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Scientific Spam on Climate Health Effects

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., April 28, 2001 — Having spent decades as a Washington reporter, I’ve read more government reports that I can count. Paper is policy currency in D.C.

But this week’s interagency report – A Human Health Perspective on Climate Change – is the loopiest I can recall. This report, honchoed by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (one of the National Institutes of Health), claims, without anything remotely resembling evidence, that global warming could (note the conditional) increase the frequency or severity of a range of diseases including cancer, heart disease, food contamination, neurological disorders and mental health.

And if my wife had wheels, she’d be a bicycle.

It’s is clear what the aim of this report is. In Washington, it’s known as trolling for dollars. The life scientists, seeing the federal money flowing to meteorology, climatology, atmospheric physics, are attempting to dip their hand into the dollar stream.

The report – done by an ad hoc group including NIEHS, the Environmental Protection Agency, NOAA, State, Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – is not coy about its aims. The report notes that prior examinations of purported health effects of global warming were extrapolations. “The purpose of this paper is to identify research critical for understanding the impact of climate change on human health….”

The tactic is the scary scenario, long employed by the advocates of doing anything and everything to attempt to prevent the unpreventable. “Climate change,” says the report, “may (my emphasis) exacerbate existing cardiovascular disease by increasing heat stress, increasing the body burden of airborne particles, and changing the distribution of zoonotic vectors that cause infectious diseases linked with cardiovascular disease.” Then, again, it may not. Give us dollars and let us try to answer the questions.

Here’s the entirely dubious take on mental health: “By causing or contributing to extreme weather events, climate change may result in geographic displacement of populations, damage to property, loss of loved ones, and chronic stress, all of which can negatively affect mental health.” But those phenomena already exist and mental health professionals have no clue how they actually affect the mental health of individuals or populations.

Possibly troubling to some greens and alternative energy advocates, the report also raises the specter that exotic materials used in photovoltaics, advanced batteries, and alternative fuels may increases incidences of cancer. “Very little is known” about these risks, says the report, again calling for more research (we’re talking federal dollars here).

Of course, very little is known about all the topics raised in the report. The likelihood that more research dollars would shed light on the topics is simply not credible. We know so little about the causes of cancer (not one disease), heart disease (ditto), asthma, and so forth. The chances that the ability to suss out how a warmer world would affect the diseases strains credulity far beyond the breaking point.

A disclaimer on the title page of the report (in type so small it is barely legible) states, “The content, views, and perspectives presented in this report are solely those of the authors, and do not reflect the official views, policies, or implied endorsement of any of the individual participating federal agencies or organizations.” This is boiler plate, and entirely disingenuous. It is “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” stuff.

NIEHS published the report and it resides on the agency’s web site. The paper was also published in Environmental Health Perspectives,” which says a lot about the state of peer review in climate science. Peer review in climate science, as several reports have observed, more often resembles a “circle of friends” than a rigorous examination of the science. If the report were a grant application to NIH, this garbage would be laughed out of the review committee.

But the audience is not NIH; it is the public and Congress. The presumption is that if the government says it is so, it must be.

Charlie Brown and the Senate Energy Bill

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., April 25, 2010 — The Senate has again failed to kick off debate on energy/climate legislation.  A bipartisan group — Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts (D), Joe Lieberman of Connecticut (I-D), and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina (R) — have been laboring for a year to create a bill that could gather 60 Senate votes, enough to defeat a Republican filibuster.  The bill — a legislative Rube Goldberg contraption designed with something for every conceivable interest, perhaps excepting the buggy-whip industry — was to have been unveiled on Monday, April 26.

Forgetaboutit.  Graham announced Saturday that he’s pulling out of the deal and won’t come back to the table.  Graham told reporters he’s upset that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-Nev.), along with the Obama administration, has decided to move on Senate immigration legislation before the energy bill.  Immigration has suddenly moved up on the political hit parade, in part because Arizona has decided that it can usurp federal powers on immigration, and in part because Reid is in the race of his life to retain his Senate seat, in part because the administration wants to strengthen its position with the Latino community for the upcoming election. In Nevada, immigration is a major issue, while energy is not a big deal.  So Reid and the White House, hoping to protect Reid, have decided to turn their searchlight on immigration reform.

Graham, one of the few Republicans who will even walk on the same side of the street with Senate Democrats, says that’s unacceptable to him. It’s energy first, or he won’t play the game.  “Moving forward on immigration — in this hurried, panicked manner — is nothing more than a cynical political ploy,” Graham said in a letter to Kerry and Lieberman.  “I know from my own personal experience the tremendous amounts of time, energy and effort that must be devoted to this issue to make even limited progress.”

That probably means that the game won’t be played, at least this year. Kerry said in a statement, “We all believe that this year is our best and perhaps last chance for Congress to pass a comprehensive approach. We believe that we had reached such an agreement and were excited to announce it on Monday, but regrettably external issues have arisen that force us to postpone only temporarily.”

