Do we have to continue on this path, waiting until the disputes around the "science" -- ie politics -- truly do become "towering thunderclouds sucking energy"?, as Science so eloquently put it, before choosing not to use just one chemical?

Stone, Richard: Science, July 15, 1994: Environmental estrogens stir debate. Vol. V265 No. N5170 ISSN: 0036-8075

Acronym Required has been following Bisphenol A since 2005. We last wrote about the Bisphenol A "public relations" rift between the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Trevor Butterworth of Stats.org, in BPA Rhetoric and Reaction.

Doctors Fret On Behalf Pharma: Pro Bono For What? No Free Lunch?

Vermont and Massachusetts recently passed strict conflict of interest laws that require certain drug and medical-device manufacturers to inform state health officials of gifts made to doctors. At least half a dozen states have similar laws. Pharmaceutical companies spent $2.93 million on marketing in Vermont in 12 months. Payments and gifts to some Vermont psychiatrists totaled more than $100 thousand dollars a year. Nationwide, pharmaceutical companies spend between $20 billion and "$57 billion per year" on marketing per year.

The majority of Americans approve of the measures. In a survey of the public opinion, 64% of Americans think it's important to know their physician's financial ties to pharmaceutical companies and 68% support legislation requiring pharmaceutical companies to disclose gifts to doctors according to the results of a Prescription Project survey.

The regulations aim to bar some gifts from industry to doctors and researchers and more closely monitor which doctors and researchers pharma pays. The Vermont Medical Society supported the new regulations, noting that trust is necessary to build doctor patient relationships. The president of the physicians group commented: "Gifts from the pharmaceutical industry can create at least the appearance of conflict of interest, so in our minds that has a negative impact on our relationship with patients."

Just Don't Say "Corrupt"

However, opposing the conflict of interest regulation is the Association of Clinical Researchers and Educators (ACRE), a group of 100 physicians led by Harvard hematologist Thomas Stossel.¹ ACRE acknowledges that some physicians or researchers may take too much money from industry but argues that regulation of conflict of interest is not the answer. ACRE says that regulation will encroach on the free give and take between industry, physicians, and researchers that has yielded great research and medical progress. Nature reported frustration on the part of physicians who attended ACRE's July 23rd meeting:

"One attendee complained that he couldn't buy a $12 hamburger for a consultant who had agreed to speak for free. 'They're giving us a pro bono service and we're going to ask them to pay for their own lunch?' he lamented." ²

Really? Should free consulting from a pharma representative or consultant raise feelings of obligatory angst in attendees? If a pro-bono talk motivates such laments, what guilt do free samples provoke? What about a vacation trip? Will a $12 dollar hamburger fulfill the obligation? Or perhaps just a few prescriptions orders for patients?

ACRE's Stossel objects to the gift ban because it suggests that physicians have "'have a corruption problem'". In Marcia Angell's January, 2009 NY Review of Books article, "Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption", the author reviewed three books on pharmaceutical corruption.^3,4 The books were published after the congressional inquiry into drug company payments that uncovered quantities of drug money flowing into psychiatry doctors' pockets.

A Senate investigation led by Chuck Grassley (R-IA) (pdf!), uncovered payments to three Harvard psychiatrists who received over a million dollars each over a several year period. One psychiatrist at Stanford and one at Emory also received payments of over a million dollars.

A study in 2007 by Columbia University researchers showed that doctors don't feel that their personal integrity is compromised by taking gifts or money from pharmaceutical companies. But they do feel that other doctors would be compromised by such gifts. Chimonas et al concluded: "Our findings suggest that voluntary guidelines, like those proposed by most major medical societies, are inadequate. It may be that only the prohibition of physician-detailer interactions will be effective."

Marcia Angell points out that although the cases highlighted by the media tend to be more extreme, most physicians (94%) do have some relationship with drug companies. And certainly many of these payments are inconsequential and/or don't sway research or influence prescribing patterns. But clearly many do, or else pharmaceutical companies wouldn't be spending tens of billions of dollars on doctors and research.

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¹ The group is now supported by membership fees, according to Nature and the organization website. However in 2008, according to a note accompanying a British Medical Journal article, Stossel was on the boards of several pharmaceuticals, and received fees for speaking to corporations and other organizations about conflict of interest.

² Willard, Cassandra, "Physicians fight back against disclosure rules" Nature 460, 556-557 (2009) | doi:10.1038/460556b. Also published in Nature Medicine.

³ The NY Review of Books received a letter from the legal representative of one of the doctors covered in her article, complaining about the use of the word "corruption" in the headline and text of Angell's review, because it inferred the doctor had been engaged in "bribery" or "similar dishonest dealings". The weekly disagreed.

⁴ The three books are: Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial by Alison Bass (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill); Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs by Melody Petersen (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux); and Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness by Christopher Lane, (Yale University Press).

OIRA Chief Job Requirements: Letters, Meetings, Farm Tours

Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) recently placed a hold on Cass Sunstein's confirmation to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA resides within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and was established by Congress in the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980(PRA) for oversight tasks like reviewing and setting standards for Federal regulations.

OIRA has a mixed reputation due to its expanded role in "the catbird seat" (.pdf!) over government regulatory policy. Progressives point out the agency's successful efforts using cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to delay environmental and public health regulations and to impede agencies like the EPA from improving air quality which threatens the health of Americans.

While CBA can be a useful tool for helping to evaluate regulatory impact, critics like Rena Steinzor of the University of Maryland's Center For Progressive Reform have written prolifically in opposition to the flavor of cost-benefit analysis previously applied by the OIRA and championed by Sunstein. Sunstein's books and papers contain ample examples of how CBA can be used to stifle progressive regulation, and progressives fear that Sunstein could continue the trend set by previous business friendly OIRA administrators John Graham and Susan Dudley.

By all accounts, Sunstein is the perfect choice for conservatives. He's even endorsed by conservative mouthpieces such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and lobby groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). Yet oddly, it's not progressives concerned with CBA, but conservatives like Chambliss and Cornyn who are holding up the nomination by promoting fears that Sunsteing will restrict hunting and agriculture.

According to The Hill last week, the move has probably delayed the Obama administration's regulatory review document due two months ago. The late arrival of the review document concerns liberals who question the president's commitment to government transparency and also agitates parties like the regulation allergic American Chemical Council.

Contrary to Sunstein's refusals to to meet with some journalists and progressives until after his confirmation, the nominee met with Senator Chambliss to assure him of his intentions and to be toured around some farms. Sunstein also wrote the senator a letter including "strong statements", as Chamblis put it, like: "if confirmed, I would not take any steps to promote litigation on behalf of animals". That letter apparently doesn't satisfy Senator Cornyn. Nor do Sunstein's words at his confirmation hearing last May when he thoroughly addressed the hunting and animal rights questions asked by Senator Collins (R-ME).

Hunting v. Cost-Benefit Analysis

In OIRA -- How Will it Evolve Under Obama?, written prior to Sunstein's House confirmation hearing, Acronym Required noted the proliferation of internet chatter suggesting that Sunstein would ban hunting and/or somehow restrict freedom of speech on the internet. Drawn from subjective readings of his work and comments, these ideas can be easily dispelled by purusing the Sunstein corpus. Therefore we never expected the paranoid musings of various hunting and meat interests to be given serious consideration at Sunstein's hearing. Sunstein's confirmation hearing proved us wrong.

At his hearing, admiring Senators on the committee voiced their approval of Sunstein to lead the OIRA. They all breezed through questions about how regulatory matters would or wouldn't change under a Sunstein's OIRA leadership and skirted over cost-benefit analysi. The nominee provided careful, footnoted responses. He repeatedly drew a line between his "academic writings", and actions he would take as the head of the OIRA.¹ On animal rights Sunstein said that he would "follow the laws" -- for instance the EPA laws in the case of the Endangered Species Act. Compared to his nuanced answers about cost-benefit analysis then, his views on hunting seemed clear and unequivocal.

Sunstein told Senator Collins (R-ME) that he would not ban hunting, which the "2nd amendment protects". He said previous comments were provocations that did not "reflect my personal views". Hunters were the "strongest environmentalists and conservationists in the United States, and it would be preposterous for anyone in a position like mine to take steps to effect their rights or interests", he said. Collins thanked him for his "strong statement".

Bounties for Bambies

Cornyn could watch this testimony to abate his fears, or read Sunstein's letter to his colleague Senator Chambliss, or read some of Sunstein's other work. For instance in his paper "Predictably Incoherent Judgments", with Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade and Ilana Ritov (June, 2002: Stanford Law Review, Vol. 54, No. 6), Sunstein et al argued that people "in isolation" make incoherent moral or legal judgements that lead to excessive jury awards, unreasonable public good valuations and ill-considered civil fines.

To overcome such "predictably incoherent judgements" the authors suggested using systems such as that devised by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to "establish values for injured or destroyed fish, birds, and animals." The system would appeal to those who like empirical data, but defied scrutiny. For instance according to their scoring system, "a score of 0-3 for 'eight scoring' criteria" gave a "total criteria score". That score was then multiplied by a "weighting factor" decided by the "demand for the species". Endangered species (those higher in demand, apparently) and threatened species got and extra $500 or $1000. Sunstein et al expounded:

"The particular judgements may seem a bit arbitrary; why is an elk worth $1, compared to the $1050.50 penalty for killing a loggerhead turtle? What is important is that the Texas provision actually offers an answer to this question, one that is relatively transparent to the public, and one that ensures that the various values line up with one another along the stated criteria".

So the arbitrariness of the values seems not to bother him, as long as there's a number. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department assigned "Mule Deer, M", a value of "$525.50", "Mule Deer, F" a value of "$163", and just plain "Deer" a value of $1. Indeed, the numbers make the valuations little more than a calculator exercise, but in the end, the numbers are the product of a value system that's obtuse and arbitrary.

To the point of this post, though, does someone who endorses this system as a "remarkable approach" seem like someone who would get overly emotional about deer and elk hunting?

In a 1999 Stanford Law Review article "Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation" Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein portrayed environmentalists as misinformed yet powerful fringe groups: "subcommunities whose members interact primarily among themselves", who were susceptible to a biased media and prone to exaggerating risks like industrial waste. These "subcommunities" were sentimental about deer and underestimated the risks they posed: (Vol. 51, No. 4 (Apr., 1999), pp. 683-768). The media, too, were irrational about the environment. The authors wrote:

"Whereas the electronic and print media are replete with reports of industrial waste dumps, they seldom pay attention to the traffic injuries and deaths caused by deer herds that have grown fifty-four-fold since the 1940s because of hunting restrictions, lack of predators and abundant new habitat. As a consequence, many people who consider environmental contamination an omnipresent and devastating danger, think of deer as the affectionate, harmless, and vulnerable animals portrayed by Walt Disney's moving fable Bambi." (emphasis mine)

Again, we'd question whether someone who portrays environmentalists as bewitched fanatics full of Bambiesque fantasies strikes you as a someone who would march up to your tree stand at 6AM, and order you down from your hunting perch and confiscate your gun?

Cass Sunstein = Melancholy Jack?

Despite his explicit letter, testimony, and writings, Chambliss and Cornyn choose to portray Sunstein as some Melancholy Jacque, the character in Shakespeare's "As You Like It" who weeps over a slaughtered deer and whose mournful sensitivity disturbs the hunting party. Hunting enthusiasts issue dire warnings about a probable Sunstein nomination. Publications like the Cattle Network and Pork Magazine ruminate about Sunstein's "radical" notions. Ammoland.com joins in.

Despite the craziness, there is a twinge of reason here. Sunstein describes himself as a legal "pragmatist", and he may also be pragmatic when selecting different points of view for liberal versus conservative audiences. Both conservatives and liberals are a little nervous about which way he'll lean, and with reason, since you could interpret his positions in different ways. Despite his pro-environmentalist statement in his confirmation hearing, his portrayal of them as "subcommunities" prompts the question: what does he really think about environmentalists?

Despite the apparent flexibility of his views, however; much liberals dismay, he's always been rock-solid consistent about the advantages of using of cost-benefit analysis to value life. A deer, it seems, is simply a commodity. It's ironic, then, and not necessarily the best omen for some species, that liberals can't be credited as the loudest complainers in the current fray.

And what are Chambliss and Cornyn up to, isolating what Sunstein calls "provocations" on animal rights, to hold up his nomination? "He is about as good as you can hope from this administration" David Mason, a visiting senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, told The Hill. What's their beef? Their complaints definitely attack the Democrat administration and move the center to the right.

Availability Cascades?

In their paper, Sunstein and Kuran explained the reaction of residents of Love Canal to the crud bubbling up in their backyards with the term "availability cascade". Humans develop irrational fears which are not based on evidence, they say, and those harebrained ideas spread contagiously among other susceptible individuals. These humans therefore don't fear deer as they logically should, but build unreasonable paranoias about toxic waste dumps. Sunstein often portrays environmentalists as caught up in availability cascades.

Considering the bounty of evidence against their claims then, are Chambliss and Cornyn, our elected representatives, along with hunters and agriculture interests swept up in such an availability cascade? Or perhaps Cornyn wants his own meeting, his own letter, to lead his own farm tour, or to extract some additional promises, and when Cornyn is satisfied, the next conservative Senator will step up with his own cabal of clamoring agriculture interests and batch of factory farmers. Or perhaps it's just simple Obama opposition. Or something else, we don't know.

In our last post on Sunstein, his nomination seemed a cinch. So much so that we suggested that people who were interested in public office could write both liberal and conservative views to baffle audiences looking to pinpoint ideological leanings. But we might revise that opinion. Sunstein, at least in the short run, seems destined for more meetings, more letters, and some tramping around agricultural production farms in hip boots (No? A suit?). So perhaps we'd suggest espousing more neutral views. All this must be a tedious distraction from the work of (officially) running OIRA and generating cost-benefit analyses. And maybe all on account of availability cascades?

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¹ Acronym Required wrote about the similar line that Sunstein proposed for assessing John Roberts' record prior to his nomination.

Acronym Required's not entirely neutral on agricultural practices in the US, as we've scribbled about here, and here, and here, and here. We've also written periodically on OIRA, for instance here and here, and here, and here.

Bisphenol A Rhetoric, Reporting, and Courting Etiquette

Her: Energetic, sparkly eyes, feisty, dedicated to good causes, tenacious, award-winning reporter, not afraid to color outside the lines, plastic interest for the past two years...Him: erudite with a charming accent, young at heart, versatile reporter, enjoys evening sunsets, long walks on the beach, gourmet food, lingering over cappuccino in the morning, handwritten notes...recent plastic interest. Both dedicated to a cause and a mutual interest -- plastic -- bisphenol A (BPA) to be precise. Could Acronym Required be matchmaker? Will amiable dialogue ensue between the two? Or are they doomed by circumstance to animosity?

I got home one day and was kicking back after work, reading mail, when I saw one a message from sender: xxxxxx@journalsentinel.com. It read in total:

"what do you guys know about trevor butterworth?"

a puzzle. a short puzzle.

A message that posed as direct, but was actually vague. Did they want Acronym Required to share some unpublished motherlode of information? Is the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's research department strapped for time? Did the newspaper disable all the shift-keys in the computers to conserve resources, forcing people to write in all lower case?

We've been incidentally covering Butterworth's employer Statistical Assessment Service and Center (Stats.org's)** campaigns since 2000-2001. We couldn't have been writing about BPA industry astroturfing here at AR since 2005 without reading their stuff. We also read Butterworth's non-chemical industry journalism all the time -- he's good writer, prolific. But he's not a exactly a mystery, nor are industry tactics concerning BPA and other chemicals, there's A LOT written on these subjects. So why their question?¹

Reaction and Rhetoric

Later that week, perplexing missive forgotten, I was enjoying a sunset, sipping a glass of Carnivale of Love Shiraz, when, perusing my newsfeed, I noticed that I'm not the only recipient of the Journal Sentinel's messages. In response to Stats.org's big report about bisphenol A toxicity being a media conceit, MJS sent Trevor Butterworth at Stats.org a whole series of pointed questions.

Acchhhh...I was hoping for a BPA summer vacation. You can read Stats.org 27,000 word defense of BPA, which we assume they got paid for -- perhaps by the word, or you can read this post, which is about 2,700 words and mentions their large document. (We're not paid per word.)

Here's the journalists' question #1 to Stats and Butterworth:

1. "According to IRS 990 forms, Stats.org received $100,000 in donations in 2007. That same year, the Sarah Scaife Foundation donated $100,000 to Stats.org. Is Stats.org's funding solely from the Sarah Scaife Foundation?"

We know what the paper wants. Like many before them, they think someone paid Butterworth/Stats.org to write the 27,000 word bisphenol A (BPA) article that criticized reporters in general, and Journal Sentinel's journalism in particular, since the Journal Sentinel did the award-winning BPA series.

In their first question, the JS reporters chose to focus on Stats.org funding rather than refute the article's BPA content (the chemical is safe, journalism is biased, etc). They're questioning financial information that probably comes from Stats.org or CMPA's 2007 IRS 990 disclosures, probably the latest year they had access to. Like their note to Acronym Required, the Journal Sentinel's questions were stunningly direct and a little unclear. The reporters' first question is in 3 parts. They ask about Stats.org's 2007 funding in parts 1 and 2, then skip to the present tense in part 3. This type of questioning works well for Stats.org, because they use such gaps to their rhetorical advantage, and rhetoric, not science, is their game.

Stats answered part 3 first: "Stats is not solely funded by the Sarah Scaife Foundation". Then, probably to show how "transparent" they are, Stats shared some 2008 funding sources that the newspaper didn't ask about: ...$100,000 from the Stuart Family Foundation, $40,000 from Mr. Paul Mongerson, and $70,000 from the Endocrine Society's Hormone Foundation." Is that all of Stats 2008 sources? Who knows? But Stats.org got to write "Endocrine Society" while handily omitting any mention of 2009 funding, which I assume the paper is most interested in since they focus on it later.

In question 3 the Journal Sentinel asks:

3. "Did you receive funding from any other source while working on this story? In other words, were you contracted to do this? Or did the Scaife funds provide the monetary support you needed to complete your report?"

Here the ambiguity is in the "you". Acronym Required assumes MJS's "you" is the same "you" as in question 1 -- the 'you guys' of Stats and/or Butterworth -- whoever is producing the report saying BPA is safe. But the MJS reporters leave it ambiguous enough for Trevor Butterworth to respond with his own interpretation: "I received no funding from any other source other than Stats." The implied question from the Journal Sentinel was: Who paid Stats.org/Butterworth for the report? Butterworth answers with "I", as in I'm just a contract employee for Stats.org therefore don't really know anything about anything. Slick answer.

State of Play

Butterworth answers all the Journal's questions the same way, wordily, repeatably, with careful rhetorical choices, obfuscation, and utter cordiality.

