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.
If you were born prior to 1980, you likely had a parent say that you needed to eat your dinner because people were starving in Africa.And it was true. The Malthusian boom and bust lamented by Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and other doomsday prophets in the 1970s had gripped journalists and therefore popular culture.(1)Yet beginning in 1980 scientists began to run the table on breakthroughs that have headed off starvation. Now no progressive seriously discusses mandatory sterilization or abortion and a Planetary Regime to enforce them the way Ehrlich and Holdren did in "Ecoscience"; the worry instead is that everyone is getting too fat thanks to science making it possible to grow food so affordably.
I have a pocket watch from the late 1800s. Why or how anyone carried this thing comfortably is a mystery. It is bulky and heavy. I can't have been alone because within just a few decades there was a wave of optimization that can best be compared to cell phones; even low-cost watches became small, light, and they kept great time. A pocket watch from the 1930s or '40s can often be found on my person, never the big heavy thing.I don't like dainty coffee cups or a salad fork and I like a heavy blanket. Though recent trends had been toward smaller and lighter, I am not alone in preferring heft. People have started to love weighty stuff again.
Though we're at the tail end of the third coronavirus pandemic of the last 18 years, and a billion people in the world still use wood and dung for energy, and some people still starve, things are better than ever before. The mountains and valleys of feast and famine have tapered into gentle hills and science has made it possible for previously inhospitable regions to grow food. That has meant prosperity. A decade ago the World Health Organisation set targets for income among the poorest, and those targets were met far ahead of schedule.
Are you a white person who believes you have a moral imperative to introduce your superior belief system to brown and black people in other countries who have not yet been converted?No, you're not a 19th century European missionary, you work at a modern European environmental NGO. That reads provocative, even inflammatory, but it may be happening. And agroecology academics want to stop it before it is too late.Europe has made it plain that they want European laws to be earth's laws. If a developing nation uses a safe pesticide that Europe has still chosen to ban, Europe will put them in their economic ghetto, along with imports from Israel.
Nearly 70 years ago, results of a Swedish experiment, now called the Vipeholm studies, correlated frequent candy consumption and tooth decay. With the benefit of scientific hindsight, this is no surprise. What is a surprise is how different cultures reacted. For example, instead of public awareness campaigns highlighting the effects of carbohydrates on oral health, as Americans might expect, Sweden asked people to cut back on candy drastically, to eating candy one day per week. Thus was born lördagsgodis - “Saturday sweets.” Parents only let their kids eat candy on Saturday.
"Shark Week" is a Discovery Channel event each summer, unsurprisingly about sharks. It came into existence because "Jaws" the book and then the film were huge hits and they never left the public consciousness after that.Now Shark Week is much the same, a part of the cultural lexicon. They used to market it, one year they even killed me off in a shark attack as part of their promotional stunt, but now I bet they don't have to do much at all. Yet when you grow to be important, you are going to those who want to bring you down a little. Big tree fall hard, as the saying goes.
A short while ago a prominent physicist made the offhand claim that bees were dying because of a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids - seed treatments that protect plants from pests at their most vulnerable stage and result in far less chemical use than mass spraying. It's not true, and bees are not dying off anywhere, but that claim was still made by environmental fundraising brochures and lawyers hoping to sue so it's no surprise Mother Jones readers believe it.But a scientist? That should be odd. Yet it isn't.
Americans are inherently skeptical, and American adults lead the world in science literacy, so those two things combine to show up in debates about climate change and other sciences.
When you are literate and skeptical it is easy to know just enough to be wrong, when it comes to climate or nuclear energy, vaccines, and agriculture. The difference between the first one and the latter three is the political demographic that is skeptical about them. Politics infects everything.That is why the each side paints issues they embrace in black and white; you can't be skeptical, you either accept what they accept or you are a denier.
A study by the Silent Spring Institute(1), with funding from the politically sympathetic National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences during the days of organic industry keynote speaker and Ramazzini Institute member Linda Birnbaum, claims that hundreds of chemicals are endocrine disruptors.
San Francisco is worried that highway 37 may be in danger of flooding. They invoke environmental justice, of course, but it's really about rich people going to their second homes in Napa's wine country on weekends. Rich people need peasants toiling to feel elite and without roads they can't get there.Yet if San Francisco journalists and editors are concerned about rising water, why are they continuing to support dumping the water that poor people need into the Bay? It clearly does not need more water. Poor people who can't afford to live in Napa do.
Correlation can accomplish anything, it's how the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences consistently finds a way to endorse chemicals in the organic food process while scaring people about chemicals everywhere else.(1) It's how the price of steel can be linked to violence in the Mid-East.A recent paper argues that reading scores are going down and phones are to blame, and they use correlation to try and show it.
Starting in 1975, in defiance of Population Bomb claims of mass famine about to happen, agricultural science hit an inflection point and more people began to be fed on less land, using less water and energy, with less environmental strain than ever before.
