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Senate Advances "Secret Science" Bill, Sets Up Possible Showdown With President
sciencehabit writes: Republicans in Congress appear to be headed for a showdown with the White House over controversial "secret science" legislation aimed at changing how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses scientific studies. A deeply divided Senate panel yesterday advanced a bill that would require EPA to craft its policies based only on public data available to outside experts. The House of Representatives has already passed a similar measure. But Democrats and science groups have harshly criticized the approach, and the White House has threatened a veto.
Secret toad controls Congreff. Secret toad has poison webs in its eyes. Secret toad is behind all NATO exercises and World Bank. Secret toad controls air with secret toad poison rays and mind controff.
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Making decisions based on research that can't be independently validated or audited is the very definition of junk science. I mean, I know that the pay journals would love to see open access go away, but that's just their flawed business model talking.
If they're going to create such a rule for EPA, then it should also apply to NIH, FDA, DOE, and so on. If they don't make it universal, then they're showing an obvious bias and clearly pushing an agenda which is attempting to influence specific science.
You have to start somewhere.
Even if there is such a bias, what of it? It is not like imposing this rule on the EPA today would prevent imposing it on other departments/agencies later.
Besides, the opponents of the idea do not oppose it on the grounds, that it is not going far enough. Obama is not saying:"I will veto this bill unless the rule covers the entire federal government! No way, no how!!"
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If Congress is for it, it probably isn't science.
"Secret Science" must be their code words for real science.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There is ample evidence of Ocean acidification to suggest that CO2 needs to be treated as a pollutant.
I RTFA and don't get the controversy. Of course the data used to form regulations should be easily available to everybody. The only reason to use secret data is you want to hide something.
Not trying to troll here, just not seeing the other side.
Pollutant = A resource in the wrong place, as in "do not pollute my scotch with water". The evidence of harm caused by 1/2 trillion tons of CO2 in the wrong place may not be clear to you, but it is to almost everyone who has actually looked at it with a scientific eye. AFAICT the senate republicans think an appropriate mission for the EPA is to STFU and mow the whitehouse lawn.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
..is as usual relying on the ignorance of the public. For example one of the long time complaints about the "hockey stick" from the deniers in the US senate was that a small portion of the raw data could not be published due to (default) copyright terms imposed by the french and a couple of other geographically small nations. The data was available but you had to go to the French government and wait six months to get it. There are lots of other cases where data is collected from industry and individuals where those supplying the data do not want the raw data published for legal, commercial, or personal reasons. The basic rule of research is you take what data you can get and publish what you are allowed to by those who supply it.
A more useful law would be to force anti-science "charities" such as the heartland institute to reveal their accounts to the public, if the IPCC and EPA can do it why can't a tax exempt no-think tank do the same?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
There's not only plenty of scientific evidence, there's also legislation and a Supreme Court ruling supporting it. Just because your belief system rules out the facts, it doesn't make them any less true.
One mention of the EPA and we're already at BIG GUBERMENT CO2 neck collars. I can't believe someone so dumb can use a computer, let alone reads /.
Shouldn't we want them to be basing policy on publicly available data?
This is an excellent example of how well-crafted political propaganda works. The act of introducing the bill implies the EPA are not already basing policy on publicly available data, opposing the bill implies you want to hide something from the public. Even if the bill fails to pass, it has already succeeded as a propaganda piece.
Make no mistake, this is a far-right attempt to put Science on a short leash.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
There is a very clear constitutional basis. The environment is very key to interstate commerce without any doubt. If you could confine the environment to every state's borders then perhaps things would be different, and Ohio could be full of burning rivers as long as Illinois is not affected.
But according to some nuts, under the constitution the feds can't do anything except manage wars. The constitution as it existed in 1781 is not the same as it is today. People forget all the amendments, all the judicial decisions, and the great big massive war we had that overturned the constitution so that slavery could finally be abolished which resulted in a strong centralized federal government no matter what the hell the founding fathers who owned slaves would have wanted.
Your reading implies that Congress can do pretty much whatever the fuck it wants if it deems it to be for the General Welfare. That pretty much flied in the face of the idea of limited government, which is the central pillar of our Constitution.
Depends on how limited you want the limits to be. If you want the government to be small enough to drown in a bathtub, then yes, it flies in your personal idea of a limited government.
