EPA Takes Action to Protect Scientific Integrity | Hacker News Reader

EPA Takes Action to Protect Scientific Integrity

epa.gov

165 pointssamizdis139 comments

I think the EPA, and most executive agencies should not be allowed to write policy. They should be broken up into an independent advisory group, and an enforcement group which would be part of the FBI. The advisory group would advise congress on environmental concerns, and congress should write laws accordingly, balancing all other concerns. Before you come at me for being for deregulation, I think punishments should be extreme for breaking environmental laws. In my world C-Level/Board members of a company willfully polluting to save money would be executed. I just don't think its ok to have bureaucrats writing detailed policies that have the same power as law.

Agreed. The problem is that many of these decisions are not exclusively "science." They involve policy-making, and agenda-driven organizations are masking their preferred policy choices as "science." Toxic risk assessments are a perfect example. Toxicity assessments are famously arbitrary (e.g., adjusting acceptable dosages by orders of magnitude on the basis of uncertainty when one could argue for any other uncertainty factor).

This.

Not many people are anti-science. It's just when opinion gets passed for science that we should be worried because opinions are instructed by agenda. And if there is a funding motive behind that agenda, well, your gonna have problems with corruption.

I dunno.

From what I've seen, most people are pro-sciencism, not science. Science is difficult and rarely provides easy answers. If it does not affect them, sure---nobody really cares about the big bang, dark matter, etc., and astronomy provides pretty pictures---but if the question interacts with their jobs, cultures, or lifestyles then they are very happy picking the result that agrees with them and ignoring any nuance or counter-evidence.

Would you or the parent have any specific examples? The only thing I can think of is the different values assigned to human life by different agencies.

That's one. And as I mentioned above, the uncertainty factors are pretty wild. Because some individuals within a species may more vulnerable to a toxic than those tested, the standard practice is to move the decimal point for the lowest/no observed effect dosage one place to the left. And when you're using animal studies, it's standard practice to account for inter-species variability by moving the decimal point to the left another digit. If your data was at all suspect, they will apply another uncertainty factor (though usually less than a full order of magnitude). And always, the adjustment is in the direction of being more conservative, notwithstanding the fact that humans are frequently more resilient to toxic exposures than small animals, not less. An order of magnitude is a big deal when dealing with very small exposures. Two orders of magnitude starts to become completely unmoored from reality. How conservative we are in the face of that intra/inter-species uncertainty is couched as "science," but it is TOTALLY a policy call. And it has real world impacts. For large manufacturers, an adjustment factor of half that much frequently means the difference between no pollution controls and tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars in pollution controls. I find that where you land on that uncertainty has nearly perfect correlation with your politics.

There are at least 70 million Americans that are anti-science. How many would be "many"?

Where does this number come from?

I agree with you regarding punishments for polluters (although I do find execution a bit on the harsh edge).

However, your idea of agencies not writing policies... is not gonna last long. Congress is already ineffective and broken and there is not much on the horizon to change the reasons behind its dysfunctionality. There's a sad reason for the steady expansion of executive rights, and as long as this isn't fixed it is foolish IMO to force the executive to rein these in.

Edit: not to mention that, unlike government agencies, Congress is extremely corrupt. What is to prevent polluters from simply buying off Congress?

Edit: not to mention that, unlike government agencies, Congress is extremely corrupt. What is to prevent polluters from simply buying off Congress?

Why would they be any less corrupt? What is the DEA's stance on cannabis again? No person or group is above being paid off, or acting in their own interests over those of the country. Which is why power should be spread out as much as possible, to mitigate the risk.

> Why would they be any less corrupt?

Government agencies have historically proven themselves to be largely immune to the wild flip-flop at the political top. This is the kernel of truth behind the Trumpists' claim of the "deep state" conspiracy.

> What is the DEA's stance on cannabis again?

The same unfounded-in-science crap it was many decades ago, which further proves my point: it is incredibly hard to change the course of a government agency away from its mandate.

It's called the Civil Service system and it was put into place for a reason.

Why can't congress delegate implementation to an agency?

Congress can always override the agency if needed. If you think congress is incapable of oversight then you are just for complete deregulation.

It's much harder to change a law, because there are many more chefs in the kitchen. The president can put pressure on any of the executive agencies to make any policy they want. One person should not have that much power over ~400,000,000 people, even if i agree with that person.

Federal laws should be simple and straight forward enough that most people agree with them. The only way to achieve that is to have some accountability to those people.

Most people cannot agree on even simple and straightforward issues due to any number of reasons ranging from capacity for change, political alignment, or what their favorite news anchor told them to do.

And that seems obvious enough that it really does just sound like you're wanting deregulation.

And if not, then it sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too.

This is not true, most people don't really care. They might have a team they root for, but even those seemingly braindead people that are posting on the internet towing their party line are just looking for a way to fit in. They are all capable of thinking for themselves, and most of them will have a reasonable conversation with you if you run into them in the real world.

