NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet

from NYT:

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

From 2002 until this year, NASA’s mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can.”

In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” deleted. In this year’s budget and planning documents, the agency’s mission is “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”

David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush’s goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.

But the change comes as an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the “understand and protect” phrase was not merely window dressing but actively influenced the shaping and execution of research priorities. Without it, these scientists say, there will be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

“We refer to the mission statement in all our research proposals that go out for peer review, whenever we have strategy meetings,” said Philip B. Russell, a 25-year NASA veteran who is an atmospheric chemist at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “As civil servants, we’re paid to carry out NASA’s mission. When there was that very easy-to-understand statement that our job is to protect the planet, that made it much easier to justify this kind of work.”

Several NASA researchers said they were upset that the change was made at NASA headquarters without consulting the agency’s 19,000 employees or informing them ahead of time.

Though the “understand and protect” phrase was deleted in February, when the Bush administration submitted budget and planning documents to Congress, its absence has only recently registered with NASA employees.

Mr. Steitz, the NASA spokesman, said the agency might have to improve internal communications, but he defended the way the change was made, saying it reflected the management style of Michael D. Griffin, the administrator at the agency.

“Strategic planning comes from headquarters down,” he said, and added, “I don’t think there was any mal-intent or idea of exclusion.”

The line about protecting the earth was added to the mission statement in 2002 under Sean O’Keefe, the first NASA administrator appointed by President Bush, and was drafted in an open process with scientists and employees across the agency.

In the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which established the agency in 1958, the first objective of the agency was listed as “the expansion of human knowledge of the earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.”

And since 1972, when NASA launched the first Landsat satellite to track changes on the earth’s surface, the agency has been increasingly involved in monitoring the environment and as a result has been immersed in political disputes over environmental policy and spending, said W. Henry Lambright, a professor of public administration and political science at Syracuse University who has studied the trend.

The shift in language echoes a shift in the agency’s budgets toward space projects and away from earth missions, a shift that began in 2004, the year Mr. Bush announced his vision of human missions to the Moon and beyond.

The “understand and protect” phrase was cited repeatedly by James E. Hansen, a climate scientist at NASA who said publicly last winter that he was being threatened by political appointees for speaking out about the dangers posed by greenhouse gas emissions.

Dr. Hansen’s comments started a flurry of news media coverage in late January; on Feb. 3, Mr. Griffin issued a statement of “scientific openness.”

The revised mission statement was released with the agency’s proposed 2007 budget on Feb. 6. But Mr. Steitz said Dr. Hansen’s use of the phrase and its subsequent disappearance from the mission statement was “pure coincidence.”

Dr. Hansen, who directs the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a NASA office, has been criticized by industry-backed groups and Republican officials for associating with environmental campaigners and his endorsement of Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.

Dr. Hansen said the change might reflect White House eagerness to shift the spotlight away from global warming.

“They’re making it clear that they have the authority to make this change, that the president sets the objectives for NASA, and that they prefer that NASA work on something that’s not causing them a problem,” he said.

Bush Chooses Superstition over Science, to the Surprise of Nobody

from What’s New:

On Wednesday, Bush vetoed the “Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act.” The first veto of his presidency was exercised to protect surplus embryonic stem cells in fertility clinics from research, thus preserving their “dignity” so they can be put out with the garbage. He did so on the grounds that using them in research would be “murder.” This is based on the ancient belief in a “vital life force,” or “soul,” which is said by some Christians to be assigned at conception. The first sign of differentiation in embryonic cells occurs in about 8 weeks. Jews, however, say that infants don’t get a soul until they draw their first breath. They cite Genesis: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” On the other hand, superstition may not be the best guide. Why not turn to science?

Imaginary Weapons

Listen to Sharon Weinberger being interviewed on NPR (37 min.) about ‘Imaginary Weapons’ at the Pentagon, including the bogus ‘isomer bomb’ fiasco.  The politicization of (formerly) science in the Pentagon is stunningly irresponsible.  Your tax propaganda dollars at work.

Book Review: The Republican War on Science

NASA’s Shameful Reverse Thrust

from SciAm:

When George W. Bush unveiled his plan for a new moon shot two years ago, a lot of people worried that it was long on rhetoric and short on cash--ultimately forcing NASA to raid its science budget to pay for it. On close examination, though, the trajectory seemed reasonable. The money freed up by phasing out the space shuttle and the International Space Station was not an implausible amount to build a post-shuttle spacecraft (known as the Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV) and send it moonward by 2020. A “go as you can pay” strategy would extend the deadlines if money got tight, rather than pickpocketing other programs. A modest dollop of extra funds would help cover the transitional costs. NASA administrator Michael Griffin said at a press conference last September: “In our forward planning, we do not take one thin dime out of the science program in order to execute this architecture.”

Now it looks like the skeptics were right. The NASA budget announced in February mows down a scarily long list of science missions, from a Europa orbiter to a space-based gravitational-wave observatory. Research grants to individual scientists, traditionally kept safe from high-level budget machinations, have taken a 15 percent hit, retroactive to last fall; hundreds have already received “termination letters” canceling their projects. Griffin went before Congress in February as the bearer of bad news: “Fulfilling our commitments on the International Space Station and bringing the Crew Exploration Vehicle online in a timely manner, not later than 2014 and possibly much sooner, is a higher priority than these science missions during this period.” [Thus confirming that Griffin is a sack of shit.]

