science

Obama’s State of the Union: A Blueprint for Crony Capitalism and Costly Educational Failures

by Hans Bader on January 26, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Energy, Environment, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

In his State of the Union address, President Obama called for even more spending on his cronies — what he euphemistically referred to as “investments” in “clean energy technology.” Such spending benefits companies that donate millions to liberal politicians, like GE,  which recently spent  $65.7 million on lobbying to extract special favors from the government.

As the Washington Post notes, GE received massive taxpayer bailouts on special, preferential terms not available to other companies:

General Electric, the world’s largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government’s key rescue programs for banks. At the same time, GE has avoided many of the restrictions facing other financial giants getting help from the government. The company did not initially qualify for the program.  .  .But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE.

GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, is the “Chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.”

The “clean energy” spending Obama wants includes “initiatives aimed at building the renewable-energy sector — which received billions of dollars in stimulus funding.”

This is a bad sign for American workers, because such green jobs programs have wiped out thousands of American jobs in the past.  The $800 billion stimulus package used “green-jobs” subsidies to send American jobs overseas.  79 percent of those subsidies went to foreign firms, such as an Australian firm that imported Japanese wind turbines, effectively outsourcing American jobs.  (The stimulus package also wiped out jobs in America’s export sector.)  Moreover, some “green jobs” funding actually damages the environment, like ethanol subsidies:  ethanol mandates actually harm the environment, yet the Obama administration apparently considers them to be a “green jobs” program.

Echoing earlier reports that he would advocate “new government spending” on education, Obama attacked the idea of scaling back massive increases in education spending. He called cutting education spending “like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine.” Lost in his hyperbole was the fact that America already spends much more per capita on education than most other wealthy industrialized countries, with worse results.  As spending has exploded, college students are spending much less time studying and reading than they used to.

Dumping more money on the educational system is unlikely to spur economic growth, since so many college students learn little in college, are not interested in learning, and only go to college in order to get paper credentials rather than an education. Obama wants all Americans to attend at least one year of college, saying in his address that “higher education must be within reach of every American.”

Those paper credentials are increasingly useless to many who obtain them.  Most people who went to college because of rising college-attendance rates in recent years wound up in unskilled jobs (including 5,057 janitors who have Ph.D’s or other advanced degrees), while tuition skyrockets. (100 colleges charge at least $50,000 a year, compared to five in 2008-09.)  Bush increased federal education spending 58 percent faster than inflation, while Obama seeks to double it.

Colleges are so awash in money that many elite colleges are using it to rapidly expand educational bureaucracies.  For example, Wake Forest University increased spending on administrators by 600 percent.

Unlike other countries, which focus on educating engineers and other economically-productive occupations, America focuses on superficial, ideologically-fashionable liberal-arts majors.  The Obama administration seems more concerned about the gender ratios in college science departments than the small number of Americans who go into science, and is now contemplating caps on the number of male science students under Title IX to promote what it perceives as gender equity.  Such caps would be based on the Obama administration’s faulty interpretation of Title IX.

Environmental Working Group Should Win Annual Junk-Science Award

by Angela Logomasini on December 23, 2010 · 3 comments

in Environment

If there ever was a year-end, junk-science award, it should go to the Environmental Working Group — every year.  Perhaps more than any group, they regularly issue junk-science “studies” alleging myriad ills caused by man-made chemicals.

Most recently, they issued a report on hexavalent chromium (aka., chromium-6), noting: “The National Toxicology Program has found that hexavalent chromium in drinking water shows clear evidence of carcinogenic activity in laboratory animals, increasing the risk of otherwise rare gastrointestinal tumors (NTP 2007, 2008).” The same is basically true for broccoli. Lots of substances — including many healthy fruits and vegetables–give rodents cancer when they are given relatively high doses.

Such tests tell us little about impacts on humans exposed to trace amounts in food and water.  And the amounts that EWG reports in its study are extremely low–reaching a peak of just 12.9 parts per billion in one city’s drinking water.   This tiny amount is supposed to scare us because it is “200 times” higher than a ridiculously low standard of 0.06 parts per billion that California regulators proposed. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set the “safe level” for total chromium in drinking water at 100 parts per billion.