Is there something to be learned here? Sure. Perhaps that one can storm at organizations like Stats with punches and kicks flying, as many people have, again and again. But verbal aikido is the game, Stats.org's raison d'etre, and the direct assault method has routinely landed others in a heap on the floor.

Mr. Butterworth says he wants to "promote dialogue". Does he mean he wants to continue to pretend there's no science showing BPA toxicity? I don't know. But to note, it's a little strange to say you're just out to "promote dialogue", after you've accused a good portion of the news media (Discover, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, USA Today, etc.), journalists in general, and the public who reads the news -- of sloppy, uninformed, biased thinking.

But Stats.org insists it's all in the name of non-partisan, neutral analysis. To prove it, they point out that they've written for "progressive outlets such as the Huffington Post, Salon, and Mother Jones."

Butterworth didn't mention it, but Wonkette, a blog that's not exactly a mule for the chemical industry, met Butterworth and called him charming. So should future would-be hostile reporters at outlets like the Milwaukee JS cozy up to their quarry a little before firing off such blunt questions? Would a friendlier approach help the public relations involved with getting toxic chemicals out of our babies mouths? (So to speak?) This is what the current administration advocates, more or less.

I'm not criticizing the Journal Sentinel's methods, per se -- it's not like they're wide-eyed naifs writing a blog. That said, Trevor Butterworth's not the huge enemy they'd like to make him...some major BPA kingpin. Yes, he criticized the paper's reports and misrepresents BPA science -- but he's doing a job. His wordy response comes after the danger of BPA and the significant lobbying efforts to obscure that danger for over 20 years have been widely revealed. So Butterworth's basically keeping himself off the troublesome unemployment reports at the behest of someone as a last ditch effort to persuade someone that BPA isn't a problem after consumers aware of the problem? I'm not sure he needs to be "revealed."

Acronym Required previously wrote about Stats in "Yotta-Yotta-Yottabytes: Content Makes Kings, Print Dies", and various other posts on BPA, like here and here. Stats, as we've described before, and as reported here by Sourcewatch, claims to be a "non-partisan" think tank, but they are funded by conservative sources and consistently produce reports that fly in the face of science.

So, of course partly tongue in cheek -- why not try to promote dialogue? Journalists say you're supposed to empathize with your subjects -- (Or is that just long-form journalism?) Anyway, we can gain empathy by scanning Trevor Butterworth's site. You can tell he's a nice guy. Look, at pictures. Really, you think I'm getting paid for this? GO LOOK. Read his stuff while your there. First picture (July 13) -- a sunset over an East Coast port. See, he likes sunsets. Bunny rabbits too, I'm sure. How can you not have empathy for someone who likes sunsets and bunny rabbits? Another picture -- an intimate table, a fancy coffee beverage. There's a book and some notes -- written in long hand! It's like the setting for a romantic, General Foods International Coffee commercial. Awwhhhh....

Third picture -- he stands on a beautiful beach, smiling at the camera. Now I'm actually not sure if he likes long walks on beaches or not, because although he is on the beach, the footprints seem to go around in circles. Potentially useful information though isn't it? Note the glasses tucked into the front of his shirt and the hoodie -- says sophisticated, young at heart. Do you think he likes being addressed in letters from the Milwaukee JS that paint him as a petty thief?

This may be an economic match made in heaven too. If the Journal reporters had gotten the Pulitzer, it would be worth $10,000/2 -- 5K. But Butterworth advertises that he has access to a giant sandy beach, with that view, the terrace, the ambiance, a boat maybe? Everyone needs to earn a living.

Butterworth and Stats.org thrive in a specific political, legal and historical milieu, seemingly untouchable with ordinary reporterly methods of inquiry, but operating in a free market. So friendly dialogue can now ensue....He says his site that his email is butterworthy@...

A Gentleman or a Scoundrel?

The tone of the Journal Sentinel's questions -- reproachful, chiding, incriminating - is outwardly unfriendly -- though perhaps not unexpected, given Stats.org's assault. But moreover -- did it work? If the journalists got what they wanted from their pointed questions, Stats.org is so far the only one talking about it. The paper hasn't said a word, while Stats.org posted the whole exchange on their site. Butterworth wrote a pleasant introductory explanation to readers:

"Given the extent of Stats criticism of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's "Chemical Fallout" series on the chemical bisphenol A (BPA), and that the authors of the series have now contacted Stats to inquire about our motivation and funding for taking on this issue, we have decided that transparency and dialogue are best served by posting our responses to the paper's inquiries. Below is the full text of the responses sent to both reporters."

Not defensive mind you, just explaining their noble mission. Of course readers are left contemplating more than a few ironies, not only Butterworth's proposed quest for "dialogue", but also the illusion that "full text" of the responses means "full truth", or "honest answers".

In the 27,000-word article that Stats.org contracted to Butterworth, industry research takes a prominent place. Acronym Required has previously talked about BPA research and the stark differences between the results of industry research (BPA is safe) versus all the other research which shows risks. The writer criticizes journalists "who instinctively see a conflict of interest in industry-funded anything -- and who become even more suspicious when an industry funded study confirms that something is safe..." Butterworth says that it's easy for "journalism to fall into a formulaic response to a scientific controversy: independent research good; industry-funded research bad".

Acronym Required previously cautioned on reflexively vilifying industry research, but in this case, industry research in BPA has methodology problems that make its results very questionable.

Furthermore, if people have suspicions about industry vis a vis BPA, they are warranted. Acronym Required and others have long documented that chemical, plastics, and toy industries have for years funded misleading consumer advertising on bisphenol A, something that states are now also investigating. But Butterworth tells readers that, the "independent vs industry theme", is the "kind of rhetoric" that "has a distinct appeal for journalists".

Of course despite our opening in this post, we truly can see how such Butterworth rhetoric might reduce hardened Stats.org critics to blurting out non-sequiturs in all lower case.

When Size Doesn't Matter and other Truths

In addition to questions and answers, perhaps some results could gleaned from simple research into Stats.org's ample body of pre-existing work. The Journal Sentinel focused its uber-direct approach on Stats.org's funding, as many others do, but there are plenty of questions waiting to be asked of the decade-old canon.

For instance, look more closely at the statistics and science as presented by Stats.org. Just as they interpret questions for a predetermined rhetorical end, they redefine statistics methodology, and science methodology to suit their ends. In this case they insist that BPA data -- decades of it -- is flawed, and those who see safety concerns are misguided.

For example, Stats.org perverts the meaning of "statistics", using it to describe things like their own recent survey of selected toxicologists, which "found that only nine percent of toxicologists rated BPA as a high risk to health, compared to 26 percent who rated sunlight as a high risk and 29 percent who saw a high health risk in aflatoxin..." This reminds us of Trident Gum's "four out of five dentists" survey 30 years ago -- now familiar fodder for children's lessons.

For one more example, Butterworth asserts that only large size studies which can be funded by industry are valid. Not true. This idea was overturned by the National Toxicology Program in their 2008 report.

These are just two examples. Some of Stats.org's other parries could be easily averted, should the BPA "controversy" turn out not be in its final death throes -- quite likely. For instance Stats.org questions the credentials of frequently quoted Frederick Vom Saal, and in turn, the Journal Sentinel attacks the scientists Stats.org chooses to quote as possibly on someone's payroll. However reporters in the future could reach out to scientists beyond Vom Saal, to primary researchers on hundreds of studies that Stats.org criticizes or dismisses.

The "Rhetorical Advantage"

In indicting BPA journalism by the JS, Butterworth writes, "journalism is all about choosing what to report and who to talk to, and selective sourcing can make the innocent seem guilty and the guilty innocent." And that's something he does know about!

When Butterworth responds to the Journal Sentinel's flinty question about how long he has been interested in BPA, and "why" -- he sounds so innocent that angel halos practically hover over the sentences as he thoughtfully traces his survey back to 2006 of "peer-reviewed", "award-winning" reports, and "toxicologists surveyed" who rate BPA safer than some other things.

And we don't doubt Butterworth's account. But he also has spoken about his long-standing interest in how chemical companies defend their markets, a circumstance that adds texture and interest to his story. He told the publication Chemical Week in 2006 that 'the chemical industry has not been effective in promoting its side of the story', when it comes to "alleged health threats" and "educating the public", because "'the rhetorical advantage is always with the groups claiming to work in defense of the public'". As Chemical Week quoted Butterworth:

'"Companies need to develop a public information policy that is proactive in educating the public and tackling the claims of activist groups in real time. Most of the companies are like a deer in the headlights, and traditional PR is useless in dealing with these problems."'

So then we can't help but wonder for whom he speaks when Butterworth asserts now that the public holds an irrational mistrust of chemical company research, which he paints as ignorant superstition. Is he really speaking the name of science and statistics as he claims? Or are his recent reports simply a 'non-traditional PR' on behalf of chemical companies who are otherwise "deer in the headlights" faced with inconvenient science piling up in disturbing ways on BPA?

If people want to ingest plastic I've no qualms with that, free world and all that. If scientists consider the risks irrelevant, well than that's fine, plastic is handy. But if lobby groups are using rhetoric to keep safer products out of the competition, not only is that not good for our health, it's not good for business.

But by all means keep up the friendly dialogue. When Butterworth retires from this calling there are hundreds of others like him eager to take his place at the table overlooking a view of the sea for some non-traditional PR.

--------------

**There's actually a company called STATS which is a sports reporting company at stats.com. To avoid confusion, we'll therefore refer to the organization Butterworth contracts for as Stats.org.

¹ A central theme at Acronym Required is to explore problems in science or policy or medicine that are not necessarily best solved by that forceful economic driver, efficiency. We also don't believe that investigative journalism is well served by cutting corners. Given those conditions, we could have easily ignored the question. (As well, we appreciate journalistic etiquette, and think that if simple etiquette is really that challenging one could easily get help -- Microsoft Word's letter template, for starters, has greeting examples.)

In our experience, people on and off-line; in corporate, government and non-profit sectors; students, retirees, and professionals alike -- respond to gentler information gathering. See see paragraph 6.

• China Delays Censorship Software

  The New York Times reports that China will delay their rule requiring all new PCs to come installed with the Green Dam Youth Escort" censoring software that we wrote about earlier this month.

• EPA Grants California Waiver

  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted California the waiver the state has long sought which will allow it to set emissions standards that are stricter that the federal government's. We wrote about this in several posts including "Clean, Clear Air, Nothing To See Here, Drive Through Please".

• Bisphenol A in the NYT and Journalistic Fence-Sitting That Must Hurt

  Yesterday we wrote on Nicholas Kristof's NYT report about disturbing research on endocrine disruptors. We discussed what we called 50-50 science journalism, where you erode your science article by giving credit to the "other side", which could be a global warming denier, for instance, or the chemical lobby.

  Another way newspapers can practice balanced journalism is when a publication like the New York Times or the Economist or LA Times runs conflicting articles to appeal to all paying advertisers. For instance John Tierney's column in the NYT today, written by Tina Kolata, quoted Stats.org to deny the dangers of bisphenol A, an endocrine disruptor. Stats has the opposite (and incorrect) science information, which conflicts with what Kristof wrote yesterday. Thus the NYT gets 50-50 coverage, for all of those science deniers it wants as subscribers.

  Both Stats and Tierney are solidly in the science and environmental deniers camp. We wrote about John Tierney's denialism in "Scientist Columnists Sell You Short". Tierney has long expressed his devotion to bisphenol A -- "if they ever try recalling it, they'll have to pry [my Nalgene bottle] from my cold dead fingers", he wrote last year. Tierney routinely comes out against science.

  Acronym Required previously wrote about Stats in "Yotta-Yotta-Yottabytes: Content Makes Kings, Print Dies", and various posts on bisphenol A. Stats, as reported here by Sourcewatch, claims to be a "non-partisan" think tank, but they are funded by conservative sources and consistently produce reports that fly in the face of science.

• Climate Bill's Mixed Reports

  The Waxman-Markey Climate Bill passed last week by Congress received mixed reports on its predicted effectiveness. The National Resource Defense Fund sent an email screaming euphorically, "Well, we did it! And we did it because millions of people like you made their voices heard on Capitol Hill."

  On the other hand, Clive Crook, who we previously highlighted for his climate denialism, had an opposing opinion. Read his "The Steamrollers of Climate Science", for instance, in which he wrote that the IPCC report on climate change was biased, and what the world needed was some opinions from people affiliated with the Marshall Institute, Fraser Institute, and Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) (all funded by ExxonMobil). You'd think from that you'd know where he stood.

  But Crook, climate science denier last time we looked, said yesterday that the President was being too weak on climate change. Accompanied by a cartoon of the president ripping open a Superman t-shirt to reveal a cute little Hello Kitty figure, Crook said:

  "The cap-and-trade bill is a travesty. Its net effect on short- to medium-term carbon emissions will be small to none. This is by design: a law that really made a difference would make energy dearer, hurt consumers and force an economic restructuring that would be painful for many industries and their workers. Congress cannot contemplate those effects. So the Waxman-Markey bill, while going through the complex motions of creating a carbon abatement regime, takes care to neutralise itself."

  Conservatives argue that the climate bill will negatively effect the economy for a very small pay-off, whereas some environmentalists argue that the cap-and-trade regime proposed will not work, that there a giant loopholes, and that coal gets too much of a boost from the legislation.

  RealClimate, for its part, is taking a break, a little bummed out about the Groundhog Day aspect of the internet, where you explain the science that all the deniers deny, then they pop-up again. How true, though more a game of Whac-A-Mole than Groundhog Day perhaps. Tenacity wins.

  Joseph Romm of Climate Progress weighs in favorably on the bill.

Nicholas Kristof wrote about endocrine disruptors in his column this weekend. He cites some of the evidence for disturbances in sexual development -- "bizarre deformities in water animals" -- and accumulating evidence of the same disturbances occurring in humans.

Acronym Required first wrote about endocrine disruptors back in 2005, with Plastic Bottles- Protecting Your Baby, by the ACC". Hundreds of studies in the past 20 years have documented disturbing effects of endocrine disruptors, which are widely used in industry and agriculture to make the food you eat, the containers you eat out of, and the products that surround you as you sit and read this post. Endocrine disruptors act like hormones to effect physiological actions in species from fishes to humans. Here's some of the evidence Kristof cites from the research literature on different chemicals:

• "Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians began to sprout extra legs."

• "In heavily polluted Lake Apopka, one of the largest lakes in Florida, male alligators developed stunted genitals."

• Researchers found in 2003 that "in the Potomac watershed near Washington, male smallmouth bass have rapidly transformed into "intersex fish" that display female characteristics." Today 80% of these male fish lay eggs.

• Scientists are concerned with "large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys."

• "7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles, although this often self-corrects over time."

• "And up to 1 percent of boys in the United States are now born with hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the penis improperly, such as at the base rather than the tip."

• "DES, a synthetic estrogen given to many pregnant women from the 1930s to the 1970s to prevent miscarriages, caused abnormalities in the children."

• "evidence from both humans and monkeys [suggests] that endometriosis, a gynecological disorder, is linked to exposure to endocrine disruptors."

• "Researchers also suspect that the disruptors can cause early puberty in girls."

"research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans."

• "mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults."

• Kristof notes a recent statement from the Endocrine Society. The group of scientists says: "In this first Scientific Statement of The Endocrine Society, we present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology."

• Kristof quoted Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network, who said, "'this can influence brain development, sperm counts or susceptibility to cancer, even where the animal at birth seems perfectly normal."'

There's a lot more evidence showing that chemical disruptors produce widespread harm over the environment to produce abnormal reactions. As one John Hopkins scientist told Kristoff: "It's scary, very scary."

But in a completely curious turn, halfway through the article, Kristof capitulates to the winds of "50-50 science journalism". Here's how "50-50 science journalism" works.

1. Accumulate your evidence.
2. Make a strong case for your point, citing the evidence.
3. Then abruptly cripple your whole point, smash it across the knees, by writing a one or two statements for the "other side", thus appeasing some readers and advertisers.

Kristof writes: "The scientific case is still far from proven, as chemical companies emphasize, and the uncertainties for humans are vast." To be fair, Kristof's reference to the "other side" could be considered merely a polite and politic mention. "Vast uncertainty" for humans could mean anything. But even at best this doesn't line up with the rest of his article and all the evidence he cites. What about his lists of studies?

Scientists are "connecting the dots" he writes. I know this may sound trifling but scientists are well into the data. It's only recently that the public is realizing that this problem is real -- a realization that's more substantial, quite un-dot-like. Some journalists are farther behind, but again, the evidence is accumulating at a brisk pace.

My small reservations with his article aside, Kristof often takes on controversial issues, especially in international development, that are easy for the mainstream press to ignore. While coverage of bisphenol A is surprisingly robust, now that states and cities have initiated legislation restricting its use, the larger questions of pervasive chemical use without regulation remain largely ignored. Importantly, this topic has been very easy for federal agencies to ignore. Therefore, it's great to see coverage of endocrine receptors by an influential New York Times journalist who will help inform the public, who will in turn demand that government act more aggressively on chemical oversight.

-------------------------------

Acronym Required writes frequently on journalism that remains faithful to all sides of science policy issues despite the evidence, for instance Climate Change: Fueling the "Debate", "Science Editors Sell You Short", and Phthalates and Bisphenol A: Media and Politics

• Spies, East and West

  Beijing will recruit 10,000 "internet volunteers" to monitor "harmful" websites and content, according to the city's municipal authority information office, via Financial Times.

  The US too, is expanding a program to recruit spies among first and second generation college students. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the program started as a pilot program, the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program in 2004. Kansas Republican Pat Roberts initiated the program after September 11, 2001 following urging by a University of Kansas anthropology professor. Professor Felix Moos had shopped the program around for years, arguing that the federal government should provide scholarships for people to attend colleges and learn languages, technical skills, culture and anthropology in order to work for the CIA. The Obama administration would keep the identity of the spies-in-training a secret.

  The program has its critics. According to interviews by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2005, some professors were concerned about the Pat Roberts program and the anonymity of the participants which the government could leverage to essentially spy on professors, as they did during the Cold War. Others argue that the program could instill distrust of all researchers from foreign governments. Still others were concerned about the ethics of mixing spying with academia.

• East is East, Thanks to the West

  In other government spy news, the Wall Street Journal writes that Iran is using technology made by Siemens AG and Nokia Corp. to censor internet communications. The technology allows Iranian authorities to block and filter sites and perform deep packet inspection to monitor individuals and control information. Much of the Iranian system operates through a single node at the Telecommunication Infrastructure Co., part of the government telecom monopoly.

  Iran controls communications any way it can, according to the WSJ, filtering international connections go through a single gateway, blocking users in the country from accessing millions of sites in the last few years, and at times requiring bloggers to obtain licenses from the government.

  Under normal circumstances, all the west's technology helps Iran control the population. And periodically, there are more turbulent times like these, when Iran is "now drilling into what the population is trying to say", Bradley Anstis, director of technical strategy with Marshal8e6 Inc. told the WSJ.....Because if an uprising happens on your dictatorial watch and you don't have the wherewithal to look outside the window, then just -- use Windows?