Seriously all I am saying is that regulation should be slow to change, and be approved by elected officials. I also think there should be way more congressional districts, and senators. Currently there is way too small of a sample size to be representative of the population. Basically I'm in favor of more democracy not less. Honestly if it wasn't such a waste of time I would be ok with replacing congress with open voting on every issue.

I do agree that it's an interesting thought experiment to consider if federal law were decided entirely by popular voting. I think it would need to be compulsory, however, to ensure enough people voted on niche issues.

I think the inherent complexity of, e.g. environmental regulation is such that it's impossible to write them in a way that is both effective and straightforward enough to be widely understood, much less widely agreed on. Inflexibility also works against effectiveness in cases where the law must adjust rapidly to changing conditions. While the US hasn't implemented it terribly well, I think the executive agency model is potentially a good one.

Quick, without looking it up---or rather, doing the necessary experiments---what is the proper limits for the amount of cadmium in drinking water? :-)

Isn't the proposal that any evidence of the toxicity of cadmium be given to the legislators? Presumably with information about the cost of regulating cadmium in drinking water so that they can weigh the tradeoffs?

> If you think congress is incapable of oversight ...

I think the burden of proof is on you to show why you think congress is capable of oversight.

Selection bias, etc, but when I reflect on this I can think (and quickly find) dozens of instances, large and small, where congress has demonstrated "oversight incompetence".

I disagree. They are for congress writing detailed laws for every environmental issue.

They need to show that congress is capable of that.

It's the difference between the "legacy" government (your traditionally elected public officials), and the "efficiency" government of bureaucracy. The legislature in the US has offloaded the power to make law to a multitude of bureaucratic agencies through the use of administrative law, as distinct from legislative law. Through the acts that establish these agencies, they are granted the power to create and enforce these administrative laws, which often leave the law-breaker with little recourse other than capitulation. The book National Security and Double Government by Michael Glennon is a fantastic resource for those interested in learning more.

The problem is not that bureaucrats are writing these laws (at some level this needs to happen), but the immoral relationship between these agencies and private interests. Everyone knows about the revolving doors between industry and government. This needs to be stopped by congress.

I agree it needs fixing but allegedly it's pretty hard to solve. The ideal regulator knows the industry inside & out. Best place to find these people? From the industry. But the appointment is only a few years long, and these people still need a job after their appointment ends.

That not correct. It is similar to saying that the ideal person to write criminal laws must be a criminal. One possible place to find people with deep knowledge about a particular area is academia, just to give an example.

For some industries, it's not just correct, but very correct :-).

I have a bit of experience in working with a financial industry group that coordinated with regulators in different nations (US, EU, UK, Japan, Brazil, Singapore, etc.) in finalizing the details of rules for a fairly esoteric area of finance. None of this stuff is taught in schools except in the most general/theoretical terms. It's very complex and tough to understand without being well versed in: financial markets, stochastic calculus, derivatives, risk models, monte-carlo simulations, trade execution, inter-institution asset liabilities, etc, etc, etc. It's literally impossible to even know half this stuff the regulations covered exists without having worked in the industry for an extended period of time. Much less understand the implications of rules changes.

From the various calls I sat in on, a few things that became clear to me was that:

1) while industry did have a significant say in how the rules were eventually setup, the overriding goal was a) clarity and b) uniformity across jurisdictions. the exact details were (usually) not quite as important.

2) while regulators (i.e. government) left much of the details to the industry group, they a) set the broad goals and guidelines and b) did sometimes make decisions that nearly everyone on the industry side did not like. But those decisions were always accepted in the end (often with lots of offline complaining) -- industry didn't really have a choice.

3) regulators clearly had authority over industry even though the people there were ex-industry. They knew it and everyone in industry clearly knew it.

Essentially, it was regulators off-loading a bunch of work on industry. If they had to pay for it themselves, it would have cost a silly amount of money to set the rules for an sub-industry 99% of people have never even heard of.

Where corruption comes into play is what those "broad goals and guidelines" are. And that's decided at the legislative level, not at the bureaucratic level. Perhaps things are different for the EPA and manufacturing. I can't say as I don't have any experience interacting with the EPA.

That's just a bunch of nonsense. Every single topic you mention (derivatives, stochastic calculus, risk models, etc.) is well known and studied in universities before it even entered the radar of financial institutions. What universities don't know is the insidious combination of rules they're trying to come up with in industry, because that is the "secret sauce" they want to conceal. This is exactly why regulation needs to be done outside the industry circle that will benefit from it: society needs to have clarity about what kinds of deals Wall Street and other industries are trying to work on. Without this transparency, the work of specialists in Wall Street payroll will always be seen, with reason, as suspicious.

It’s a nice idea but if you have scientists as just advisors, separate from policymaking, the science will simply be muted altogether.

Going further, if enforcement is separate, I predict hearing from the FBI, "we have enough money to catch polluters or murderers, which do you prefer?" My state (Wisconsin) has largely de-funded enforcement of environmental laws, with predictable effect.

