Point Source ... Science and Politics — Will We Ever Learn?
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You’d think we would have learned by now — but no. Never has science seemed more politicized on the environmental beat than it seems today.
Journalists, politicians, policy-makers, and public — almost none of whom are scientists — have been left debating the scientific basis of important environmental policy decisions. Often this debate obscures basic policy choices that a lay person with a high school education could understand clearly.
Example #1: The Bush-Whitman EPA decided in March 2001 to withdraw a tightened standard for arsenic in drinking water set by the Clinton-Browner EPA in January. One of the main reasons given for doing this was so the new administration could get a review of the science on which the old administration’s decision was based — with the pointed implication that it was fuzzy. It took Peter Waldman’s April 19, 2001, Wall Street Journal story to point out that Bush was calling for a new National Academy of Sciences study on top of six earlier NAS studies. We could not find any other news story during the month following EPA’s announcement that had included this fact.
Example #2: Opponents of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository raise endless doubts about the safety of the site — and about the scientific studies which are supposed to determine its safety. The studies may or may not be valid — but they are largely irrelevant to a decision which has always been at its core political. Congress ensured they would be irrelevant by dictating the outcome back in 1987. Instead of studying three or more sites to see which was safest, it allowed study of only one site.
Both industry and environmentalists abuse science to support positions that are based mainly on values, ideology, or self-interest. Are dioxins dangerous to human health at typical exposure levels? EPA and others have been wringing their hands over this question for most of two decades without coming to a clear conclusion. Almost every time EPA scientists have come up with a conclusion industry does not like, industry has denounced the quality of the science and demanded a re-study.
People want certainty from science — something science rarely provides. Not just certainty — but the kind of certainty that unequivocally justifies certain actions. The notion of “scientific certainty” is based on misunderstanding of the scientific method as it usually operates in daily reality. Doubt is a key value in the science culture — the kind of deeply skeptical doubt that journalists are supposed to practice more often than they do.
So if the health effects of dioxins are inadequately understood, what do we (or EPA, or Congress) do? That is not a question of science, but a question of values (which make journalists even more uncomfortable than science does). If human health is the nation’s greatest value, we might choose to play it safe and reduce human exposure to dioxins. If the economic well-being of corporations is our greatest value, we would declare dioxins innocent until proven guilty and let companies keep producing without restriction.
So much depends on which side has the burden of proof — or succeeds in shifting it to the other side. Are chemicals guilty until proven innocent, or innocent until proven guilty? The premise that it is one or the other is buried in so many of the statements that journalists quote. All too often, journalists simply repeat the buried premise rather than illuminating it or examining it critically.
We live with uncertainty and risk every day — not just mothers worrying about what’s in the baby food, but hard-boiled business-people. Can meteorologists and agronomists scientifically and accurately predict this year’s wheat harvest? No — that is why we have futures trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Even Enron, one of the Bush administration’s key advisers, sells “weather derivatives” — a sort of insurance to help companies hedge against financial loss from bad weather. Any relevance to global warming?
Comes now a new administration claiming that various decisions of the previous administration are based on “bad science.” The media dutifully write this down and publish it. End of story?
The current “sound science” campaign smacks of Steven Milloy’s pseudo-journalistic “Junk Science” page — which is as ideology-driven as a Cato Institute “adjunct scholar” can make it. (Hint: he defends tobacco and his doctorate is in law, not science.) Which in turn only recalls EPA Deputy Administrator John Hernandez’ crusade in 1981-83 to bring “sound science” to EPA. (Hint: he resigned during Congressional investigations into charges that he had fiddled with science reports to accommodate industry.)
Environmentalists sin and spin in the opposite way. They will emphasize a single study suggesting hazards from, say, low-frequency electromagnetic fields, while ignoring dozens that fail to find health hazards. In the late 1980s (when scientists knew considerably less about climate), Sen. Tim Wirth (an apostle of global warming) was busy declaring scientific certainty and consensus on global warming — before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change even existed.