"Flashlights of Our Own"

I've never been persuaded by glib declarations about technology's capabilities to further, deepen, advance, or promote democracy. The internet emerged to find itself embraced by early adapters who would burden it with such imaginary powers -- Free the people from oppressive governments, bureaucracy, and oppression! Ten years later it was preposterously "a collection of tubes", to some, but in those early, headier times it was known by its proper name, the "Internet", and bequeathed with expectations that would fit a newborn king. Just as preposterous in retrospect, but such euphoria is typical of early technology adapters for whom new tools present endless possibilities before the inevitably slower but deeper resources of government and industry upend such temporary power imbalances.

Thirteen years ago, David Brin wrote optimistically about the spy society, and eloquently: "Can we stand living our lives exposed to scrutiny ... our secrets laid out in the open ... if in return we get flashlights of our own, that we can shine on the arrogant and strong?". But it usually works out that strong and arrogant control the resources and the opaque legal cover to build and control powerful data mining tools (for instance), while we hunt around for a couple of D batteries to peer our way into the dark with a flashlight.

The internet is now thought of more realistically, just as a wrench is a wrench, not a "Wrench", or radio is radio, not "Radio". Extraordinarily useful and life changing, but not a spontaneous force for good. However there will always be faithful technocrats who claim that technology will accomplish broad feats as "improving healthcare" or making government more transparent. I am also fairly skeptical of these claims. "Transparency" that involves dumping data onto the internet will be meted out by officials with the same vigor they reveal analogue documents, and the scads of data will be sought after by citizens with their same limited enthusiasm.

Ubiquitous cameras mounted in public places, for instance, sometimes come in handy but don't come close to demonstrating the benevolent use of technology by society, that was once claimed. Criminals only too quickly develop cunning ways to outwit such schemes. Government and corporate power of course trumps citizens' ability to oversee the overseers.

We Film Them and They Film Us and For Just A Moment No One Knows Who's Who

Though I am dubious about the claims of zealous technophiles, these doubts are periodically challenged when occasionally I see technology used in a way that hints to the potential of the evangelists. The movie Burma VJ, a docudrama that's been playing around the world for the last couple of months, is one such example.

Burma VJ splices live video footage from the 2007 uprising led by monks, with dramatized film of related events like the coordination of the video jocks (VJs) covering the protests. Starting in August and moving through September of that year, thousands of monks and citizens marched against the governance of the military junta of Myanmar, until government brutally cracked down on the protesters by all means possible. The junta dispersed (sometimes withspray (perhaps insecticide)), detained, tortured and sometimes killed protestors, monks, and videographers. A Japanese photographer was fatally shot. The VJs for Democratic Voice of Burma filmed it all -- the initial protests, the tension, the unrest, the violence, the exhilaration and hope for better life, and the ruthless snuffing out of that hope.

The video journalists and the ubiquitous secret police secretly videoed each other for a while, before the junta, armed with more guns and the unquenchable drive for absolute power, wrested control of the rising discontent. Some members of Democratic Voice of Burma are being held in prison today, some have fled to Thailand, and a couple of the luckier individuals are traveling around giving talks about the movie Burma VJ. The 2007 uprising was subdued just as quickly by the junta as during the last generation's protests. Burma VJ presents powerful political commentary on the Burmese state, and current events in the country help highlight the awful straits of Burma's citizens.¹

Since the uprising two years ago, the government remains in control, drawing oil revenues from the pipeline and clamping down on perceived threats. The trial of Aung San Suu Kyi, following the incursion of the supposedly out-of-shape, asthmatic, diabetic American who the government claims swam 1.2 miles with makeshift flippers and 60 items in a pack, including a Mormon book and robes, is the latest charade.

---------------------------------------------------

¹ My only qualm with the movie is the dramatization. I don't consider myself a documentary "purist", but couldn't write non-fiction without the strong believe that consciously mixing facts with fiction isn't the best approach to presenting problems as believable. Admittedly, there's persuasive power in the director's technique, and no doubt the movie wouldn't have the power it does without the devised storyline. Nevertheless, its unsettling both that some of the scenes are re-enacted and that so many film reviewers seem to miss this fact.

Despite the paucity of news, people traveling to Burma bring back interesting news and projects.

Most people acknowledge global warming and understand that the research is correct and the scientists' aren't running some elaborate conspiracy. Sure there are naysayers, those pugnacious commentators and columnists we don't even bother naming anymore, who we wrote about two, and three years ago. Now that public opinion seems mostly to support the solid scientific evidence for global warming, fewer and fewer denialists seem willing to forsake their reputations or souls by refuting climate change. So don't you wonder what drives those who still insist climate change is a hoax? Do they get paid very handsomely, either by lies per column inch, by special honorariums for dishonest speakers, or perhaps by the sheer number angry blog referrals they receive in any given week. What else makes sense?

This week the Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory issued a report in Geophysical Research Letters, suggesting that the arctic is melting so fast that it could be gone in 30 years. Meanwhile, as the science rolls in, the politicians weigh in, and petroleum dependent companies finagle mostly secret deals to keep the profits rolling in.

• Wagoner Walks: A year ago we wrote about the auto industry pressuring the EPA to stall and obfuscate rather than act on the Supreme Court order to regulate emissions. When we wrote The EPA: Mulish Days, Staring out to Pasture" the auto industry had just posted 18% losses. All it had to offer customers was large, gas-guzzling, air-polluting vehicles at a a time when the economy was sinking, gas was expensive, and some families already owned four new cars bought with cheap credit.

  As the poles melted, we watched industry lobbies instruct the EPA to "abstain from attempting" to regulate emissions and limit its actions to identifying "technical feasibility". One lobbying document warned that the sector's innovation to improve emissions couldn't require "extra costs", and that if "additional technology" were needed, then the EPA could "properly decide to not adopt standards under the Clean Air Act".

  As it had for 30 years, the auto industry assumed it could hold innovation, emissions control and government at bay while continuing to build vehicles that benefited not the environment, not oil independence, not customers long-term needs, not future business, and certainly not autoworkers working for an ever failing sector. Rather its strategy benefited a few well-placed individuals and executives holding the majority of "shareholder value". In the end the strategy did little but assure US auto manufacturing expiration. Long ago the auto companies had become no more than magical slot machines for select executives, who quarter by quarter, hook or by crook, extracted huge windfalls.

  We concluded facetiously that "if 'the health of the industry' is truly still a goal", as one briefing paper aimed to stall EPA regulation stated, than "maybe the government's kindest move would be to shoot it, or drown it in the bathtub, or whatever libertarian types do these days with ponderous, surly sectors."

  This week, Rick Wagoner, the General Motors CEO who most flagrantly flouted common sense and economic sensibilities, abruptly stepped down from GM, under pressure from Barack Obama.

  Maybe there's more to this story. What sort of deal made Wagoner step down? What about the banks? Certainly a solution where Wagoner gets his $20 million, but workers and their pensions and healthcare are left dangling is not the ideal deal. It would have been better if the manufacturers had innovated smaller more efficient cars sometime during their multi-decade slide into the abyss, or been righted years ago with a few swift legislative kicks -- before major shareholders squeezed their companies to death. But if that hadn't happened for 30 years would/will it ever happen?

• Waxman and Markey Unveil ACES, An Energy Bill: On a positive note, Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) released a 648 page draft global warming and energy bill (PDF), the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES). The legislation proposes a cap and trade system to reduce US emissions 20% below 2005 levels by 2020, a more aggressive goal than the cap and trade recently cut from Obama's 2009 budget.

  The Waxman-Markey bill would require every region of the country to produce a quarter of its electricity from renewable sources like wind, solar and geothermal by 2025, would modernize the electrical grid, and would encourage the production of more electric vehicles and energy efficient buildings. Out of the gate, the congressmen refute Republican criticism of the bill. Ed Markey's office released their own forceful rebuttal to GOP criticism and called opponents on four "distortions" being forwarded by the GOP (more details on the site):

• "Distortion #1-Clean energy and climate legislation will cost $1,300 per family.
  
  FACT: The Republican "experts" who did this math should get an F for 'False.'"

• Distortion #2: Democratic proposals would cost families up to $3,100 per year.
  
  FACT: More fuzzy math from Republicans, this time by distorting a study by MIT. Republican leaders like Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) are attacking clean energy and climate legislation, claiming that it would "cost every American family up to $3,100 per year in higher energy prices"....The author of the MIT study [the authors reference] has said this figure is "wrong in so many ways, it's hard to begin," and today sent a sharply-worded letter to Rep. Boehner pointing out the inaccuracies in his statements about the report. The letter can be found by clicking here."

• "Distortion #3-There are great costs to transitioning to a low-carbon economy, but no benefits.
  
  FACT: Oscar Wilde once said that cynics "know the cost of everything and the value of nothing." In a real cost-benefit analysis, you look at both sides of the equation. Industry-friendly analysis like that done by Charles River Associates, commissioned by the Edison Electric Institute, grossly overstate the cost of climate protection..."

• "Distortion #4-The technology isn't ready for us to move to a clean energy economy.
  
  FACT: This is Republican pessimism that runs directly counter to American optimism, ingenuity and our proven ability to meet great challenges. History has demonstrated over and over again that if policy creates the right ground rules, entrepreneurs and American businesses find solutions that were previously unimaginable."

Serving up the necessary messaging with your energy legislation. But how will the bill fare?

• On Behalf of Wildlife and Forests: Last year we wrote in When To Chop A Tree" that the Bush administration was turning 500,000 acres of California forest into roads and thoroughfares for oil drilling. This was just the tip of the iceberg (so to speak) for the Republican administration, which had spent eight long years decimating protections not only for clean air and water, but endangered species and the environment.

  Even in the last moments of Bush's administration, we wrote in "The 43rd President's Grand Finale of Rulemaking" that Bush proposed to allow mining companies to lop of mountains to allow the refuse clog rivers and streams, and was permitting companies to pollute streams with factory farm run-off, lifting regulations on placing power plants near national parks, exempting factory farms from reporting air pollution, loosening ocean fishing management regulations, and doing nothing about oil refinery toxic emission control which Congress mandated.

  In some encouraging moves, President Obama has now stepped in on behalf of some endangered species like the flying squirrel. This week Obama signed the 2009 Omnibus Public Land Management Act which included 160 separate proposals covering public lands in nine states. The bill adds and expands wilderness areas and national forests.

• Meanwhile, Making Mountains into Molehills: But we never forget that politics is politics and not everything turns out just as you like it. The House of Representatives failed to reverse the mountaintop removal mining bill.

• BP's Solar Energy Burn-Out: British Petroleum (BP) -- motto: "Beyond Petroleum" -- recently cut 620 jobs from its solar business, which employed 2,200 people worldwide. Two years ago, we wrote about BP's econ-marketing push in "Green Spirit". Green spirit lives on.

  In other BP news, the Department of Justice, Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation brought a civil suit against the company for two 2006 spills from the Alaska pipeline. The plaintiffs request maximum civil penalties and charge that the company did not adequately prevent or clean up the spill. In a separate suit, Alaska charged the company with environmental damage and lost state revenues due to BP cost-cutting and business practices.

10-07 reposted as single post from Notes 03-26

Slick

Although it's been twenty years since images of oil-drenched birds (~250,000 initially killed) filled our newspapers after the huge Prince William Sound spill, the damage remains.

The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council recently reported on the status of some species in the Sound. Ten species are "recovering, ten are considered "recovered", and two, the Pacific Herring and Pigeon Guillemots, are "not recovering". The fate of many more species is unknown. We last wrote about the Exxon Valdez spill when we looked at the stated reasons the Supreme Court decided to lower the damages in the case to $500 million.

16,000 gallons of oil continues to seep out into the ecosystem bit by bit during rains. To address the ongoing pollution, the US Government and the State of Alaska sent Exxon-Mobil a demand for $92 million dollars to fund the joint-federal restoration plan in 2006, but then President George Bush and Governor Sarah Palin didn't press the company to pay up. The Public Employees for Environmental Safety (PEER) and Professor Rick Steiner from the University of Alaska have written the Obama administration and the Attorney General of Alaska asking them to act to collect Exxon-Mobil's debt.

Congress Takes on Bisphenol A

The US House and Senate introduced bills last week that would ban bisphenol A (BPA) in all food and beverage containers. The proposed bills are the latest federal legislation to try to curb the used of BPA, even as production of the chemical continues to increase worldwide.

Studies conducted by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) have found that bisphenol A is found in 92.6% of people tested. For years consumers assumed that the chemical was benign. However BPA has now been shown through hundreds of science studies to be linked to prostate and breast cancer, obesity, neurological problems including behavioral problems in children, precocious puberty, altered sperm counts, immune disorders and other problems.

For a long time, even though more and more studies showed the dangers of BPA, legislation was nowhere to be found. Now legislative efforts are starting to gain traction following increasing public awarenes and outcry on bisphenol A. In 2005 Acronym Required reported on the first bisphenol A legislation out of California, introduced by Wilma Chan, that proposed a limit to bisphenol A in childrens products. "Plastic Bottles- Protecting Your Baby, by the ACC", focused on the industry's use of misinformation about baby bottles to protect their plastics and bisphenol A market. Reporting on San Francisco's attempt to clamp down on the use of BPA in baby bottles and children's products, we wrote: "It will be interesting to watch the progress of this legislative attempt to control use of this chemical". The California legislation was swiftly defeated under industry threats.

In the four years since, the accumulation of science research attracted public attention then propelled citizen action, which in turn motivated city, state and federal legislatures to pay heed. Not coincidentally, the companies who we chronicled vehemently denying the dangers of BPA, now "voluntarily" discontinue some of their controversial uses for the chemical. Not all lobbies are so agreeable however. The Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association (JPMA), which currently owns the site www.babybottle.org that we took exception to 4 years ago, still runs under a banner of blatant lies "PLASTIC BABY BOTTLES ARE SAFE. Convenient. Tested. Trusted."

Taking a Stand on the Precautionary Principle?

Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) sponsored the Senate bill S. 593, which Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) co-sponsored. Said Feinstein when introducing the bill:

"I strongly believe that the time has come to utilize a precautionary standard in all food and beverages with respect to chemical additives. If you do not know for certain the chemical is benign, it should not be used. Bisphenol A, known commonly as BPA, is one such example. It is used in consumer products all around us: plastic containers that store food, compact discs, water bottles, canned soups and other canned foods, even baby bottles. More than 100 studies suggest that BPA exposure at very low doses is linked to a variety of health problems..."

America consumers should not be "guinea pigs", Feinstein said. The bill would ban Bisphenol A from all food and drink containers, effective 180 days from enactment. The chemical is ubiquitous, found in pipes, baby bottles, infant formula cans, dental sealants, and car parts. But the Environmental Working Group commissioned research showing that half of the cans they tested had detectable levels of BPA that would not only expose adult consumers to levels of BPA considered dangerous, but could expose unborn children whose mothers eat canned food to up 200 times safe levels. Therefore a bill that targets the use of bisphenol A in food containers would help keep the chemical out of humans.

Feinstein's legislation would allow companies to petition for renewable waivers by claiming that it was "technologically impossible to replace BPA in that time frame", an interesting and potentially problematic criteria.

The language Senator Feinstein used in her statement is interesting for other reasons too. "Precautionary Standard" is similar to "Precautionary Principle", which is a sort of loaded term, one that industry and free trade organizations detest. The presumed head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) (in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Executive Office of the President), Cass Sunstein -- unofficially nominated but at large (maybe somewhere in the bowels of OIRA) -- has periodically taken a strong stand against the Precautionary Principle. (For instance read the paper "Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle", the book of the same tittle, papers or the related less conciliatory CATO article on the subject. Some of these same ideas which are propagated throughout his writing including in "Nudge"). If Congress goes forward with the legislation, will it bring the US stance on chemicals closer to the European one? Will the "Precautionary Standard" edge its way into policy or become more mainstream?

Whatever the outcome, if you were to take a stand on the unfortunately named but potent and historically interesting Precautionary Principle, would the chemical bisphenol A, which has been thoroughly researched, be the chemical you'd choose? (It's not clear whether Feinstein is doing this or whether this is just convenient, casual wording.) Acronym Required has written about the disconnect between the hundreds of studies showing potential dangers of the chemical, legislative action, media coverage, and stalling action by lobbyists, in Phthalates and Bisphenol A: Media and Politics".

The research on bisphenol A does not leave very much doubt as to the dangers of this chemical. So then is this "precaution"? Or even "caution"? Or is it legislation that is very late in to the scene, slowed by chemical companies and their intense lobbying, which makes it simply "reactionary". Not to dredge up an overused cliche here, but is this that different from warnings on cigarette boxes, decades after the first health studies came out? I'm not answering, just asking.

Making this a joint congressional action, Congressman Edward Markey (D-MA) introduced the companion bisphenol A legislation in the House. Markey's bill will be known as "Ban Poisonous Additives Act of 2009".

Senator Feinstein also helped write a 2008 amendment to the Consumer Product Safety Commission which banned the sale of phthalate containing products to children under seven. California passed a similar law in 2007.

Communities Take On Bisphenol A and Companies Suddenly Choose Science

As we mentioned above, Acronym Required previously chronicled San Francisco's failed efforts to ban bisphenol A legislation. The San Francisco City Council members deleted language that would have restricted the use of bisphenol A in certain infant and children's products when sued by plastic manufacturers. We also wrote on Chicago's city legislation and Canada's, and Canadian communities' bans. Since then, more communities have taken on bisphenol A, and Suffolk County" is the latest to institute a ban on the chemical. While manufacturers can afford to take one city to court, if multiple states and cities are introducing legislation, the balance of power changes. Steve Hentges, the prolific American Chemical Council spokesman and author of editorials proclaiming BPA's safety must be spinning (as in 360s) trying to keep up.

American manufacturers are expert at stalling legislation. But at some point, they too, glance over their shoulders an realize that legislation and negative public opinion is bearing down on them. Six companies, Playtex Products, Gerber, Evenflow, Avent America, Dr. Brown's and Disney First Years said they would stop the sale of plastic polycarbonate baby bottles in the USA, in response to action by Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal, and the attorneys general in Delaware and New Jersey.

In other company responses to public outcry, Sunoco wrote a letter to investors saying that they would stop selling bisphenol A to companies that can't assure that BPA won't be used in food and water products for children under 3. Sunoco noted they couldn't assure that bisphenol A was safe. Sunoco's action, though rather anemic, was in response to investor actions and queries to the company. Interviewed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Tom McCaney, associate director for corporate responsibility at the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, a group of about 600 nuns who petitioned Sunoco on BPA: "We thought this was a really bold step, especially for a company that's a member of the American Chemistry Council." Bold indeed. Not the adjective I would choose perhaps, since Sunoco's not guaranteeing anything, but a "smart" business move? Sure.