>we have enough money to catch polluters or murderers

Mass marginal murderers versus highly concentrated murderers. ;)

>"we have enough money to catch polluters or murderers, which do you prefer?"

If the rest of law enforcement is any indication then this should work out quite well and align the enforcers with what people actually want.

Look at poor city police departments. This is basically what they do. They prioritize the crimes that get their bosses yelled at by the politicians. It certainly isn't great for the officers who have to work in it but it's a great way to ensure resource allocation at least kinda sorta reflects the will of the people.

The FBI and EPA have no shortage of "you spent your resources doing what?" themed missteps. There needs to be some way to get them to do what people actually want them to do.

"...what people actually want them to do."

Which is ... nothing, in regards to regulatory matters, at least. Until it begins to affect them, in which case it becomes a crisis requiring immediate and massive changes, if the people in question have enough political clout.

Didn't we just have a significant amount of protesting against city police departments that would strongly indicate a massive disconnect between policing and the community?

I think that's a far lesser problem than having un-elected individuals making and enforcing the same laws. Congress hasn't just abdicated a power, they've abdicated a responsibility. You're worried about bad lawmakers, but that's a problem orthogonal to the issue and how we ended up with such a structure in the first place.

How can they be making and enforcing laws? Doesn't that violate the separation of powers? Where do they get their authority to enforce laws precisely and by what means?

It’s more obvious with a specific example.

Write a law that makes penalties for speeding without directly defining the speed limit on every road. Then write a law giving the department of motor vehicles the ability to define a different speed limit for each stretch of road.

As such government agencies aren’t actually creating laws, but the laws are written to give their choices legal weight.

Think of it as a separation of powers issue itself.

Assuming agencies only have advisory capabilities and that regulation itself is handled by lawmakers directly. The determination of what is safe or not becomes a matter of who has the best lobbyists; any actual damages will occur years down the line, will be visible only in statistical terms (i.e. a higher rate of leukemia), and will only affect people without significant political power. This is a textbook description of an issue which democratic institutions are spectacularly bad at handling: expert knowledge is required to understand the issue, there is no immediacy, and the consequences are delayed while the costs are up-front. Consider climate change---it will cost a shit-ton of money, cause a crap-load of damage, and yet humanity has collectively done essentially nothing to prevent it in something like 40 years.

Now, it's possible that legislative regulation could work, if the legislators essentially rubber-stamp the advisories from the agency, but still allows political influence in the issues. Consider PVC and cigarettes.

The approach, then, is for the legislature to delegate authority for regulation, within specific parameters, to an executive agency. The agency then sets the regulations, which the legislature can override with exactly the same ease as they would regulate them in the parent's model.

I am unaware of any country that relies on legislative regulation and is regarded in any sense as successful. In fact, political interference in regulations is almost universally regarded as a bad thing.

Anybody have a specific example of regulatory excesses?

[At one point I got trapped in a conversation with a cousin's husband, who had recently gotten fined by OSHA or the state equivalent because he had diesel stored in the correctly color-coded container, but it did not have "diesel" written on it. I thought about mentioning people who didn't know the color codes (Red = gasoline, yellow = diesel, blue = kerosene, and green = oils) or about the color-blind, but I prefer to avoid arguments.]

Yes, but how much pollution to accommodate is a decidedly political question. Science cannot answer how much is too much. If your answer is that no pollution is acceptable, that's not science either (frankly, it's more akin to an ideological position). But presuming you're willing to admit that the benefits of certain activities outweigh their impacts to the environment or human health, particularly when our information is imperfect, then the question becomes how much is too much. And every human has their own utility curve and risk preferences. Science cannot answer those questions. Like the parent, I agree that this is decidedly a question for policy makers (preferably accountable to the electorate) informed by science.

> How can they be making and enforcing laws?

The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Procedure_Act...

Science (besides political science) is not about politics or policy making. Science is about earnestly seeking reliable knowledge. By placing scientists in political roles where they may need to “play the game” to get results, it makes the advice they give less reliable due to compromises or political pressure, and makes people trust science less as a side effect. Not that scientists shouldn’t be in office, just that acting in both roles at once is complicated

"Science" as a pursuit of knowledge is.

Technically, in the US, executive branch agencies do two things: (1) sponsor actual science (either directly by employees, or by grant to third parties), (2) decide on how to apply scientific results.

"The EPA" is more of a body concerned with "What do we do about scientific results?" than "What is scientific truth?"

It often conducts research, usually in areas where private industry has no incentive to do so, but that's not why it exists.

And historically the dichotomy between science and policy has been reflected in the organization: scientists were highly discouraged from advocating policy positions in their research results, and policymakers were highly discouraged from influencing science.

Both norms are rapidly changing.

> Science (besides political science) is not about politics or policy making. Science is about earnestly seeking reliable knowledge.

You are talking about the scientific method.

Science is generally used as a broader term that includes how practice of the scientific method relates to society.

Policies don't have the same power of law, they do however include incentives for compliance.

