Blogs

I had a long post on the announcement this morning that Perry is suing the EPA over greenhouse gas regulation. But, alas, the new blog system ate my words.

I’ll say this: Perry is up to his neck in pseudo-scientific gobbledygook and he’s bringing Attorney General Abbott and Ag Commissioner Todd Staples along with him. The (“frivolous“) lawsuit today is neither a legal nor scientific document. It is a political one: poorly-reasoned, poorly-sourced and containing enough tin-foil hat conspiracies to block a Mexican border blaster.

However, I’m sure it will please the conspiracy-minded tea party crowd and the Big Money donors in the fossil fuel industries. The lawsuit can’t possibly be intended for anyone who has even a cursory understanding of climate science.

In the second paragraph, there’s already a tip-off that the thing was thrown together. The document refers to the International Panel on Climate Change. Problem is, there’s no such thing. There is an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the world authority on the issue that won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Even though Perry & Co. can’t spell the group’s name right, they feel qualified to viciously attack the IPCC’s credibility.

Essentially, their argument boils down to this:

1) The EPA based its endangerment finding on the IPCC’s findings;

2) The IPCC has been discredited;

3) Therefore, the EPA’s endangerment finding is flawed and should be revisited.

The 38-page legal brief is filled with footnotes, giving the appearance that it’s been carefully researched. But on closer inspection many of the references are to rightwing blogs, “studies” by armchair climate analysts, and obscure anti-climate groups like the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.

Perry & Co. seem to believe that if they find a handful of mistakes in the IPCC assessment that it will cut the legs out from underneath climate science. And so they cite several acknowledged errors in the latest IPCC assessment: an overestimation of glacial melting in the Himalayas, an incorrect percentage of The Netherlands’ land mass that’s below sea-level, etc.

Folks, it’s a 2,800-page document with 18,000 references. There are going to be mistakes. But if the Himalayan glaciers are mostly melted in 2080 and not 2035, does that change the underlying physics of climate change (that a concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is leading to an increase in the average global temperature, e.g.)? Of course not. Only a fool would believe that.

There are sections in this legal brief that are shameless and childish. For example, the AG rants about the use of non-peer reviewed sources in the IPCC assessment.

Perhaps most egregious was the Fourth Assessment’s citation to a boot cleaning manual.

This reminds me of Bobby Jindal complaining about funding for volcano monitors in the stimulus bill. It sounds damaging at first but a cursory look shows it to be cynical B.S.

In fact, in a very brief section on economic activity and sustainability in the Antarctic, the assessment discusses ecological impacts from increasing tourist activity in Antarctica.

A footnote references guidelines promulgated by the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators for decontaminating clothes, boots and equipment so as to avoid spreading diseases or introducing non-native species to the continent.

Is this the “most egregious” citation that Professors Perry, Abbott and Staples can come up with?

They say they’re just concerned about the Texas economy.

If so, then they should be concerned about how well Texas’ economy will fare if portions of Galveston Island, Houston, Padre Island, and Freeport are swamped by rising sea-levels. Or, how changes in precipitation may affect Texas agriculture and drinking water supplies. Or, how Texas industries will be affected by a carbon-constrained economy if we don’t prepare for that inevitability.

Perry & Co. offer no constructive solutions to climate change other than business-as-usual.

You know the old saying: You can’t begin to understand another person until you’ve spent some time in his shoes.

Today, I’m casting off my usual self — that tired, old liberal whose heart leaks blood and oozes sympathy, the woman who plans to send money to the disaster in Haiti and has never managed to vote her pocketbook in decades of elections.  Enough with her.

Today, I am Pat Robertson.  I am wearing his shoes.  They are Ferragamos.

10:17 AM  I wake up.  I am very tired.  I pray.  God tells me I am exhausted from doing His work and should go back to sleep.  “Thy will be done,” I say and turn over.

11: 44 AM  I wake up again, more refreshed.  As usual, God was right.  I have been dreaming of the earth churning, buildings collapsing, people dead.  Could it be — o, praise the Lord! — Armageddon?  I am ready for it, Lord!  Unfortunately, I am a bit deaf and may have difficulty hearing the wails of the damned.  I pray for God to improve my hearing.

11:46 AM  I turn on Fox News.  I am bitterly disappointed.  It isn’t Armageddon, after all.  It’s just the continuing story of all those worthless sinners in Haiti getting wiped out.  How long will the news media (even Fox!) keep up its endless bleating about this “tragedy”?  Make a note to pray to God to send an earthquake to Cuba next time.

