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EPA's Science Advisory Board Has Not Met in 6 Months (scientificamerican.com)
The U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board has not met in at least six months, and some of its members say it's being sidelined to avoid getting in the way of agency Administrator Scott Pruitt's anti-regulatory agenda, Scientific American reported this week. From the report: Agency officials say the lapse isn't intentional and that it's just the result of delayed paperwork. That has prevented the group from meeting because there weren't enough members to make a quorum. The board, which typically has about 45 members, is tasked by Congress to evaluate the science used by EPA to craft policy. The full board has not met since August, nor has it had any conference calls or votes. In the past, members would have had multiple interactions during that time period, said William Schlesinger, a board member who is an emeritus professor of biogeochemistry at Duke University. "I guess the Science Advisory Board still exists; I guess I'm still on it," he said. "I think the answer is maybe they're giving it what we used to call the 'pocket veto': If you don't meet, then the scientists are not a pain, because they don't have a forum."
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Thatâ(TM)s all I want to know.
Not every problem can or should be solved with a hammer, however. But the Carpentry Council, accustomed to meeting daily and driving nails into whatever was nearby, is getting antsy. Also, they have used only a fraction of their T&E budget, and that is *really* pissing them off.
The entire science framework, ie. without leftist activists making things up, used by the government needs to be rebuilt now that Obama is gone.
This is not governance in any political affiliation. This is treason and abdication of duty. Prison can't come soon enough for these fools.
n/t
Have gnu, will travel.
Ignoring (or otherwise eliminating) the experts and science is pretty much standard operating procedure for this administration.
and no one but a few moonbats have missed it.
Ignoring (or otherwise eliminating) the experts and science is pretty much standard operating procedure for this administration.
How do you feel about the science of economics? Has the administration been ignoring that as well?
The 'woke' metaphor is appropriate.
Government is what you get when people get together and decide how they want to live together, beyond just tribal rules.
Much of America's legal framework actually came from studying multi-tribe gatherings of tribes, banding together to end cycles of violence.
Here's the Extra History take on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Science now holds no place at the table with this latest administration. Liberal or conservative, this should not be accepted in ANY form of governance.
Indeed - it shouldn't even be called an actual government anymore. What we have is a largely sleeping body where representation of the United States, it's scientific community, and its ideas should be.
But our current administration has no interest in sharing space of any kind, in communicating ideas, of advancing any but their own narrowest of interests. They'll lavishly communicate with dictators of any kind, but never offer a second to science.
Which is a shame - because they're largely the last place of noteworthy power that baby boomers will hold in this world. This will be their legacy, more than most things.
It's such a shame they spend that power sleeping, while being robbed of everything they used to care about.
biogeochemistry
I read that as:
bigegochemistry
Like 10 times till I got it right :l
During night, it is 10 degrees average colder than day time
and stays cold for 10 hours no end.
Waaa! Waaaa! wwwaaaaaaaa!!
Glow ball cooling is oppressing me each night!!!
So glow ball wumming doesn't work in the night
and only works when the sun comes out?
So 50% of a day and 50% of the whole year,
glow ball wamming doesn't exist?
Climate change now accelerated to 1 degree per HOUR!!!!
As the Sun cums up, the earth's temperature goes up
average 1 degree per hour. And when then Sun cums
down, the globe cools 1 degree per hour.
Climate is changing every hour!
Awe noooo! This is making me crispy and toasted.
Can I have a bacon sandwich to top it all off?
I'm torn here. Left to their own devices, businesses will pollute, strip, destroy, and maim anything in the name of profit. On the other side of that coin, the EPA has been egregiously out of control for years.
I don't know where the middle ground is, or if anyone knows what it is, but the pendulum *always* swings back the other way.
We're just taking a quick 4 year vacation to recharge ourselves. Well, technically a staycation -- wouldn't want to travel and risk visiting one of those shithole countries.
Trump's administration has been marked by regulatory capture (FCC) or outright hostility to our system of government and regulation. To say the administration's actions are suspect in the wake of the ever widening Mueller investigation is a massive understatement. But even ignoring that, he's putting people in charge of government agencies that don't believe those agencies should function (DOE is another example). It feels like sabotage.
Trump won and Science lost, so get over it, snowflakes.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Didn't you now science is now owned by The Pres and his party ?
The Roman Catholic Church use to define science based upon the scripture until I think the 19th or 18th century.
So we (US) have been moving slowly back to that time period, where real provable science is fake and real science is just entertainment :)
Strange times we live in, many people running the US rejects Science were Roman Catholic Church seems to be a leader in science.
They're probably too embarrassed to meet. They might get asked about all the global warming we, and Europe, and Russia are having this winter. How would they explain all the media coverage of an arctic heat wave when the data show nothing ? Just more fake news ?
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
Until now, did it affect your life ?
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
"... it's being sidelined to avoid getting in the way of agency Administrator Scott Pruitt's anti-science agenda..."
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
EPA is unconstitutional goverment interference in freedom of speech and market. Next kill off the department of "education" and re-privatize all the national parks that were stolen from regular americans by big goverment.
William Schlesinger and others in the advisory board have a list of people who are on said advisory board, presumably. This list contains contact info, presumably, or conversely the members are well known enough (to one another, at least) that contact info is easy to retrieve, presumably. Send some emails, make some calls, decide on when everyone has time, and schedule a meeting. It can be done in person or via teleconference, most of these people are academics and will have access to decent bandwidth. If a quorum is reached without Pruitt or the political appointees, tough cookies for them, they should've done their job. This is an easy solution that requires literally minutes of time and maybe tens of dollars from everyone involved.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
The are changing the composition of the board and some people don't like it because the new people may have opposing views. Well that's just too bad.