My cable company doesn't have to go through Congress to pass legislation to have me comply in paying my bill. They can choose to give me late fees and ultimately cut my service, incentivizing me to comply. Does that mean that corporate middle managers, who were not democratically appointed, are regulating my behavior on par with the governing body of the US? This may seem like a dissimilar comparison, but corporate entities establish policies that effect consumer behavior all the time. Most decisions in general aren't made democratically, given the need for specialized knowledge and effective/time-sensitive execution for many decisions. Congress still makes the laws, agencies, and pretty much every private/public organizations, make policy. The assumption Congress would be better because they'd "balance all other concerns" has no bearing on reality.

Policies totally have the same power as law. The DEA & FDA can decide something belongs on a schedule, and then the DEA can arrest you and have you put in prison for possessing something on that schedule.

Congress has been deadlocked for the past two decades, where even the least contentious pieces of legislature can't make it through the senate filibuster.

If your goal is to freeze all environmental law at where it is today, I agree, neutering the EPA is the best way to accomplish that.

If your goal is to have democratic oversight over the EPA, you already have that - by virtue of voting for the executive. You're essentially grousing that the executive has more power than you'd like them to have in a scenario where their main check-and-balance - the legislature - is busy playing golf and arguing over suit colors. Okay, sure, that's definitely an argument you can make, but that's not going to change as long as the legislature remains deadlocked, and unwilling to legislate.

If the legislature wanted to, it could trivially overturn policies, by passing new laws. It doesn't, though. Your democratic oversight is already here - its just that the representatives you voted for disagree with you on whether or not they should do anything.

In a battle between regulatory policy and regulatory law, law will win nine times out of ten. Your lawmakers aren't fighting that battle, though. This is not a problem with your system, this is a problem with your lawmakers. Democracy is giving us exactly what we've asked for.

Delegating a task to congress is how lobbyists ensure that it will not be done. It is a highly effective tactic.

I had this very discussion just a few days ago. Agencies like the EPA cannot satisfy their objectives by advising alone. Administration and case-handling is the bread and butter of executing any strategy, and laws alone won’t cut it.

It is inevitable to have some sort of policy-making involved, even for an agency, because the very strategy they choose to reach a certain goal (set by politicians) or enforce a law (set by politicians) may itself be a choice between political alternatives.

> In my world C-Level/Board members of a company willfully polluting to save money would be executed.

I... what? I’m glad I don’t live in that dystopia.

It shocked me at first too, but on thinking about it the policy a bit more I think it's actually quite reasonable.

Environmental pollution directly results in increased human death (due to cancers/etc), and GP wants the people responsible to be liable for those deaths. Under this scheme, accidental pollution would then be the equivalent of manslaughter, and intentional pollution would be the equivalent of murder. I'm personally not a fan of executing murderers, but many states in the US execute them.

Most of the civilized world has gotten rid of the death penalty, even in murder cases. Even those that still do have capital punishment generally do NOT apply it to manslaughter cases. Your jump from manslaughter to murder is not legally justified, unless the polluter caused environmental damage explicitly for the purpose of killing people, which I'm pretty sure is not what you are describing.

But even setting that aside, we are talking about capital punishment for a crime, the evidence for which is statistical and divorced from the actual crime itself. The managers who make the decision to pollute aren't on the scene leaving their fingerprints. As this is not something for which there is a smoking gun proof of culpability, which makes it ripe for abuse. Do you really think the people who called the shots are going to be the one on the executioner's block, or will it be some mid-level fall guy? And what about manufactured controversy? How difficult would it be to make a spurious connection between some unlikeable business and an environmental disaster, getting a jury to give that business' managers the death penalty? What an upgrade to cancel culture: now you can get your opponents legally murdered.

Finally, the actual suggestion here is that C-level leadership and board members be executed for crimes their company commits. Note this means that someone lower down in the organization could commit a crime which causes the CEO or board members to be executed. So we're talking about killing people who might not even have been involved in the decision at all!

I stand by my prior description of this proposed society as dystopia.

I would agree with you, except for the application of capital punishment. Prison time, absolutely. Hefty fines, absolutely. Lifetime ban from any executive positions, absolutely. Murder? No way.

The challenge being is that Congress doesn’t want to go through all the trouble to do that, and frankly would probably be too slow even if they did.

Say Congress writes a law saying it’s illegal to dump toxic waste in a river. Pretty clear cut, right?

Well, law rolls out, and now you have an enforcement problem with all the edge cases. For instance, what counts as a river? Does the drainage ditch behind the building count? Does the creek? Does it matter if it has water in it right now, or will have water in it later?

Also, what counts as toxic waste? If a substance is poisonous at say 100ppm and considered toxic - what happens if we dilute it so it’s 100ppb. Still toxic waste? What if the background level in the tap water in the area is 100ppb?

Is it dumping if a building containing the waste catches on fire and falls in the river? Does it have the same penalties? What if it was arson?