Both EWG and California regulators target this substance because it has been the subject of considerable press coverage and Hollywood sensationalism. Trial lawyers made chromium 6 an issue when they initiated a class action lawsuit in the early 1990s. The case proved nothing, but the lawyers made a killing in the settlement — $133 million for the lawyers alone. And the story generated more dollars when featured in the film Erin Brockovich.

The legal case and film focused on an alleged cancer cluster in Hinkley, Calif., that trial lawyers said resulted from elevated levels of chromium 6 in the town’s drinking water. But their claim was highly unlikely for a number of reasons that CEI highlighted when the film came out in 2000. In addition, Michael Fumento did some stellar investigative reporting on the topic that clearly debunked trial-lawyer claims. There was no evidence of a cancer cluster in Hinkley at the time nor is there any today.  And recent survey research confirmed this reality yet again. The cancer rate in Hinkley is actually lower than expected for the area.

But EWG doesn’t let the facts get in its way because hype helps them pressure regulators and lawmakers into take action.  Along with its “study,” the group launched a petition on its website calling for EPA action. The group suggests that their report prompted EPA action: “Within 72 hours of the release of this report, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced new actions to detect chromium-6 contamination in the nation’s drinking water.”

It’s more likely that EWG conveniently planned the release of its “study.” According to the agency, the chemical is the subject of a routine review, and tests were underway before EWG issued its report. Nonetheless, the EWG campaign may push EPA to be more aggressive because it’s now headline news. In fact, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson followed up on the EWG report in a meeting with senators to address concerns raised by the activist report and brief the lawmakers on EPA actions.

If EPA imposes an onerous chromium 6 standard because of activist pressures, public health benefits are likely to be zero. Unfortunately, the compliance costs could be high, particularly for relatively poor, rural communities — that have few resources to waste.

Photo Credit

Medical Trial and Error

by Greg Conko on October 21, 2010

in Culture, Health and Illness, Healthcare, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Zeitgeist

The Atlantic has an interesting profile of medical researcher John Ioannidis, who famously concluded in a groundbreaking 2005 study (a different version of which can be found here) that the scientific conclusions of most of the articles published in medical journals are wrong.  I’m not sure what took The Atlantic so long to write the review.  After all, The New York Times Magazine covered the same ground way back in 2006, and the Times excerpted a lengthy section of Ioannidis’s new book on the subject in June of this year.  Still, the conclusions are worth taking into consideration.  After all, science is merely an organized search for the truth, and every scientist worth his salt knows that any one study can generate incorrect or incomplete results.  It is only once a given observation is tested repeatedly and reproduced that we should come to view the findings as anything more than provisional.

What’s troubling is the reception that Ioannadis’s work has gotten from quacks and cranks — exemplified by a handful of the comments following The Atlantic article, and elsewhere.  If science can’t be trusted, then science must be useless, according to some.  Others lay the blame at the feet of pharmaceutical companies peddling junk science in order to sell more drugs.  But, as pharma researcher and blogger Derek Lowe points out, “drug research probably comes out of [Ioannadis's] analysis looking as good as anything can. A large confirmatory Phase III study is, as you’d hope, the sort of thing most likely to be correct, even given the financial considerations involved. Even then, though, you can’t be completely sure – but contrast that with a lot of the headline-grabbing studies in nutrition or genomics, whose results are actually more likely to be false than true.”

In the end, the cumulative weight of a body of science, as opposed to any single study, still is right more often than not.  To quote science blogger Orac, “in many ways, the present system of randomized clinical trials and peer-review is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill regarding democracy, the worst system for finding the best treatments–except for all the rest. … Despite all that, it is a big mistake to take Ioannidis’ findings as “proof” that science is not the best methodology we have for answering fundamental questions about how the universe works, the pathogenesis of disease, or for identifying the most efficacious treatments. Certainly, it far surpasses any alternatives.”