Skepticism is a great thing. This year the Bush administration, convinced that concerns over global warming were not based on good science, commissioned a panel from the National Academy of Sciences to review more than a decade of work by the IPCC. The NAS panel concluded that the IPCC was mostly on target. The administration’s policy (which had been formed before it reviewed the science) did not change. Should the media continue to simply quote the administation’s assertions that the science behind climate change predictions is shaky?
Before mindlessly parroting mantras about “bad science,” journalists might consider whether industry itself doesn’t have a “bad science” problem. A July 12 General Accounting Office report (GAO-01-536) found that EPA did not check well enough for conflicts of interest on members of its science advisory panels — and that some of the members had questionable financial ties to affected industries. Last year’s convictions of Intertek lab managers for faking test results for tens of thousands of clients should remind us that industry’s professed concerns with intellectual purity should not always be taken at face value.
Joseph A. Davis
On Septic Tanks and Global Warming
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Next time you contemplate the pros and cons of acting on the potential risks posed by climate change ...
Step back. And think a moment of the relative pros and cons of acting, or not acting, on having your septic system pumped-out.
That was among countless tips provided reporters attending the Great Lakes Environmental Journalism Training Institute at Michigan State University this past June. The roughly two-dozen attending reporters and editors, many of them Canadian reporters and freelancers, heard Kansas City Star environmental reporter Mike Mansur, for instance, remind them to become determined students of their home towns and areas and to “learn to see” things happening all around them that those less observant might miss.
“Ask dumb questions,” Mansur beseeched. “Act as dumb as your grandparents” all the better to elicit information and insights. As for overcoming writer’s block? “Know that everyone can’t write,” urged Mansur, a former president of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), a conference supporter. Those prolific and nimble writers of flowing environmental prose “are not better writers, they just work harder,” Mansur insisted.
The “think of septic tanks” counsel came in a June 5 opening keynote talk by New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin, whose piece on a breaking National Academy of Sciences global warming report led his newspaper the next day.
Relaying the maintenance challenges posed by his 70-year-old farmhouse 50 miles up the Hudson Valley from New York City, Revkin told the reporters “the thing nagging at me the last couple of years was the septic tank.
“You know you’ve got to get it pumped, but you want to stretch out those pumpings as far as you can to save money. But you don’t want to wait too long or the septic field becomes a swamp.”
He said he and his family in the end “lucked out. Finally got it pumped last month, and it was more than ready. And there were some tree roots growing into it and…Enough detail, you get the idea. I took a calculated risk.”
To Revkin, “climate change is a little like septic maintenance. You try to get information on the risk, the rate, the costs of waiting years versus the cost of acting.”
Emphasizing the long lead times in showing the effects of climate change, Revkin told the reporters, “You’re never going to wake up some morning, pick up the paper and read, ‘The average temperature of the planet jumped five degrees yesterday…Sea levels rose sharply….The most heavily populated sections of Bangladesh were also inundated, creating millions of refugees. Crops withered in the tropics. Fires scorched the west.”
“Even though all of these things are possible consequences of the phenomenon,” Revkin continued, “if they occur, it’ll be scattered over decades. A thousand little cuts.”
Revkin related a Times colleague’s mishandling of a story on open water at the North Pole (“Better yet, they had pictures!!!!!,” he exclaimed in capturing the juice behind the story, which occurred while he was away on vacation.)
Notwithstanding the “compelling” nature of that story, which was written late on a Friday on deadline, “it almost immediately became clear that the heart of the story was wrong,” Revkin said. “There’s often open water at the Pole in summer because that eggshell cap of ice up there is a milling, churning jumble of pieces. Other things are happening to the Arctic, as I recently wrote, but this was not one of them.”
“OUCH,” Revkin said in illustrating the pain in the Times newsroom over that mishandling of a would-be major story. He said such incidents in the newsroom can lead to a form of self-censorship which on its own can be a concern.
“The story has haunted me and the Times ever since,” Revkin told the group. “Our editors became gun-shy about subsequent, more legitimate, climate reports. I rarely got climate news on the front page, even when it deserved to be there.”