These edge cases come up during the regular course of enforcing these laws, and at some point someone has to decide what the right thing to do is. Situations can change too - say a dry river wasn’t considered a river - until a massive conglomerate used that ‘loophole’ and started dumping massive amounts of toxic waste into dry river beds, that then flooded and poisoned a bunch of people. Do you want to wait for congress to get it’s act together, or do you want an agency to step in and follow the intent of the law, clarifying the prior ‘dry rivers are not rivers’ stance to ‘a channel that has, or will have, predictable seasonal water flow’?

The rule making process is designed to give visibility, and predictability into this process. It used to be people would just do whatever and never formalize these decisons, or formalize them internally and never publish them so people could challenge them.

3M and DuPont knew 30 years ago about the PFAS-dangers, yet here we are still using it and the "replacement" GenX is not a bit less problematic (try to Google that. Apparently someone doesn't want you to find that...)

A lot longer than 30 years.

I'm reading Exposure by the lawyer who helped blow the case open, Robert Bilott, portrayed in the movie Dark Waters, which I recommend -- the book and movie.

What DuPont knowingly did, sacrificing our health for their profit, would be unbelievable except that it happened.

Over 99 percent of us have these known carcinogens and causers of birth defect in our blood. As they knew, our bodies don't know how to get rid of them nor process them into anything benign.

And that's just one class of known-to-be-dangerous but profitable chemicals they create and dump. If they had to pay the externalities, Teflon would cost . . . well, what price do you put on testicular cancer, or a baby born with half a nose or eyes in the wrong place?

In case you were wondering, the term for “causer of birth defect” is teratogen.

Wait until you hear about pharmaceutical companies.

Teflon? Teflon the polymer isn’t toxic. The monomer is a gas. Teflon is used in medical implants. It’s a massive technological gain, massive positive externalities.

The resulting product is fine, yes (assuming proper filtering at the end to remove contaminants). The nasty things happen along the production process, similar to why an awful lot of the US Superfund sites are in the "Silicon Valley" - the production process leached chemicals in the landscape: https://cleanair.camfil.us/2017/11/21/toxic-danger-silicon-v...

>What DuPont knowingly did, sacrificing our health for their profit, would be unbelievable except that it happened.

Why would that seem unbelievable to you? Aren't there countless examples of corporations harming humanity for profit?

> GenX is not a bit less problematic

Do you mean Generation X, or is this a reference to some chemical?

it's a chemical, but of course every reference is conveniently painted over by this

It's not exactly hard to find by just searching "GenX chemical"

First hit for "teflon alternative genx"

https://www.nrdc.org/experts/anna-reade/epa-finds-replacemen...

Am I the only one who thinks you can't separate science and politics when it comes to deciding policy?

I agree 100% we should not be fudging the science. If the LD50 of a chemical is 10mg, we shouldn't be playing with the number to make it 20mg to say it's safe.

But translating an LD50 of 10mg to government policy is of course fraught with political bias and interference. Scientists might say "that pesticide is toxic we should ban it", but they know one side of the equation. What's the economic impact? What's the impact on jobs? What if there is one industry that has to shutdown if it's banned? What if it's need in the defense industry?

Anyone who says "just follow the science" is inferring that science will give you one answer, and only one answer, and every other answer is undeniably wrong. That's rarely the case. It's usually probabilities, other theories are likely wrong, but maybe not. The world isn't black and white. Even in science.

From what I understand reading through the memorandum, knowing a bit about how these agencies operate, and understanding how policy is made, what you want is what is happening here. Remember hurricane forecasts where Trump or one of his minions literally labeled his own projected path in with a sharpie? That's the nonsense we don't want to see.

The point of the memorandum and actions are that in the previous administration, in order to influence policy, the scientific evidence was ignored, manipulated, cherry picked, etc. to match a policy decision that was already made. This is trying to protect against that sort of action. They were producing false information and labeling it scientific evidence undermining trust in government and federally funded scientific research.

It's one thing to say: here's the evidence, but unfortunately we can't do that for reason X. It's another thing to say: outcome X needs to happen, here's some fringe science that supports us doing X.

Policy will still be made weighing in other factors going forward, it's just nice to know the evidence preceeds the decision and you can hopefully better trust the evidence to know if there are mistakes, it's not likely due to political pressure of say the current POTUS.

You talk about cherry picking or ignoring data. But that happens in science as well. I can remember in graduate school there were two senior researchers with competing scientific theories. They both just made judgement calls about which data could be ignored and which was solid and could be relied upon.

So if we extend this to the EPA, it seems like we might be getting into the realm where scientific integrity means “nobody questions our view of the science”.

You see that trend already “we follow the science”. Well there is not one universal scientific truth all the time. Two people could both “follow the science” and make very different decisions.

Not sure why you are being downvoted. This is a correct stance. It is also important to note that two different branches of science can lead us to opposing outcomes. For instance much of the trash that is harmful and damaging to the environment was developed by material scientist seeking a cheap, human safe, and reliable storage solution for water (water bottles). This took a lot of very smart scientist incredible amounts of time. Of course environmental scientists rue the day these bottles ended up in the ocean. Science doesn’t lead us one place, it leads us all over the place.

