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Misuse of Scientific Data By the White House
Science data nerds writes "The White House is consistently and persistently claiming that the US is doing better than Europe in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is false — their claim is purely based on carefully selecting the only subset of the data that supports this conclusion. When all the data are used, it is plain that European emissions have declined substantially and US emissions have grown substantially. The article, and this linked analysis, debunk the White House claims."
Not sure about you, but I'm here in America. I'm confident that I will have completely forgotten this issue a few hours from now. If something good is on TV, the entire scandal will be out of mind by the time I'm finished dinner.
File Deletion is Murder.
I just watched two movies: Control Room (2004) about the media coverage of the invasion of Iraq and Al Jazeera's role and The revolution will not be televised (2003) about the role of the private media in the coup in Venezuela in 2001. Neither of the two might be called very objective, but I see how difficult it would be to find an audience for more scientific analysis.
The common theme in both is how important the media has become. Now this is not really news, but during the last decade the media reaction has been part of e.g. military operation (embedded journalism) and there is a tremendous effort to control the pictures. Not so much to suppress any reporting, since it has become obvious that this will never work, but to control what is fed to the press. And unfortunately the press is not yet up to speed to get their informations from a wider number of sources.
Now with blogging, youtube, flickr etc. there seems to be a much wider range of possible information sources, even harder to suppress than in the past. But today we face the problem which of these sources to trust, there are just so many. There are attempts like newstrust, which tries to be a sort of slashdot moderation system on top of existing news. But I think we need much more of this. Like greasemonkey allows you to attach things to websites that the authors did not intend to be there, we need the option to attach other sources to any news and have a large body of people vote on which of these sources should be taken into account. I have no clue how to realize this, but this is a typical case: the government using FUD to strengthen their position. People can react and argue with the claims, but there should be a way for these comments to reach the public, not only via sites like slashdot, but by default. With the increase of media sources and media power we have to become better at using and evaluating media as a group, not only as single viewers and readers.
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Take a look at US and UK BMW websites. The UK entry level model gets 40MPG, which is not much worse than our Prius. Living proof that we can double our car fuel efficiency NOW if we just stop being apathetic about it. And this is nothing compared to the impact of living in apartments and having a working Metro.
The only way they could claim ignorance at this point is by making a concerted effort to maintain said ignorance by ignoring any of the multitude of reports out there that contradict them. Going to that much effort to remain ignorant in order to avoid changing your opinion is evil in itself.
A reformulation of CLarks third law by J. Porter Clark: "sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
China and India pollute substantially less per person than any EU country or the US.
So? They're growing at a much, much faster rate. And the statement you chose - that it would be like saying, "We got to industrialization first, so we're the only ones who get to benefit! Oh and you have to clean up just as much as us even though we've made a bigger mess," - is telling, but it's actually the opposite of that: it's more like, "We got to industrialization, but we'll allow other developing economies to artificially pollute much more, leaving Western economies at an even greater disadvantage than they are now when competing."
One day, when India and China are serious polluters they will curb emissions.
Oh, they will? Really? Who's going to make China curb emissions? And China has plenty of problems now.
So yeah, it's not "fair" if China, especially considering the force it is already, isn't held to any standards at all; or, rather, would you find it surprising that there are other factors to consider in the US not simply wanting to happily allow a severe competitive disadvantage, and frames the discussions based on that? This isn't a "Republican" issue or a matter of "misuse" of scientific data. It's an issue of pure economics. Might it be treated more gingerly by more liberal politicians? Sure. But it wouldn't be a lot more than lip service, because no matter who is in office, the economic and other threats from China in particular are very real, and emissions are but small part of that equation.
The summary's claim is that the White House is selectively using data points, and to an extent that is true. They base their claims on an index comparison that starts at the year 2000. When you view the data this way, it does appear that the EU's Greenhouse Gas emissions have gone up, while the US's have declined/been neutral. The article prefers on the other hand to index at 1990, which shows that over the last 14 years of data that the US's emissions have increased dramatically compared to the EU.
Now here's my first problem: the accusation assumes that 2000 is not a good index year, which it is. If the Bush Administration wants to make the case that they (The Bush Administration) have been more successful than the EU in reducing emissions, then the logical start point for comparison is about when they took over which would be 2001.