In the Senate, temporarily usually means forever (defined in Washington terms as “until after the next election”).  The chances that Reid and the White House would allow a Republican Senator to set their political and legislative agendas are slim and none, and Slim just got put on Senate life support.

Some Washington cynics (they constitute a majority in the city) suggest that Graham, as savvy a player who has ever played political football, never really intended to support an energy bill.  Rather, he intended to bring the Democrats to the bargaining table as a way to delay the action. It is, these folks suggest, a case of the political ploy known as “Lucy, Charlie Brown, and the football,” with Graham (Lucy) assuring Charlie that, this time, she won’t pull the football when Charlie (Kerry) goes for the kickoff. Then she grabs the ball away and Charlie falls flat on his back.

A wrinkle on that is that by calling on Reid to move energy first, rather than immigration,  Graham probably understood that he was guaranteeing that immigration would be the first Democratic priority.

Complicating the kerfuffle is the role of the House. The House passed a massive, and massively atrocious, energy/climate bill last June by a narrow score of 219-212, laregely along party lines.  The Senate has refused to take up that bill, which many consider to be a lethal concoction of cracklings, rendered fat, and pulled pork.  The Kerry-Lieberman-Gramm package, as most understand it, is a bit better, but filled with concessions to oil companies, coal, nuclear power, natural gas, biomass, industrial emitters, the auto industry, and so forth. The details aren’t clear, as they were to have been unveiled Monday.

The House also went first on health care legislation, which then dragged on in the Senate. If the House were to take up immigration, it would give the Senate some time to work on energy, while the solons waited for House action.

But House leaders are coy about whether they are willing to go first on the wildly controversial immigration issue. The Christian Science Monitor reported, “House majority leader Steny Hoyer went so far as to say at Monitor-sponsored breakfast last week that he has questions about whether the Senate can pass immigration reform – and that the House will not take up the issue until the Senate proves it can make headway.” Immigration is a more more complicated issue in the House than in the Senate

Ironically, Lindsey Graham is the only Republican working with Senate Democrats on immigration, but says he will drop his support for legislation unless at least one other Republican Senator is willing to join him.

Bye, Bye Blankenship

Washington, April 7, 2010 — The coal mine disaster at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia rips at my heart. The 25 miners who died, and that’s likely to be 29, are the kind of folks I grew up with and lived with a major portion of my life. I’m a child of coal.

My father’s first job, which he held for more than 20 years in the U.S. Department of Interior, was to man the “rescue  car,” a rail car equipped with latest in mine rescue gear. The U.S. in those days had no authority over coal mine safety. That was a state responsibility (my great-uncle Richard Maize was Pennsylvania’s mine safety chief for many years). The role of the rescue car was to hook up to any railroad engine when a mine disaster came down and get to the mine to help organize rescue operations. It was bloody work.

My father then went into energy research, working for DOI’s Bureau of Mines out of Denver, Colo., including oil shale research at Rifle, Colo. (which oil shale mavens will recollect).

The next stop — mining engineers tend to be peripatetic — was Washington, where Dad became the National Coal Association’s lobbyist on mine safety issues. He left in 1952, when NCA opposed new national mine safety legislation (following a major coal mine disaster in Centralia, Ill.) and he thought the industry was wrong. He then became the mining chief for the Sheridan, Wyo., coal company, using underground mines to supply the Union Pacific with coal to power it’s giant locomotives crossing the continental divide at Cheyenne Mountain, Wyo.

That was a great job until the UP went diesel. After some time uranium prospecting out of Steamboat Springs, Colo., it was back to Pittsburgh, where my father did the basic research on resin roof bolts that help keep mine roofs from falling in. When he retired from the Bureau of Mines, he took a job teaching at Penn State, where he remained until he died.

I’ve been an energy journalist for about 40 years. Much of that time has been covering the coal industry.

All of this is to establish my coal credentials. I love coal. It’s been very, very good to me. I think I understand the business.

If Massey Energy doesn’t give CEO Don Blankenship a pink slip, the industry will face its darkest political days. Blankenship is opinionated, combative, and always in-your-face when it comes to criticism of his company or the coal industry.

He’s been ethically challenged, particularly for his opposition to unionization of his mines (the Upper Big Branch mine is a non-union mine), and his rejection of climate change legislation that would limit coal. Neither of those positions are grounds for his removal as Massey CEO. But he’s got an attitude about ethics, and that’s the problem.

The Washington Post reported recently: “The Massey Energy chairman garnered national attention in 2004 when he contributed $3 million to the campaign of a West Virginia judicial candidate, who later played a pivotal role in overturning a $50 million judgment against Massey Energy. The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled that the judge should have recused himself from the case.”

If I were a Massey Energy shareholder, I’d be looking at the company’s shares, which have been nosediving, and I’d be suggesting that Don Blankenship should ship out as soon as possible. The company needs a cultural and ethical makeover.