12:01 I see I am in the news once again as I labor selflessly to speak about God’s will and His righteous wrath toward the despicable and loathsome.  It is my cross and my duty; I accept it, Lord — even the calumny.  “Why doesn’t God strike down the rich, the comfortable, the smug, instead?” my persecutors cry in a clammy chorus of self-righteousness.  Oh, ye of little faith!  Don’t you see that God is always testing the best of us — even me?  That is why we have a Negro in the White House.

1:30 PM  I go outside.  It is a beautiful day.  This is because God loves me.

1:31 PM  Unfortunately, I am in New York City, the center of all things heinous, wicked and vile.  You see what I mean?  God is still testing me.  I go to lunch at the Four Seasons.  I am meeting that new Fox commentator, Sarah Palin.  When we get a really good table, I realize I am doubly blessed.

1:32 PM In a loud whisper, Sarah announces she thinks our waiter is a homosexual.  Since there are no homosexuals in Alaska, Sarah says, she used to have trouble recognizing them.  After spending more time in this God-free zone of iniquity, though, she can now spot them in a fast, unerring way: Any man who doesn’t desire her is a sodomite.  She and I bow our heads to pray to God to smite them all, just like the Haitians.

1:33 PM  After we say amen, I mention to Sarah that I desire her.  She winks at me and says she isn’t surprised, since I don’t look like a faggot.  We hold hands and pray again for strength not to sin.

3:02 PM  I walk through Central Park.  I am filled with loathing.  All these idlers sitting in the sun, ignoring the fact God is going to be punishing them for eternity any minute now!  Those shameless, lust-filled couples who can’t wait to get back to their apartments and fornicate!  Those godless toddlers in their prams whose mothers are clearly too busy pursuing their own tawdry, self-aggrandizing careers to bring up their own children, so they have left them in the dark, unseemly hands of their hired help, who are doubtlessly illegal aliens.

3:33 PM  I recover from my tortured half-hour of doubting God’s plan for the world.  My suffering has been so great!  I make a mental note to alert the INS about all the nannies in Central Park.  I will also loudly urge Yale Law School, my troubled alma mater, to stop admitting women into their classes so they will criminally neglect their future children.  Praise Jesus.

4:17 PM  I am still in New York, so God is still testing me.  I recall my wonderful talk with Sarah about God sending a message to New York City on September 11.  If God hadn’t wanted to punish godless liberals, then He would have had the terrorists attack a righteous, God-fearing metropolis like Oklahoma City, Sarah said.  She is such a brilliant, insightful woman!  I pray for her to outlive Katie Couric for a long, long time.

5:03 PM  I arrive back at my hotel.  I am sick of  the iniquity, the atrocity of the secular world, the untrammeled sin!  I turn on Fox news and they’re still talking about Haiti, Haiti, Haiti.  Thousands may be dead, the Fox newspeople say.  They try to look serious, but I know they think it’s as amusing as I do.  I pray, once again, for Armageddon to occur in the waning moments of my lifetime.  (Perhaps Haiti is only a start!)  Then I take a nap, for I am tired.  I sleep the deep, untroubled sleep of the just.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)  Excerpted from my blog http://www.geezersisters.com/

Here’s an exercise: Go to your local supermarket, stop 10 people—any 10 people—in the store and ask them how national health care reform, if it were passed by Congress, would affect their lives. You’d get some odd looks and some rambling answers. But I doubt more than one person out of 10 could explain what the proposed Senate or House bills would actually do to the health care system or whether he or she would benefit.

This is a major problem with the health care debate: The public doesn’t know what the bills would do.

For this, I blame the White House and Democrats in Congress, neither of whom have made an effective case for reform or made enough of an effort to explain the reform plans to an apathetic public. I also blame the media.

The health care debate has been one distraction after another. Much of the reporting has centered on ludicrous distortions like death panels or supposed cuts to Medicare services (neither of which are really in the bills). The media and elected officials also seem obsessed with the politics of health care reform. I bet a lot more people in the supermarket could tell you what happened in the Massachusetts senate election than could explain how many uninsured Americans would be covered under the reform plan (about 30 million).

Now health care reform is enduring a near-death experience. Polls find that only 42 percent of Americans support the proposals. But—as the Kaiser Family Foundation recently found out—when survey respondents are asked about specific parts of the bills, they’re overwhelmingly in favor. A huge majority of Americans support eliminating pre-existing conditions, covering the uninsured, extending the life of Medicare, creating health insurance exchanges and other provisions.

The main question for many Americans—myself included—is: Will the reform plans improve my health care?

So let’s look at how the reform proposals, if enacted, would benefit specific groups of Texans. (I’ve taken the following data on the nonprofit Center for Public Policy Priorities’ health care policy page. Go here for more details.)

If the current bills are passed:

1. All co-pays for immunizations, doctor visits for kids and teens, and well-woman exams would be banned. Many Texans would have no more out-of-pocket expenses for preventive care. (This provision takes effect six months after the bill is signed.)