Now, the article points out correctly that Greenhouse emissions tend to drop during economic slowdowns. One can see that easily by looking at the graph at the end of it (the US has a drop in 1991; the EU has a drop from 92-96; the US has another drop from 00-01). If one takes these economic slowdowns into account, then 2000, the peak of the last economy, might very well be a good starting point for the Administration to start their indexing from. Why should they have to take into account the failures of past administrations (Bush I, and Clinton) when touting the success of their administration? If, hypothetically, US emissions had decreased from 1990 to 2000 and increased from 2000 to 2004, would it be fair for the Bush Administration to take the earlier data into account and claim that they had reduced emissions? No, that would be taking credit for progress they did not make. The same principle applies reverse.
The article also brings about a perpetual flaw in any sort of greenhouse gas analysis. It completely ignores economic growth and the effect it has on increasing emissions (which it candidly points out by the way). During much of the mid-90s the US economy was booming, especially compared to the EU, so of course there was going to be an increase in emissions from 1991-2000. Additionally, these indexes fail to take into account the size of the economic growth when making the comparison. If we really want a useful measure, we should be tracking "Volume of Emissions per Unit of GDP Growth." That way we could judge economies based on their environmental efficiency rather just on pure volumetric data.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
I would suggest that the problem is not with hard facts and statistics, but rather with a populace that is poorly educated in statistics and a media that is unwilling to actually analyze the statistics (and present that analysis) for fear of offending or boring an apathetic and relatively innumerate populace.
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"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
"That's really all this is. It's cherry picking on both sides."
Oh, look, Republican Debating Techniques 101! Look folks, let's play: muddy the waters!
Suggesting that the strides being made in Europe on emissions are the ethical or environmental equivalent of the destructive pollution policies of the GWB administration, because, oh, "really both sides are biased," is an affront to science and to intelligence.
The policy of this administration has been unapologetically regressive. Bush loosened and terminated regulations through a stacked Congress and rolled back initiatives by presidential order, because corporate big business lobbyists told him environmental regulations were cutting into profits, "and that hurts the economy." This isn't even up for debate. He has related his policies and his actions over and over again to the press and in his speeches across the nation. We have so much going wrong in this country after 8 years that even if we get a Democratic president and Congress, it will take 10 years to recover policy-wise after this administration is finally run out of office.
The environment isn't high school debate club; this is serious and it matters, and unless Mars suddenly develops an atmosphere, we only have one shot at getting it right.
Hardly. One side has most of the scientific establishment behind it. The other side has a few crackpots, "researchers" paid to provide desired data, and cherry-picked data. Only the willfully ignorant at this stage give equal credibility to both sides.
The largest, most successful car company on the planet? Toyota. The leader on going Green through higher fuel economy and smarter technology? Toyota. Coincidence?
Which city in the rust belt has a trade surplus with China and why? Erie PA. Because GE makes the most fuel efficient locomotives on the planet in Erie and even though the Chinese have lower labor costs and environmental protection standards, the GE locmotives, while costing more to purchase, pay-back the extra cost very rapidly in fuel savings. The greenest tech is the most efficient tech and it wins economically.
So, protecting and subsidizing stupidity might protect one particular set of players in an industry (GM & Ford, for instance) but overall it doesn't do the USA any good.
Green is efficient, so Green is smart business.
There's green in going green -- Friedman
In other words:
They say 2+2 is 4.
We say it's 18.
So, obviously, it must be somewhere around 11?
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
They wouldn't need to claim ignorance. The claims the whit house said was that according to the IPCC, we were leading less. This study as well as the initial version of the report gets it's data from a different source. There is no lie, and what was said it true. As for cherry picking, this so called report specifically uses a different data set in order to make a claim of misleading and wrong doing. Nothing could be further form the truth.
Here is the link to the numbers the pacinst uses. and here is the link to what the white house used.
Three things to be noted. One is that the IEA publication costs a lot of money so unless some one is willing to pony up the change and do the actual comparisons, we won't know for sure. Using numbers from another study or data set does nothing to show anyone mislead anything. If anything, it is misleading of this study to suggest something that doesn't exist.
Second, the IEA numbers don't cover the same numbers the other report does. It used numbers from fuel combustion were as the EPA numbers account for all use including purpose full manufacturing of Co2.
Third and probably the most important is that the EU and the rest of the world have only been attempting to reduce Co2 emisiosn since 2000 when the kyoto accord was in effect. Comparing to anything previous is senseless and misleading. It implies there was an effort that isn't and attempt to say look, we are guilty because we done this before that.
In all, It would be note worthy to have numbers that come form the same source and cover the same data. This report doesn't do it and even attempts to use the disconnect from consistancy as a basis to refute the conclusions of a report that does use the same source and same data collections. I have contacted them by email about their apparent misleading and have not received a response from them. Also they have listed this second "refined report" after that.