HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
Last year, when CNN journalist Chris Cuomo was recovering from COVID-19, he endorsed all sorts of homeopathy and alternatives to medicine. It's no surprise, he is married to an influencer who just happens to sell those placebos to other wealthy, white elites. He's not alone. A surprising number of celebrities have spouses that promote nonsense.(1)
Epidemiology pushes out a lot of dumb papers. Not as many as social psychology per capita but in volume a whole lot more. It's easy to see why the public believes horse de-wormer cures COVID-19, it was in an epidemiology paper, and that methodology was just as valid as a paper this week 'linking' olive oil to longer life.
Prior to 2021, if you found an anti-vaxxer, it was also going to be someone who bought organic food and thought cell phones cause cancer. While some kooky Republicans have taken over for some of the wacky left-wing people that deny vaccines, organic food and 5G conspiracy theories are thankfully still only one party and thus don't get much media attention from their political tribe in corporate journalism.
If you believe solar power is ready for mass usage, you are likely an activist, in the industry, or one of the customers who really believes they are selling electricity back to the utility at the same price they are paying when they need it and it isn't being paid for by people in the apartments that we get told are better for the environment than single-family homes.Without mandates and subsidies, plus fees tacked onto every non-solar-using customer, the industry would go back to the niche it was prior to 2010. Since 2010, the share of conventional energy needed has not moved while the world spent trillions underwriting alternatives.(1)
The Supreme Court dealt another blow to federal overreach by the Biden administration but then rightly upheld vaccine mandates if an organization is federally funded.Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, nearly all hospitals are federally funded. So a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rule requiring vaccinations for health care workers at companies that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding, which is nearly all of them, is legal, while the overzealous attempt to use the Occupational Safety and Health Administration requiring companies with 100 or more employees to force them to get vaccines was rightly found unconstitutional.
We all know there is no Beepocalypse by now, right? Seeing it referenced in sit-coms from the 2010s is as anachronistic as watching "Soylent Green" from the 1970s and seeing them lament that they didn't listen to scientists and make the hole in the ozone layer larger. Sure, Washington Post readers probably still believe bees are dying, just like their contributors think "Soylent Green" got a lot right, but it's as unscientific as acupuncture.
When you see a TV weather personality put up an air quality map for the last 10 years, it might make you believe that pollution is far worse than when you were young.
If you read social media, you might believe we're teetering on the brink of societal collapse due to COVID-19 but one metric tells the real health story; ICU beds.Deaths have been cut almost in half from this time last year while ICU occupancy is down 40 percent. If you're a positive person, you'll note that this is a win and big thanks go to the health care system that critics demand be replaced by something like VA hospitals, which very few veterans agree is good, or Medicare, which very few old people think is good. You'll also note that vaccines work, and those are the product of Big Pharma that similar critics decry as greedy evil opportunists.
In the 1966 Harry Harrison novel "Make Room! Make Room!" concerns about population control were the driver of the plot and the storytellers were various people in New York City when the world has reached a population of 7 billion. You have probably never heard of the novel, but you likely have heard of the movie version, "Soylent Green", starring the incomparable Charlton Heston.
It's that time of the year, a few days until Christmas and you bought everything on that Amazon wishlist but it doesn't feel all that creative. If you are like me, masks everywhere can be a bit of a downer, so you want things you can order. These are not what I like to call "aspirational" gifts, the kinds of things parents want their children to want in order to feel like better parents. They are all good, I have watched, read, or used them all this year, so they aren't yet another 'how to make a piece of paper turn using flame' experiment science, they are actually enjoyable science. And technology. And science-fiction.
It is common in a polarized political climate to try and blame the other political party when missteps happen but most government employees are not political appointees, they are career bureaucrats, and sometimes care more about protecting their fiefdoms than in helping the public.
There was a time when politicians worried about a "slippery slope" when it came to political actions. While dirty politics by individuals was always assumed - President Lyndon Johnson set the modern standard for that - overt actions by parties were more thoughtful. The reason was simple; once there was a precedent, the other party could do the same thing when they got into power.That all changed this century.