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Grapevine of Worry

Lucy Kellaway wrote in the Financial Times a couple of days ago that her own "mild fearfulness" about the economy had ballooned to hyperventilating paranoia after she spent time surfing the web and opening e-mail.

"Through blogs, websites and e-mails the world's economic ills are fed to us on a drip all day long. It is not just that we hear about bad things faster, we hear about more of them and in a more immediate way. My worries become yours, and yours become mine."

Since I don't "sit over my computer all day and feed my anxiety", I disagree. I don't succumb to bad news, rather I cheer myself when Obama talks about limiting publicly financed executive pay, or when the head of the Bureau of Land Management puts a hold on the drilling leases near national parks auctioned off by the Bush administration. In dire moments, I distract myself with unicorn chasers and happy news. Don't you? I walk away from the computer at will. I turn it off.

Back To Math Class You Go

But lets move beyond my anecdotal evidence. Lucy Kellaway speaks, as always, slightly tongue in cheek, but other news stories might convince you that the internet truly does harbor inescapable and vile corruption that needs to be caged. Take for instance, the New York Times piece yesterday about MySpace and their campaign to purge registered sex predator names from their site. According to the NYT, MySpace turned over 90,000 names to Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Attorney General Roy Cooper of North Carolina.

Officials are pressuring social networking sites to adopt more stringent safety standards to assure children's safety. This is a welcome but confusingly priority since a report by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, commissioned by 49 state attorneys general found that bullying online was a far more serious problem than sexual solicitation. Nevertheless, Attorney General Blumenthal said in a recent statement:

"Almost 100,000 convicted sex offenders mixing with children on MySpace -- shown by our subpoena -- is absolutely appalling and totally unacceptable...for every one of them, there may be hundreds of others using false names and ages."

I'm all for blocking names. But lets sort through his math. 90,000 names, times "hundreds" of "others". We'll interpret his "hundreds" conservatively, let's say 300-- although perhaps the Attorney General meant 900. So 90,000 * 300 = 27,000,000 sex offenders on MySpace? Maybe up to 81,000,000? The population of the US is ~303,824,640. So on the conservative side, Blumenthal tells us that 1 in 10 US sex offender citizens trolls MySpace. YIKES!

The Times reports later in the story that there are 700,000 sex offenders in the US. The paper doesn't worry with the math discrepancy. Instead they quote John A. Phillips, "chief executive of Aristotle, a company that supplies identity and age verification technologies for companies like the New York State Lottery, breweries and film studios", who is trying to sell his software to Myspace, and so piles on: '"this is just the tip of the iceberg on MySpace".

So, fear for the little children. Fear for the investor class, homeowners, and retirement fund enrollees. Who else?

Fear For the Suggestible, the Unvaccinated

If 1/1000 to 4/1000 registered YouTube users rate vaccination videos with 1 to 5 stars, adding comments like, "your video is stupid, and your a dumbass that's what my mom thinks", should we use this "data" to propagate concern that YouTube feeds the public irrational and dangerous opinions about vaccinations? A year ago the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a study that did exactly that.

In December 2007, University of Toronto researchers announced a "first-ever study of its kind". The investigators selected YouTube videos relating to immunizations or vaccinations, and concluded that much of the video content "contradicts the best scientific evidence". The public health community should find this "very concerning", they wrote. The press pounced on this announcement like a starved puppy tossed a Porterhouse steak. Articles titled "YouTube Full Of One-Sided Anti-Vaccination Videos", littered the news.

The authors selected and watched 153 videos. 73 (48%) had so called "positive" messages (in favor of immunization) , 49 videos (32%) had so called "negative" messages, and 31 videos (20%) had so called "ambiguous" messages. The study concluded:

• 1) "negative videos were more likely to be rated by viewers"
• 2) negative videos were more likely to "receive more views"
• 3) negative videos "received a higher mean star rating".

The authors then generated their dire warnings.

Garbage In...

When JAMA published the study I spent some time looking at their data, which I'll briefly highlight here. Unfortunately, it was impossible to repeat the study. Obviously, time had elapsed between authors' video viewing and publication, but also the authors' described their methodology fleetingly: "On February 20, 2007, we searched YouTube (www.youtube.com) using the keywords vaccination and immunization." Straight-forward and repeatable? Hardly. Different permutations of the keywords and Boolean operators yielded anywhere from 63 to 1300 videos, when we copied their methodology. This result may not seem important, but such unreliability prompted us to look at the validity of the study's conclusions.

The authors found that "negative videos were more likely to be rated by viewers." Of 73 "positive" videos, 46 had a rating. Out of 49 "negative" videos, 42 had a rating. But you have to wonder how meaningful a metric like "number of ratings" or "likely to rate" is. Looking at the raw data a different way, you would also learn that more people rate "positive" videos.

We multiplyied 73 "positive" videos by the study's "mean number of positive" video views - 181, which gives 13,213 views. Yet there were only 37 viewer ratings. Multiplying 49 "negative" videos by the mean, 520 views per video, gives 25,480 viewers -- but only only 36 ratings. So yes, there were "more views" of "negative" than "positive" videos, and more negative videos were rated. But also the data showed that an individual is more likely to rate a "positive" video (.28% of viewers rated), than the "negative" video (.14% of viewers rated). Why? Do more people watch "positive" videos to the end? Who knows.

There were other confounding questions unanswered by the study. How long had the videos been posted? Does rating a video actually signal a change in attitude? Behavior? Anything? How many people rate videos -- only registered users can rate videos, so do registered YouTube users represent the vaccinating public? Is a "negative" Gardasil video a "bad" public health message, given the uncertainty about the pros and cons of that vaccine? Moreover, can tabulating viewer ratings translate to anything meaningful? Especially when only ~1-2 in 1000 viewers rates a video?

...Garbage Out

The authors also tallied the YouTube star ratings and concluded that "negative" videos received higher ratings. But in a 1-5 star rating system such as YouTube's, what do we learn from reports that the mean "positive" video rating was 3.5, with 1.5 standard deviations (SD), whereas the mean "negative" video rating was 4.4 with .9 SD?

Does running statistics on shaky data make it more meaningful? According to analyses of 5-Star Rating Systems there are plenty of other problems with drawing many conclusions from ratings. Individual ratings tend to be either very low, or very high (1 or 5), in a bimodal distribution. Problematically, an average score of 3 or 4 might only describe "conflicting opinions". As it turns out, averaging most 5 star ratings gives a mean 3-4 star rating.

Another bias of 5 star rating systems is upward-bias from "fans". For instance, when we looked at available videos in December, 2007, in a video from "House MD", the TV program, a doctor very sarcastically scorns a woman for not vaccinating her child. This ("positive") video got rated very highly (4+ stars). But tans will rate a show highly no matter what the public health message. Problematically, then, the JAMA study uses these crude ratings to make some serious public health claims about the dangers of YouTube.

In December 2007 we did our own little mini-study on YouTube to confirm the JAMA data showing that only 1-5 of every 1000 viewers rated these videos (true). Ironically, at the time, the most popular YouTube video about vaccination was a "positive" one put out by a pharmaceutical company, which only showed up in some searches. This corporate video got almost 800,000 views, more than 10 times the 69,000 total views of the 153 videos the authors studied, far surpassing all the "negative" videos.

The pharmaceutical company was advertising a video contest for homemade videos about getting a flu shot with a $500 prize. The video got negative reviews, but some comments reflected people's annoyance that the contest had ended or they hadn't won. The House MD video was the second most popular video.

Barbarians on the Net

This idea that the internet will tear down society one way or another by undermining civility, by cultivating irrational fear, spreading disease, crime, or irrational behavior is not new, and in fact reflects various bricks and mortar versions of the same fear-mongering. See for instance, The Coming Anarchy, by Robert D. Kaplan and similar titles. In reality, nation-states quite adeptly control the internet, as they do their roadways, waterways, and airspace.

Despite the constant threat of unreasonableness and anarchy, it is reason that often trumps unreasonable cacophony on the internet, the opposite of what people predict. Would Obama have been elected without the internet? Would the Palin candidacy have met the same fate without TV's internet availability to the hordes who watched Couric and Fey?

The internet has its problems, but I suspect its vagaries offend most people when the internet disrupts the power assumptions they hold dear. One can find all the nastiness, the worry, the fear, and the bizarre opinions of the internet on the streets. In reality, predators pass kids everyday on the street, as anonymously as on the the net.

The internet provides only an illusion of anonymity for ne're-do-wells and oafs, just as your house with its fence and well surveyed lot and planted trees provides an illusion of safety to you. Do those in privileged positions avoid the awfulness of the cement ghetto more easily than they elude the unsettling and unwanted spam in their AM inbox, and thus be more offended by the internet?

Power brokers of course become threatened by the internet. Record companies, the networks, and politicians, and pharmaceutical companies -- they've all had run-ins with the internet. Professors object to "RateMyProfessor", as it mucks up the power structure. But it's certainly helps the public forum.

One needs to exam the data behind assertions that the internet is dangerous. Corporations have far more power on the internet than so called fringe groups -- to advertise, to astroturf, to datamine, and to collect personal information, although they may claim that's not so. The pro-vaccination video put out by the pharmaceutical company, even by the very dubious standards put forth in the JAMA study, was more "influential" then all the rest of the videos on YouTube combined.

Authors, consultants, the media, have always tried to pin down and characterize internet communication trends, but their calculations and predictions often miss because they are only a static snapshot of the evolving internet at a point in time. John Perry Barlow predicted the World Wide Web without a government (1996); consultants predicted internet "content was king" (1997); Cass Sunstein dreamed up regulatory schemes so that the polarizing internet wouldn't destroy democracy (2001); and print journalists talked about how doomed blogging was (2004). They misunderstood the adaptability of the internet as a communication tool and underestimated how individuals, corporations, and governments would continue to shape it to further their own personal wish lists. One day anti-vaccination videos seem prevalent, the next, pharmaceuticals have usurped YouTube just fine thank-you.

The film critic Robert Ebert is right, newspapers can be great to read, (all five of them) they also tend towards banal, narrow-minded, wrong, and biased, so we better get used to the excellent, disparate, positive as well as very negative flux of the internet.

"...Manufacturers told the subcommittee Monday that some faced financial ruin without the bill, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates could cost taxpayers...."¹

"We appeal to your sense of justice!"

That's how the American Apparel Manufacturers Association begged the Senate for $50 million in 1981, pleading with legislators to approve the Tris Indemnification Act. Tris (2,3-dibromoprophyl) phosphate (tris) was used as a fire retardant in children's sleepwear in the 1970's, but the government banned its use in kids' pajamas when studies showed that it could be absorbed into the skin and could cause cancer. The apparel association wanted some payback.

$50 million seems like pittance now, given the billions flying around as the 2008 US government hopefully sprinkles newly minted, crisp Treasury dollars about. The back story of American Apparel Manufacturing in the 1970's is clearly different than the insurance, bank and auto-industries of 2008. But there are similarities. Behind many bailout stories, it turns out, is a coincidental trail of deregulation. Deregulation that's good for business.

Autos and Chemicals in Deregulated America

Today's beggarcorps, the auto, bank, and insurance companies, greedily sucked as much money as possible out of the Great Market and its Invisible Hand until it showed signs of withering. Companies shunned deregulation, oversight and caution. Once market money dried up, like insatiable green blooded Aliens or Predators, the CEOs stoop to clamber out of their Neon concept cars and pursue taxpayer dollars.

In the case of the auto industry, history repeats itself. Reagan bailed the industry back in the 1980's after Carter left the White House. Carter tried to wean the US, but Reagan declared morning in America. As they say in Michigan, Reagan "really pulled the fat out of fire for the auto industry". But how did the automakers use the good will, deregulation and limits imposed on Japanese import cars, grandly granted to them by Reagan?

Not to pursue wise business practices. Reagan's bailout not only bought the auto industry time, it helped cement expectations for habitual handouts. Auto CEO's learned how to fly to Washington on a Jet, fling out minimal rhetoric circa 1970 about: "the health of the industry", then fly back to Michigan and continue to sell good 'ole oil-hungry "safe" cars -- at a rate of two and three per household. Now, they're forced to offer two-for-one sales and occasionally even drive to bailouts in their own vehicles.

The chemical industry did even better under Reagan. It never floundered like the auto industry has, but thrived under deregulation and continued to grow into the behemoth we know today. Its size allows the chemistry industry to produce more and more consumer products, under less and less scrutiny. On occasion citizens become apoplectic about something like bisphenol A, but the industry's size make it more than capable of mowing down potential regulation or even, heaven forbid -- threats to remove a chemical from the market. As with the auto industry, "idealistic" long-term consumer goals like non-polluting products routinely fall by the wayside to quarterly profits.

Tris History - In Brief

The story of Tris is interesting, because it was banned in the US before the chemical industry became adept at protecting its economic interests so thoroughly. Tris was an unusual chemical in that it only had a quick sojourn in pajamaland before being banned. In 1971 the U.S. produced about 3 million pounds of tris. That year the Department of Commerce established flammability standards for children's pajamas. The chemical industry saw the opportunity in that particulas regulation and promoted tris for use as a fire retardant in children's sleepwear, essentially without any preliminary studies on the chemical's safety. 3 years later Tris production in the U.S. was 12 million pounds.

Then rat studies showed toxicity and kidney cancer from exposure to tris and rabbit studies showed that the chemical was absorbed through the skin. These were followed by human studies showing that kids absorbed tris too. Congress had just established the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) in 1972 as part of the Consumer Product Safety Act. The Environmental Defense Fund, also recently formed after its successful legal action against the use of DDT, threatened to sue the CPSC if it continued delaying. The CPSC banned tris in 1977.

Carter: The Presidential Scrooge of Toxic Chemicals

Once the US banned tris, textile manufacturers sold their tris pajamas overseas until President Jimmy Carter ordered them to stop. Carter said he wanted countries to know "that the United States is a responsible trading partner and that they can trust goods bearing the label 'Made in the U.S.A." (AP Feb., 1981)

Despite their overseas sales, however the textile industry claimed losses of $50-$100 million in business as a result of the ban. Textile manufacturers demanded government compensation via a bill passed by Congress in 1978, saying that they tried to abide by government regulation and took a loss.. But Jimmy Carter vetoed the indemnification bill, saying the resulting litigation would cost too much and only large retailers would be able to fund lawsuits. Carter noted that the companies had alternatives flame retardants to tris, and advised that the bill would set "an unwise precedent [to] paying industry for losses" incurred to industries when subsequent research showed a particular chemical was dangerous. Instead Carter offered business loans.

The Greatest Presidents

When President Reagan was elected, he promptly revoked Carter's executive order on exports. This allowed US companies to ship abroad hazardous products banned in the US. This is now a common practice known as dumping. A Reagan congress promptly rewrote a Tris Indemnification Act to allow textile manufacturers to sue for damages, which the legislature estimated would cost taxpayers $56 million dollars or more. Senators like Strom Thurmond (R-SC) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) helped sponsor the bill that Reagan signed into law.

US citizens have been swept along for years of these policy battles over fire retardants. In the 1970's California was one of the first to require fire retardants, and California children became some of the first in the nation to wearing tris pajamas. When tris was banned in 1977, the chemical industry replaced it with dichlorinated tris, which the CPSC then also banned from pajamas.

The chemistry industry then quickly introduced chemicals called polybrominated diphenylethers (PBDE's). Europe and Sweden banned all PBDE's. In the US, anufacturers of Penta and Octa PBDE's only recently stopped producing these chemicals due to toxicity. But individuals states first had to pass legislature which threatened the PBDE market. Now, many US states plan to ban Deca-PBDA. For each chemical banned, however, which is few and far between, several more spring up, all untested for safety. But chlorinated tris, banned from pajamas years ago, is now used to flame proof furniture today.

The cigarettes that ignited most fires that these anti-flammability chemicals protect consumers from are not only less in use, but they're finally required by law to be self-extinguishing. Now fire deaths from flaming pajamas are even less than when tris was introduced. Despite the decreased home fire risk, in 2007 the Bush administration pushed through a nationwide flammability law. The law attracted attention mostly for clauses it contained that pre-empted states from taking their own measures against flammable products, either by stricter laws or as a result of tort law.

Acronym Required discussed this trend in the Bush administration to hoard power at the executive level when we talked about greenhouse gas emission regulation in The EPA and the Automobile Manufacturers Lobby, Snuggly Under their "Patchwork Quilt"?, and http://acronymrequired.com/2008/07/clean-air-one-two-punch.html">"Clean Clear Air, Nothing To See Here, Drive Through Please". In the case of flammability chemicals, the states are now forced to the Bush administration standards, despite the limited proof that deaths due to fire are effectively decreased by stricter flammability laws requiring more chemicals. California is now working to amend its own laws to accommodate evidence about toxicity.

Toxic Chemicals Persist

The story of tris's demise as an anti- flammability product is often portrayed by the chemisty industry as a huge regulatory mistake, a case of overzealousness. But was it overzealousness? Or did science work as it should -- but just in that case?

Federal agencies and politicians are exceedingly cautious about banning chemicals when faced with the expanded clout of industry. Take bisphenol A, an endocrine disruptor with far reaching effects in experiments with rats, which seem to be replicated in humans. Children are heavily exposed to BPA as neonates, infants and toddlers. Meanwhile, Canada recognizes BPA as a toxin. Yet despite hundreds of research papers, and decades of questions about the safety of BPA, US politicians are still debating the pros and cons.

Public attention to an issue is influential as the history of BPA shows. But the underlying process for assessing chemical safety is flawed -- if it could be considered in existence at all. The European Union recently implemented REACH to deal with the more systemic problems of regulation for toxic chemicals, as we wrote about here and here. The US has no such program.

Lobbyists persist, and "risk benefit analysis" is often spun-out to cover for politicians dragging their feet on telling chemical companies to come up with a better product. The chemical lobby is so strong that as BPA history shows, even the most convincing body of evidence can be trounced by a few well placed lobbyists who don't let any public conversation stray from industry talking points.

Chemisty Lobbyists -- Planted on the Down Side of the SeeSaw?

Not to say that many organizations don't try to balance the scales. But as the global warming and BPA debates show, their voices are weaker and budgets smaller.

This week the Purpose Prize, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the Atlantic Philanthropies, awarded six individuals 60 $100,000, and nine others $10,000. The recipients were chosen from 1000 60+ nominees "who are taking on society's biggest challenges". Arlene Blum, a chemist whose research helped convince regulators to remove tris from the market 30 years ago, received the award to continue her work at the Green Science Policy Institute she founded.

Blum is a chemist who worked on the the flame retardant tris (2,3-dibromopropyl) phosphate (tris) in the 1970's. In threeScience articles she published with Bruce Ames et all, the authors looked at the history of flammability chemicals and the toxicity of tris ², ³. They then analyzed urine samples from kids wearing tris treated pajamas and showed that children absorbed the chemical through their skin.⁴ Months later tris was banned. In the 1978 paper, Gold, Blum, and Ames wrote. In their 1978 paper Blum and Ames concluded that testing of chemicals and labeling of products was essential to consumer safety.

