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.
A new analysis used Alaska Department of Fish and Game data and fish estimates from 2007 to 2016 to quantify the number and value of Pacific salmon harvested from streams, rivers, and lakes in Alaska. They estimate that it's 48,000,000 fish per year, and that is without the recreational fishing catch and local communities where it's a food staple. The value is $88,000,000 per year.While $88 million is a fine industry it speaks poorly about those who protest farming and hunting while claiming to care about nature. Good luck going to a fancy restaurant without having a server note that the salmon you might order was wild.
Intelligence Squared recently had a debate on nuclear energy kicked off by Bill Nye, the famous Science Guy, and moderated by John Donvan.On the pro-nuclear side were Daniel Poneman, Deputy Secretary of Energy under President Obama, and Kirsty Gogan, co-founder of Energy for Humanity, while on the anti-science side was Gregory Jaczko, Obama's chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission(NRC), and Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.(1)What was missing? An actual nuclear physicist.Would you have a debate on vaccine safety without a doctor? A debate on climate change without a climate scientist? When it comes to nuclear energy, everyone is such an expert actual expertise seems to be irrelevant.
If you have never heard of the Journal of International Psychology, you are not alone.
Energy is the great equalizer in human existence. Don't have enough water? Energy can fix that. Want to make a culture that prizes libraries, art, and education? Give people affordable energy. We can even do what ancient alchemists could not, turn lead into gold, with enough energy.It goes almost without saying that energy made the difference when it comes to farming. In the early days of agriculture, one person might work harder than another, and they might even be prized for that, but nothing boosted productivity like when oxen came into use. No person could do the work of eight others but the ox could. Then the heavy plow raised the bar of energy efficiency again, and then the tractor.
In 2002, Berkeley Professor Tyrone Hayes got a paper titled "Hermaphroditic, demasculinized frogs after exposure to the herbicide atrazine at low ecologically relevant doses" published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.In it, he claimed this common herbicide was changing the sexuality of frogs, an indicator species.
A few years ago, after concern about the administration's efforts to use EPA to pick and choose winners in the private sector reached a crescendo, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that EPA "violated publicity or propaganda and anti-lobbying provisions contained in appropriations acts with its use of certain social media platforms in association with its "Waters of the United States" (WOTUS) rulemaking in fiscal years 2014 and 2015."It was a shockingly bold attempt by the federal government to use water regulations to penalize the public.
Would any school with a medical program be happy about a paid talk by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. so he could rail against vaccines, claiming that a world of preventable diseases made humanity stronger by culling the weak? Would doctors be happy if a school organization devoted to fighting climate change helped fund it?
About 300 year die each year due to heat, but if you look at the statistics of heat deaths another 300 list heat as a "contributing" cause, which means something else killed them but heat may have made the thing that caused the death more likely.Though a 100 percent increase seems odd, that heat as a contributing cause could be a factor is not a surprise.
The Obama administration mandated that the U.S. Department of Agriculture tell schools to add more fruits, vegetables, and other vegetarian fare and USDA did as it was told.They had data showing it would just lead to a lot of food waste, and it did, but it is often better to let the other side undo things than to take on your boss and have to find new work in a bad economy and USDA rode it out. Now it is going away. Yet it is a small victory. It will be replaced by some other new fad project.
Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are trying to out-compete each other in ways to wrap themselves in the flag of environmental sustainability, but some of the ways they want to do it are laughable. Amazon's Jeff Bezos wants to do his part to stop global warming and his plan is running a million small business owners in India into extinction; which is why a giant chunk of the country booed when the newest White Savior from a rich country got off his private jet.
The True Health Initiative (THI) describes itself as a nonprofit devoted to “fighting fake facts and combating false doubts to create a world free of preventable diseases, using the time-honored, evidence-based, fundamentals of lifestyle and medicine.” That sounds like a terrific place to be, Science 2.0 does the exact same thing. Except we actually do that. We are not instead selling a belief system promoted by scholars here. And that is what True Health Initiative does, despite the legitimate-sounding name.
There is no question that our microbiome is important to health, but just like science behind mitochondrial function inside cells set off an antioxidant craze in the 1970s, all of the applied health claims about probiotics in the 2000s are nonsense. If you enjoy the taste of expensive yogurt buy it, but if there was any chance it was really impacting your trillions of bacteria, it could just as easily be doing harm.