The Story of Cosmetics: The Critique

by Richard Morrison on August 4, 2010 · 2 comments

in Video, Zeitgeist

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxO3bPNyWzo 285 234]

Michael Specter and The danger of market denial

by Fred Smith on April 26, 2010

in Agriculture, Environment, Odds & Ends, Zeitgeist

Michael Specter, a journalist who’s also an excellent speaker, appeared at the last TED conference.  Specter is technologically optimistic but has accepted many of the eco-catastrophe myths.  He favors GMOs, worries about micro-nutrients, says nothing about perfumes or clothes or other status items, makes fun of the organic food movement (sort of) and so on.  Like many modern intellectuals Specter likes technology (or, at least, the right type of technology – the Bright rather than Dark Side of the Force).  And here is the problem – he fails to discuss the institutional framework most appropriate to guide technology in human- friendly directions.   Should innovation be “guided” by markets or by politics?  His condemnation of nutritional supplements would suggest that he’d favor laws banning or taxing the “wrong” consumer choices. 

Specter does not seem to recognize that institutions-not science per se- is the key factor.  He says (in this clip, at least) nothing about the critical link between R and D (he doesn’t really discuss D in any meaningful sense).  No allusion to markets and profits as ways of stimulating innovation.  And, of course, ignores the reality that absent property rights, markets are a grand illusion.

Human Achievement of the Day: Beam me up, Scotty?

by Michelle Minton on March 10, 2010

in Nano & Biotech, Odds & Ends, Privacy, Tech & Telecom

Today’s achievement doesn’t quite put us on the final frontier, but the successful transmission of atoms via teleportation by scientists at the University of Maryland is a quantum leap toward significant advancements in technology…maybe even human teleportation someday.

Brace yourselves; this post gets a little esoteric.

“For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart – a significant milestone in the global quest for practical quantum information processing.”

From what I’ve tried to learn, and I’m not pretending to understand all this, quantum physics theorizes that reality acts differently upon particles based on their size and that at the atomic and sub-atomic levels particles, such as photons, can simultaneously have properties of both energy and matter (armchair physicists: feel free to use the comment section to correct me).

Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, without traveling through any physical medium.

With the convergence of the principles of matter and energy, it makes sense that teleportation would be based on quantum mechanics…I think.

A team from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) at the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan has succeeded in teleporting a quantum state directly from one atom to another over a substantial distance…

Our system has the potential to form the basis for a large-scale ‘quantum repeater’ that can network quantum memories over vast distances, says group leader Christopher Monroe of the Joint Quantum Institute and the University of Maryland department of physics. Moreover, our methods can be used in conjunction with quantum bit operations to create a key component needed for quantum computation. A quantum computer could perform certain tasks, such as encryption-related calculations and searches of giant databases, considerably faster than conventional machines. The effort to devise a working model is a matter of intense interest worldwide.

I think the scientists here are being a little modest. More than just a “considerably faster” computer:

Development of a quantum computer , if practical, would mark a leap forward in computing capability far greater than that from the abacus to a modern day supercomputer , with performance gains in the billion-fold realm and beyond. The quantum computer, following the laws of quantum physics, would gain enormous processing power through the ability to be in multiple states, and to perform tasks using all possible permutations simultaneously.

aspirin

My brain hurts now. Somebody Wonka me a bottle of pain killers. Is it too late to change today’s Human Achievement of the Day to Aspirin?

Obama Speech to the UN: The Data

by Iain Murray on September 22, 2009 · 2 comments

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, International, Regulation

Myron has already pointed out how most of what the President claimed were the threats from global warming are exaggerated.  Here’s the data to back that up.

“…[T]he threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing.”  Reality: global mean temperatures increased slightly from 1977 to 2000.  Temperatures have been flat since then.

“Rising sea levels threaten every coastline.”  Reality: sea levels have been rising on and off since the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago.  The rate of sea level rise has not increased in recent decades over the nineteenth and twentieth century average.

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“More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”  Reality: there is no upward global trend in storms or floods.

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“More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive.”  Reality: there is no upward global trend in major droughts.  Reversals in large-scale cycles have meant that the southward march of the Sahara Desert into the Sahel has been reversed in recent years and the Sahara is now shrinking.