Despite this quick seeming success, chlorinated tris is in heavy use today Thirty years later, as progress on this aspect of protecting consumer health seems elusive. Blum will put $100,000 to the task. And its a far more daunting task today than it was 30 years ago. The industry is dependent on being unregulated, and has a gargantuan marketing budget with which to keep things laissez-faire, status quo.

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¹ The Associated Press, May 5, 1981 "Sleepwear Manufacturers Call Tris Ban 'Regulatory Overkill'"

² Blum A, Ames BN. Flame-retardant additives as possible cancer hazards. Science. 1977 Jan 7;195 (4273):17-23.

³ Gold MD, Blum A, Ames BN et al. Another Flame Retardant, Tris-(1,3-Dichloro-2-Propyl)-Phosphate, and Its Expected Metabolites Are Mutagens: Science, New Series, Vol. 200, May 19, 1978 (4343), pp. 785-787.

⁴ Blum A, Gold MD, Ames BN et al. Children absorb tris-BP flame retardant from sleepwear: urine contains the mutagenic metabolite, 2,3-dibromopropanol. Science. 1978 Sep 15;201(4360):1020-3.

The Exxon-Valdez and Whales in the Supreme Court

The New York Times recently published a story about the Supreme Court decision in the Exxon Valdez case. In 1989 Exxon's tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound, piloted by an overworked seaman and his drunk master. The ship spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil over 1,200 miles of Alaska shoreline. The livelihoods of 32,000 plaintiffs were ruined.

The jury awarded the plaintiffs $5 billion in damages, a sum the district court reduced to $2.5 million. The Supreme Court then lowered the punitive award from "$2.5 million to $500 million. Exxon-Mobil made about $40 billion dollars in profits in 2006. $5 million accounts for about 4 days of Exxon-Mobil profit. By the time the Supreme Court ruled on the case, in June of this year, 20 years after the accident, about 20% of the plaintiffs had died.

From the title of the NYT article, "From One Footnote, a Debate Over the Tangles of Law, Science and Money", I thought that the Times story would have similar themes to the recent case about Navy sonar testing off the California coast. In that case, Winter vs. NRDC, (we wrote on this in "Whales in the Supreme Court"), the justices seemed to take at face value oral assertions by the Navy that their sonar caused no harm to whales, despite government funded research proving sonar did indeed cause significant harm to marine animals. In fact the Navy's own research -- both published and suppressed -- also found risks for significant damages to marine mammals. The damning evidence was significantly downplayed in the Navy's arguments.

The science in Navy case, Winter vs. NRDC also seemed for the most part to be explicitly ignored by the Supreme Court. Said Justice Breyer: "you are asking us who know nothing about whales and less about the military to start reading all these documents to try to figure out who's right in the case where the other side says the other side is totally unreasonable." The court appeared to perfunctorily reduce the case to a question of national defense vs. an incidental whale, and naturally ruled in deference to defense.

The ruling in the Navy training case was narrow, which environmentalists like NRDC and the Sierra Club took as a good sign. Despite NRDC's sanguine public relations statements in face of their defeat, however, it is not clear to me that the court's decision was even any real calculation of the risks the Navy's training efforts would face by making efforts to spare whales. Rather, it seemed more simply to be a nod to the Bush administration and its callous approach to the environment when it comes to the military, commerce (or, well, anything else)?

Scientific details which could have influenced the decision were ignored. While the court didn't say that the military would never have to do environmental impact statements, the ruling hinted that they were thinking in that direction.

When Exxon Recruits Researchers

The Times article on Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker ended with a quote from Prof. William R. Freudenburg, who teaches sociology at UC Santa Barbara: "The legal system and the scientific method, he said, co-exist in a way that is really hard on truth."

Freudenburg had been recruited by Exxon to do sociological research showing (basically) that juries are too generous in awarding damages. His initial research apparently offended people at the company, so Exxon terminated his contract. Exxon than paid other sociologists and legal experts to do the work and published their findings in two prestigious law journals. The Supreme court read these articles, and wrote the following footnote to their decision.

"The Court is aware of a body of literature running parallel to anecdotal reports, examining the predictability of punitive awards by conducting numerous "mock juries," where different "jurors" are confronted with the same hypothetical case. See, e.g., C. Sunstein, R. Hastie, J. Payne, D. Schkade, W. Viscusi, Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide (2002); Schkade, Sunstein, & Kahneman, Deliberating About Dollars: The Severity Shift, 100 Colum. L. Rev. 1139 2000); Hastie, Schkade, & Payne, Juror Judgments in Civil Cases: Effects of Plaintiff's Requests and Plaintiff's Identity in Punitive Damage Awards, 23 Law & Hum. Behav. 445 (1999); Sunstein, Kahneman, & Schkade, Assessing Punitive Damages (with Notes on Cognition and Valuation in Law), 107 Yale L. J. 2071 (1998). Because this research was funded in part by Exxon, we decline to rely on it."

However the court's decision concurred with this Exxon funded research, despite the footnote saying the opposite. This, combined with the fact that the court misinterpreted non-Exxon funded research to show that jury awards were generally fair compensation, led Freudenburg to comment on science and the court.

The Supreme Court's footnote has led to a maelstrom in the legal world over both the validity of the sociological research and the court's treatment of it. After the June decision, some writers were alarmed about the court's assertion since they considered the legal research in question ""top notch work". Others voiced a completely different concern -- "skepticism about these particular mock jury trials."

These two vastly different interpretations of the validity of sociological research and its place in the court distract from a different problem evident in both the Navy and the Exxon-Valdez case. Science brought before the courts can easily be sidelined as it was in Baker in favor of sociology research, or denigrated, as it was in the Navy case when the court simplified the question to one of national security. The environment lost in both cases and the plaintiffs lost in the Exxon Valdez case.

Of course sociological research is different than science research. Exxon is well known for supporting "anti-research", for example stating that global warming doesn't exist. In the current case, Exxon didn't deny damages to the plaintiffs rather they supported research claiming that juries are rather simple-minded and over compensate, research that doesn't hold up in other studies. This is more useful to them in the long run and allows them to skirt the real questions.

Despite my initial impression, the Exxon case did not resemble the NRDC case in a simple way. But the two cases are similar in how predictably the court seems to decide, despite whatever science research is out there. The footnote is a puzzle, and seems politically motivated rather than anything else. It's either cover for a court decision that actually was influenced by Exxon's research, or evasive action based on the acknowledgment that the reader might suspect this.

It's hard to ignore the fact that corporations have long worked to eviscerate the ability of the public to impose financial damages because of bad behavior. Corporations have also long worked to reduce consideration of the environment when doing business. The court seems merely to be codifying these goals.

Some recent news stories:

• Whales:

  The Supreme Court ruled that the Navy trumps whales. Acronym Required commented on the arguments presented to the court in "Whales in The Supreme Court".

• Corn Conquistadores: (?)

  Nature writes this week (doi:10.1038/456149a) that a paper to published in the journal Molecular Ecology reports on transgenes from genetically modified corn planted in Mexico found in tradition maize. The work confirms the findings of a disputed 2001 paper published in Nature. The new paper found that 4 of 23 sites reported in the 2001 work had evidence of genes from the GM corn in the native maize.

Mars Lander, No Goodbye, Just Kaput:

NASA is ceasing operation of the Phoenix Mars lander. The $428 million dollar mission began operations in March of last year, outlasted it's scheduled usage, and died in a dust storm of Mars winter. Winters don't provide enough solar energy to keep the lander running.

• Plasticware In the Lab:

  In last week's Science, McDonald et al, report that plastic labware can leach manufacturing agents into dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) and ethanol solutions. As polycarbonate plastic leaches bisphenol A into water, for instance, other plastics can leak manufacturing agents into solutions. This could possibly change the outcomes of experiments.

• Your Secret's Safe, or Not:

  Google Flu trends tracks flu outbreaks before the CDC, the company reports. A study by Yahoo and researchers at the University of Idaho confirmed that search engine results produced a faster indication of disease that traditional tracking methods. This is pertinent news for tracking deadly pandemics. So if one typed "itchy bottom" into the computer, would Google be tracking the data in some database, say Pinworm Trends across the US? Don't worry. The researchers scrub the data of personal information.

• Old, Older, Oldest:

  Gobekli Tepe is in the news again. Archeologists continue to excavate the temple site containing 11,300 year old carved stones in southern Turkey. The pillars were built in circles in with pillars up to 16 feet tall, some carved with foxes, lions, scorpions, and vultures. One of the sites lead archeologists, Klaus Schmidt, suggests that culture and building proceeded and then necessitated farming. Scientists have thought that the domestication of nomad hunter societies to farming societies proceeded the building of communities.

YAY!

It's a new day.

"...His triumph was decisive and sweeping, because he saw what is wrong with this country: the utter failure of government to protect its citizens. He offered a government that does not try to solve every problem but will do those things beyond the power of individual citizens: to regulate the economy fairly, keep the air clean and the food safe, ensure that the sick have access to health care, and educate children to compete in a globalized world..." (NYT)¹

Yes, there's work to do. Yes, it will be difficult. But today we recognize how much America's just accomplished.

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¹Obama won despite warnings about possible GOP ballot fraud stemming from information dribbling out of the Ohio trial concerning 2004 Ohio ballot fraud. In the latest episode, Michael Connell, a consultant whose firm has been accused of computer manipulation, denied knowing anything about GOP rigging the 2004 Ohio election results. Connell works for Randy Cole. Cole owns 15 companies that work simultaneously on GOP election campaigns (Bush/Cheney 2000/2004, McCain 2008, many others), anti-Abortion groups and churches, GOP mass mailings, government contracts, etc. Stephen Spoonamore, a key witness in the trial brings the allegations, explains in a multi-part series starting here.

Subcommittee to FDA: Room For Improvement

The FDA subcommittee reviewing the FDA's August 2008 draft report has released its first recommendations(PDF) on the draft BPA report. The subcommittee brought lots of suggestions for improvement.

They wrote that the draft did not adequately provide scientific support for their method of choosing which studies to include: "Specifically, the Subcommittee does not agree that the large number of non-GLP studies should be excluded from use in the safety assessment."

The subcommittee also questioned the use of "no observed adverse effect level" (NOAEL) standard the FDA employed to determine the safety of exposure. The panel pointed out that so many studies show effects in neurobehavioral development, prostate gland, mammary gland and puberty in females, that it seems BPA must bind to gonadal hormone receptors during development. The panel said this suggests safe exposures "at least an order of magnitude below the 5 mg/kg/bw/day NOAEL identified in the draft assessment." The panel authors suggest several alternative ways to measure dose response that would model findings across the many studies that the FDA excluded in its draft.

The subcommittee offered additional point by point criticism and noted that the studies cleared by the NTP's Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR) indicate that the FDA standard should be "substantially below (i.e., at least one or more orders of magnitude lower than) the 5 mg/kg bw/day level selected in the draft FDA assessment."

Living Through Chemistry -- U. Michigan and Dow

The FDA panel released their draft at an opportune time. Philbert was under increasing pressure about his role on the panel given appearances of conflict of interest. Acronym Required wrote a couple of weeks ago on Philbert's directorship of the University of Michigan SPH Risk Science and Analysis program, founded and heavily contributed to by Charles Gelman, a retired manufacturer and tireless critic of chemical regulation. Had the subcommittee's report dared reach the opposite conclusion than the pressure would have increased.

Following our post Martin Philbert wrote a letter to the editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel protesting the paper's allegations that his work would be influenced by the donations he accepted from Gelman: "This simply is not true", he said.

To illustrate his point he described in his letter the $15 million dollar grant the Risk Science Center took from Dow Chemical for a dioxin study. Philbert told how, given the grant, his colleagues "still found that people living near the Dow plant had higher levels of dioxins in their bodies."

However, nobody should find Philbert's assurance about his work for Dow Chemical comforting since Dow manufactures bisphenol A and takes political action to protect its market when necessary. For instance at (http://dowaction.com/grassroots/notice-description.tcl?newsletter_id=30665022), you can read Dow's letter thanking their employees for their "Best in Class", 31.5% "grassroots" effort in defeating California SB 1713 Bisphenol-A Ban.

The University of Michigan task in the Dow study was to measure blood dioxin levels of home-owners in different geographic areas -- not to investigate health affects. In that sense the dioxin study is not an analogous situation to the BPA panel. But even if were comparable, the University of Michigan results got Dow off the hook in a way, by finding that the variation in dioxin levels was due to things like age and body mass index (BMI), not levels of dioxins in the air or soil.

Media, politicians, citizens and scientists criticized the study because Dow had long been under pressure from the EPA to clean up dioxin contamination ¹ and the study was seen as a stalling technique. The EPA had this to say in one memo: "the study was initiated at the request of Dow in order to downplay the risks of exposure to dioxin contaminated soils." The EPA went on to say:

"public presentations of the preliminary results have emphasized how little effect living on contaminated soils has one an individual's dioxin blood level. This emphasis has resulted in numerous media stories, an understanding by some members of the public, that remediation of dioxin contamination is unnecessary."

The BPA memo on the FDA draft will no doubt assure the doubters in the public that Philbert's panel has their best interests in mind. ² If not, Philbert warns that he will "think long and hard" before taking time to "perform this kind of public service".

Stay on your toes...

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¹ Burnham, D. "1965. Memo Show Dow's Anxiety on Dioxin.", NYT 1983)

² Perhaps Dow's BPA economy is not at stake in Michigan? John Dingell (D-MI), bulldog for the auto-industry, has also taken on BPA.

BPA: Trade Globally, Regulate Slowly

Today there are hundreds bisphenol A studies, with a growing body of evidence showing connections between low-dose exposure to the chemical and harm, especially during perinatal development. Some of the reported effects of BPA are so commonly known that recent headlines for Asian, Indian and UK papers reported on Canada's new ban: "Canada to Ban 'Gender-Bend' Baby Bottles".

But chemistry and plastics companies keep up the relentless marketing. They've been aggressive for years, for instance here's the American Plastics Council in 1999, (APC, now part of the American Chemical Council (ACC)) ordering:

"Consumer Reports has committed a serious error alleging dangers from the use of polycarbonate plastic baby bottles, based on an apparent lack of understanding of toxicology or safety and risk assessment. Because of the misleading and needlessly frightening statements made in the Consumer Reports article, the American Plastics Council has requested that the publication issue an immediate retraction."

In addition to orders, press releases, letters to editors, and scientific studies, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) owned a corral of internet domains where they posted reassuring consumer information on topics like the safety of plastic baby bottles. Sites such as the ACC's www.babybottle.org assured parents via scripted Q&A's like "Ask the Doctor", that plastic bottles were the absolutely safe. Explicit notice about the site's ACC affiliation was missing, as such, the messages were pretty convincing.

Just last week the Polycarbonate/BPA Global Group issued a press release saying they'd just reviewed the weight of the BPA evidence. The research, from Gradient Corporation in Massachusetts, and a convened panel on the matter, found BPA harmless. The same scientists sat on this panel that sat on preceding panels -- in 2004 at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, and in 2006 by the Gradient Corporation. They reached the same conclusion every year, despite the flood of recent research on BPA. Two more studies indicating derogatory effects on fetal neural development were included in the October issue of Environmental Research in its feature "A Plastic World".

The lead panel member and author of the Gradient paper is Dr. Lorenz Rhomberg. Acronym Required last caught up with Rhomberg when he was working for the American Plastics Council (APC) writing letters to editors of California papers. Our 2006 post covered the failure of California legislators to get AB 319 through appropriations. AB 319 would have banned phthalates and bisphenol A in the state, but got killed following the intense lobbying by the ACC and American Plastics Council (APC). California came back with a different version later, and Rhomberg now works for a private research lab in Boston.

Does the ACC own the FDA on BPA?

Recently the public has increased their response and even outrage over the extent of the deceptions by chemical companies and their lobbies. Congress has beefed up its scrutiny of the BPA regulation, and scientists continue to spend time and money responding to the flood of industry research. The current focus is how much the chemical industry seems to influence the FDA. The FDA issued a decision in August, 2008 saying basically that BPA was safe, weighing its decision on two industry studies. The FDA's decision conflicted with statements of concern from other agencies and scientists.

We previously wrote about the investigation of the FDA's actions by the U.S. House of Representatives and Committee on Energy and Commerce, chaired by John D. Dingell (D-MI), and its Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. On October 15th, the Committee wrote to a letter to FDA Commissioner von Eschenbach, questioning the appointment of the FDA BPA advisory panel chair Martin Philbert and concerning his possible conflicts of interest. Philbert's panel was to review the April, 2008 decision of the FDA which deemed BPA safe.

In that same letter the Representative Dingell requested "all records of communication between the FDA and ICF Consulting relating to their BPA work for the agency." As Dingell and Bart Stupak (D - MI) wrote:

"summary assessments of BPA were created for FDA's BPA panel by ICF Consulting, a private contractor that has done prior work for BPA manufacturers, and whose board members have ties to BPA manufacturers."

Acronym Required found supporting documents for the FDA draft here on the FDA site. Among them you can find the ICF consulting product as well as the neurobehavioural review contracted by ACC to the company Exponent¹, along with various other reviews and communications about BPA research.

Markey To FDA: Are Americans Not Worthy Of Canada's Standards?

In other action from the legislature, Congressman Ed Markey wrote a letter to the FDA Thursday asking if the FDA analyzed the same studies that the Canadian government's did, and if so why it hadn't decided differently on BPA than its North American neighbor?²

"Does the FDA consider a different level of risk acceptable for American consumers including infants, than the Canadian government is willing to accept for its consumers? If so what is the difference in risk assumption and why is the difference appropriate?"

Markey wrote that he was concerned that Americans, "including our most vulnerable infant populations", were being exposed to unsafe doses of bisphenol A. Senator Grassley (R-IA) also asked the BPA to answer questions about the criteria it used for its decision.

-----------------------------------------

² Acronym Required wrote on the different economic and political climates of the two countries and their BPA policies in "The Politics of Everyday Bisphenol A".

Once Red State - Blue State, Now Internetland - Radioland?

The news is all economy and election: Warren Buffet, accustomed to being courted by the press, software tycoons and presidential candidates flexes his muscles and asks that everyone go buy stocks. The people totally ignore him. Greenspan rears his head, a haunting apparition, moaning about 'the one thing he didn't know'...The market swoons again....

Sarah Palin goes for the rich little poor girl image...McCain supporters stage increasingly hostile and bizarre threats to Obama supporters and all the media...The liberal Internet pulls for a landslide Democrat win that I believe parts of the blogosphere could accomplish by sheer force of editorial will. The liberal-nets feature daily reports from conservatives and their sons and daughters and commentators who either disapprove or are defecting from the Republican Party (Goldwater,Schwartzenegger, Powell, Buckley, Brooks, Adelman...) If Huff Po ran out of Republican offspring essays to feature I'm sure campaign enthusiasm would give editorial space to increase the pixel size of their headlines from 70-80 to 700.

Bloggers predict that the internet is bringing an end to the era of Rove style politics...Karl Rove writes a letter to the editor of Harper's to point out that Grover Norquist, not him, said: "We can go to students at Harvard and say, 'There is now a secure retirement plan for Republican operatives'"

The media talks about back-stabbing and Republican Hill staff's curriculum vitae reportedly flying out to corporations...Nobody's too happy that Imelda Palin spends a lot on make-up in addition to shoes. (Still, I think it's way to soon too start cheerfully humming 'We never promised you a rose garden')

Meanwhile in science news:

The Oddities in Commodities

• Chinese Milk Scandal: We last reported on melamine in milk made in China when the tainted milk had killed three kids and sickened a couple of thousand. Now 5000 are hospitalized in China, and products across the world are found to be toxic with melamine. Along with the "rabbit hole" of the economic despair and the "rabbit hole" of the McCain's campaign strategy, there's the imported melamine tainted "White Rabbit" candies found on candy shelves throughout the world. The United Nations noted this week that the Chinese government's oversight system needs "urgent review and revision".
  
  
• Scientists are Eager to Explore your Genome: Last month Sergey Brin advertised on his blog that his genome indicated an increased risk of Parkinson's. This week George Church announced the first 10 volunteers had signed up for the Personal Genome Project and release parts of their genetic information and medical records to Harvard investigator. Church is "hoping to offset ethical concerns" that the data may breed discrimination in jobs, health insurance and how volunteers and their families are perceived."

  Before you sign up, the "Personal Genome Project" wants you to know a couple of things. On the positive side they say you're doing good for "society" and your "donation" (if you will) might allow you to indulge in a little "self-curiosity". One possible negative they mention is that someone could "claim statistical evidence that could affect employment or insurance or the ability to obtain financial services for the participant."

• Open Access: In "Publish and be Wrong", earlier this month, the Economist pointed to a PLoS Medicine article that argues the science publishing model is seriously flawed. According to he authors, there's a false scarcity of publication slots at top science journals, and the criteria for publication doesn't assure that quality papers get published.

  The weight of the article rests with its title: "Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science". Along with some familiar points, the writers offer shaky economic comparisons, vague criticism and recommendations. In one line of argumentation, the authors rework the idea that journals should include more negative results and fewer positive results. However its hard to see how publishing negative results (along with analysis, peer review, time) would help solve the problem of too much data and too few publication outlets, which is their primary concern. Peer review is so flawed they say, let's allow the more unprepared, less science literate readers, as opposed to scientists familiar with the research, sort through the data. Make sense?

  The team writes that many top journal publication results turn out to be flawed, and bases this on previous research by lead author John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Ioannina School of Medicine, Greece, who in 2005 wrote "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False". I didn't pick through the 2005 study, but assuming his assertions are true -- for the sake of discussion -- lots of published results get overturned. Therefore as I read it, lots of research is "negative", but published. So why isn't that "negative" research coveted as much by the authors of the current PLoS Medicine as the unpublished "negative" research they say are so important?

  Ioannidis et al assert that "scientific information is a commodity" and say there's a "moral imperative" to consider how its judged and disseminated. Maybe so, but if that then why separate the publishing from the foundation that its built upon (academia, tenure, granting)? And to be consistent, can we talk about drugs as commodities? And the moral imperative for generics?

  There's more to say, but in short, from my view, some of the most spurious research emanates from public relations departments of universities, or lobbyists in the form of press releases. Some of the most flawed research (sometimes what seems like reworked press releases) shows up in esteemed media outlets (for instance FT and the related Economist). And if I were a certain type of policy advocate who wanted to push policy under the guise of science I'd welcome the chance to elevate my editorial -- I'd pay to publish my "research" in PLoS Medicine along with all the genuine great research, and if I got rejected there than I'd settle for PLoS One, with all its real research. Upon publication I'd mail out press releases touting my PLoS research.

  Sure we have far from a perfect system, but open access has its pitfalls too.

  Along with Ioannidis, the collaborating authors are Neal Young, an MD at the NIH, and Omar Al-Ubaydli, an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University and a research fellow at the Mercatus Center.

Seen In Space

• India to the moon: India is aiming for the nation's first lunar exploration by putting an unmanned spacecraft, Chandrayaan1, into orbit for a 2 year mission on the moon.
  
  
• NF₃: The journal nature Nature reports that scientists found much higher levels of nitrogen trifluoride 3 from plasma TV's in the atmosphere then they had predicted.3 replaced perfluorcarbons and is "12,000-20,000 times more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide". A UC Irvine scientist correctly predicted earlier this year that the emission rate of the chemical was more that previously assumed by scientists. An alternative technology to the plasma screens is LCD screens.

Picking Teams

• The American Bar Association lists lawyers who might be chosen by Obama or McCain to serve their administrations. For Obama they list Robert Sussman for the EPA, a former Clinton administration deputy administrator. They name Cass Sunstein as possible White House Policy Advisor (a libertarian, but "no idealogue" writes ABA). Sunstein has written extensively on various topics; see for instance "The Paralyzing Principle" about the precautionary principle in the December, 2002-2003 issue of Cato's journal Regulation. ABA also picked Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick as possible attorney general choice.

In Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the court heard arguments from the Navy and the NRDC about probable injuries to marine animals due to sonar, and whether the Navy had to file an environmental impact statement (EIS) as established under EPA law. The justices seemed to clearly lean on the side of the Navy and the Navy's interpretation of the science. In fact Justice Scalia seemed to coach the Navy's counsel through his arguments. How does that bode for whales? For environmental impact statements?

What Environment?

In February 2007, the Navy initiated training exercises without filing the environmental impact statement (EIS) required by the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969 (NEPA). The EIS is required by law and is meant to predict possible environmental harm from the sonar training. Following their action, various groups challenged the Navy in court,and the case wound up in the Supreme Court yesterday. There the prosecution and defense presented their arguments (NRDC). The counsel for the Navy, General Garre, summarized for Justice David Souter the Navy's decision to go ahead without the EIS, arguing that the Navy broke the law because: "it doesn't specifically say what happens if they [the laws] are not followed".

A District Court had originally found in favor of NRDC, deciding that the Navy had violated NEPA. But instead of complying with the court injunction, the Navy wrote its own environmental assessment EA and presented this to an executive-branch administrative agency called the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). The CEQ found that the Navy's mission constituted "emergency circumstances", thereby allowing the Navy to circumvent the law.

The Navy took this CEQ opinion back to the court, arguing that the court should dissolve its injunction. In more court reviews, Los Angeles U.S. District Judge Florence Marie Cooper sifted through scientific evidence and determined criteria for when the Navy should turn off sonar. According to the NRDC brief, the District Court reviewed "thousands of pages of briefing and evidence over the course of many weeks, and tour[ed] a Navy destroyer--to assess the Navy's contention that the mitigation measures would risk the Navy's ability to train and certify its strike groups."

The mitigations the NRDC asked for weren't new, in fact the Navy had followed the same mitigation procedures previously. The District Court considered that in previous Navy training exercises, the Navy had "trained and certified its strike groups using the two mitigation measures at issue in this appeal". Following the lower court's decisions the Navy continued training exercises in the Pacific Ocean, "completing the last 13 of 14 training exercises, 8 of which were under the current rules", and did not appeal to the court for relief. Richard Kendall, who argued on behalf of NRDC pointed this out to the Supreme Court as well as the fact that the LA District court had already loosened its initial ruling to accommodate the Navy.

But the Navy doesn't want to take any more steps to mitigate environmental damage (It too, conceded several points before bringing its case to the high court.) Despite the fact that the Navy's training was not impeded by the mitigations the LA court requested, the Navy and the President appealed to the Supreme Court to overrule any measures imposed by the lower courts, and yesterday the Supreme Court questioned the two sides about whales, sonar, and impact statements. It considered issues of standing and equity, as well as the role of the executive branch in determining the fate of endangered species.

Sometimes the court seemed aloof to the information in the briefs. In balancing the possible harm to marine animals, Chief Justice Roberts hyperbolically suggested that one possible harm was: "the potential that a North Korean diesel electric submarine will get within range of Pearl Harbor undetected". NRDC counsel Kendall corrected the Chief Justice, noting that the questions in the case concerned only military training, not combat. Justice Breyer also seemed confused, and elicited a laugh by suggesting that all military exercises were destructive: "You go on a bombing mission, do they have to prepare an environmental impact statement first?" Mr. Kendall said again: "No", since NRDC was arguing for basic mitigation measures during training, ones that the Navy had previously followed, which had not stopped training.

Whales & Sonar: It's Not Pretty

Research shows that whales become disoriented, injured, and die after sonar testing. Strandings and deaths that have been frequently documented; in North Carolina (2005); in Haro Strait off the coast of Washington State (2003); in the Canary Islands (2004, 2002, 1989, 1986, 1985); in Madeira (2000); in the U.S. Virgin Islands (1999, 1998); Greece (1996), and the Bahamas (2000), and off the coast of Spain (2006), just for starters. The coincidence of whale strandings or deaths and naval sonar testing exercises seems too obvious to ignore. Recent research indicates how the marine mammals become injured and die, although cause and effect is sometimes difficult to pinpoint.

After the 2003 mass strandings in the Canary Islands, Nature published a report by Jepson et al, showed that beaked whales had gas filled cavities and emboli in their organs and tissues. The animals tend to hemorrhage around their ears and brain. According to Jepson's theory, those whales died from decompression sickness.¹ A subsequent study in Science, 2004 found the same effect in sperm whales. ². Jepson later reported that embolisms were also present in whales stranded off the coast of Spain in 2006. ³ More studies of strandings found the same. ⁴ So common to the many government funded reports and consistent with observation, tagging, and corpse analysis, whales become disoriented when subjected to sonar, leading to decompression sickness ⁵.

Recent research by teams in the Ian Boyd lab at St Andrews University and in the Peter Tyack lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute suggest that the whales try to escape the sound, causing them to dive frantically, which upsets their usual feeding and breeding habits. This erratic diving behavior causes the bends, hemorrhaging and injuries, Tyack told Times Online in a story published September 28, 2008:

"[The Navy] uses pulses of similar frequency and duration to the pulses emitted by killer whales and is very loud. It seems to have a particularly strong effect on species, such as small beaked whales, of which killer whales are the primary predator."

Beaked whales are most susceptible to harm because of their behavioral response of abnormal diving in the presence of sonar. Scientists are closing in on the mechanisms for injury and possible ways to avoid them. In the meantime, the Navy publicly denies this research.

This Won't Hurt at All, Says the Navy

The justices of the Supreme Court acknowledged they can't evaluate science. When presented with rationale by the Navy about needing to train at night because of thermal layers, Justice Breyer considered the Navy's stance: "Fine, they went on some exercises and they didn't run into these layered things. So obviously they couldn't have training." (Thermal layers and sonar are not too complicated for a lay person to understand at a basic level, as in here in the book, "How To Make War", by James Kunnigan, Chap. 10: Navy: Run Silent Run Deep.)

The court only anemically challenged the Navy's General Garre, who repeated asserted that the Navy's sonar causes no harm. Garre also claimed that the respondents hadn't shown "irreparable harm". For instance General Garre referred the court to a Navy document listing "all the species of beaked whales and explained that the harms that are predicted in the environmental assessment are non-injurious, temporary harms". Alioto asked Garre to explain this in "lay terms". Garre led Alioto to conclude there wasn't "physical injury", rather the whales might, as Alioto put it, just: "swim in a different direction"? (As if your child was whining in the living room so you wandered into the kitchen to get yourself a snack, rather than, that you were suddenly subjected to unending earth-shatteringly loud, nerve-ripping noise that caused you to flee up to the attic window, cover your exploding ears and plunge from the roof.) Garre assured Alioto: "that's right". But here's how the noise sounds according to the NRDC:

"In sound intensity, in this courtroom if we had a jet engine and you multiplied that noise by 2,000 times, correcting for water, that's the sound's intensity that would be going on in the water if you were a marine mammal near that source."

That's loud. Despite the Navy's assertions, the NRDC presented significant evidence of harm in its briefs. Kendall disputed General Garre that sonar caused "no harm." He described the noise, the embolisms, gas filled pockets, and hemorrhaging.

What the Navy Doesn't Want Us Know?

People have long suspected the Navy knows more then they're letting on about how sonar effects marine life. According to the NRDC brief (PDF) the Navy predicted in their EA that the SOCAL sonar training would result in 170,000 incidents to marine mammals -- harassment, injuries, or deaths -- and 548 permanent injuries for beaked whales.

The Navy denied and backpedaled about the possible harm to marine animals during Supreme Court questioning, but there is plenty of evidence that militaries of the world understand sonar's effects. The science journal Nature obtained an unpublished 2007 report from the UK Military under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 documenting that sonar negatively effects whale behavior and can lead to death. ⁶ The UK military ran Operation Anglo-Saxon 06 in 2006 and reported on whale activity during the "submarine war-games". Using hydrophones, researchers found the number of whale recordings dropped by 75% over during sonar exercises. The whales stopped vocalizing and foraging for food, and the UK military predicted this would lead to '"second and third order effects on the animal and population as a whole"', including starvation and death, according to the report.

To the extent the research is sparse perhaps it's because the US Navy has tried to suppress its findings. Nature reported in "Panel quits in row over sonar damage" in 2006, that the US Navy pressured scientists to suppress evidence of harm from sonar. ⁷ The US Marine Mammal Commission (MMC) was convened by Congress in 2003 to advise Congress on a plan to research whales and sonar, however the commission broke apart, plan-less, after 2 years of meetings.

Nature spoke to members of the failed MNC who said that the science had been "highly politicized". According to one participant, "the Navy, as well as other groups that use sonar, including geophysical researchers and the oil and gas industry, blocked a consensus." Lindy Weilgart of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, told the journal: '"This process has been a travesty of fiscal responsibility, scientific integrity, and environmental stewardship."'

Environmental Law, by the Navy: "What He Said."

In the beginning of the hearing Supreme Court pursued the facts pertaining to the Navy's decision to ignore the law requiring the EIS, and simply construct its own environmental assessment (EA) according to it's own criteria, unvetted by anyone but the Navy, and not subject to public comment.

Different justices questioned General Garre about the CEQ's authority as an office in the White House to override environmental law set out in NEPA. They suggested that perhaps the only "emergency" was that the Navy had ignored the legal requirement for the EIS before starting training. Then Justice Scalia proposed a tactic of argumentation for General Garre:

Scalia: "Look, the problem you face and maybe you're being whipsawed, is that you are effectively estopped from the argument that no EIS is necessary by the fact that you have agreed to these alternative arrangements. But you should not be estopped from arguing that at the time the EA was issued that was not a good faith completion of all the Navy's responsibilities....It assumes that the EA wasn't enough. And I'm not sure that we -- that that assumption is valid."

General Garre: "Well, that's right....the Navy believes that its EA was not only prepared in good faith, but was appropriate and reached the right conclusions...." Garre had repeatedly stated that the sonar training would cause little "likelihood of irreparable injury..." But Justice David Souter wondered whether: "without the EIS, the Navy is acting in -- in a state of -- of some degree of ignorance greater than would be the case if -- if it had done -- done the EIS."

Scalia addressed Garre again:

"The EA demonstrates in your view that the EIS would -- would very likely say that this -- this action by the Navy is okay. And since that is the case, there is -- there is no probability of irreparable harm; to the contrary, there is the probability of no irreparable harm because of the EA."

Said General Garre: "Well, we agree with that." (The Navy does agree with that, even though the EA predicted over 500 serious injuries and 170,000 incidents, it concludes no harm, no harm, again and again.)

Scalia later suggested:

"In all -- in all of these cases it is controverted, or in most of them, whether an EIS is either necessary -- is even necessary. So if the mere allegation that it was necessary gives rise to an allegation of irreparable harm, you are going to get a preliminary injunction in all cases?"

General Garre replied: "I think that's right."

However, earlier in the questioning, General Garre had assured the court that he recognized the Navy's original "duty to prepare the EIS". He had told the justices about the Navy's steadfast commitment to completing the tardy EIS document per previous legal agreements. Now, suddenly, Garre asserted he was "contesting" what he had before agreed to -- that the Navy needed to complete an EIS. This confused Justice Ginsburg, who remembered that 30 minutes earlier Garre had stated his commitment to "meet the goal" of producing the EIS by January, 2009 (although, disconcertingly, the training ends in 2008). Ginsburg said: "I thought you conceded that point". General Garre the quickly apologized for his earlier concession: "if I misspoke".

Who needs Scalia's book "Making Your Case Persuading Judges"? Just show up for the tutorial, let him argue your points, and nod -- "what Scalia said".

Good Stewards of The Environment

In the end, the Supreme Court justices puzzled over why the Navy was dragging its heels if the agency had completed the EA, was committed to completing the EIS, and if there was "no irreparable harm" to mammals.

Garre, perhaps emboldened, after Scalia's pat on the back, suggested in closing that the NRDC did not even have standing if beaked whales were harmed.

One justice queried the two parties about why they hadn't worked it out, as opposed to leaving it to the courts. Judges aren't experts on Naval exercises or marine biology, the justices pointed out. NRDC's Kendall answered that "the Navy is focused on having it its way or no way". Chief Justice John G. Roberts retorted, "that's not fair"; the Navy had continually compromised, he said, but "no good deed goes unpunished".

Scientists warn that the beach strandings may indicate an even larger problem -- not all animals may be washed ashore, many more may be dying and lost at the sea. In a review of research on whale injuries, causes, and mitigation by Marine Pollution Bulletin. ⁸, the authors write: "...the greatest user of military sonars in the world, the US Navy, appears to be in denial about the situation." While the US has taken significant action to weaken cetacean protection in national and international waters, especially with regard to sonar, the Navy continues to boast about its commitment to being "good stewards of the environment".

The Supreme Court will issue its decision later this session.

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EPA: The Dog Ate Our Homework

Last week 18 states sued the EPA after the agency refused to act on last year's Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA. The court had ordered the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gases presented a danger to public health and welfare, and if so to plan how to regulate them. The states' action was the latest move in the long tussle between the EPA and the states, the EPA and multiple Congressional committees, the EPA and various non-profits speaking on behalf of citizens, even the EPA and businesses who have a keen interest in slowing climate change.

On March 27th (PDF!), EPA administrator Steven L. Johnson sent a letter to Congressman Henry Waxman's (D-CA) Oversight Committee, outlining his plan to seek public comment on greenhouse gases and potential regulation. It was a short, simple letter but an elaborate Victorian lacework of excuses. The decision, he wrote, involved sifting through "options", "potential effects", "pending petitions","possible regulations", "careful considerations", "comment periods", "relevant data","drafts", "solicit[ations]" and "extensive briefings".

