In 1989, the communist dictatorship oddly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached the extent of a third giant hole in the Arctic Circle, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3, where they'd been drilling for 19 years. It clocked in at nearly 8 miles deep.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Energy Information released a report projecting that by 2040, world energy consumption will have grown by 48% from 2012 levels. That sounds like a terrific advancement for developing nations. We worry about water in other countries, we worry about food, we worry about education and culture. Every single one of those is resolved with affordable energy. Energy is the great equalizer and America's second most important strategic resource after, obviously, food.
The news that the Department of Defense had found a woman in Pennsylvania with a strain of E. coli carrying the gene mcr-1, the first time plasmid-mediated resistance to colistin (MCR) has been found in the United States, should have brought calls to action, because MCR creates resistance against colistin, a powerful antibiotic seldom prescribed due to side effects that remains effective as a last resort.Instead it brought political posturing. Democratic Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (NY-25) immediately demonized farmers and drug companies - again.
Environmental groups, who ordinarily love centralized government and social authoritarian mechanisms to block science and progress, have suddenly embraced the free market - well, when the free market is using social authoritarian mechanisms to block science and progress, anyway.Last year, after review and stalling well beyond believability, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved the AquAdvantage salmon, an Atlantic salmon that expresses a gene from a Chinook salmon and grows faster.
Friends of the Earth, an activism group generally devoted to impeding science and progress, is excited that the Texas Clean Energy Project, a carbon capture and sequestration facility in Texas, has support from the Department of Energy that is set to expire.
The Obama administration released new limits on methane emissions from oil and gas wells that are even tougher than the industry expected - $530 million more per year than the already high costs. 25 percent more. The government, meanwhile, claims their new regulations will make money because this will stop storms, floods and other consequences of climate change. Yes, a government regulation on methane will change the weather.
The political attack site PRWatch, one arm of the dark-money funded group self-named as the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), is run by a former attorney for the Clinton administration which slashed funding for real science in the 1990s (1) while promoting junk environmental claims about ethanol, so it's no surprise CMD hate pro-science groups who don't cater to the environmental scaremongering CMD gets paid to do.
The Bee Informed Partnership conducts an annual survey of commercial and backyard beekeepers so that they can try and track health and survival rates of honey bee colonies. Though honey bees are just one bee species out of about 27,000, estimates of their implied economic value are around $10 billion annually. A The latest results show that honey bee colonies declined 44 percent during the year spanning April 2015 to April 2016.That sounds alarming, and it is in contrast to studies showing that bee numbers are not in decline, but were instead at a 20-year high last year. (1)How can the claims be so different? Should we be alarmed or not?
The United States Environmental Protection Agency has already been caught releasing proposals for early commentary to environmental trial lawyers and even republished Sierra Club talking points about Keystone XL, making them officially from the Obama administration.You may not be surprised. The modern EPA is stuffed with former environmental activists, being at Union of Concerned Scientists is practically a shoe-in for a government job during the last seven years. Yet those clearly conflicted EPA officials have never recused themselves from decisions, even when being lobbied by their friends at activist organizations.
A YouGov poll found that anti-GMO beliefs are a sign of being less educated. It is something the science community has always known but organic industry trade groups such as Organic Consumers Association, U.S. Right To Know, and SourceWatch try to claim the opposite - that the customers of their clients are super-smart.
ThinkProgress has found a way to use the tragedy of the Zika outbreak to advance their political agenda. America is one of two developed countries that allow abortion on demand at any stage for any reason (Canada is the other one) and the lack of a national policy has led to varying restrictions on that within the states.
A new study finds that a vegetarian diet likely led to a mutation that may make people more likely to get heart disease and colon cancer. Using reference data from the 1000 Genomes Project, the team discovered that a mutation called rs66698963 in the FADS2 gene used for making long chain polyunsaturated fats like arachidonic acid is linked to inflammatory diseases like heart disease and colon cancer -- but only if they didn't follow a balanced diet to offset the risk.That is better scientific methodology than every single International Agency for Research on Cancer monograph produced since 2009, will IARC call a vegetarian diet a carcinogen?(1)
Organic Consumers Association, which funds Denier For Hire cabals like the anti-science group U.S. Right To Know, has baffled the science community once again by just making stuff up. When groups made claims that a larvicide named pyriproxyfen was part of a Monsanto conspiracy to promote Zika to give Monsanto a problem to solve(1), they were dismissed by even Washington Post reporters, so OCA has simply swapped out a new name and is trying again.(2) This time they chose atrazine, a pesticide made by the chemical company Syngenta that is commonly used on corn fields and golf courses.
