WASHINGTON — Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson today announced the agency is reversing controversial changes to how science is used to set air pollution standards. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to establish National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for harmful pollutants using the best available science. For decades, EPA staff scientists worked with the independent Clean Air Science Advisory Committee to review the latest studies and recommend appropriate standards. The Bush administration changed this process, eliminating the independent assessment by scientific experts and injecting political determinations much earlier in the decision-making process. Under the Bush rules, high-level political appointees were involved from the start, working with staff scientists to draft a document containing ‘policy-relevant science’ that ‘reflects the agency’s views’ that replaced the independent ‘staff paper’ agency scientists had previously produced. The Clean Air Science Advisory Committee strongly criticized the Bush rules. The following is a statement from Francesca Grifo, senior scientist and director of UCS’s Scientific Integrity Program: ‘Restoring science as a foundation for setting air pollution standards is a return to reason. While policy decisions are based on a variety of factors, public health suffers when politics are allowed to […]
As I looked over the news release from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detailing a new study that global warming is going to be twice as bad as previously predicted, I knew that anywhere from 30 to 49 percent of people reading or hearing the news were going to be doubtful about some or all of it. The doubt won’t surprise any regular reader of this blog – where visitors often vigorously debate this issue. But how could I be reasonably confident of those specific numbers of doubters? Because of a survey last fall from Yale and George Mason universities. It asked more than 2,000 Americans about their beliefs in global warming. Here’s a summary of what they found. (You can read the whole thing by clicking here.) Fifty-one percent believe global warming is happening and is a serious problem: – Eighteen percent of those surveyed ‘strongly support a variety of climate change policies, such as regulating CO2 as a pollutant, says the survey’s summary. – The other 33 percent aren’t taking many personal steps to save energy or reduce their carbon footprint, but do pay attention in purchasing decisions to which companies are taking […]
When Pew released a poll earlier this week suggesting that there had been a significant shift in public opinion on abortion in recent months, Nate did a fine post exploring the long-term trends on the subject, and expressing considerable doubt that Pew had discovered anything of great moment. Well, today Gallup released another survey that seems to parallel the Pew findings, such as they are. And since (1) Nate’s on vacation, and (2) the two polls together are sure to get tons of play in conjunction with the anti-abortion protests at Notre Dame, not to mention Supreme Court speculation, I’ll do a brief post raising a few questions to help tide us over for a while, with particular emphasis on the key questions that pollsters rarely ask on this subject. First of all, the headline-grabbing finding by Gallup involves its efforts to split Americans into two camps self-identifying as either ‘pro-choice’ or ‘pro-life.’ Aside from all the issues with how these two terms are perceived, this methodology also forces asunder and thus distorts the views of the vast ‘mushy middle’ on abortion policy, which Gallup itself measures at 53%, in a secondary question that divides respondents into three […]
A survey of people hospitalized because of swine flu in California has raised the possibility that obesity is as much of a risk factor for serious complications from the flu as diabetes, heart disease and pregnancy, all known to raise a person’s risk. In all, about two-thirds of the California patients had some underlying medical condition, according to a report yesterday in the weekly bulletin of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nationwide, 47 states and the District have reported 5,469 cases and six deaths since the start of the outbreak in late April, according to the CDC’s count. Yesterday, officials in Missouri reported a seventh U.S. death — that of a 44-year-old man who had no underlying medical problems, wire services reported. ‘We were surprised by the frequency of obesity among the severe cases that we’ve been tracking,’ said Anne Schuchat, one of the CDC epidemiologists managing the outbreak. She said scientists are ‘looking into’ the possibility that obese people should be at the head of the line along with other high-risk groups if a swine flu vaccine becomes available. Other studies have shown that pregnant women are also at higher risk for serious […]
LONDON — Boys and girls were beaten, sexually abused and emotionally terrorized for decades in workhouse-style schools run by Ireland’s Catholic Church, in which a ‘culture of silence’ showed more concern for protecting victimizers than the children in their care, according to a long-awaited report released today in Dublin. For more than half a century, excessive and arbitrary punishment created a climate in which students at schools administered by Catholic religious orders lived ‘with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from.’ Sexual molestation was ‘endemic,’ committed by offenders who were often transferred to other institutions rather than dismissed or turned over to authorities, said the report by Ireland’s Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse. And through it all, government inspectors failed to stop what was going on, despite attempts by some individuals to bring their abusers to account in an effort to lessen the trauma that many still suffer years later. These are some of the findings of the 2,600-page report unveiled after a nine-year investigation. Drawing on the testimony of nearly 2,000 witnesses, men and women at more than 200 Catholic-run schools during the 1940s through the 1990s, the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