The Supreme Court ordered a ruling on the implications of CO2 from mobile sources, but administrator Johnson chose to expand his review to include as many stakeholders as he could think of -- "experts", "schools", "hospitals," "factories", "power plants", "aircraft and ships", "on-road vehicles", "off-road vehicles", "petroleum refineries", "Portland cement", "authorities", "power plants" and "industrial boilers". Procrastinators and students of the dog-ate-my-paper temperament should study his document for inspiration.

The 300 Page EPA Reports Had Already Found C02 Endangers Public Health

The science on CO2 is conclusive and the EPA knows it. The agency has already followed up on the 2007 Supreme Court ruling with a thorough investigation of their own. They recruited 60-70 experts to look at the greenhouse gas effect on public welfare (summary, PDF). The large EPA team found that, yes, global warming did endanger public welfare and detailed their result in a 300 page report. To note, this wasn't news to them, the EPA worked through the issues at stake in Massachusetts v. EPA back in 1999 and in other investigations which documented the same health findings.

Following their 300 page report, Johnson signed a proposal that would have reduced carbon dioxide from motor vehicles and brought fleet fuel economy to 35 mpg by 2018, a proposal which bested by two years the time-line in the energy bill recently signed by President Bush. Unfortunately Johnson's proposal for emissions regulation, the endangerment finding, and the 300 page document got lost somewhere between the EPA and the White House and NHTSA, leaving Congressman Waxman and his committee investigating what became of these EPA decisions and plans.

Now in 2008, nearly ten years after the initial request was given to the EPA, Johnson decides that rather than "rushing to judgment", as he put it in his latest memo, the EPA must continue to look at "complex issue[s]", "interconnections" , "lawsuits", "deadlines", possible "changes" and "ramifications", "permits", "thresholds", "requirements", "relevant information", "complexity", and "implications". The world is anxious for action on global warming. Why now, with the pressing urgency of climate change bearing down, is the EPA is overtaken by omphaloskepsis? Or is it mendacity?

Stalling: EPA Extends Public Comment and Oil Companies Weigh In

Congress wrote the Clean Air Act in 1970 to safeguard public health and welfare. Air quality regulation deserves public comment. But Johnson is proposing a comment period in the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR), despite having already received 50,000 public comments in 5 months, when the EPA previously solicited comment. This new "public comment period", seems like nothing but an unnecessary stalling mechanism, one that will only solicit "public" comment from organizations who have already weighed in loudly.

Before Bush signed the energy bill and the EPA denied the California waiver, the EPA, OMB and the White House met regularly with many stakeholders including those from the petroleum and auto industries. The Detroit News reported last year that Cheney and/or Bush met with "Detroit's three automakers" multiple times in 2006 and 2007. Public Citizen wrote a 54 page report last August (PDF) documenting how from 2001 to 2003, senior administration officials met with Department of Transportation's (DOT) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) 45 times in order to produce an attributes model for determining fuel economy. Their considerations were incorporated into the CAFE standards.

As well, according to meeting records, the OMB held five "20-in-10" meetings last year and more in 2006, when the (OMB), the EPA and DOE and the DOT/NHTSA gnashed over the President's proposal to raise fuel economy by 20% in 10 years. Stakeholders who attended these meetings included Shell, the American Petroleum Institute, Frontier Oil, Occidental Petroleum, BP, ExxonMobil, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, and Porsche.

The LA Times wrote in a March 28th article that Johnson's suggestion for more comment followed a memo circulated by the Heritage Foundation, an industry lobby group or "think tank", to "everyone that we could think of" in the White House and Congress. The memo urged decision makers to pressure the EPA for the ANPR because this would make legislators look like they were doing something. As the lobby group put it, the public comment session:

"would allow all interested parties to send the EPA relevant information and start a record on important topics such as the cost and burden of carbon caps and Clean Air Act expansion without triggering the costly new regulations."

When the EPA found on endangerment (that GHG were a public health hazard) last year, it conducted "extensive analysis....about costs and benefits", according to Waxman's letter, before producing the plan that Johnson signed off on.

Now, the industry and its agent, the EPA, propose to expand the pool of stakeholders in order snag the regulatory process in a morass of bureaucracy. What's fascinating to us here at Acronym Required, is how quickly interested parties drop their typical ideological attachment to "efficiency" and "small government" when advocating an obstructive process that suit their ends.

Industry Meet and Bleat: EPA, NHTSA and the OMB

If we want to know what more "public comment" might look like with respect to "costs and benefits", we could get insight from glancing at a memo presented to the OMB and its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in a meeting November 15, 2007 with Chrysler executives. (The document we will be discussing doesn't have an author noted, but there's various fingerprints from oil companies, lobby groups and car manufacturers. Since the only company attendees at the meeting were Chrysler executives I will call it the document the "Chrysler document", the "meeting document", or the "document")

There are hundreds of other memos to the EPA, of course, but this one, the anonymous authored "Regulation of Motor Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act and the Energy Policy Conservation Act", (Whitehouse.gov/omb..) reads like an industry directive to the EPA role for how they should regulate greenhouse gases emitted from moving vehicles. After reading this it doesn't take a vivid imagination to see the industry's prints on the EPA's current actions. The "simplest" solution, the authors of this document say, "...is for the EPA to abstain from attempting to set carbon dioxide standards" from vehicles "already subject to the NHTSA regime." [emphasis ours]

To quickly explain: The two government agencies that regulate motor vehicles are the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the Department of Transportation (DOT). NHTSA sets gas mileage targets through CAFE standards, and the EPA is charged with regulating motor vehicle emissions.The energy bill that Congress passed and Bush signed (H.R. 6) last December pertains to mileage standards. Carbon dioxide emissions are primarily responsible for global warming. Industry argues that the EPA should not regulate emissions because of "regulatory overlap" between the NHTSA and EPA, but this was already defeated by the Supreme Court, who rejected this overlap argument.

The meeting document defines the EPA's "primary mission" under the Clean Air Act as determining the "requisite technology", that will "address the potential problem of climate change" -- as if technology were the only solution (and the entire thrust of the Act). A quick aside: Politicians use the word "technology" because of its magical properties. It's modern, smart, and forward leaning. "Technology" solves unsolvable problems and no one argues with it, it offends no one. "Technology" inevitably translates to more *business*, and business is always good, therefore "technology" is probably the only noun in the world that remains nonpartisan. Pollution problems have been solved with techology -- ie: scrubbers, catalytic converters, but too often it's used as an empty promise. The "technology" argument has been quite successful in staving off progress on global warming, as we mentioned in a previous post.

The document advises that if the EPA find endangerment, which they did, then the agency should coordinate with NHTSA "a series of clearly defined steps, each of which involv[es] public participation", and successive "public comment" periods. The document precisely describes the very political maneuvering we see today, so no one today should be surprised at the EPA's announcement.

But long after this document was made public, the press and politicians expressed shock over EPA actions like the agency's denial of the California waiver. Sometimes the press should pay more attention to the evidence. There was no room for surprise given the very public history of the climate change tussles.

Cues: "Technological Feasibility, Economic Practicability, Maximum Feasible"

The meeting document repeatedly cites the NHTSA's Energy Policy & Conservation Act of 1975 ("EPCA" or "the 1975 Act"), and its "balanced goals". The reason for the auto industry's adoration of the 33 year old NHTSA standard over the Clean Air Act and the EPA's updates to the Clean Air Act, is because the 1975 Act considered things like "technological feasibility" and "economic practicability", which allow for more input from the industry.

A favorite concept from the "1975 Act" is "maximum feasibility". "The document" insists that the EPA carbon dioxide standards should be "no more stringent" that the "maximum feasible" standards for fuel economy set under the NHTSA. Although the phrase "maximum feasible" seems straightforward, it's anything but. To be clear about what they mean, the authors spell out their own definition. It's not, they write, "the highest level of fuel economy that can be achieved by a single vehicle, or even by a fleet of vehicles, through the application of available technologies". "Maximum feasible" they say, gives the auto industry leeway to consider sector employment, consumer choice, and the overall health of the industry. In other words, "maximum feasible" is entirely subjective and by their interpretation, the fantastic 1975 Act, "ensured wide consumer choice by leaving maximum flexibility to the manufacturer". To be clear, the industry theorem therefore takes "maximum feasibility", and neatly redefines it as "maximum flexibility to the manufacturer".

The authors emphasize the part of the Clean Air Act 202(a)(2), that says the EPA should give "appropriate consideration to the cost of compliance". The document predicts that costs like "investment in tooling engineering research, and development" are a "primary constraining factors on the industry's ability to achieve higher average fuel economy levels on a fleet-wide basis", and that "NHTSA's own standard setting process under EPCA would...be the upper limit of what EPA could properly determine to be the most stringent standards". In other words, gut the intention of the Clean Air Act, and instead follow NHTSA's 1975 standard.

The document says the Clean Air Act should allow the EPA to: "set standards that take account of the limits on the investment capabilities and product cycles of the industry, just as NHTSA does...". The document advises the EPA to consider the financial resources of the industry, and weigh the "potential trade-offs between more stringent requirements in the near-term, and investments in longer-term strategies that seek to commercialize vehicles that do not require" carbon fuels. Of course, the industry has for 30 years spent all its effort undermining "longer-term strategies", so this is a bit of a canard.

Citing a petroleum industry case, the document recommends that whatever the EPA does, standards shouldn't require costs and if "additional technology" is needed, than the EPA can "properly decide to not adopt standards under the Clean Air Act". So first the EPA should define "requisite technology", then once it's defined, then the auto industry waive action. The Chrysler document outlines all the ways the EPA can not regulate greenhouse gases, including "abstain from attempting..." regulation, a request that the EPA under Stephen Johnson seems quite agreeable to.

Automotive "Modernization" -- Back to the 70's?

Of course if we look back 30 years ago we get an idea of how antiquated and stuck the American auto manufacturing industry really is. In the 1970's the fuel efficient cars looked like the Plymouth Duster or the Chevy Chevette, and the impetus to innovate for customer choice was real because those rattletrap choices were truly dire. Today, "customer choice" is an encrusted artifact of advertising cynically used by auto manufacturers, especially when faced with regulation. Despite seductive rhetoric about "new technology", the auto industry is clinging to the good 'ole days and the loose regulatory framework of the NHTSA's 33 year old standard.

The document presented to the EPA in November, 2008 directs "what the Congress sought to achieve in the [1970's] EPCA and how those objectives should shape EPA's action under the Clean Air Act." The authors on last year's document quote Phil Sharp, former D-IN (now the president of Resources for the Future, an energy policy think-tank) who sponsored the 1975 Act. Apparently, three decades ago, during a congressional debate, Sharpe noted: "Serious unemployment in the auto industry" called for considerations to "preserve this important segment of the economy". Sharp urged the EPA to maintain "the health of the industry."

It's interesting that a 2008 document would pull a quote from a congressional debate three decades ago, but since the authors did, lets respond to Sharp circa 1970/2008.

Back to the 1970's. We know that "mid-century" is all the rage in fashion and home decorating, but while we tolerate (for the sake of argument) scaly old orange plastic chairs and brown shag rugs as retro fashion statements, we're not so keen on mid-century policy for 21st century problems. We need an evolved policy to "preserve the auto industry". Plus, if you think back, the Chevy Chevette got 40mpg highway, 28mpg city, better than many cars today. Surely we can do better with mileage and emissions in 2008, then in 1970 -- given our technology-centric society?

Today in 2008, the auto industry is swamped with losses. In the 1980's, when one auto company president suggested controlling the regulators, Reagan replied "Get control of them? We need to get rid of them."

Per Ronald Reagan and successive White House leadership, for the last 35 years deregulation spared the auto industry manufacturers, who chose to use the government's leniency and improvements in fuel efficiency to innovate gas consuming features rather than mileage standards that surpassed the "1975 Act" mandate. When sales sink up to 18%, as they now have, unemployment follows. Would today's crisis have been averted if a less permissive policy had been pursued?¹

The auto industry would love to live forever in the 1970's. But if "the health of the industry" is truly still a goal, maybe the government's kindest move would be to shoot the industry, or drown it in the bathtub, or whatever libertarian types do these days with ponderous, surly sectors.

The Prognostications of New York Times

In a post last week we questioned the New York Times assumption that Congress would never alter the Clean Air Act to include cost benefit analysis.² But perhaps they don't have to, if the Heritage Foundation is successful at urging members of legislator to bog down EPA action on global warming.

When legislation leaves it to industry to decide whether a particular environmental regulation to mitigate pollution or toxins, the process towards resolution is well-rehearsed and elicits a predictable response -- YES, yes; way, way too costly! This is the problem. Costs and benefits must be considered, even though some people unilaterally criticize cost benefit analysis for public health and welfare. But on the emissions arguments and the Clean Air Act provisions, analysts correctly point out that costs are often overestimated. This is because the industry doesn't approach this exercise fairly, rather they seek to torpedo all regulatory initiative to preserve and enhance today's profits.

The document prepared for the Chrysler/OMB meeting underlines one of the points of our previous post: that costs and benefit analysis done by industry will prioritize industry profits; and forsake clean air, water, health and welfare.³

To run out the clock, the EPA broadened the emissions issue addressed by the Supreme Court to all greenhouse gas emitters. Expanding the Supreme Court's mandate so promiscuously will allow corporations and their lobby groups, maybe even some newly minted ones with deceptive names like 'Citizens For Fresh Air', (I made this up) to make wide, swinging estimates of costs in an attempt to freak the public out about lost jobs, economic gloom and doom and the exorbitant cost of regulation. This is a 30 year old trick though, and where did it lead the auto industry?

Consumer Choice, Sea to Shining Sea

In the US, school children sing national songs about the country's natural resources. Indeed, the country is famous for its natural beauty, the mountains, forests, canyons, fields and azure oceans. Children learn "America The Beautiful" early on. But once they grow to adults, the children naively adapt their thinking. They accept rhetoric from industry that rejects the idea that resources are really the citizens', rather they belong to industry, which uses and pollutes air, water, land, trees. Somehow citizens think that yes, what's good for industry trickles down to them. Then when pollution burdens public health, as with smog in California, industry reacts as if fouling the public's air and water is its right -- how dare citizens overstep their rights by demanding we control our pollution?

Trotting out the "costs" of regulation, industry rebuffs citizens as if they were encroaching, trying to steal its property. Regulation is hurting business, they cry! Once citizens and politicians subscribe to this rhetoric, regulation is easily overturned in the name of freedom. And subscribe they do, paying daily, yearly, for industry to pollute the nation's resources. If that doesn't work for businesses and their lobbies, they drag "jobs" onto the set.

When industry puts "jobs" onto the national bargaining table they present a coercive choice. Regulation or jobs? Clean air or jobs? Water or jobs? Glaciers or jobs? Species or jobs? Your health or jobs? Your kids health or jobs? Would most citizens walk up to a slouch on the street and ask to play 3-card Monte with them? No. But in just as obvious a con, citizens instinctively recoil from the "jobs threat" and snatch desperately at the "jobs" hand -- just as if it were really a "choice"! Addressing global warming is good for the economy, not bad.

Global warming is not a simple problem, but the Supreme Court has many times laid the groundwork for how the EPA needs to act. But the Environmental Protection Agency, in the name of its citizens but in the service of "free-markets" flouts the court, congress, states and constituents.

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¹Deregulation that impacted environmental resources didn't start in the 1980's, but Reagan amassed huge gains in this direction, including cost benefit considerations. Many politicians are attentive to these analyses and some ascribe to more radical sentiments. Senator Tom Delay and Senator James Inhofe would dismantle agencies like NOAA, NEH, DOE, OSHA and the EPA, which they liken to the "Gestapo". (See for instance Delay, T., "No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight" (p13)). Inhofe puts out regular press releases as ranking minority member of the Committee for the Environment and Public Works (EPW) which is led by Barbara Boxer stating that any global warming measure will cost jobs and wreak economic havoc.

²We previously wrote about Johnson's request to Congress that the Clean Air Act be "refurbished" to include "benefits, costs, risk tradeoffs, and feasibility in making decisions about how to clean the air".

³A 2007 draft report for Congress on costs and benefits of government legislation used Heritage Foundation information and the example of failed communist states to show how regulation can wreak havoc on an economy. Of course the Soviet Union was famous for disasters like Chernobyl and for leaving a devastating, costly pollution legacy, so the example is flawed on many levels. Not to mention how ludicrous it is to write a 2007 report to Congress which stoops to waste even one sentence linking clean air and water security with communism.

Flipping a Nation

The press, scientists, and commentators were instinctively indignant yet unsurprised by the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) new ozone rules, which of course came out below science and public health recommendations. The agency changed the ozone levels from 84 parts per billion (ppb) to 75 ppb. Scientists agree that 60-70 ppb are necessary to decrease deaths and smog levels dangerous to children, the elderly, and those with asthma and respiratory disease.

Of course industry and the Bush administration weighed in on the matter, killing a secondary standard that EPA staff had recommended. The EPA's secondary standard would have allowed agency discretion to set temporary standards in the event of certain conditions like weather, for instance in to protect vegetation and wildlife from ozone exposure during growing seasons.

Considering the urgency of the situation, the EPA issued a flaccid ruling, but naturally held a full-court press conference to give agency heads the opportunity to beat their brave, intrepid, heroic chests. There, administrator Stephen Johnson spoke of standard as, "the most health-protective eight-hour ozone decision in the nation's history".

A New York Times editorial wrote:

"The big surprise was Mr. Johnson's proposal to rewrite the Clean Air Act to allow regulators to take costs into account when setting air quality standards. Since this would permanently devalue the role of science while strengthening the hand of industry, the proposal has no chance of success in a Democratic Congress."

What? The Bush administration whittles away government regulation? It marches "forward", privatizing various common assets like air, natural resources, forests and health that the administration acts like it inherited for the America public? Shocking. You the spin we hear about the redistribution of national resources as a principled, constitutionally sound, economically ideal (market driven) thing to do is -- well, spin? Surprise, surprise.

We can count the ways that our government ignores science in its decisions -- astute observers attend to this problem. The EPA itself attempts to gut the Clean Air Act at every opportunity, for instance after Hurricane Katrina (pdf!). But to the NYT editor's point, is Johnson's cost/benefit proposal outlandish? Not a chance of passing?

The EPA Saves "Living" Things: Documents

Johnson called the Clean Air Act a "living document" that needed to be "refurbished", "overhaul[ed] and enhance[ed]", "modernize[d] and upgrade[d]". There's really nothing to complain about on the face to this statement. Johnson announced his four "principles" for a Clean Air Act, including, to"allow decision-makers to consider benefits, costs, risk tradeoffs, and feasibility in making decisions about how to clean the air." The Clean Air Act was not "a relic to be displayed in the Smithsonian", he said.