Science never tells you "what" to do. But it does tell you what is happening (e.g. Drinking water in area X will reduce your life expectancy by y% or change your odds of cancer Z by v%).

"Politicizing science" happens a lot, is terrible, and is stoppable, and must be a goal. Denying global warming is "politicizing science," saying "vaccines cause autism [when studies show they don't]" is politicizing science. Saying "Covid is no worse than a flu" is politicizing science.

This specific case is about EPA not being able to release numbers for a chemical that is KNOWN to be toxic (and epa is years/decades behind the science already) [1]

Your stance is weirdly reductive/defeatist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid

Comments like yours and its parent get downvoted because "science" has become a religion in the eyes of many, and they find it heretical to question its teaching. As a scientist I find this ironic but also horrifying to see the same behavior that we've seen many centuries ago in other religions now intruding into science.

This is true, but the problem is the government policy may consist of (wrongly, without evidence) saying "no, it isn't poisonous".

The usual question is "what if the industry in question has made campaign or PAC donations? what if it's located in an electorally marginal state?"

Or, these days, "what if the government is dependent for its support on a weird youtube-based cult that thinks that 5G causes viruses?"

I agree with you - the complexity is that the division between 'doing science' and 'making decisions based on science and other factors' isn't necessarily clear. The simplest expression of this is choosing which of (possibly conflicting) papers to listen to. Drug companies have their version of this where they cherry pick clinical trials with results they like.

100% agree, science provides information about causal relationships, that's all. It doesn't make decisions for you, it doesnt reflect the will of people.

The decision making / consensus building should be the job of politicians. Saying science tells us we need to do x is a lazy shortcut.

You are right in your intuition that government and science are not the same thing. Politics deals with power and subjective perception of values. Safety versus liberty is not something you can prove one way or the other, different people have different expectations from society and we try to develop political and leadership systems that account for those preferences.

When you go overboard is using politics to decide on issues other than values. For example, we have widely decided that poisoning people is bad. Some amount of harm is inevitable in the real world, and we have set (purely political) limits on acceptable risk, say, one in a million that you get cancer.

Once that value decision is made, the job of politics stops, 1 in a million cancer risk from Asbestos is the same as 1 in a million from second hand cigarette smoke. It's irrelevant how many people work in the cigarette industry, it's importance to the GPD, how well connected politically are the cigarette manufacturers etc. The risk becomes a pure scientific fact that is not amenable to political negotiations.

> What if there is one industry that has to shutdown if it's banned?

Then the world is improved and we should all feel relieved. Seems pretty straightforward.

Just because someone found a way to profit while damaging society doesn't mean they have some right to keep profiting once society realizes what is going on.

The last four years have been some Twilight Zone-level regressions in the simulation

Glad to see the core maintainers are reviewing pull requests again

Temporarily reviewing until 2024 or 2028.

Trump was historically unusual in this respect. So unless Trump comes back for re-election and wins, I don't think you need to worry.

In what way is Trump unusual? He picked up the torch from Ronald Reagan and Trump currently has many people in both branches of Congress who support him and his ideas.

I think Trump is unusual in that he is genuinely a stupid man who is incredibly easily manipulated - e.g. See Rex Tillerson's comments on it wrt. having to use pretty graphs and no words for the president, and Bob Woodwards calls. Nixon was a tortured soul, but he was no fool.

Beyond that he's not too unique as a president - at least in the abstract: No one else has dared to be so bold in their disregard for the constitution, and yet so inept in executing it.

If you're going to downvote please counterargue. If you can find me some evidence of Donald Trump being a genius then go right ahead...

I'm still not sure if he can read or not.

I'd bet even odds he's dyslexic, that condition is over represented among people in his line of work and would explain a lot of his behaviour.

I'm not sure what skills you consider necessary to win both a contested primary election and a national election, but I'd consider many of them intellectual skills and the competition to be of a high level.

Presumably you've never heard of the Idiot Savant?

Money. Money is what's necessary to win an election in America.

Bloomberg's presidential run would perhaps be a counterexample there.

Money and name recognition. If it wasn't for the TV show 'Apprentice', it is doubtful that people would have known who he was. That show is what established his (completely fabricated) reputation as a successful, skillful businessman, and he was able to ride that wave all the way to the White House.

> That show is what established his (completely fabricated) reputation as a successful, skillful businessman

Uh, no, The Apprentice traded on that reputation, which had already been established decades earlier.

I meant in the public perception. Most people in America didn't know who Trump was before that show aired.

> Most people in America didn't know who Trump was before that show aired.

Maybe most people who were quite young when it aired; Trump was a constant media presence from something like the late 1970s well into the 1990s, and sort of a pop culture touchstone for conspicuous excess as well as having a reputation as a successful NYC developer and prolific womanizer.

Savvy, but not intelligent. His brain is heavily optimized to be skilled at the particular American environment of celebrity worship, mixed with perceived business success. He is able to capitalize right now on that, but I'm not sure there is an adaptive intelligence in there.