While environmental reporters at many newspapers may yearn for the kind of play Revkin gets with the Times, he has a somewhat different take: “The paper treats astrophysics better than it treats environment,” he told the Great Lakes meeting, although he expressed confidence that Editor Howell Raines’ affections for fishing and the outdoors could open some new column inches for issues ranging from wetlands to oceans.
Discussing his own experiences in covering global warming in particular (Revkin noted that until the National Academy of Sciences’ June 6 report to the President, the Bush White House had steadfastly refused to use the term “global warming,” instead preferring “climate change”), Revkin suggested that reporters “don’t trust anybody until you find somebody you can trust.” He said he finds it useful in his reporting to have some sources whom he likely would never quote or name, but rather use instead for fact-checking.
“There are people who make their living just being the solar variability curmudgeon,” Revkin joked, urging the reporters to “quote invisible people” whose expertise and independence they have come to respect.
“I’m not just a science reporter,” Revkin told the group. “I’m always first just a reporter as far as I know.”
Medium Rare
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Behind Closed Doors: Donors Making Energy Policy?
In late July Vice President Dick Cheney’s office was still refusing to disclose to Congressional investigators a list of individuals who had met with the Cheney-led panel forming the Bush administration’s energy policy. The dispute was reported by Joseph Kahn in the June 26, 2001, New York Times. At the request of top House Commerce Committee Democrats, John D. Dingell (MI) and Henry A. Waxman (CA), the nonpartisan General Accounting Office had asked Cheney’s office for the list. Dems and enviros have charged that the secret meetings gave top Bush campaign contributors in the coal, oil, nuclear, and utility industries a chance to write the administration’s energy policy. Such meetings are a way around the requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act that rulemaking input from interested parties be on the record and in the open.
Sincerity Check: “If We Tell You, The Terrorists Will Have to Shoot You”
When the Clinton EPA and Justice Department, at chemical industry and Congressional urging, suppressed any coherent national overview of the risks to people from chemical plant explosions, fires, and leaks a year ago (EW, Sept. 2000), they justified it with the threat of terrorism. The chemical plants in U.S. communities, they argued, were actually weapons of mass destruction — and if terrorists knew which ones were the most dangerous, they would target those. The media acquiesced. The GOP-led Congress that imposed the data blackout in 1999 legislation, also ordered the Justice Department to complete by August 2000 a report on how to protect chemical plants from terrorists and make them inherently less dangerous. A year after that deadline, Justice shows no signs of producing such a report. Dozens of people have died in those two years from chemical plant “accidents,” but there have been no terrorist incidents. Current law makes it illegal for EPA to tell reporters the ten most dangerous plants in the United States, but does not require those plants to screen employees for terrorist background or even to lock their gates at night.
Stossel Watch: Out of the Mouths of Babes
John Stossel knows that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Advance criticism of his methods in producing “Tampering With Nature,” which aired on ABC June 29, seemed certain to bring higher ratings — if not corrections. Stossel’s methods took a hit in the June 26, 2001, column of Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz. After Stossel interviewed schoolkids for the show, some parents complained his questions were “misleading to evoke the responses he wanted,” and withdrew permissions for airing the interviews. Kurtz’ story appeared the day after the controversy splashed on the Web site of the Environmental Working Group (http://www.ewg.org), who had originally fielded the parents’ complaints.
Toy Manufacturers Say No to Chemical Disclosure
Chatty Cathy® aside, the toy industry isn’t talking. Fred Krupp, director of Environmental Defense, wrote CEOs of about 100 toy companies in October 2000 asking them to disclose the chemicals that are in the toys they sell. They refused. Their trade group, the Toy Industry Association (formerly the Toy Manufacturers of America) opposed disclosure.
“Accordingly, we do not believe that providing the consumer with knowledge of the chemical ingredients of toys will in any material sense advance the safety of toy products or the protection of consumers,” TIA president David A. Miller wrote Krupp. “In fact, it might mislead them.” ED published the April 3 letter in a June 11 ad in USA Today.
Krupp and ED assert that “Both the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Com-mission (CPSC) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have officially confirmed to us that they do not have systematic information on what chemicals are present in children’s pro-ducts.” TIA’s Miller, however, says “both the EPA and the CSPC know precisely what the consumer is getting.”
Former ‘Timesman’ Keith Schneider ... You’ve Come A LONG Way ...
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One-time New York Times environmental reporter Keith Schneider, whose reporting in the early to mid-90s earned him the praise of industry officials and the scorn of environmental activists and some reporters, is singing a new tune nowadays.
Schneider, now Program Director at the nonprofit Michigan Land Use Institute, in Benzonia, Michigan, in a recent piece for an upstate Michigan weekly newspaper, celebrates what he calls “an extraordinary period for environmental writers” in the midst of Bush Administration environmental policy controversies.
Once known for his Times reporting perceived as pooh-poohing environmental risks and concerns, Schneider wrote in the weekly Northern Express in May, “My perspective has changed a bit. As a newspaper reporter I dispassionately reported the facts without fear or favor. The goal was solely to inform. Now, as an environmental writer and advocate, I deploy the same tools of investigative journalism not just to inform, but to go one important step further: to mobilize public support for useful social policy goals.”
For the new Keith Schneider, “I find hardly anything more compelling than watching a mother of three swallow hard, leave her secure life, and become a heroine by successfully taking the despoilers on.”
Schneider, who still describes his nonprofit organization staff colleagues and himself as “journalists,” says in the article that his current advocacy writing shares much in common with conventional “straight” news reporting: “Sound reporting. Solid fact gathering. Fairness and accuracy.”
“Few areas of journalism exert more profound influence on public opinion and government decisions than the work of environmental writers,” Schneider wrote in his Northern Express bylined piece. “Why? Because the free market — for all the good that it does to produce wealth that improves the standard of living — is lousy at managing its excesses, especially its wastes. Two great disciplines of environmental journalism evolved to report on the consequences of capitalism to man and nature, weigh the competing interests, and explain to citizens and policy makers how to reduce them.”
Among daily environmental journalists’ most important job, Schneider writes, is collecting and interpreting facts on how the market system “distorts the natural world and often endangers public health.” Those reporters also show how profit-making is compatible with protecting the environment and public health, he writes, but they refrain “from advancing a point of view.”
Briefly recapping the history of environmental advocacy writers, Schneider points to his own organization’s “activist newsroom” as an example of Michigan environmental reporting done right.
“Those of us who report the news and work in the trenches know how hard it is to sift through all the competing interests in our dynamic northwest Michigan economy, and still defend the singular environmental assets that make this such a choice place to live.”
Whether its journalism or, more likely, “advocacy journalism,” Schneider makes clear in the piece that the brand of writing he now practices in upper Michigan is a far cry from what he was doing while reporting for the Times from its Washington, D.C., bureau in the early- and mid-1990s.
Backgrounder: Ultraviolet Radiation and Sun Protection
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Why cover UV Radiation?
As vacation-goers head for the beaches and mountains, they may need to be reminded that the sun can sneak up on them. Over-exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays can cause more than a nasty sunburn — it can cause skin cancer.
Weather forecasters may routinely mention the “UV Index” along with other weather conditions, but they rarely pause to explain exactly what it means or what to do about it.
A significant portion of the roughly one million cases of skin cancer diagnosed in the United States are caused by overexposure to damaging UV radiation. This kind of “environmental cancer” is more common and better established scientifically than many of the cancer risks from toxic chemicals which get more media attention. Sunlight is one cancer-causing agent to which people can easily limit their exposure. If they are properly informed.
Story Ideas
- Explain to your readers some of the local conditions which affect their exposure to ultraviolet radiation. How far is your town or county above sea level? What’s its latitude? What are prevailing cloud conditions? How much more UV might people get at the beach?
- Explain to your readers what the UV Index means and how it is calculated. Why does it change from day to day?
- Explain the key precautions people can take to limit their exposure to UV radiation.
- Can anyone quantify the effect of the thinning stratospheric ozone layer on the amount of UV radiation reaching your locality?
- What do SPF ratings on sunscreen products mean? How much is enough? How should sunscreen be worn?
Background
The sun which makes life possible on Earth can also be lethal. Visible sunlight is only a fraction of the huge amount of energy given off by this continuous thermonuclear reaction. Some is in the form of ultraviolet radiation.
Some kinds of ultraviolet can be very harmful to living things, because they directly damage cells and DNA, which carries genetic information. Fortunately, Earth’s atmosphere normally protects living things from most incoming UV.
Oxygen as it normally exists in the atmosphere comes in molecules consisting of two oxygen atoms attached chemically. A small fraction is in molecules containing three oxygen atoms — called ozone. Both oxygen and ozone are virtually transparent to visible light. They block ultraviolet not by shading or reflecting but by taking up its energy in various chemical reactions. Key among those reactions are the transformation of two-atom oxygen into three-atom ozone and the transformation of ozone back to oxygen.
Ozone is particularly abundant in a certain layer of the lower-mid stratosphere, at an altitude of about 19 miles. The largest part of incoming UV radiation is absorbed by this so-called “ozone layer.”
The ozone layer has been eroded by the large-scale release of certain man-made chemicals into the atmosphere. The most common ozone-destroying chemicals are the chlorofluorocarbons — or CFCs. In the Montreal Protocol of 1987, the nations of the world agreed to phase out and eventually ban such chemicals.
The ABC’s of UV
The wavelengths of ultraviolet radiation (220-400 nanometers) are shorter than the wavelengths of visible light (400-790 nm). A nanometer (nm) is one-billionth of a meter. Ultraviolet radiation is not all the same. The shorter the wavelength, the more energy it contains, and the more damage it can do to living things. The oxygen, ozone, and other gases in the atmosphere do not block all wavelengths equally. Scientists find it convenient to break the UV portion of the spectrum down into three smaller bands — or “types” of UV radiation.
UV-A. The wavelengths of UV-A radiation range between 320 and 400 nm — the closest to visible light. These longer-wavelength UV rays carry less energy than other kinds of UV. UV-A rays are often considered less damaging to human skin, because they do not cause appreciable sunburn. But UV-A penetrates to the lower layers of skin, and can damage its supportive elastic tissues (collagen). Years of UV-A exposure tend to cause skin to wrinkle and sag. Scientists also believe UV-A is a contributing cause of skin cancer. UV-A rays are generally not absorbed by the ozone layer.
UV-B. UV-B ranges in wavelengths between 280-290 and 315-320 nm. These more energetic rays are the ones that cause sunburn, or erythema. They also damage the skin’s immune response and promote formation of cataracts in unprotected eyes. Small doses of UV-B can benefit people by promoting the body’s production of vitamin D, but larger doses raise the risk of skin cancer. Most, but not all, UV-B is absorbed by the ozone in the atmosphere.
UV-C. This most energetic — and dangerous — band of ultraviolet is generally considered to include waves shorter than 290 or 280 nm and range to as short as 220-150 nm. UV-C is the most damaging to humans, plants, and animals. Fortunately, nearly all of the UV-C coming from the sun is absorbed by ozone and other gases.
For many years, sunscreens were only designed to block UV-B rays, since they were the ones causing sunburn. The SPF rating of sunscreens only measures their ability to block UV-B. Dermatologists today recommend use of “broad spectrum” sunscreens, which also protect against UV-A. Sunscreen products containing zinc oxide (Z-cote) or avobensome (Parsol 1789®) will also protect against UV-A.
Sources
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
National Safety Council/Environmental Health Center
SPF — Sun Protection Factor
SPF ratings are a standard measure of how well a suntan lotion protects a person against UV radiation. The rating is a number that typically ranges from as low as 2 to as high as 60. The number is a multiplier — representing how much longer a person using the lotion could stay in the sun without burning.
For example, a person wearing SPF 4 lotion could stay in the sun four times longer without burning than could a person wearing no lotion at all. If a lotionless person would take 30 minutes to start burning, a person wearing SPF 4 lotion would take 120 minutes.
That’s the theory, anyway. The sensitivity of people’s skin to solar UV also varies widely according to how darkly pigmented it is and other factors.
SPF ratings only apply to UV-B radiation, the shorter wavelengths that cause sunburn. Longer UV-A rays can also harm skin.
The UV Index
| Index Number | Exposure Level |
| 0 to 2 | Minimal |
| 3 to 4 | Low |
| 5 to 6 | Moderate |
| 7 to 9 | High |
| 10+ | Very High |
Calculation of the daily UV index is complex — but some understanding of how it is done may help your audience understand what it means.
The UV Index is not calculated for everywhere in the U.S. Currently it is calculated for 58 U.S. cities. The index is not a measurement of actual conditions, but a prediction of what conditions will be in that locality over the next 24 hours. It is pegged to predicted UV at noon (the peak time for UV) the following day. It is based on the following variables:
- Elevation/Altitude. A mile-high city like Denver has a mile less atmosphere to protect it than a sea-level city like Washington, DC. UV exposure increases by about 6 percent for every kilometer of altitude.
- Angle of Sun. The lower the angle of the sun in the sky, the more protective atmosphere its rays pass through before they reach us. Even at noon, the sun is often not directly overhead. The angle of the noonday sun in the sky varies according to time of year and latitude of the location in question.
- Amount of stratospheric ozone. Satellites measure global atmospheric ozone daily, and this data is fed into computer models to produce a prediction of total ozone for the next day.
- Cloudiness. Based on conventional weather forecasts. More clouds filter out more UV. A clear sky transmits 100% of UV to the surface, while an overcast sky transmits as little as 32%.
- UV Wavelength. Shorter wavelengths in the UV portion of the spectrum (290 to 400 nm) do more harm to human skin than longer ones. But the atmosphere blocks different amounts of the different wavelengths. UV Index calculations estimate the amount of the different wavelengths reaching the surface and then weight them according to how much they harm human skin.
There are important variables which the UV Index does not consider. One is the reflectivity (albedo) of the surface. Sea and sand reflect more UV onto people than a green lawn. Another is pollution. Smog, haze, soot, and other particulates can reduce the amount of UV reaching the surface.
FOIA Requests: EPA Tells All (Well, Almost)
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Only a journalist could get excited about EPA’s latest annual report on Freedom of Information Act activity. EPA issued its report for fiscal 2000 in April of 2001 (http://www.epa.gov/foia/).
The agency’s backlog of FOIA requests not responded to grew significantly in fiscal 2000 — from 8,772 pending requests at the end of fiscal year 1999 to 9,841 at the end of fiscal year 2000. During all of fiscal 2000, EPA received 15,906 FOIA requests, and it processed 14,837 during the same period.
During fiscal year 2000, the most recent year for which data are available, the EPA granted 10,178 FOIA requests fully, granted another 628 partially, and denied 77. There were other reasons for non-disclosure beside denial of the request. For example, for 2,160 of the requests the records sought did not exist. Another 658 requests were referred to other agencies, 856 of the requests were withdrawn, and 254 were duplicate requests. In only 3 cases was the reason for non-disclosure related to fees.
FOIA requires agencies to provide requested information unless it falls under specific exemptions. The one most commonly used by EPA (381 times in fiscal year 2000) was the one for trade secrets and confidential business information. EPA used exemption 5, which applies to certain inter-agency or intra-agency memoes or letters, 288 times. In 280 cases, EPA used exemption 7, for information whose disclosure would interfere with enforcement or invade personal privacy. In 93 cases, EPA used the exemption covering personnel and medical files.
EPA reported that it had 83 full-time FOIA personnel in fiscal year 2000 — and another 547 with part-time or occasional FOIA duties. The agency’s total costs for FOIA activities were $7,628,076 ($45,960 of it for litigation). During the same period, EPA collected $394,970 in FOIA fees — about 5.2 percent of costs.
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Note: Formerly published by the National Safety Council. Reprinted with permission.