The Times editor pointed out that Johnson's proposal would "cut to the very heart of the Clean Air Act", which was written to protect science from special interests by mandating rule-making based on health, not economic costs.

As we have witnessed, when the first hint of pollution regulation arises, any energy company worth its salt begins wailing about "technology not being available", about the exorbitant cost of the proposal, and about all the risks of complying when there is such scientific "uncertainty". Companies did just this when they held the nation in a decades long trance while they chanted about global warming uncertainty. Recognizing hints of recent history in his statement, and knowing how Johnson's incredulous suggestion could easily put estimates about cost and feasibility squarely in industry's park to the detriment of clean anything, we should become alarmed, perhaps leap into action and phone all our legislators.

However the NYT editor's tone sought to sooth us by calling Johnson's pronouncement a "revelatory moment", one that signaled the administration's "cry of frustration at being largely unsuccessful in undoing three decades of environmental law". Like the wolf frustrated in mid-hunt? One last guttural, spine chilling howl before giving up its prey -- and the fawn darts into a thicket of brambles just in the nick of time, a small defiant flick of its white tail?

Can we argue so optimistically, as the NYT editor did, that the Bush administration attempts have been "largely unsuccessful"? Knowing that standards should be set according to science can we be assured that, "the proposal has no chance of success in a Democratic Congress"? We love this view, can we share the optimism?

Ozone Decisions, Sunset Regulations and the Doyenne of Death

In Johnson's ozone ruling he said he followed the letter of the law and ignored "costs, net benefits and implementation challenges of more stringent standards", as required by the Act. Despite his words, scientists say that his new 75ppb standard was in deference to industry. Rogene Henderson, who chairs the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee, told Platts Energy: "I think [Johnson] is responding to the pressure of the industrial groups about the cost".

The idea that agencies need to consider the costs of clean water and air rulings on "small business" seems intuitive. But it can be manipulated to leave small businesses susceptible to lobby manipulation by groups like the National Coalition of Petroleum Retailers, who may officially represent "small business", but whose aims may appeal most strongly to huge business. In another example, look at San Francisco's attempt to limit bisphenol A, and the immediate lawsuit which of course included BPA manufacturers, but also listed as parties to the suit local toy stores.

Various White House meeting records also indicate influence on the EPA from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). A series of memos between Susan Dudley, the OIRA administrator, and the EPA, detail the Administration's influence in crafting the rule (available online www.regulations.gov). Over a couple of exchanges, the EPA refused to back down on the secondary standard. Then administrator Dudley issued a 'President-says-so' order March 12th: "The President has concluded that, consistent with Administration policy, added protection [Orwellian doublespeak?] should be afforded...by strengthening [more OD?] the secondary ozone standard and setting the secondary standard identical to the new primary standard..." Thus, the EPA was over-ruled.

Before Susan Dudley was chosen by Bush to head the OIRA, she distinguished herself by attacking what she saw as over-regulation, and she decried the diminished role of the OIRA and OMB in overseeing the regulations that agencies enacted. In the 1990's she roundly criticized the effect of a Clinton executive order, which shifted regulation out from under executive control to science agencies like the EPA. Dudley said the OIRA and OMB under Clinton had been made impotent and she urgently advocated for cost benefit analysis, especially for ozone and particulate matter rules. She chafed at how OIRA had lost its standing as the "watchdog for social welfare". (Regulation, Fall, 1997) As Reagan and H.W. Bush did before him, the current Bush administration has now spent the last 8 years pulling authority back into the executive branch. Dudley's interests are clearly aligned the administration's.

When Bush considered Susan Dudley to run OIRA, according the the Washington Post in 2006, "'Frank O'Donnell of Clean Air Watch called Dudley 'a true anti-regulatory zealot' who 'makes John Graham (previous OIRA head and Mercatus executive) look like Ralph Nader.'" In 2006 Public Citizen and OMB Watch published a report about Susan Dudley on the eve of her appointment to the OIRA, titled "The Cost Is Too High: How Susan Dudley Threatens Public Protections". The two groups argued against Dudley's appointment to the OIRA -- because her approach to regulation, they argue, was laden with "extreme-antiregulatory ideology". Public Citizen and OMB Watch went on to detail her background at the neoliberal Mercatus Center and her dedication to "embedding cost considerations in all laws that authorize agencies to protect the public, including...'safety first' laws" (like Clean Air Act).¹

Of course cost/benefit calculations involve valuing health, the environment, and quality of life. When considering the cost/benefits of smog then, here's a question: what's an acceptable threshold for the number kids who are forced to stay inside on high ozone days to prevent asthma attacks? Thousands? Millions? Particular cost-of-death calculations are often seemingly arbitrary, and long-term injury or morbidity that may or may not truncate a life are treated in an even more speculative way by CBA. Moreover, the end, what does this say about how the US values its citizens, its children?

At the other end of the age spectrum, according to the OMBWatch/Public Citizen report "Dudley has supported a senior death discount that counts the lives of seniors for less than the lives of the young". While this may be standard actuarial practice, pollution is more dangerous to the elderly, which make her calculations seem savage. For the prospects of regulations protecting our welfare the report pulls no punches in painting Dudley as the doyenne of death.

What Happens in "The Catbird Seat"

The report's authors also point out that not all "costs" have the same moral and ethical value. With the government's "regulatory budgeting", they say, "industry can knowingly expose the public to grave harms, enjoy the financial benefits of failing to take the steps necessary to protect the public, and then use compliance costs -- the costs of finally doing the right thing -- as a shield against being forced to comply with new protective standards."

Then there is Dudley's advocacy for sunset regulation, which 'imposes automatic extinction to regulatory policies then puts agencies in the position of having to justify regulations'. As we can see from global warming, environmental damage accrues with indecision. By the time a piece of the Antarctic the size of seven Manhattan's drops off, well, too little has been done too late. Decades go by with corporations lobbying for quarter to quarter profits, as the ice melts.

Finally, as Public Citizen notes: "Dudley would impose "regulatory budgets": fictional budgets of industry compliance costs, with a cap. Once an agency like the EPA hits its cap, it would be forced to stop promulgating any new protective standards, no matter how great the need."

As part of its regulatory oversight OIRA invites industry to suggest changes to federal rules. The Washington Post reported that shortly into President Bush's first term, when the OMB asked for public input on which regulations should be revised or killed, Mercatus submitted 44 of the 71 proposals that the OMB received. OMB approved 15 of them according to the National Journal.

In 2002, this number increased significantly. 267 regulations were targeted, 80 from business associated organizations and a couple dozen from Mercatus. As a result, in 2001 and 2002 the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act were changed by proposals that benefited industry sponsors like BP Amoco, ExxonMobil and Koch Industries and other Mercatus donors.² The Public Citizen/OMB Watch analysis predicted that when Dudley headed the OMB she "will sit in the catbird seat, overseeing the entire executive regulatory process...able to slow, stall, weaken regulatory proposals" to the detriment of public health and the environment.

Ozone Rulings and Regulatory Agencies

Bush worked around the nervousness surrounding Dudley's nomination by appointing her during Congress's recess. Dudley then immediately began to reclaim more ground for the OIRA. Specific to the smog ruling we opened with, Dudley had long advocated against smog regulations on behalf of industry. In 1997 testimony before the Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works on the Subcommittee on Clean Air, Wetlands, Private Property and Nuclear Safety she argued incorrectly as the Vice President of "Economists Incorporated" that smog was beneficial because it protected individuals from ultraviolet radiation. In the same presentation she asserted preposterously that since research showed that asthma rates were associated with poverty, a smog ruling would have the "perverse effect" of costing communities money, which would in turn increase poverty and asthma. While she now works for government and on behalf of citizens instead of industry, she employs the same line of thinking.

The OMB for its part has the EPA in its sights for what it deems as engaging in misguided rule-making based on unreasonable scientific uncertainty and high costs. In the 2007 annual report to Congress The Costs and Benefits of Federal Regulations, OMB criticized the EPA for its determinations of the health effects of particulate matter: "the degree of uncertainty in benefit estimates for clean air rules is large. In addition, the wide range of benefits estimates for particle control does not capture the full extent of scientific uncertainty."

The authors single out six EPA rules on drinking water which they say cost state, local, and tribal governments or the private sector "over the threshold" of one hundred million dollars annually. The Clinton/Bush II Executive Order 12866, and Bush's two recent amendments, strengthened the OMB/OIRA's authority over the agencies, including putting executive appointed regulatory policy positions into each (decreasingly) independent agency.

Of course this OMB analysis doesn't expound on the enumerable benefits of clean drinking water free of cleaning agents, disinfectants or arsenic. And why one hundred million dollars? Some Senator's houses cost nearly that much. And this is a drop in the bucket compared to the Iraq war, which cost $341.4 million per day and has some mighty uncertain benefits.

The 2007 OMB costs and benefits report grounds its analysis in the philosophy that economically well-off countries have strong property rights and minimal regulation. The draft document veers often to pure right-wing citing the Heritage Foundation for information and absurdly saying that Communism was the result of excessive regulation gone awry.

No More Neighborhood Wimp

In an issue of Regulation in 1997 Dudley wrote before she was administrator about a previous OIRA administrator who had bragged that OIRA was the "biggest kid on the block", so other agencies had to respond to its agenda. She complained that the OIRA under Clinton was the neighborhood wimp. So although Dudley's perch at OIRA may be short-term, she had been preparing her tenure for decades and when nominated by Bush strode in to the post with a clear agenda.³

Johnson's proposal to rewrite the Clean Air Act is not out of left field, rather something urged for decades by industry, various government agencies, congressman and lobby groups. Furthermore, it's no more surprising then his smog ruling, if more appalling, since the changes he speaks of have been in the works for years and in fact progress towards the goals he articulated is well underway.

Health and the Environment: The Public's Standing

You'd think Johnson wouldn't even mention to Congress rewriting the Clean Air Act, given the spotlight on the EPA's recent record on the environment and the vocal admonition of members like Senator Boxer (D-CA). But Congress, though recently vocal against the EPA's refusal to move on environmental laws, has at times acquiesced eagerly to business deregulation and cost benefit guided rulemaking. Thus the current ease and confidence of Dudley in thwarting the goals of the EPA. Congress of course touts progress on all fronts, business, environment, and health, but business generally comes out the biggest winner.

Our intent is not to focus entirely on Susan Dudley, anymore than it is to focus on Stephen Johnson, or George W. Bush. They're all accomplices to a larger agenda which seems outmoded and outdated, that needs to be "overhauled" and "modernized". We are not in competition with Soviet ideology, capitalism is not merely ascendant, it's dominant -- so arguments in last year's OMB report to Congress about regulations on Clean Air and Water being nigh to Communism are absurd.

We live in a time when kids can't play outdoors because of smog, when business pollutes with abandon then screams about a rule that mildly asks, please don't pour oil into streams. We live in a time when the UN warns monthly about climate change and rising seas. This is the state of our nation today. This administration's decades old way of thinking deserves only to be encased in Plexiglas in a museum.

We live in a time when business calls the shots in Congress, in the White House and in the Judiciary, and we should all wake up to that truth. Yet voters still respond to "red phone" imagery with a knowing nod of utter naivete. There is no threat bigger than ourselves -- we are the traitorous monsters in our midst.

When the phone rings -- red, blue, yellow or green -- in the White House, in your Congressperson's office, or at the court house, it's not some nameless international threat, but an American industry whose TV advertisements you hum to and whose brand you endorse, and the person on the other end is calling to murmur in the lawmaker's ear about less regulation. One hand of the caller is slipping dollars into the decision-maker's pockets while the other waves fanatically to citizens about the economic doom of Clean Air and Clean Water, about the unemployment that will follow, and balance sheets that will run red. That's what happens when the red phone rings in the White House in 2008. Let's get real.

So what will elected representatives do for Clean Air? What they always do? Should the world have faith that Congress will protect Clean Air and Water? Sure, as long as somehow business benefits. But citizens have a choice, and always a voice, so we'll veer positive here. The NYT editor's right. The US evolves. Congress will see Johnson's clumsy marionette arms and legs being yanked by OIRA, his mouth voicing the agreed upon words from the decades old script. And your Congressman will answer the phone when citizens call, skip the form letter reply, and renounce Johnson's quest to rewrite Clean Air considering such things as costs, feasibility, and trade-offs.

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¹The report details how during seven years in the 1990's, Koch Industries (a petrochemical company) was found by the EPA to have spilled 3 million gallons of oil (300 unstopped leaks) into waterways in 6 states, and was fined $30 million dollars as a civil penalty (Koch founded Mercatus and is its largest contributor).

² Incidentally, Mercatus donors included Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan Chase, NYSE, Fanny Mae, and Freddie Mac. A quarter of the proposals the Mercatus submitted to OIRA in 2001 and 2002 were for financial services deregulation.

³Executive orders and congressional laws paved the way, for instance in the 1990's, rules such as the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act (1995), the Government Performance and Results Act (1993), and the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA) (1996), all addressed regulatory and reporting costs without expanding definitions of benefits. SBREFA, for example, spares businesses from what could be burdensome regulatory costs. Bush's latest rules significantly strengthen the clout of the agency.

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Acronym Required wrote previously about the EPA, the environment, and public policy.

EPA v. Massachusetts

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Monday, in Massachusetts v. EPA, that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is obligated to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Twelve states, along with public health and environmental groups, had sued the EPA for failing to protect citizens against emissions. The case wended its way to the highest court after the EPA denied the appeal of the states asking it to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The EPA had argued that it wasn't authorized to pass mandatory regulations under the act, and that no causal link between greenhouse gases and emissions was proven. The agency also said that such regulation would be a "piecemeal", therefore would conflict with "the President's comprehensive approach".

Interestingly, the EPA relied in part on the court's opinions in a tobacco case, Brown v. Williamson. In that case the Supreme Court ruled that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could not regulate cigarette smoke. The EPA noted in its arguments that in the tobacco case the court had considered "tobacco['s] unique political history" and the tobacco industry's "significant portion of the America economy". Climate change also has "political history", said the EPA. The agency reasoned that if it were to act on carbon dioxide and other emissions, that would alter Congress' intent for the Clean Air Act to regulate "local" pollution, and would force the EPA to apply the act to a very "global" problem. This, the EPA said, would have even greater economic and political repercussions than had the FDA been forced to regulate tobacco.

The court's majority opinion heartily rejected these arguments. The opinion recounted some of the science and political history of climate change and emissions, and compared this to tobacco's history, clearly outlining the strong differences between congressional intent and action in the two cases.

The EPA also reasoned that even if it did have agency in this case, the only way to control greenhouse gases would be to regulate fuel efficiency, which was the Department of Transportation's (DOT) purview. The court rejected this rational, noting that the EPA "has been charged with protecting the publics 'health' and 'welfare'", whereas "DOT sets mileage standards". The EPA couldn't "shirk its environmental responsibilities", said the court, by claiming some confusing inter-agency overlap.

The agency stated that it was following the Clean Air Act's allowance for it's best "judgment", and that given existing scientific uncertainty on climate change, it would be best in the EPA not take action. It also said that greenhouse gases weren't "air pollutants". The court said that such a stand was "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with the law". Added the court, the "laundry list" of excuses of why the EPA couldn't respond, unbacked by any scientific reasoning, was inadequate excuse for inaction. The court ordered the EPA to find whether greenhouse gases endangered public health.

In the April 2, 2007 White House Press Briefing following the decision, acting Press Secretary Dana Perino asserted that the Bush administration has "long said that greenhouse gases are contributing to a warming planet and that human generated carbon dioxide is a large contributor..." But then she refuted the court, stating that the Bush administration policies have been successfully (and comprehensively) enacted via Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, even though in fact combined fuel efficiency of the US car and light truck fleet has decreased since 1986. The Press Secretary also argued incorrectly, that increasing fuel efficiency would cause safety issues, which is oft-tried, but tired and false reasoning.

The minority court opinion argued that though global warming was real and problematic, the "redress of grievances of the sort at issue" was best left to the executive and legislative branches. (though, given that the Clean Air Act is Congresses current solution, one that the executive branch has blatantly flouted, this seems questionable). The minority disputed the state of Massachusetts' (plaintiff) standing, and also argued that the plaintiffs didn't convincingly show an injury due to "global warming". Furthermore the minority opinion said, it wasn't clear that the injury (loss of coastal land) was redressable with the Clean Air Act.

Bush responded to the decision by saying that any action must not hurt the economy. The U.S. couldn't do something when China was doing nothing, he noted puerilely.

EDF v. Duke Energy

The Supreme Court also ruled 9-0 in favor of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in EDF v. Duke Energy. The court ruled that the company needs to follow the rules of the Clean Air Act when refurbishing old coal plants.

Clean air proponents welcome the rulings.

In a letter to the editor of Financial Times today, a group of professors representing the CASCADE Network, a European Union funded organization, write about a proposal to monitor chemicals used in the EU. The EU parliament will vote November 15 on REACH (Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization and restriction of Chemicals), a regime that addresses growing concern about the unconsidered production and accumulation of xenobiotics that persist in the environment, humans, and animals.

The scientists note that the EU produces 31% of the world's chemicals, 100,000 of which are released into the environment. For the vast majority of chemicals, the health risks are unknown. Scientists give the example of the persistence of PCBs in the food chain despite their banned production years ago, to illustrate the long term effects of historical choices about chemical use. Lack of knowledge combined with lax regulation has left governments, after decades of PCB use, urging women of childbearing age to avoid eating certain species of fish. Biomonitoring studies show the presence of hundreds of chemicals in humans, a result that brings to the fore how little attention governments and citizens have paid to fairly wanton production and disposal of chemicals.

"As scientists studying different aspects of endocrine systems, we argue that decisions on how a chemical is used must be based on scientific data...[T]he European parliament must consider long-term effects of exposure and protect the European population from involuntary exposure to chemicals."

In summary, the proposal seeks too enact the following:

• Registration of chemicals produced or imported in large quantities (> 1 ton), to be managed by a designated agency.
• Evaluation of substances that pose risks to health or environment.
• Authorization for use of chemicals that are either carcinogenic, mutagenic or teratogenic, and those that are toxic, persistent and bio-accumulative, unless certain conditions exist, like there are no chemical alternatives or the risks can be controlled.

• The chemicals industry and their customers such as carmakers claim the changes will lead to loss of competitiveness and jobs.
• The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) approves the proposed regulations because they will lower incidence of occupational diseases and decrease health insurance costs.
• The environmental and consumer's groups complain that the commission has made destructive concessions to lobbyists from industry and to the United States.
• Some governments such as Germany (the largest chemical producer) and France are angling to postpone the vote on the proposal for economic or logistical reasons, however Norway is threatening to veto the proposal because some of the measures have been essentially gutted by chemical lobbying efforts.

Citizens have signed various petitions urging action on the chemicals in the environment. If REACH were approved by the EU parliament, the professors say in their article that it would replace 40 existing petitions and would establish a habit of long-term thinking about the effects of chemicals on our health and environment.