2. Parents could keep their kids on their health plans up to age 27. This is a huge change. If you’re 24 years old and uninsured, your parents could immediately insure you through their policies. Are you hearing this recent UT grads?

3. The so-called “donut hole” in the Medicare prescription drug benefit would be closed. Older Texans on Medicare who are still struggling to afford their medications would see an immediate benefit.

4. The government would provide assistance to buy health insurance. The bills would offer subsidies to middle-class individuals and families (those earning 400 percent of the poverty level or less—about $88,000 a year for a family of four.) About six million uninsured Texans would qualify for help, according to CPPP.  (Six million people—that’s the populations of Houston and Dallas combined). If you’re a single Texan earning $30,000 a year, you would receive some cash assistance to buy insurance. This provision would take effect by 2014.

5. Expand Medicaid to cover the poorest families. This would provide insurance to about one million Texans who are currently uninsured, according to CPPP. (Texas has a miserly Medicaid program that doesn’t cover many adults, leaving some of the poorest Texans uninsured.) If you’re earning $14,000 a year or less, you would be covered.

6. By 2014, insurance companies could no longer deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. So, if you know someone who’s uninsured (or underinsured) and was diagnosed with, say, skin cancer—and I use this example because someone i know was in a similar situation—then that person couldn’t be denied coverage.

That’s just a sampling. There are many other provisions in the bills, of course. (For instance: Changes to Medicare that would reduce the nation’s debt; out-of-pocket spending caps that would help prevent medical bankruptcies.)

But there’s no doubt that—despite claims to the contrary from some statewide officials—health care reform would help millions of Texans lead healthier lives.

The Associated Press carried a little-noticed story over the weekend that’s a must-read for anyone interested in the health care debate.

The piece examines what will happen to the American health-care system if the reform bills currently stalled in Congress don’t pass.

It ain’t pretty:

“[T]here’s no doubting the consequences if lawmakers fail to address the problems of costs, coverage and quality: surging insurance premiums, more working families without coverage, bigger out-of-pocket bills, a Medicare prescription gap that grows wider and deeper, and government programs that pay when people get sick but do little to keep them healthy.”

The details are alarming:

1. Many Americans could soon see double-digit increases in their premiums.

2. Medicare and Medicaid will consume more than half the nation’s health care spending, overwhelming state and federal budgets.

3. The number of uninsured Americans is projected to reach 54 million people in the next decade.

4. “More employers will drop coverage. More consumers will get increased copayments and deductibles,” Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden told the AP.

5. Insurers would continue denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. People in their 50s and 60s, whose health is declining, would face premiums six times higher than people in their 20s.

I recommend  you read the full story, which lays out how the reform bills would address some of these problems. (It’s estimated the reforms would provide health insurance for 30 million people). We need more reporting like this in the health-care debate.

The reform bills passed by the Senate and House are far from perfect. There’s much not to like in each. But the bills would improve health care for tens of millions of Americans.

As I’ve written in this space before, the choice for lawmakers at this point is to pass a health care reform bill  (either the House or Senate version or some combination of both) or do nothing.

Congress can’t start over, not in an election year. And if the current reform effort fails, it will be many, many years before anyone in Washington has the political will or courage to attempt comprehensive health care reform again.

You may not love either of the health care bills. But the cost of doing nothing is awfully high.

We know that the Perry cronies who run the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality aren’t terribly interested in basing environmental policy on science. But what about the agency’s top scientists?

(For those of you who want to skip the science-talk, go here.)

At an EPA hearing in Houston last week, TCEQ Chief Toxicologist Michael Honeycutt joined with industry groups in decrying the new, stricter smog standard. New York Times:

At the hearing in a hotel ballroom, Michael Honeycutt, the director of toxicology for the Texas commission, questioned the evidence that a higher level of ozone is linked to more hospital admissions for lung problems.

Mr. Honeycutt also declared that no ruling would fly in Texas if it required people to drive less or change their daily habits.

“Programs that require lifestyle changes are unacceptable to the public,” he said.

Although the Times didn’t mention it, Honeycutt also blasted EPA for relying on epidemiological studies that, in his words, “are not scientifically rigorous” because they assume that most people spend 8 to 24 hours outside each day.

Recently, Honeycutt has been lending his scientific credentials to a number of ozone “skeptics,” including Michael Fumento, a conservative journalist who was fired from Scripps Howard News Service four years ago for not disclosing that he had accepted a grant from biotechnology firm Monsanto.

In an op-ed piece for Forbes.com on ozone “alarmism,” Fumento quotes Honeycutt as saying the eight-hour ozone standard “makes no biological sense. Most people are indoors for 90% of the time.”

Honeycutt seems eager to undercut the scientific basis for the new smog rule, an ambitious task since a highly-distinguished panel of experts unanimously recommended the standard four years ago under the Bush administration.

To be fair, Honeycutt is correct that there are areas of significant uncertainty in ozone science. For example in a 2008 report that drew on a wide body of published research, the National Research Council acknowledged:

Uncertainty about the relationship between outdoor ozone concentrations and personal exposure, especially of persons who spend most of their time indoors or use air conditioning during periods of peak ozone concentrations.

However, in that same report, the NRC affirmed the EPA findings that:

[T]he overall evidence supports a causal relationship between acute ambient ozone exposures and increased respiratory morbidity outcomes resulting in increased ED (emergency-department) visits and respiratory hospitalizations during the warm season.

and

clear and convincing evidence of causality for lung function decrements in healthy children under moderate exertion for 8-hr average ozone exposures.

as well as

strong evidence for a causal relationship between respiratory symptoms in asthmatic children and ozone exposures and between hospital admissions for respiratory causes and ambient ozone exposures.

In other words, there’s little to no doubt that ozone can have a detrimental effect on human health. Indeed, the whole rationale for lowering the smog standard is that the latest science points to unacceptable health risks at the current 75 parts per billion level.

But you won’t hear Honeycutt acknowledge that.

Over at the Environmental Defense Fund, toxicologist Elena Craft points out that Honeycutt, in criticizing the link between high ozone days and hospital admissions, is picking and choosing his studies.

Is it just coincidence that Honeycutt chose to single out these reports from among more than 1,700 papers on the issue? When the EPA’s independent, statutorily-established expert panel, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), convened to develop a health-based ozone standard – after examining all 1,700 papers on the issue –the verdict was explicit: a unanimous recommendation for decreasing the primary standard to within the range of 60-70 ppb.

Should we listen to Honeycutt, speaking for a notoriously politicized agency, or should we rely on the nation’s top experts who have spent their professional lives studying the subject?

I think what Honeycutt is doing is deeply cynical, especially for a scientist. If he were acting in good faith he wouldn’t be focusing entirely on areas of uncertainty while ignoring the balance of evidence indicating that ozone is bad for people’s health. But if your goal is to cast doubt on, well, it makes sense.

Honeycutt and his bosses know exactly what they’re doing: trying to confuse the public.

The average person tends to throw up her hands when she hears two groups of scientists arguing over a point, even if it’s a side-debate that does nothing to change the long-settled fundamentals.

It’s just very, very interesting. Honeycutt almost never finds any links between pollution and health effects. He almost always sides with industry. And he never finds a reason for laws to be strengthened.

Take a look at just a few of the examples I found in the Lexis-Nexis news database:

“Benzene levels in Texas shale no cause for alarm,” Greenwire, January 28, 2010:

Air samples taken from natural gas fields around the Barnett Shale in North Texas found elevated levels of benzene at 20 percent of the sites, but the levels were low enough not to prompt immediate concern, state environmental officials said.

[...]

“Based on the data we see, there is no need for widespread alarm,” said Michael Honeycutt, director of TCEQ’s toxicology division.

“Feds studying hazards at Texas cement factory town,” AP, July 17, 2009:

“A lot of people have looked at it over the years, and we just can’t find anything based on the data we have,” said Michael Honeycutt, who oversees toxicology studies for TCEQ.

“People everywhere have asthma, have birth defects, have cancer; it’s not a localized phenomenon.”

“Cancer study spurs 2 bills,” Houston Chronicle, January 20, 2007:

“In the past, our state agency has sometimes appeared to be working for industry,” Farrar said. “The TCEQ just hasn’t seemed to have the political will at the top to enforce our air rules.”

Michael Honeycutt, manager of toxicology at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, disagrees. Emissions of 1,3-butadiene are now three times lower at a Milby Park monitor than they were in 2003 data used in the new study.

“My point is you don’t have to pass a law to make us do our job,” he said. “We’re doing our job.”

The Texas Association of Business, which has petrochemical company members, is opposed to the legislation.

“Coal plants will cause 240 deaths annually, new report says,” Associated Press, November 22, 2006:

TCEQ chief toxicologist Dr. Michael Honeycutt said in a statement that with TXU’s planned 20 percent cut in emissions, no increase in harmful fine particle pollutants are expected from the new plants.

“Citgo’s Troubled Corpus Plant; As pollution spews, law lags,” San Antonio Express-News, October 1, 2006:

Although the benzene is over the state screening levels, Honeycutt said it really doesn’t pose a major threat, particularly because the Oak Park neighborhood is now abandoned. Even if it weren’t, levels at the Oak Park monitor are roughly equal to those found in a home of someone who routinely parks a car in the garage.