OTOH, the Founders were explicitly creating a less limited government. They said flat-out it needed to be more powerful the the Articles of Confederation government because it had to be strong enough to keep the Brits out.
If there'd been pollution in their day they almost certainly would have added inter-state pollution to the list of things the Feds had the right to regulate, because part of the point of their Constitution was keeping the states from fighting each-other over trivial shit. And you can bet your ass that if Pennsylvania had been able to have all the benefits of coal power, with none of the pollution, simply by siting the plants upwind from the rest of the state they'd have done that shit; New York would have responded by calling out the militia...
With a name like "Obfuscant" I'd lean towards the former.
And now your argument is pure ad hominem.
As far as I can tell, the actual bill requires all data to be reproducible.
You tell wrong. Are you making it up out of whole cloth? It requires data to be available online in a form that anyone who wishes to verify or reproduce it can. It makes no requirement of reproducibility. Some people even lie and say that this law requires the EPA to reproduce it.
That means the raw data used by a study has to be available publicly (and probably on the internet) or it's "secret science" and can't be used by the EPA.
Close. You could read it for yourself if you want. It says nothing about all raw data, only "all scientific and technical information relied on to support such covered action". The raw data leads to results, the results are the scientific and technical information that are relied on.
In fact most sources I've seen actually say that even including difficult to reproduce data bans the EPA from using the study.
They lie. There is no such language in the law. Read it for yourself. It is even shorter than the FCC net neutrality rules.
Several say flat-out that private data of all types is banned.
They lie. The data isn't banned, but use of data that isn't available "in a manner that is sufficient for independent analysis and substantial reproduction of research results" cannot be used in formulation of EPA regulations.
But what about private medical data? Doesn't have to be made available. "Nothing in the subsection shall be construed as requiring the public dissemination of information the disclosure of which is prohibited by law." If your private medical data is covered by HIPAA, it doesn't have to be made available -- but it doesn't have to be made available anyway, only the results used to support regulatory actions. If you've signed away your legal protections to that data, well, you should have gotten legal advice prior to signing.
The Amendment that would have fixed this would have given peer-reviewed articles a free pass on the point, and it was voted down by the committee.
The process of peer-review is prior to publication. If it is published, then put it online and the law is satisfied. People here seem quite enamored with Open Access publishing, so any law that furthers the cause should be greeted with open arms. But here we have opposition to law, so keeping science private is somehow good.
So please, tell me how you could use a private database in your study and still get it used by the EPA.
That depends on what the "private database" contains, but I'd say that if you want public regulations then you should provide support for your desire and not just "because I say so". If your entire study is based on someone's private database then you have reproducibility and validity issues from the get-go and that means you aren't really doing science, you're trolling for data to support whatever conclusion you're looking for. That's the kind of science this law would stop, and I think that's just fine.
This is knee jerk fear mongering.
The bill states that the law wouldn't supersede any statutory requirement (such as protection of PII).
The bill also specifies that the data should be presented so that "substantial reproduction" of the study is possible. It doesn't specify that reproduction needs to be done. It doesn't specify "100% independently verified."
These guys are asking the EPA to follow similar guidelines the FDA imposes on companies in evaluating a new drug or device. The FDA maintains a public database of filings, it's really interesting to go through. The bill is even closer to NIH publication guidelines. This is not just an anti-EPA thing here (granted, I'm sure there's some of that going on), this is getting the EPA in line with other health oriented agencies.
As for de-identification of the government owned part of the data, the Republicans are right. That should take an expert a couple of days, but it does cost money (there are many businesses who specialize in this kind of thing). The CDC doesn't leave money sitting around (I'm kind of shocked they leave PII medical records sitting around though, my company can't do that). They probably just can't pay to de-identify the data, and don't know if they can legally trust a Congressional committee to handle the data properly (probably they can't). So they're stuck without funding. The bill specifies $1M to do this, but given all the government offices involved, that's probably not enough.
Here's the real issue: The government doesn't actually own all the data the EPA is referencing, so the EPA can't publish it or share it. This is all to put pressure on the EPA to ask Harvard and ACS to share the data.
The data the government makes decisions on should be public. It shouldn't be acceptable for a scientist to say "trust me, I did the analysis correctly." We're not perfect, we make mistakes. Peer review is broken, we can't rely on that to catch errors. Open things up a bit more, and we'll get better conclusions.