Let the Truth Trickle Up: Attack Science, Perchlorate, and Babies
The truth hurts. Some of us accept the truth; some of us ignore it. All too often, industry-sponsored scientists take another approach to the truth: attack.
A recent spat over a study finding that perchlorate blocks iodine in breast milk is an object lesson in what CPR Member Scholar Tom McGarity calls “attack science.”
In October, I blogged about this study, which was the first to ask whether perchlorate inhibits iodine transport to breast milk. Perchlorate is a component of rocket fuel and munitions. It’s known to cause thyroid problems by inhibiting how iodine is absorbed by the body. Iodine is essential to proper fetal and infant neurological development. According to the EPA, perchlorate has contaminated the drinking water of 16.6 million Americans to unsafe levels. The study’s question is important because though we knew that perchlorate inhibits babies' thyroids when they ingest it, we didn’t know whether perchlorate also created problems for babies because of what it was doing to their mothers’ thyroids.
The results were startling. Breast-feeding babies were getting too much perchlorate at the expense of much-needed iodine. Perchlorate, in other words, inhibited the transport of iodine from the mother to the baby …
Monday was a good day for our nation’s science policy. At the same time he announced that the federal government will abandon misguided restrictions on stem cell research, President Obama unveiled an effort to promote a sea change in the way political appointees will treat the science that informs so many federal policies.
In a memorandum to department heads across the government, President Obama announced that John Holdren, the soon-to-be-confirmed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), will develop a plan to achieve a goal of “ensuring the highest level of integrity in all aspects of the executive branch's involvement with scientific and technological processes.”
The memorandum hints at some very encouraging ideas that reflect a significant change in attitude from the Bush Administration. For starters, President Obama writes that “science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions …
On March 3rd, the Supreme Court issued its much awaited decision in Summers v. Earth Island Institute. This was the latest in a series of cases dating to the early 1990s where the central question has concerned citizen standing: will the courts allow a citizen to stand before a court to argue that government or private action violates the law?
In Summers, the environmentalists' challenge involved a few layers. The real legal challenge raised by the environmentalists was to regulations issued by the US Forest Service that largely eliminated opportunities for utilization of a notice, comment, and appeal process for actions designated by the Forest Service as small in size and therefore categorically exempt from these regulatory challenges ordinarily available for larger scale projects. The challengers asserted that these regulations violated statutory requirements. The challengers used a particular project, the Burnt Ridge Project in the Sequoia Forest …
The following is cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet.
The Bush administration’s last-minute ESA (non)consultation rule is getting almost as much attention now as it did during the comment period. Then, the administration reportedly received more than 300,000 comments, the vast majority of them negative. Those objections were, of course, quickly swept under the proverbial rug so the administration could finalize its rule significantly cutting back on the application and scope of the consultation process. Now, Congress and the administration are rushing to figure out how to return the consultation process to its prior state.
On Wednesday, the Washington Post ran a “mission accomplished” headline: Obama Reverses Bush Rule on Protection of Endangered Species. Not so fast. Although President Obama took a significant step toward that end, the job is not yet complete. It would be a mistake for environmental advocates to stop pushing …
After suffering years of neglect at the hands of the Bush Administration and conservatives in Congress, Superfund may be on the verge of springing back to life. That at least is the objective of a new proposal from President Obama, included in his recent budget outline, calling for the reinstatement of a tax on polluting industries to fund toxic waste cleanup efforts.
Congress created Superfund in 1980, responding to national furor over the toxically infamous Love Canal. Its mission was to clean up such toxic waste sites across the nation, first identifying sites in need of cleanup, then prioritizing them, then forcing the relevant polluters to clean up their mess, or, if no polluters could be identified or made to take responsibility, paying for the cleanup. The bill for this latter set of cleanups was to be footed by a multi-billion dollar trust fund (hence, Superfund), supported …
Last Wednesday, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that the Bureau of Land Management is going to "review and reconsider" the oil shale leases proposed in the waning days of the Bush Administration. The Bush proposal would have potentially opened 1.9 million acres of land in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming for oil shale development and would have locked in a paltry royalty rate. The Obama Administration is going to take 90 days of public comment on the shortcomings of the old plan and then come up with a new one, potentially in a very short time frame.
Salazar’s and BLM’s comments on the oil shale research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) program do not paint a clear picture about the Obama Administration’s agenda. Last week, Salazar spoke to the National Governors’ Association and told them that oil shale has “great potential” and “that …
The Center for Public Integrity released a report last week finding that the number of lobbyists seeking to influence federal policy on climate change has expanded more than 300 percent in five years. The report also finds that special interest industry lobbyists outnumber public interest environmental advocates 8-to-1.
That’s right. The most important environmental legislation in our lifetime is likely to come before Congress this year, and the overwhelming majority of meetings that Members of Congress have with advocates will be with folks interested in either watering it down or gumming it up.
Significantly, the report identifies the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as the “leading voices against climate action.” While most climate change junkies would not be surprised that these groups oppose any action on climate change, there’s more to the story. Industry folks are suiting up …
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would not be accepting an appeal of a case involving the Bush Administration’s regulatory plan for reducing air mercury emissions from power plants. For the last two decades, the regulation of mercury air pollution has been caught up in a long and winding journey reminiscent of Homer’s Odyssey. With the Supreme Court’s announcement, however, it appears that the mercury air pollution saga may soon be reaching its long-awaited conclusion.
This story began in 1990 when Congress, frustrated by EPA’s past failure to regulate toxic pollution effectively, amended the Clean Air Act to put regulation of a number of specific toxic pollutants on the fast-track. In particular, these amendments directed EPA to undertake particular regulatory actions, and they set strict deadlines for EPA to achieve these actions. Among the pollutants specifically targeted by these …
Walk into any grocery store and you’ll find a barrage of labels on every product that proudly and loudly proclaims its ecofriendly pedigree: Organic! Fair trade and shade-grown! Local! An article last week in the Wall Street Journal posits two of the latest entries into the fray: virtual water and water footprint.
Relatively new additions to the enviro-lexicon, “virtual water” is the volume of water required for producing a commodity, and “water footprint” measures “the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community.” The water is “virtual” because it is often not part of the final product. For a cotton t-shirt, for example, the virtual water accounts for the water needed to grow and irrigate the cotton and the water used during the manufacturing process. The average water footprint of a country depends on four …
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporters Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger are about to pick up some well deserved hardware for their series on bisphenol A (BPA) – a plastic hardener that leaches from plastic when microwaved. The substance causes neurological and developmental hazards, but it is ubiquitous in food storage containers, including water bottles and baby bottles. Rust and Kissinger’s 2007-08 reporting on the problem, and the FDA’s eagerness to overlook it, ignited public controversy, causing FDA to reconsider a decision to take a pass on regulating BPA. In fact, FDA has promised an update on the issue this week.
In April, Rust and Kissinger will receive one of journalism’s highest honors for the series, the George Polk Award from Long Island University. The series has already been awarded the 2008 John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism …
