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Shocker: Chinese air pollution debunks U.S. EPA junk science

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
January 5, 2012  •Leave a Comment
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The Chinese city of Xi’an has some of the worst air quality in the world. Yet its air is significantly safer than the air in U.S. cities, according to a new study.

And if you have trouble believing that, then you ought to have trouble believing Obama Environmental Protection Agency claims that U.S. ambient air quality is killing tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people per year.

Chinese researchers compared data on air pollution and death rates in Xi’an from 2004 to 2008. In 2006, the World Health Organization ranked Xi’an as having the second worst air pollution in Asia, which means the second worst in the world.

The study was just published online (Jan. 3) in Environmental Health Perspectives.

The city of Xi’an had the second worst air quality in Asia in 2006.

Using the same sort of data and statistical analysis employed by EPA-funded air quality researchers, the Chinese researchers reported having statistically correlated every 10 microgram per cubic meter’s (μg/m3) worth of fine particulate matter (soot or PM2.5) in Xi’an’s air with a 0.2% increase in the city’s death rate.

While that sounds like a result in the statistical noise range — and it is as the mean daily death toll in Xi’an is only about 26.2 — we’re going to overlook that normally fatal flaw and, instead, momentarily embrace the result so that we can compare it with what EPA-funded researchers claim about U.S. cities.

In a 2009 study of 112 U.S. cities, EPA-funded researchers reported that every 10 μg/m3 worth of PM2.5 correlated with about a 1.0% increase in death rate. Once again this is, in reality, statistical noise. But in the fantasy world of EPA air quality science it is five times greater than what Chinese researchers reported from the second dirtiest city in the world.

But there’s more. Just how dirty is the air in Xi’an?

As measured by the Chinese researchers, the air in Xi’an is, on average, 9-10 times more polluted in terms of PM2.5 than the median PM2.5 levels of the two most polluted cities in the 112-city study (Rubidoux, CA and Los Angeles, CA).

And that dirty Chinese air, according to EPA scientific practice, is safer than U.S. air by a factor of five. This is shocking since if air pollution really was deadly, one would expect to see this phenomena operating in high gear in the respiratory horror story that Xi’an should be.

Keep in mind that EPA chief Lisa Jackson testified to Congress on Sep. 22, 2011 that:

Particulate matter [i.e., PM2.5] causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.

Leaving the fantasy land of EPA air quality science and returning to the real-world, however, clean U.S. air is axiomatically not more dangerous than filthy Chinese air and so some sort of explanation of these results is required.

The scientific and medical reality is that PM2.5 — even as high as it is in China — does not kill or hasten death.

PM 2.5 was such a public health problem in the U.S., in fact, that no one knew about it until EPA-funded researchers invented it in 1993 with the so-called “Six Cities Study” — 30 years after the Clean Air Act was enacted.

Concern for PM2.5 — the primary and virtually sole justification for recent costly EPA regulation like the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) and the Mercury and Toxics Standard (MATS) — has been entirely manufactured and ruthlessly exploited by the EPA for almost 20 years.

The agency has been able to get away with this scam because it has cleverly hidden key data with a clique of private researchers in academic institutions who are beyond Congressional and Freedom of Information Act reach.

Obtaining the EPA data may no longer be so important for debunking purposes, however, given the emerging reality in China.



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
January 5, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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Junk Science War: Fracking Quakes and ‘Dirty Faces’

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
November 17, 2011  •Leave a Comment
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Though I write to defend the natural gas industry from the junk science hurled at it and the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing (fracking), I do so with mixed emotions.

Two recent government reports, one from the United Kingdom and the other from Oklahoma, have tried to draw a connection between fracking and seismic activity occurring in those areas. In the UK, the seismic activity registered 3 on the Richter scale (vibrations similar to a passing truck). In Oklahoma, the activity registered between 1.0 and 2.8. Neither report could attribute with any certainty the seismic activity to the local fracking, as that would be nearly impossible to do given the multifactorial nature of seismic activity.

So: of the more than one million fracking or fracking-like operations that have occurred, unattributable seismic activity has been detected twice. Moreover, no structural damage was attributed to any of the seismic activity.

Scientifically and from a risk management perspective, fracking should be off the hook. But of course it’s not, because radical environmentalists loathe fracking — cheap natural gas means that the world won’t be giving up fossil fuels anytime soon — and so they have their long knives out for it. You can safely bet that anytime seismic activity coincides with fracking activity, they will use that coincidence to whip up fear.

And if it’s not earthquakes, it will be fracking fluids in drinking water. Or fracking’s greenhouse gas emissions. Or whatever can be dreamed up to scare people about the expanding industry of extracting natural gas from shale formations.

As we’ve learned with other environmental scaremongering, there are countless junk science-based ways to scare the public, and you can rest assured the radicals will dream them up and employ them to great effect.

What this means is that the shale gas industry will be under continual attack, and that the attacks won’t stop until fracking does.

However, while I’m more than happy to spotlight and debunk the enviros’ use of junk science, I’m also more than a little annoyed at the junk science that the shale gas industry itself is apparently quite happy to use against its brethren fossil fuels.

If you’ve followed the 21st century environmentalist war against fossil fuel, you’ve probably heard of the “Dirty Faces” anti-coal campaign: advertisements featuring coal-smudged faces, proclaiming that coal is “dirty” because its emits greenhouse gas carbon dioxide — ironically, a colorless and odorless gas.

The Dirty Faces campaign was unapologetically sponsored by shale gas company Chesapeake Energy. CEO Aubrey McClendon figured that he would do his part to help drive the coal industry out of business to drive up demand for natural gas, the current glut of which was caused by the technology breakthrough of fracking. Though cap-and-trade died in the last Congress, McClendon and Chesapeake are back to their anti-coal campaign, this time waging a proxy war through the American Lung Association.

The Obama administration is waging an all-out war against the coal industry though the EPA, the Department of the Interior, and the Mine Safety Administration. The EPA has enlisted paid allies like the American Lung Association to attack the coal industry and politicians that support it.

According to the American Lung Association’s 2010 report, Chesapeake Energy provided the funds that allowed the American Lung Association to create a new public service campaign (called “Fighting for Air”). It includes junk science-based fearmongering about premature deaths, asthma, and other heart and lung effects allegedly caused by ambient air quality. The Lung Association uses the campaign to help defend the EPA’s war against coal.

So while Chesapeake fights environmentalist junk science on fracking, it actually funds junk science to use against its rivals. To some people this may make business sense, but it’s shortsighted.

Helping the EPA defeat coal will win the gas industry no brownie points. That’s not how the all-powerful and unaccountable EPA needs to operate. Plus, Chesapeake is aiding and abetting enviro-radicals who, as soon as they have finished off the coal industry, will set their sights on shale gas. Divide-and-conquer is one of their bread-and-butter techniques.

Knowing that the junk science war against fracking has just begun, it’s more than frustrating to know that the frackers are willing to do the same to another innocent party.

Chesapeake’s problem is not the coal industry. Its problem is the radical environmentalists who are purposefully blocking U.S. economic recovery and growth in part through their war against fossil fuel production. A growing economy would actually require more energy, including gas, and gas prices would rise as demand increased.

We need to develop all forms of energy: coal, gas, oil, nuclear, wind, solar, whatever. Energy is not the zero-sum game — swap coal for gas — that McClendon seems to think it is. And paying the enemy to employ junk science is not the right way to gain friends and influence people.



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
November 17, 2011 •Leave a Comment
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EPA chief’s toxic emissions

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
November 5, 2011  •Leave a Comment
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It is time for Lisa P. Jackson to resign.

Last Friday at Howard University, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) railed against the coal industry, saying, “In [the coal industry's] entire history – 50, 60, 70 years or even 30 – they never found the time or the reason to clean up their act. They’re literally on life support. And the people keeping them on life support are all of us.”

This is patently false, of course, as emissions from U.S. coal-fired power plants are quite heavily regulated. Those emissions controls are the reason U.S. air is clean and safe and why, say, the air in regulation-free China is not.

As West Virginia’s Republican Rep. David B. McKinley pointed out, to the extent that the coal industry is “on life support,” it is Ms. Jackson’s EPA and the rest of the Obama administration that has put it there with a slew of proposed and finalized anti-coal regulations.

A week before, Ms. Jackson appeared on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” where she said, “We’re actually at the point in many areas of this country where, on a hot summer day, the best advice we can give you is don’t go outside. Don’t breathe the air, it might kill you.”

But there is no scientific or medical evidence to support this statement — not now or even when the EPA was organized and the Clean Air Act was amended to its current form in 1970.

Akin to shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, her inflammatory rhetoric actually serves to undermine all the efforts put forth and money spent by government and industry to clean the air the past 40 years.

In an Oct. 21 Los Angeles Times op-ed, Ms. Jackson essentially accused congressional Republicans of attempting to kill Americans.

“Since the beginning of this year, Republicans in the House have averaged roughly a vote every day the chamber has been in session to undermine the Environmental Protection Agency and our nation’s environmental laws. … How we respond to this assault on our environmental and public health protections will mean the difference between sickness and health – in some cases, life and death — for hundreds of thousands of citizens.”

But the bills the House GOP has passed would do nothing more than delay a few proposed and recently issued EPA regulations pending a cost-benefit analysis, including input from other federal agencies. Long-standing, pre-Obama administration emissions standards would remain in effect without any changes.

An Oct. 16 USA Today op-ed co-signed with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius stated, “There shouldn’t be a single neighborhood where parents have to worry about letting their kids play outside for fear they might get sick. Yet today, one in every 12 Americans — and one in 10 children — suffers from asthma, which is worsened by air pollution.”

The good news is that there aren’t such neighborhoods. In fact, there is no American adult or child whose health is compromised by ambient air quality. Yet reality doesn’t temper Ms. Jackson’s vitriol.

At a September House hearing, Ms. Jackson told Rep. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat, “[Airborne] particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.”

And how many people does Ms. Jackson claim suffer avoidable deaths from particulate matter? She told Mr. Markey, “If we could reduce particulate matter to healthy levels, it would have the same impact as finding a cure for cancer in our country.”

But last year, about 570,000 people died from cancer amid a death toll of about 2.2 million. So Ms. Jackson is misleading Congress into thinking that 25 percent of deaths in America are caused by air pollution. The real toll from ambient air, however, is zero – and there is no scientific or medical evidence to the contrary.

All this shrillness is a sign that Ms. Jackson is feeling tremendous political pressure from her efforts to use junk science to shut down the American economy.

She has overreacted by borrowing from the playbook of Clinton EPA administrator and former Obama environment and energy czar Carol M. Browner, who ran roughshod not only over congressional Republicans but also over Al Gore in ramming through costly air-pollution regulations in 1997.

Whatever the reason, however, Ms. Jackson’s nonsensical Earth First!-like scaremongering is hardly befitting of a responsible senior government official who is in charge of a supposedly independent agency that regulates much of the nation’s economy.

Ms. Jackson wants to be unaccountable for her actions and is trying to intimidate her critics into silence and resignation with flagrant falsehoods.

An EPA administrator whose rhetoric is as apocalyptic as that of the most strident environmental extremists – and whose agenda matches – isn’t serving the public. At a time when it is more important than ever to avoid damaging the economy, Ms. Jackson’s actions prove she isn’t fit to serve.



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Lancet editors miss bogus reference on Japanese longevity and salt intake

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
August 30, 2011  •Leave a Comment
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Is it too much to ask of medical journal editors to verify references for key claims? After all, just because a study author footnotes a claim, should that act automatically enshrine the claim with credibility?

If you want to know how lazy editors can help launch diet and health myths, you need look no further than a new article in The Lancet entitled, “What has made the population of Japan healthy?“

The study’s media release stated,

[Japanese] life expectancy increased rapidly throughout the 1950s and 60s as first infectious disease mortality dropped markedly, which was swiftly followed by stroke mortality falling. High blood pressure was also controlled through salt reduction campaigns and increased use of antihypertensive drugs and better health technologies. [Emphasis added]

Curious about the salt reduction claim, I read the full article which spotlighted it in a summary box entitled “Key Messages”:

The control of blood pressure improved through population-based interventions such as salt reduction campaigns…

The text of the article went on to read,

A reduction in dietary salt intake has been very important for the health improvement of the Japanese population. Average salt intake among middle-aged men decreased from 30 g/day in the 1950s to 14 g/day in the 1980s…

Two factors that might be important in contributing to the falling trend in blood pressure in the population are the increased coverage of antihypertensive drugs in patients with hypertension and improved lifestyles that include reduced dietary salt intake.38

“Two factors that might be important”? I though the article said that blood pressure was controlled by salt reduction. So I went to check out footnote 38, which directed me to the following study,

Ikeda N, Gakidou E, Hasegawa T, Murray CJ. Understanding the decline of mean systolic blood pressure in Japan: an analysis of pooled data from the National Nutrition Survey, 1986–2002. Bull World Health Organ 2008; 86: 978–88.

It didn’t take long thereafter for The Lancet article’s claim to begin to teeter. The abstract in Ikeda et al. stated,

Declining mean systolic blood pressure (SBP) in Japan between 1986 and 2002 was partly attributable to the increased use of antihypertensive medications, especially in the older population, and lowered mean BMI in young women. However, a substantial part of the decline was left unexplained and needs to be investigated further. A still greater decline in SBP would be expected through improvements in body weight management, salt and alcohol intake, and treatment and control of hypertension. [Emphasis added]

So lower blood pressure was linked with medications, not reduced salt intake, which only merited a hopeful “would be expected.”

Adding detail to this observation, the Ikeda et al. study stated,

Reduced mean daily salt intake contributed [in a statistically significant manner] to the decline of mean SBP by −0.4 to −0.2 mmHg in all age groups in both sexes.

But SBP is meaningless on a population level, and fractional mmHg changes in SBP are miniscule and likely not even detectable on a clinical basis for an individual — after all, “ideal” SBP is on the order of 120 mmHg. It’s no wonder that Ikeda et al. go on to acknowledge that,

Lifestyle-related factors such as physical activity, alcohol drinking and dietary salt intake made only limited contributions to the decline of mean SBP in this study.

And even that assertion is an overstatement as there is no evidence that reducing dietary salt intake even made a “limited” contribution.

So The Lancet article makes a prominent claim that is actually debunked, as opposed to sustained, by its reference.

The added bizarre twist, here, is that Ikeda is the lead author of the article in The Lancet. So Ikeda debunked his own claim before he made it, but made it anyway, and then had the nerve to cite his prior debunking as support for the new claim.

I guess The Lancet‘s editors were too busy rushing the article to publication to actually “edit” it. The Lancet‘s editors were also apparently too busy in 1998 to uncover the scientific misconduct behind the study that fraudulently linked the MMR vaccine with autism — a study that launched anti-vaccine hysteria.

We’ll see if and how the media plays Ikeda’s new article. But if you ever hear someone bloviating about how low-salt diets help the Japanese live longer, you’ll know where the myth came from and how bogus it is.



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
August 30, 2011 •Leave a Comment
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Air-pollution scare debunked

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
August 19, 2011  •Leave a Comment
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By Steve Milloy and Dr. John Dale Dunn

What if today’s levels of air pollution didn’t kill anybody?

That certainly would be bad news for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has spent the past 15 years stubbornly defending its extraordinarily expensive and ever-tightening air-quality regulations.

The EPA claims airborne fine particulate matter kills tens of thousands annually and that the prevention of those deaths will provide society $2 trillion annually in monetized health benefits by 2020.

But we can debunk those claims with more than mere criticisms of EPA’s statistical malpractice and secret data. We have actual data that simply discredit the EPA’s claims.

Everyone (including environmental zealots) agrees that the worst air-pollution episode ever to occur in the United States occurred in Donora, Pa., in October 1948.

Daytime in Donora, late-October 1948

For three days, an unusual and stifling temperature inversion trapped noxious fumes from local industry in Donora’s valley. By the time rain finally came to clear away the smog, thousands had been affected, hundreds had been sickened, and 20 elderly persons were dead. The Donora tragedy was a sentinel event on the path to the federal Clean Air Act that finally was enacted in 1963.

Ironically, though, when the Donora episode is studied rather than simply exploited as a rhetorical device, that debunks the EPA’s assertion that present-day air quality is a killer.

The U.S. Public Health Service investigated the Donora tragedy and in 1949 issued a report titled “Air Pollution in Donora, Pa.: Epidemiology of the Smog Episode of October 1948.”

The report indicates that the death rates for the period 1945-48 for Donora and nearby Pittsburgh were 826 and 1,086 per 100,000 people, respectively.

Surprisingly, those mortality rates compare pretty well with the most recent mortality data for Allegheny County, Pa., home to both Donora and Pittsburgh.

During the years 2006-08, Allegheny County’s mortality rate was 1,110 per 100,000. And while mortality rate is one of the few objective public health statistics available, there’s much more to this story than simply comparing then-and-now mortality rates.

Donora’s air quality was measured by the U.S. Weather Bureau from Feb. 16 to April 27, 1949 – i.e., more than three months after the October inversion and during what would be considered normal air-quality conditions in Donora.

The Weather Bureau’s measurements of airborne particulate matter are astonishing and compelling. Of the 205 air samples taken at 12 stations during those 10 weeks in Donora, 54 percent exceeded 500 micrograms per cubic meter.

While the other 46 percent of the readings were less than 500 micrograms per cubic meter, it’s likely that all of those were likely far greater than today’s EPA’s standard for maximum allowable fine particulate matter, which is 35 micrograms per cubic meter during a 24-hour period.

In contrast, Allegheny County violated this modern EPA standard just twice during 2007-09.

So, although the air in Allegheny County is much cleaner than it was in the years following World War II, the mortality rate is about the same.

Moreover, the mortality rate in Donora from 1945-48 was 26 percent lower than the 2006-08 death rate in surrounding Allegheny County, despite the fact that the air was far dirtier as measured by the Weather Bureau in 1949, when more than half the time it exceeded the current EPA standard by a factor of 14 or more.

So what happened in Donora? The unusual inversion trapped toxic chemical fumes from facilities that did not cease operations until conditions had reached obviously toxic levels. The 20 elderly people who died in Donora (mean and median age 65) were all already suffering chronic heart and lung disease.

Autopsies indicated that unknown substances caused the deaths, which the Public Health Service’s report analogized to the World War I chemical weapon phosgene. There was no evidence that particulate matter caused any deaths.

Although the Donora tragedy could not occur today because of stringent air-toxins regulations, modern emissions-control technology, vastly improved medical care and the societal wealth to afford it all, the EPA nonetheless likes to pretend that today’s air quality is as poor and dangerous as it ever was and that we are all just one orange or red air-quality day away from death.

The agency’s remedy is a slew of new regulations – such as its imminent ozone rule, which is estimated to be the most expensive regulation ever, costing $1 trillion annually in real compliance costs after 2020 and killing as many as 7.4 million actual jobs.

In November 1950, the Public Health Service’s Donora report was reviewed in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which observed, “There is need to know whether there is an insidious effect on those living their lifetime under an industrially polluted sky. Statistical studies of death rates in industrial cities are not sufficient. The situation requires the best in investigative medicine.”

While no one in America anymore lives under an “industrially polluted sky,” the call for “investigative” medicine 60 years ago still has not been answered. Instead, the EPA has spent tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars cooking up dubious statistical claims about air quality without ever checking to see if they match up with reality.

If the EPA seriously maintains that its existing and new air regulations are providing trillions of dollars’ worth of health benefits, it should be compelled to produce hard medical evidence of those claimed benefits.

Sixty-three years ago, the Donora tragedy alerted society that air could become deadly in certain situations. It helped America choose a path toward the clean air we have now.

We can recycle the lesson of Donora. This time, however, we must make sure we don’t allow an out-of-control EPA to wreck our economy and kill jobs with overly stringent regulations that only “prevent” imaginary deaths and illness at real and significant costs that we can’t afford.

 

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery, 2009). Dr. John Dale Dunn is an emergency physician in Texas.



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
August 19, 2011 •Leave a Comment
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Liberals LOVE science, as long as a liberal GOV is paying for it. Then it’s real expert ‘n science-y.

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Joel Johannesen
July 12, 2011  •Leave a Comment
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Our contributor Steve Milloy wrote up this blog entry this morning at his own JunkScience.com blog:

What makes a scientific expert? Congressional Democrats offer a shocking answer

What makes a scientific expert? Knowledge? Expertise? Accomplishment? Respect of one’s colleagues? A new bill introduced in Congress has a shocking new answer.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) have proposed a rigged process to ban so-called ‘endocrine disrupting’ chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA).

The bill would establish an “Endocrine Disruption Expert Panel” to advise the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences on banning chemicals.

But to be on the panel an “expert” must:

… have received Federal endocrine-research-related funding within the 2 years preceding appointment under this subsection…

So you can’t be an expert unless you’re at least partially-owned by the politicized federal agencies that want to ban chemicals like BPA in the first place. Astonishingly, a scientist’s source of funding is what makes him expert, according to the Kerry-Moran bill.

While the bill is unlikely to go anywhere due to probable Republican opposition, it does expose where Democrats want to take science and scientists.

 



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Joel Johannesen
July 12, 2011 •Leave a Comment
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If you want the EPA reined in, you need to take action now.

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Joel Johannesen
July 1, 2011  •Leave a Comment
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Action item: Stop EPA in debt ceiling deal

Junk science debunker and contributor to BoldColors.net Steve Milloy posted an urgent appeal at his own blog. If you want the EPA reined in, you need to take action now.

 



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DDT causes diabetes, breast cancer and infant deaths?

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
May 20, 2011  •Leave a Comment
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Is it time to bring back JunkScience.com’s DDTees?

Today’s New York Times article “As an Insecticide Makes a Comeback, Uganda Must Weigh Its Costs” states:

But the United States banned the use of DDT in 1972 over the chemical’s hazardous environmental impact. Studies have also linked DDT to diabetes and breast cancer. One examination of the consequences of using DDT to fight malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, conducted by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said the chemical might have increased infant deaths. [Emphasis added]

I traced the diabetes claim to a study published in the July 2009 Environmental Health Perspectives. Aside from the usual fatal flaws of weak association epidemiology, this study’s assertion that DDT metabolite DDE was associated with incident diabetes is laughable since the average body mass index (BMI) of the study subjects was 33.2 — e.g., meaning that the average study subject was likely to be obese (check out this chart to see what height/weight combos make for a BMI of 33+).

Moreover, no significant associations were reported for study subjects with a BMI less than 29.

I don’t know whether obesity leads to diabetes or diabetes leads to obesity, but there’s no evidence that DDT is involved.

As to the breast cancer risk claim, I last addressed this issue in an October 11, 2007 FOXNews.com column, responding to an October 2007 Environmental Health Perspectives study.

What about infant deaths?

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences study referred to by the New York Times doesn’t even try to associate DDT with nonmalarial infant death. It instead only estimates nonmalarial deaths that may be associated with DDT spraying, the alleged “association” being based on three studies “suggesting” that DDT exposure may increase pre-term delivery and small-for-gestational-age births, and shorten the duration of lactation.

Here’s my quick take on those three studies:

So contrary to the New York Times‘ assertion, there is no credible evidence that DDT has anything to do with diabetes, heart disease or infant deaths. Moreover, given that one million children under the age of five die every year from malaria, even if DDT did increase the risk of diabetes, breast cancer and infant death, those risks would be better than the alternative. While the Times misinforms millions are dying needlessly.

Ugandan anti-malaria workers sporting JunkScience.com DDTees.



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
May 20, 2011 •Leave a Comment
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Organic Valley identified as secret funder of ‘FrogTV’ pesticide scare campaign

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
April 27, 2011  •Leave a Comment
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Is American agriculture facing yet another major attack on food safety similar to the 1989 Alar scare?

At JunkScience.com, we take notice when certain tactics by activists and unscrupulous marketing interests repeat themselves. That is certainly the case right now vis-à-vis conventional crop protection products used by farmers and growing online advocacy and marketing campaigns seeking to tie these products to various human diseases and harms to our ecosystem.

Specifically, we’re talking about campaigns targeting pesticides use to control weeds, insects, fungus and other risks to crop and farm animal health and productivity. American farmers often find themselves under the microscopes and in the gun sights of advocacy, litigator, niche and organic marketing and other special interest groups. Many of these interest groups have intersecting interests, shared tactics and even common resources they employ in these campaigns.

Throughout 2010, we saw various signs that certain agriculture related special interest groups were organizing and putting in place the elements needed to engage in a major attack on conventional agriculture — specifically targeting crop protection pesticide products. Foundations with a history of funding anti-pesticide organizations were fueling research and activists seeking to show negative health and environmental associations with pesticides. We saw web domain names linked to pesticide issues being registered using privacy protection tools, research and travel funding funneled to activists and sympathetic academics, litigation filings targeting companies and their regulators, and related marketing investments by companies whose product sales benefit from food and health scares.

Intertwined within these tactical components was an emerging allegory frequently repeated by activists and marketers setting the stage for defining villains, victims and heroes associated with their campaign. The villains — evil corporate agribusiness and toxic pesticides. The victims — vulnerable children and their mothers. The heroes — organic food and organic advocates to the rescue.

If we were seeing these signs in 2010 that meant the planning, funding and coordination for them most likely started in 2009 or earlier. These campaigns are detailed, extremely well funded and have multiple moving parts. One such marketing organization known for their past support of similar campaigns attacking competitors in food production recently tipped their hat and served as a proof point to the evolving picture of pending risk to traditional farmers we have been tracking.

In a very subtle, low visibility channel, the head of marketing for the Organic Valley Cooperative, a provider of organic dairy, meat and vegetables with more than a half billion dollars in annual sales, let it slip that Organic Valley was taking credit for an otherwise anonymous Web campaign attacking pesticide use.

Organic Valley chief marketing executive Theresa Marquez claimed in an April 4th blog post that their campaign, which had launched in January, had been in the works for the better part of two years and part of a broader Organic Valley funded effort to foster “education” about food safety issues in the marketplace.

Called “Frog TV” this campaign is cross-linked online directly and thematically with a much broader attack on pesticides and an emerging allegory with amphibians and children as the victims and chemical pesticide manufacturers as the villain.

This is junk science and fear profiteering at its peak. You see, the peer reviewed and actual scientific evidence says no one cause is linked to frog-related issues. And specifically, the synthetic pesticides attacked here by Organic Valley have been extensively researched, independently peer reviewed and found safe by government regulators around the globe.

A recent Yale University study specifically noted, “The findings upend the conventional wisdom that agricultural pesticides are largely responsible for the abnormalities.” And, another independent, peer reviewed and published study by Oregon State University researchers similarly found, “The search for a single causative factor is often missing the larger picture, they said, and approaches to address the crisis may fail if they don’t consider the totality of causes – or could even make things worse.”

Unfortunately complex scientific interpretations don’t suit the needs of fear profiteers like Organic valley. While this is just one small example, it reveals a dark side of organic promotions, sometimes called black marketing, which clearly seeks to create fears over less expensive conventionally produces foods in order to sell their higher priced offerings. And by all measures, these tactics appear to be back on the rise by organic marketing interests, advocacy groups and litigators. The last time we saw such high levels of attacks on conventional agriculture and specifically crop protection issues was the 1989 Alar cancer scare promoted by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

Lest we forget, that Alar campaign was later exposed as a marketing and public relations campaign orchestrated to raise money and increase awareness and support for organic foods. According to the campaign architect David Fenton, “The idea was for the ‘story’ to achieve a life of its own, and continue for weeks and months to affect policy and consumer habits.”

Years later, NRDC backtracked from the alarmist statements made by Janet Hathaway about Alar. NRDC’s Hathaway had told CBS News in 1989, “What we’re talking about is a cancer causing agent used on food that the EPA knows is going to cause cancer for thousands of children…” Amending their position over ten years later, in a 2000 statement NRDC noted, “The message of that report might have been muddled by the media, and the public might have over-reacted, because we never said there was an immediate danger from Alar…”

However, the damage had been done. Their campaign cost the apple industry an estimated $150 million and an otherwise safe and effective crop production tool called Alar was removed from the market — not because of science-based regulatory processes, but through advocacy and market manipulations to promote organic foods by making people afraid of their more affordable conventional counterparts.

And, it appears that we’re seeing a similar type of well funded and orchestrated campaign emerging today again targeting conventional crop protection products. We are bombarded daily with claims, like those on Organic Valley’s Frog TV, that children are getting cancer and other ills from pesticides. Frogs, bees and other species are mutating or collapsing — all of which will lead to end of human kind – because of pesticides and other agricultural practices. Less-than-transparent marketing and advocacy interests are spending millions of dollars to create these misperceptions for profits.

As with the Alar scare, the real victims of this current campaign will be farmers who may be forced to abandon well regulated, safe conventional crop protection products due to misplaced political decisions forced on regulators or market conditions created by public misperceptions generated by these campaigns. Consumers who face rising food costs or who are scared into spending more of their limited grocery budgets on higher priced organic products as a result of these scares will also suffer.

The signs are in place and coming soon to a theater, website, blog, Facebook page, etc… near you. Farmers and consumers should be prepared for a range of well constructed scare stories amplified by the media, activists and others raising alarms about what we eat and how its grown. We should not forget the lessons of the past, that repeatedly show these scares to be widely overblown with significant undisclosed special interests funding them. The real villains and victims here are much different than those we typically assume and read about online.

Consider sending Organic Valley a message. Sign this petition and remember to send them and their organic trade association co-conspirators a message where they really feel it — at the supermarket by purchasing affordable non-organic food for your family.



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
April 27, 2011 •Leave a Comment
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Clean energy’s junk economics

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
March 23, 2011  •Leave a Comment
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The oxymoron-ish nature of a left-wing “think tank” is on display in the Center for American Progress’ latest pitch for a so-called “clean energy standard” (CES).

In a new white paper, CAP says that clean energy opponents (like us),

“…have built a fear campaign about the impacts of these investments, arguing that the costs are too great and the jobs created are too small.”

If facts constitute a “fear campaign,” so be it. Let’s examine CAP’s arguments.

Cheaper than fossil fuel?

CAP says that so-called “clean energy,” by which it means primarily wind and solar electricity generation, is actually less expensive than fossil fuel generation if you include the costs of fossil fuel’s supposed “externalities” — i.e., air pollution and its alleged health consequences, forest fires, droughts etc. CAP estimates that the externalities of coal-fired electricity cost between $175 billion and $523 billion per year.

But as shown in “EPA’s Clean Air Act: Pretending air pollution is worse than it is” (JunkScience.com, March 2011), air pollution is largely a thing of the past in the vast majority of the U.S. In areas where air quality may occasionally be problematical, mainly California, such events are mainly due to vehicle emissions (i.e., not electricity generation) and California’s particular topography and weather. Moreover, there are no coal-fired power plants in California. So the claim that emissions from coal-fired plants cause any health problems and associated health costs whatsoever lies somewhere in the continuum of wrong-to-pretend.

The forest fire and drought arguments harken back to the famously disproven and disavowed connection between manmade carbon dioxide emissions and weather-related events. But as IPCC and Climategate honcho Kevin Trenberth has admitted and the British judge who trashed Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient truth” ruled, for example, climate change and weather events are entirely independent of each other.

What we do know — and this is undisputed — is that electricity from wind and solar sources is so expensive that without government subsidies, it would not exist, let alone compete with fossil fuels. At a Senate hearing last week, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) asked a “clean energy” venture capitalist:

“If it wasn’t for the credits you’re receiving, would you be in business?”

The answer was no, according to Climatewire. CAP admits as much in its report, citing the success of several “clean energy” welfare programs.

‘Clean energy’ not subject to the ‘broken windows fallacy’?

As described by CAP,

This brings us to the second erroneous criticism of clean energy critics: that clean energy actually costs jobs by destroying productive capital and robbing jobs from other sectors of the economy. Their argument is that clean energy jobs are an example of the famous economic observation known as the “Broken Windows Fallacy.” In the classic telling of this economic lesson, a vandal breaks the window of a shop. The shopkeeper then has to replace the window, and calls the glassmaker, who then has more business. While the new business is good for the glassmaker, economists point out that this has not created a “net new job,” but has simply moved employment around in the economy. After all, if the shopkeeper didn’t have to spend money on the new window, he would have spent it on something else that he’s now foregoing.

CAP dismisses the broken window fallacy argument as follows:

But this criticism applies only if a broken window is replaced with another identical window. But in the transition to a cleaner energy economy, we are talking about replacing that first broken window with a much more efficient one—perhaps one with double-paned glass, or even glass with solar reflectors on it to store heat from the sun. Or maybe we’re talking about replacing a 40-year-old, coal-fired power plant with a geothermal plant, or a new wind or solar farm. The “broken window” analogy simply does not work when the window you start with is flawed. We’re replacing an outdated window with a new, more efficient one that costs less to operate.

But if CAP’s argument was correct and there was significant value to be had in knee-jerk replacement of old windows with new windows, then shopkeepers would break their own windows and become richer. The notion that there’s some sort of automatic economic benefit from replacing a coal-fired power plants with wind farms is disproven by the economic reality that utilities — which provide 45 percent of our electricity by burning coal versus slightly more than one (1) percent through wind, and which have no ideological preference for coal over any other fuel — choose to use coal, even with all its accompanying regulatory costs, because of its affordability and reliability.

Whether rational people are replacing windows or power plants, they will only do so if they are getting some value out of the replacement. That value doesn’t necessarily have to be purely economic (at least in the case of windows); it could be aesthetic. But wind and solar are not being pressed on us because of their aesthetic values; it’s their alleged economic and environmental benefits of which we are regaled. But there is no real world evidence that the latter exist now or will come to pass in the foreseeable future.

Job hypocrisy?

Finally, CAP takes an ironic swipe at the job efficiency. It’s not true, CAP claims, that it takes more workers to produce a given amount of energy from “clean energy” versus fossil fuels. CAP is apparently saying that “clean energy” can be as, or even more “job efficient” than fossil fuels — i.e., “clean energy” requires a comparable number of, or perhaps fewer jobs than fossil fuels to generate the same amount of power.

But CAP has called “green” or “clean energy” a,

“… great engine… for job creation in the coming decades.”

Hmmm…

CAP goes on to assert — i.e., without providing any evidence — that,

“… dirty energy opponents argue that green jobs are a myth, and aren’t actually new jobs. This is wrong because building clean energy creates new installation, construction, and manufacturing jobs immediately, and then frees up resources to create jobs and growth in the rest of the economy.

But of course, the U.S. has already “invested” about $80 billion in “clean energy” via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Where are the jobs?

The failure of “clean energy” is not just an American phenomenon. As pointed out in “The Myth of Green Energy Jobs: The European Experience“

Experiments with renewable energy in Europe have led to job loss, higher energy prices, and corruption.

Europe has tried to make “clean energy” work, but it just doesn’t.

What to do?

Last week, Sens. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) began seeking answers to questions about “clean energy” with their “WHITE PAPER ON A CLEAN ENERGY STANDARD.”

Given that a “clean energy standard” could easily become a carbon cap (as in the economy-killing cap-and-trade), it important to make sure that policymakers understand the truth about “clean energy” before the carbon cap that we have worked hard to avoid since the 1990s is snuck in place via junk economics.

 

 



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Steven Milloy
March 23, 2011 •Leave a Comment
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Filed Under: Columnists, Featured, Steven Milloy
• Also follow Joel Johannesen on Twitter -- @JoelJohannesen