Know-Nothing Administration: don’t bother me with facts

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Trump has told all agencies to cut at least a third of their advisory committees by September in order to weaken the science-based regulations process and remove scientific oversight.  462 committees are potentially involved, even without the agencies mandated by law.  At EPA and Interior, advisory committees provide scientific and technical expertise from people who are considered to be at the top of their field, and are a way to include local voices, as well as industry leaders, to discuss how best to manage public lands and property.  The agencies benefit hugely from outside expertise. 

”This unprecedented attack on science-based regulations designed to protect the environment and public health represents the gravest threat to the effectiveness of the EPA — and to the federal government’s overall ability to do the same — in the nation’s history,” said Christine Todd Whitman, who was EPA chief under President George W. Bush.

She said the committees ensure the department is “not just asking its most favorite stakeholders what they should do.” The whole point of having committees, she added is to create “a transparent way to get this kind of input.”  The. administration that says it wants to put decision making back into local hands, away from Washington. But advisory committees that are made up of just those local people.  The policy is contradictory and totally unnecessary.

“It’s interesting that this order comes now, after the administration spent two years undercutting and neglecting the advisory network that it’s had at its disposal,” said Genna Reed, lead science and policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “And now they are trying to use that neglect as a justification for removing these advisory boards for not being useful.”  

The Trump administration in recent years has shuffled career scientists out of their positions, put limits on which science experts are qualified to sit on advisory boards and created a special White House panel that’s designed in part to counter the science linking climate change to national security threats. (An amalgam, or precis, of journalistic comment from a variety of sources)

Trump knows no science, disrespects it, and sees no need to consider expert opinions on any issue critical to the American public.  Expert opinion makes him feel uncomfortable because he sincerely believes he is a genius and knows everything that’s worth knowing.  There is no point in reading expert briefs because he knows it all already, or in any case knows better.  The only advice he will listen to concerns the feelings of his base at any given moment, and what will get him a second term.

We are going through another self-induced, self-immolating spasm similar to that of the 1930s. This time we are lead by undisciplined donkeys, more interested in power than in the future of the young and of the planet.  I don’t agree with Epicurus about ignoring politics.  Ignoring the clowns and not bothering to vote, have brought us to this dangerous point, and it is going to be proved a huge disaster.   You cannot be an Epicurean, or even a human being blessed with common sense, and not be alarmed.

Epicureans believe in science and the thorough, methodical scientific method. Cling to it!

 

 

 

An unexpected encounter

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I don’t want to bore non-Brits with too many comments on Brexit, existential though it is.  But I would like to tell a short story.

My wife and I were recently walking round an ancient Greek temple in Sicily when a man, who I had never seen before in my life,  approached me, and, with his face six inches from mine, told me he was French and from Paris.  He said to me, quite fiercely:

“I hope you did not vote for Brexit!

To which I replied, “Do you think I look like the sort of person who would vote for Brexit?”. He looked a bit disconcerted.  I continued without a pause for thought:

”Brexit, Monsieur, is the worst disaster to have occurred to Britain since 1066, when  you guys sent over the Normans to conquer us,  introducing your feudal system into the British Isles, by the way”.

What could he reply?

Britain’s most unpopular generation

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Britain’s youngest adults have suffered a slump in their discretionary spending power, while people aged 65 and over have enjoyed a sharp 37% rise. The findings shatter the myth of millennials wasting their disposable income on fripperies.

In its first ever national audit on the subject, the Resolution Foundation’s new Intergenerational Centre concludes that compared with people the same age at the turn of the millennium, today’s 18- to 29-year-olds are 7% poorer in real terms after paying rent, or if they can afford them , mortgages.  Much of their spare cash goes on groceries, utilities and education – while baby boomers splash out more as a proportion on recreation, restaurants, hotels and culture. “The clear picture in terms of day-to-day living standards as measured through household consumption is of generational progress for the older generation and generational decline for the younger ones,” the report says.

A spokesman for Generation Rent said “resentment is growing” and the co-founder of the Intergenerational Foundation accused older people of “breaking the social contract”. Angus Hanton said older voters allowed policies that have financially hobbled the young: “When asked to ease the pressure on the intergenerational contract by contributing a little more if they have it, older generations have demanded universal benefits for their generation, but not for others.”

The writer is not a boomer, having been born before the Second World War, but recognises the  irritating collective sense of entitlement displayed by the boomers.  They have brought us successive right-wing governments, short-termism, unattractive greed and a seeming indifference to the poor and the less educated, not to mention shipping jobs to Asia, introducing student loans, bidding up the cost of housing, and introducing the dire and disgraceful gig economy.

All this is a generalisation.  The boomers are not a monolithic group.  It could be argued that the above cruel and uncaring measures were  brought on only by a small proportion of boomers who had (have?)political and financial power, not by the majority.  They are observations to be used with caution.

But, excuse the truisms,  but if you vote for it you part-own it.   And you can’t take it with you.  Young people need stable jobs and houses of their own.-  now.  Wise Epicureans, within  the tax rules, should pass over cash to them while they are alive – they need it now, not, given the success of medicine at keeping us all alive, when they are dead.  However, if you don’t vote you will be left out, and the boomers tend to vote. The results have not been very encouraging.

Labour exploitation

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“Great abundance is heaped up as a result of brutalizing labour, but a miserable life is the result”. 

(p.100, “The Essential Epicurus”, translated by Eugene O’Connor, Great Books in Philosophy series)

The employment practices of Big Business, the outsourcing and the indifference of politicians have led the the highest suicide rate per thousand in the world.  I refer to the United States .  One can buy, say, a book from Amazon and it arrives within twenty-four hours, facilitated by people who barely earn a living wage.

I once worked for a US company that paid a pittance, had you standing in a hot room for nine hours a day (no chairs allowed) gave you ten minutes for lunch, and you had to ask permission to from the supervisor to go to the men’s room or visit the water fountain.  When eventually  I ran my own business I was glad of this Mr. Gradgrind experience – it taught me forcibly what not to do.

The company in Chicago referred to above?  I lasted three weeks, refusing to be treated like a disposable machine.

 

Talking to skeptics about rising seas

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From Scott McNeil, Banstead, Surrey, UK

In your article about the Greenland ice sheet melting, you mention how “bad news begins to wash over you” . I spend time in parts of the US that have a lot of climate change sceptics. Discussing evidence and reasoning is often met with suspicion, or even outright derision, but I have found one thing that consistently gives them pause for thought: visualisations of the forecast sea level rise over the next 100 years.

Those that show the rise that is “locked in” due to current temperature rises and which focus on low-lying areas in Florida, Louisiana and Texas are particularly effective. I would encourage others who have similar “discussions” to use them as a tool to help.

My comment: In the part of the Florida Keys I know quite well, the sea level at high tide is a mere twelve inches  below the land level, and, over the period of years we have been visiting, it  has visually risen.  The Keys are basically a sand/ coral bar and are possibly the most vulnerable place in the US for a climate catastrophe.  The cottage where we stay was demolished by the recent hurricane.   Indeed the house market is lively and people still want to live there.  I would give the Keys about 30 years and it will be under water. But talk to locals and they are in total denial.  As go the Keys so goes Miami, which is on life support, but no one living there seems to know it.  To rescue it will be horrendously expensive, if it is possible at all.  The delusions of mankind!