The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee still mulls H.R. 1430, the so-called Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017, and H.R. 1431, the so-called EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act of 2017. These bills would force the EPA to ignore peer review of research and would demand that all the EPA's science be "reproducible," though science coming from environmental disasters isn't reproducible, and "reproducible" science isn't automatically good science (since you can, for example, "reproduce" a bad study). But Nick Stockton at Wired reminds us that H.R. 1430 would allot a mere $1 million to comply with its aims -- which surely won't be enough to defend against an onslaught of corporate challenges! -- while H.R. 1431 would put corporate types on the EPA's Science Advisory Board, which smells of like corruption and corporate welfare. So you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to oppose these bills.
Meanwhile, if you missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the unholy trinity of bills that would cripple anti-bankster and anti-pollution regulations in America -- the REINS Act, the Midnight Rules Relief Act, and the so-called Regulatory Accountability Act -- you can still call them, or you can use this petition provided by Sign for Good. We always fight uphill when we defend regulations, partly because the right has pummeled their rhetorical hostage crisis ("don't regulate corporate behavior, or these jobs get it!") so hard it seems mainstream -- this, though regulations actually create jobs for the people who help achieve compliance with them, as you know. But it's also an uphill fight because folks don't really miss regulations until something bad happens in their neck of the woods. So it'd be perfectly all right to remind your Senators that tainted food recalls, burst pipelines, chemical explosions, and gas drilling accidents always make the news.
Meanwhile, Avaaz alerts us that more and more elephants come into this world without tusks, or with substantially smaller ones, to avoid the pain and death that comes with ivory poaching. Admittedly this has actually been happening for decades, yet we're less likely to see a world without elephant tusks by the end of our lives than a world without elephants, which scarcely bears contemplating if you've ever observed them mourn their dead or turn tree branches into flyswatters. And we don't build bridges and planes and cars with ivory -- we mainly make religious carvings with it, and though many folks around the world think fake ivory is sacrilegious, I'm more of the mind that God cares less about whether your Blessed Virgin statue is real ivory than about, you know, doing good works. Speaking of which, the world's largest importer of ivory, China, has pledged to ban its trade, so Avaaz helps you tell European nations to follow suit and ban ivory trading.
Comments