"Schlesinger said he's concerned that Pruitt will stack the board with dissenting voices to create uncertainty in science where it might not exist.
"If a subcommittee working on a particular issue had enough industry people and naysayers cast enough doubt, the report that went back to the administrator would be rather vague; it would be equivocal, probably not be the basis for taking action," he said. "And a lot of times, that is what the industry wants on a subject: no change or minimal regulation."
They haven't had a quorum because certain Dem senators keep holding up nomination for no other reason than to "resist". This is one of the effects. There is nothing keeping the whiner from doing his job in the meantime. He just wants the boondoggle trips for meetings to get away from his other job.
I've been on them. They are always for show and politically correct. One member from this place. One member from there. One Black. One Hispanic. Equality for women. One union rep, one from academia, one from the public sector. And every single person there has a political agenda to push, something they want done in the name of "justice" for their cause. Everyone tries one upmanship and grandstanding and thinks they can control the agency from their chair around the table. Advisory committees are not worth the cost the agency must pay for their lunches. It looks good on a resume and is a great excuse for a junket away from work so your employer thinks you're "contributing to the public good." and putting a feather in your oranization's cap as well as your own. It's a waste of time.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Hillary lost because she was worse then the guy who beat her. Get over it.
now we are at the point where failing to vigorously use RICHARD NIXON's public relations stunt (the EPA) is TREASON?!?!?!
WTF?
Seriously, dude, just how whacko and deranged are you Trump haters gonna get? In ANY other era of American politics, Trump would be seen as a "moderate" Republican. His social policies are WAY to the left of any previous US Republican president, and indeed all previous US Democrat presidents other than Obama. While Trump is harder on immigration than the past three presidents, he's far less harsh than many US Presidents including the great moderate Republican President Eisenhower.
Has pure hatred and bile twisted you people so severely that you have NO sense of perspective and are completely untethered from reality and history?
Science says human beings only come in two sexes: male and female. Anything else is either a defect, a mental/psychological matter, or a boutique political cause.
Science says a human embryo is NOT part of its mother at all; it has its own unique human DNA. It also says that human embryos are alive, and in fact HUMAN rather than some other species. Science also says human embryos are not tumors or blobs.
Science says nuclear power is probably the best source of power without greenhouse gasses.
Science says GMO crops are OK, vaccines are OK, gluten is not going to hurt you if you do not have coeliac disease, and many other things.
Still hugging science?
Didn't think so.
You leftie snowflakes only pretend to embrace science and only when it's useable as propaganda to support your POLITICAL positions. The moment science is inconvenient to you, you run away from it.
When the left decides to embrace ALL science ALL the time, including when it gores the oxes of some of the core constituent groups of the Democrat party, you can then legitimately attack somebody else as "anti-science". Until then, you're just cherry picking like some on the political right, but you're too hysterical to see the symmetry.
How much damage are we supposed to sit and watch these "people" do before we do something about them? Why is the entire population simply twiddling their thumbs while what can only be described as *cartoon villains* go around wrecking everything their predecessors worked so hard to achieve for us? Are we supposed to simply bend over, think of England, and hope that maybe the next bunch can slow the spread of irreversible damage for a little while - at least until they're replaced by things like Pruitt again after a few years more?
The rule of law is long gone in this and several other countries. It's no wonder the People's Democratic Republic of America is so hard at work getting the population to demand it be disarmed.
The EPA does NOTHING to protect the environment and EVERYTHING to protect it's own slice of the budget.
Abolish the EPA.
The way I heard, millions more people voted for Hilary than Trump.
Firing Comey is entirely likely to result in an obstruction of justice charge, regardless of the results of the probe. I think that at the moment, the odds are against conviction. I would like to think that a charge of treason would be impossible regardless of any actions taken, given that we are not in a declared war, but apparently we have a bad history of ignoring that provision.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Clinton did not have any authority to deny that trade deal. Uranium One isn't even an American company. For a couple years, some uranium was exported to Canada for processing, and returned to the US. Due to how that works, it can technically be said that some uranium mined in the US in that brief period was exported to Japan and western Europe. No one in the US sold a damn thing.
You are a liar.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
"EPA's Science Advisory Board Has Not Met in 6 Months" Baloney. The world could not survive 6 months without that group of intellectuals meeting.
Didn't the Trump administration fire all of the scientists on the EPA's advisory board? Or maybe they resigned in protest?
Either way, it's hard for a board that has no members to meet. Who will supply the PowerPoint?
We need a blue ribbon panel of agency experts to investigate the problem and advise the president. Oh wait, Hillary lost.
Would the IRS please issue a refund of the taxes I paid for this non-operational agency?!
I'd rather it be fully implemented, yet, if it isn't doing anything, then stop paying them, and Pruitt.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Some of the board members are resisting signing their suicide notes. no matter how many times we waterboard them, they just refuse to sign. It's not like we're going to shoot them, twice, in the back of the head once they've signed the note about how sad they are.
Maybe we'll just slip them a Mickey Finn, put them in their Tesla in the garage with the engine running, and leave them to die. That'll teach those pesky scientists to mess with businessmen!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"