“On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees.”  Reality: some Pacific islanders may want to emigrate to New Zealand or Australia and are claiming that their islands are disappearing as the reason, but shrinkage has been minimal in recent decades because sea level rise has been minimal.

droughts-atollsCharts from SPPI’s Monthly CO2 Reports and from Indur Goklany, “Death and Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events: Global and U.S. Trends, 1900–2006,” 2007.

Regulation of the Day 44: Soil Scientists

by Ryan Young on September 2, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

In Wisconsin, you need a license to work as a soil scientist. The requirements are listed here, and the paperwork (up to 27 forms!) is here in case you’re interested in applying.

Obama’s Anti-Science Czar

by Marc Scribner on July 14, 2009 · 1 comment

in Culture, Environment, Natural Resources, Odds & Ends, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

Last week, Michelle Malkin posted on the disturbing past of Obama’s Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology–more popularly known as the “science czar”–John Holdren. The page Malkin links to containing  scans of a past publication is offline as of this writing, but I’ll re-post an excerpt from her site below:

In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;

• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;

• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;

• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.

• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.

Holdren has a long history of associating with Malthusian doomsayer Paul Ehrlich, and as Ehrlich’s “scholarly” co-author as recently as 1995. CEI Energy Policy Analyst William Yeatman chronicled Holdren’s history of alarmism and playing fast and loose with the facts back in January of this year. Included among Yeatman’s findings:

• Holdren’s fiction: In 1969, Holdren claimed: “If population control measures are
not initiated immediately and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear
will not fend off the misery to come.”
• Reality: Global population growth continued unabated and people today are
wealthier and healthier than they were in 1971.
• Holdren’s fiction: In 1973, Holdren encouraged a “decline in fertility to well
below replacement” in the United States, because “280 million in 2040 is likely to
be much too many.”
• Reality: Currently, the U.S. population is 304 million.

Holdren was also party to the wager between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich (on Ehrlich’s side, of course), which famously debunked Ehrlich’s dire predictions on resource depletion. So, the man President Obama selected as his primary science and technology advisor has consistently been proven wrong and is a protege of one of the biggest scientific fraudsters of the 20th century. Here’s to “Change we can believe in!”

ADDENDUM: CEI Fellow in Regulatory Studies Ryan Young examined Holdren’s peculiar brand of “science” late last year:

The most important part of the scientific method is its humility. At its very heart is the ability to admit that maybe, just possibly, you could be wrong. If that’s what the evidence shows, then it’s ok to admit it. If you (gasp) don’t know something, that’s ok, too. Instead of just making up an answer, you try to find it out.

The new political science is very different. It replaces humility with Certainty. A large part of the politicized scientist’s job is simply to disagree with the other party. It’s an effective way to raise funding. At least, it is when funding is allocated by political means.

Holdren displays all the hallmarks of The Certainty. For one, he accuses people who disagree with him as being operatives of the other party. Of course they’re wrong, just look at how they vote!

This is not a strong argument. Neither is his primary defense for his party’s preferred global warming policies – the argument from authority. Scientific consensus is on his side. Of course, there once was a time when scientific consensus said that the earth was flat, and the center of the universe. The world as it actually is matters more than merely what people think about it. Millions of people can be wrong, and often are.

Holdren’s hysterics are reminiscent of something the great Nobel economist Friedrich Hayek discussed in The Constitution of Liberty way back in 1960:

Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that ‘the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science.’ Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom.

LibertyWeek 36: We Go Green

by Richard Morrison on April 1, 2009

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Hosts Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist join Michelle Minton in welcoming you to LibertyWeek 36: The Green Episode. We begin our environmental adventure with an update on the high cost of renewable energy and the good news from the coal laboratory. We then pass on advice for drinking green in Beer News and celebrate the recent observance of Human Achievement Hour. This brings us to the featured interview with our distinguished colleague and author Steve Milloy – where we explore his new book Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them and its targets, from the Audubon Society to Zero Population Growth. Finally we round out the program with a little Olympic News.

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