I just think some of the concerns about Trump veer towards the aesthetic. Some people react to him like they react to a bad painting. The rest is just rationalization.

For your specific example, polishing graphs and communicating visually sounds totally valid in the context of any other executive.

The point is that he physically cannot read the papers they give him unless they have absolutely enormous middle school graphs

I rather the stupid man who approves a pipeline that keeps jobs and money in this country than the smart guy who kills the jobs, sends the money away for oil that will come over in railcars at higher cost, and no benefit for the environment at all, at least according to the scientists.

People just find these comments lazy and boring. Just like calling Biden senile by the other camp etc.

hundreds of congresspeople and a handful of senators have gleefully supported his attempt at a violent overthrow of the US.

Trump's environmental regulatory bonfire is something Republican presidents have sought to do since Nixon.

Nixon created the EPA.

Which is why I said since Nixon.

Since is usually inclusive of the subject mentioned.

“Since Reagan, the conservative movement saw a resurgence.”

That sentence would make no sense if “since” meant “immediately after”.

since - adv. after some point in the past; at a subsequent time

In that sense if the word, the sentence:

"Trump's environmental regulatory bonfire is something Republican presidents have sought to do since Nixon"

would indicate Republican presidents in the time period subsequent to Nixon. Which I think makes sense, ymmv.

Trump's presidency was a blueprint for the nationalistic authoritarian overthrow of democracy. The only reason it failed is that Trump is an utter fool who surrounded himself with fools. The fascists who run in 2024 will learn from this. They'll have triple-digit IQs and they'll have a much better chance of succeeding.

I agree, and it really shines a light on how vile the Republican calls for "unity" are.

> They'll have triple-digit IQs

Not sure where they would find a Republican politico with this quality in such a short time.

Might be something that happens after a 12 year D presidency if Biden ends up stepping down Jan 21st leaving the presidency to Harris and her running for 2 terms as a minority woman that didn't have to deal with questions of inefficacy from a traditional election cycle.

If Biden steps down on January 21st (why that specific date?), then Harris can only run for one term, since she would be president for more than half of this one.

[Edit: Presuming you meant January 21st of this year. It would still be true if he stepped down next year, though.]

You are correct, that is what I meant.

> So unless Trump comes back for re-election and wins, I don't think you need to worry.

There will always be someone similar to his thinking, but more competent in execution and networking. The world was incredibly lucky that Trump had a short attention span and was pretty much seen as disgusting by most of the political establishment of both parties - they saw him as an useful tool for their own purposes (tax cuts, immigration/environment/anti-LGBT/anti-abortion policy), but didn't let Trump accomplish much else.

To make it worse: the Republican Party is so overrun with rabid Trumpists and so dependent on his voter base (because moderates have fled to the Democrats) that they cannot even sanction someone like MT Greene, who openly spouts QAnon conspiracies. What once began with the Tea Party and had its culmination with the Trump Presidency will not be vanished easily... to gain back the moderate side of voters, the Republicans would have to commit to a cleaning so deep that it may reduce them to opposition for many years - in a time where lots of the population are going to shift left as an after-effect of the coronavirus shocks and the "old" Republican voter class gets demographically eliminated.

They are caught between a rock (demographics) and a hard place (essentially, call them what they are, Nazis and fascists), and are running out of time. It is very well possible that they double down on the right-wing train in 2022 / 2024 for one last shot at success.

by all indications he is going to run again, and after four years of a boring competent government that fails to inspire people to come out and vote like crazy he may very well win. this whole next two years (until 2022 when D's will have a very low chance of retaining the house) might be pretty much a solitary oasis before we dive right back into authoritariansim v2.0.

Does competent to you mean marching the military back into Syria on the first day in office?

I thought that was Trump (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/most-u-s-troops-withdr...)

Another reason you should be using water filters at home.

I took it a step further, I had been using a large (roughly 1L in size) sink-attaching filter (think of a standing filter with its on spigot that attaches to your sink with a bypass/selector knob). $75 on amazon so not bad.

While that was a great improvement over tap I really worried about all the stuff it couldn't get, so I purchased a home distiller. I fill the distiller with filtered water for maintenance reasons (way less effort to clean out of the distiller), and it can make a gallon in about 3 hours. I add 1/4 tea spoon of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) and a pinch of pink salt for minerals to each gallon and shake well. I dump each gallon into a borosilicate glass container w/304 stainless dispenser nozzle in the fridge that holds 3 gallons.

It is by far the best tasting water I have ever had, no bottled water even comes close. You can tweak the baking soda and added salt to your personal taste, total cost around $350

I wonder if we'll see a comeback of the EPA. In the last few years it was a mockery of the name, doing exactly the opposite.

Didn’t the EPA burst open an old gold mine and poison a huge swath of a Colorado River tributary? Not sure they need help in making a mockery of their name.

Refurb is referring to the EPA personnel created disaster near Durango Colorado of the Animas River. I suspect this is wrong think so he's being greytexted. There are plugins that remove censoring from HN for those that gas.

edit: link for the censors. please read the first sentence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Gold_King_Mine_waste_wate...

