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.
When Paul Krugman, a famous liberal economist who has gained enduring cultural prominence by writing for the New York Times, actually put his philosophical beliefs to practical use, he helped give us Enron. Today, Dr. Krugman wisely avoids anything that translates to the real world. In the Sarbanes-Oxley culture he helped make necessary, he can stay out of jail if he sticks to polemics about Republicans.
I’ll be honest, I like Equal. If I had my way, my morning would consist of a kiss from my wife and a cup of Double Black Diamond Extra Bold coffee with a packet of Equal and a little bit of French Vanilla creamer thrown in. Super bold coffee with sweetness added? I like contrasts.What’s even more of a contrast, and more confusing to people who know me, is that someone who won’t eat store-bought jelly - doesn't even want it in the house - someone who would, given his way, never let his family eat anything that wasn’t grown, killed, processed and cooked by anyone but him, would consume an “artificial” sweetener at all.
Not only does organic food have pesticides, which the $100 billion Big Organic industry would rather you forget, but it even has synthetic pesticides.And that "Non-GMO Project" project sticker won't save you, because some boxes of Kashi GoLean Original cereal may have been "verified" by that piece of paper also, yet the food still had glyphosate, according to an analysis by another activist group.
In February, a blogger at journal publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS), issued a random, unsubstantiated smear against the organization I now run, the American Council on Science and Health - she claimed, bizarrely, that we lost our credibility decades ago by being shills for Big Tobacco. Ironically, she is an award-winning journalist.
Imagine if Big Ag industry lobbyists created a special section inside the US Department of Agriculture, where they got to define what artificial additives would go into their products and who could check their food for accuracy in labeling, all while claiming a special "health halo" for their products. Most people would object.The $100 Big Organic industry doesn't object, though.
Dr. Chuck Benbrook is an economist who may be an adjunct at Washington State University but calls himself a research professor and tells the public he is an expert in biology. Why so many organic food proponents believe a guy about something as complex as genetic modification when he can't even get his own title correct is a mystery we can't solve today but we know his credibility sure won't be bolstered up by an op-ed he just published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
It used to be that clean energy was something that environmental lobbyists pretended to care about, at least when it came to raising money. Greenpeace, NRDC, you name it, they all put clean energy in their tool chest of ways to get their hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank.Of course, they never actually built anything to help us get clean energy, just like they don't do any science and instead prefer to criticize those who know what they're talking about. They just embrace whatever isn't shown to be viable and abandon efforts that succeed, as they did with ethanol and natural gas after they got the uptake they insisted was needed.
US Right to Know of Oakland, California, is using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to suppress and harass scientists and imply they have unethical links to the agricultural biotechnology industry - in short, the group insists scientists are being bought off.What was wrong when opposition groups did it to climate scientists, according to supporters of anti-science agendas like Union of Concerned Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council, is suddenly just fine when it is being used against every other evidence-based position, but especially when it comes to helping their wealthy donors in the $100 billion Big Organic industry.
A group of academics have channeled their inner Bernie Sanders and written a wonderfully naïve op-ed about how to lower drug prices: Destroy the industry that made America the world leader in biotechnology.It's simple. Let government control drug prices and then corporations will just do what they always do, but it will be a lot cheaper. It is so simplistic it could have been written by Paul Krugman in the New York Times. It is also in defiance of how science, creativity and medical advancement works, and would lead to a mass exodus of science jobs from America.
When you can be arrested for letting your children go to the park alone, we might be a little hyper-vigilant, yet on the other side multiple times per week there is indignation that child protective services failed to stop some idiot parents who were harming a child. It may be the precautionary principle run amok but doctors and government workers are the people who will be sued if they are not going overboard looking for problems.
By ridiculing vampires, or assuming they are all like those "Twilight" movies, society is making real vampires afraid to come out of the coffin, according to social workers.Real vampires are different than lifestyle vampires, like goths, otherkin, furries and various BDSM identities, say the authors. Think of it like the difference between people with Celiac disease and rich, white women who adapted going gluten-free as a new diet - except Celiac disease is real and there are no real vampires.
Science 2.0 family, it is with great pride that I announce I have been named the president of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH).
