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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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Methane has 23X the short term warming impact of CO2 but, it was noted by environmentalists when they used to advocate for natural gas, methane is very short-lived and the amount released due to natural gas usage is negligible.

Yet now the Environmental Protection Agency is looking for ways to punish the booming natural gas industry and they are citing methane as a problem.
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 we think of science today, we think of Big Science, like the Large Hadron Collider and the Human Genome Project.

That makes sense, Americans like big and bold, but that was not always the case. It used to be thatg science was a lonely occupation and asking for money was a negative. There was one man who turned science from being a solitary, somewhat modest endeavor into Big Science. His name was Ernest Lawrence and he was a nuclear science researcher at Berkeley. Yes, Berkeley, arguably the most anti-science town in America now, was put on the map by nuclear power. He created the cyclotron, the ancestor of today's modern accelerators.
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.