"The 2015 Gold King Mine waste water spill was an environmental disaster that began at the Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado,[2] when Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) personnel, along with workers for Environmental Restoration LLC (a Missouri company under EPA contract to mitigate pollutants from the closed mine), caused the release of toxic waste water into the Animas River watershed."

It sounds like mining companies created a disaster aided by shoddy work from the state of Colorado who then asked the EPA to bail them out.

Mining companies from the 1840's or maybe the rich white folk who moved to the area much much later should have researched before sticking holes in the ground.

Reading further than the first few sentances, it looks like it was already an environmental disaster and a ticking time bomb for getting worse, and the EPA was attempting to resolve the issue (under significant constraints due to local politics). This seems a bit akin to blaming the bomb squad for an explosion.

Having worked as a consultant in the area in the past, there is much more to the story. I'll summarize for you. It was fine until they started to muck around.

> Prior to the spill, the Upper Animas water basin had already become devoid of fish, because of the adverse environmental impacts of regional mines such as Gold King, when contaminants entered the water system. Other plant and animal species were also adversely affected in the watershed before the Gold King Mine breach.

This doesn't sound "fine" to me. They mucked about because the muck had already devastated the area.

They turned a 2/10 problem into a 9/10 problem.

The perception of a problem is inversely related to the amount of income one gets from ignoring the problem.

> There are plugins that remove censoring from HN for those that gas.

You could also set 'showdead' in your hn profile to yes, and not need the third party software.

I'll give that a shot. Thanks you for the tip.

And the second paragraph:

"Contractors accidentally destroyed the plug holding water trapped inside the mine, which caused an overflow of the pond, spilling three million US gallons (eleven thousand cubic metres) of mine waste water and tailings, including heavy metals such as cadmium and lead, and other toxic elements, such as arsenic,[5] beryllium,[5] zinc,[5] iron[5] and copper[5] into Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animas River and part of the San Juan River and Colorado River watershed."

Note the words "contractors" and "accidentally". Also note that the EPA has taken responsibility for the accident.[1] If you think this reflects poorly on the EPA, you may wish to have a word with the United States oil, gas, and chemical industries.

[1] Yes, and refused to pay "on grounds of sovereign immunity, pending special authorization from Congress or re-filing of lawsuits in federal court."

It is a government agency, full of politicos at the top.

If you think a presidency has an effect on the agency, then please look at the dam burst and the ridiculous Detroit water issue.

The context to this is the EPA's toxicity assessment on PFAS chemicals ("forever chemicals"), which are a family of chemicals shown to stay in the environment and human body for extremely long periods of time. Under the Trump administration, the EPA's toxicity assessment on PFAS essentially provided polluters leniency on how much they could release.

Consequently, these chemicals are showing up in significant numbers in drinking water & food. Since they are proven to have damaging effects on human health, this assessment is now being reevaluated. The lesson from all this is that depending on where you are and how you use tap water, the regulations might not line up with what's good for you. Use a water filter.

For some context, see EPA alleges Trump officials interfered in toxic chemical assessment (Axios, Feb 9):

https://www.axios.com/epa-trump-political-intereference-toxi...

That doesn't clarify or add anything else, it just rewords the PR. What, exactly, was wrong? Who interfered? What does the science say?

the definition of science has gotten pretty shady over the last decade. just sayin.

Only if you listen to Fox news types who believe or want you to believe there is any real debate over climate change.

I think that OP is saying that science has become exceedingly politicized over the last decade. In which case they're right. Politically tainted science has emerged from the entire political spectrum, and it's enough to make you not want to trust what anyone claims to be science.

That's the thing... science is a method. If you have actual evidence, and reproducible results, then they speak for themselves. The problem is the wholesale, willful ignorance of this method.

> That's the thing... science is a method.

Exactly. Politicians and media outlets want us to believe science is just the opinions of people with credentials, regardless of evidence or consensus from others with similar credentials.

Once those opinions are shared by enough political supporters, those same politicians and media outlets will do everything they can to amass evidence which supports them. It often comes in the form of quasi-scientific studies with unmentioned flaws and limitations. If you're lucky, the studies will even be peer reviewed; but once the opinions which the study seeks to verified have been so heavily politicized, it's much harder to trust the effectiveness of peer reviews.

Like what? Climate change for example has been independently confirmed so many times now - where is a list of papers that you are sure have been manipulated to suit political aims

No. One particular flavor of politician wants you to believe science is just "opinions". You're simply highlighting that those people are liars. That has nothing to do with the scientific method.

> No. One particular flavor of politician wants you to believe science is just "opinions".

I'm not sure exactly which "flavor" you're referring to, but if I'd have to guess I'd say its the political party which aligns least with your own opinions.

> You're simply highlighting that those people are liars. That has nothing to do with the scientific method.

Yeah, that's what I said. Science is a method used to establish evidence for patterns and relationships. The opinions of individuals are not necessarily couched in science, regardless of their credentials.

Weird... their name is EPA not SPA

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