The countdown to the crisis actually began a year ago, when the Bush administration lopped off the dollop of bridging funds it had promised. Then came Hurricane Katrina, which damaged shuttle facilities in Mississippi and Louisiana, and an across-the-board federal budget cut, largely to raise money for the Iraq War. Worst of all, a new analysis of the shuttle and space station found them at least $2 billion in the hole. Griffin went cap in hand to the administration but was told to make up the difference from the agency’s own wherewithal. [Was anybody surprised?]

Compared with the plan of two years ago, science gives up a total of $6.4 billion (in 2005 dollars) over the five years from 2007 through 2011—a 20 percent cut. Planetary exploration is the worsthit area—40 percent. Human spaceflight gains $5.2 billion, but its situation is hardly to be envied either. The shuttle fleet will make 16 rather than 28 trips to the space station before retiring in 2010, and from then until the CEV debuts, the country will have no capability to launch astronauts into orbit at all.

Griffin has described the shift of money as a “speed bump,” a temporary measure to get human spaceflight back on course. Veteran observers express sympathy for his dilemma. “It’s a knotty problem,” says John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “There’s no clear answer.”

Nevertheless, many complain that he has been heavy-handed [and a fool]. Multiyear projects require some consistency in their funding. By making such an abrupt budget change, NASA will mothball or abandon half-built (in some cases, fully built) hardware, lose expertise developed at great effort [and expense], and leave gaps in data coverage, notably of the earth’s climate. NASA has had budget crunches before, but seldom have they been so wasteful.

“It’s the sudden change in slope: that’s why this is more difficult than it was in previous years,” says Lennard Fisk, chair of the National Research Council’s Space Studies Board and himself a former NASA official. The unprecedented targeting of research grants strikes scientists as particularly gratuitous: for a small savings, only about $80 million, NASA is causing a huge disruption.

The Space Studies Board is investigating how to hold on to the grants and smaller missions by delaying or downgrading the bigger fry. Several flagship missions, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, have run over budget and need housecleaning anyway. Wesley Huntress, director of the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and another past NASA official, says scientists need to take responsibility for making the necessary trade-offs, rather than leaving it up to NASA headquarters and Capitol Hill.  [Translation: Bush has unalterably screwed NASA and American space science, so good luck with that.]

Some hope the crisis may finally force some out-of-the-capsule thinking. Should NASA jettison the shuttle and station right away? Should it do the opposite and stretch out the station’s construction to reduce its annual cost? Should NASA be split into separate science and astronautics agencies? If it were, would that really be good for science? Unless some helpful reform can be salvaged from the situation, what seemed [only to idiots] like such a grand vision two years ago may fail in the execution.

Science Under Attack

From Nature (23 Feb., 2006):

Researchers are increasingly upset with the Bush administration, not for its tactics but for its entire operational philosophy.

The highlight of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) last week was an impassioned session in which scientific leaders, including molecular biologist David Baltimore, made clear their views on the fraught relationship between science and the Bush administration.

The discussion was organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists in the wake of revelations about how the administration’s political appointees have sought to control the messages communicated by scientists to the public, including attempts by the NASA press office to muzzle climate scientist James Hansen (see page 896).

And judging from the response at a packed and emotional hall in St Louis, a great many US scientists now believe that the Bush administration is prepared not only to ignore scientific facts in making policy decisions, but also to suppress findings that conflict with its own priorities.

For Baltimore — Nobel laureate, outgoing president of the California Institute of Technology, president-elect of the AAAS, and arguably the most eminent voice in all of American science — events have reached a tipping point. He suggested that the Bush administration’s approach to science stems from its adherence to a particular philosophy of government, that of a ‘unitary executive’. Instead of resignedly shrugging their shoulders whenever such a case of scientific manipulation arises, Baltimore argued, scientists need to recognize the potency of the threat that this governmental philosophy represents to the long-cherished independence of US science.

The unitary executive is an old idea, but not many Americans had heard of it until last month, when it cropped up during the Senate confirmation process of Supreme Court judge Samuel Alito. At the extreme, it holds that the executive branch can run the US federal government as it sees fit, especially in wartime. Given that a seminal achievement of the Constitution of the United States was to establish a balance of power between the executive branch, the Congress and the judiciary, this may sound absurd, but it seems to hold considerable sway within the Bush administration.

Baltimore warned that the doctrine opens the way for “an exertion of executive hegemony over science”. He called on researchers to “fight for a very different doctrine” under which “the executive’s role is to defend intellectual freedom”. In the light of the Bush administration’s adherence to this philosophy, he added: “It is no accident that we are seeing such an extensive suppression of science.” From someone of Baltimore’s experience and reputation, these are strong words.

For science to flourish it needs settings that support freedom of enquiry, and the creation of such settings was a great achievement of the Enlightenment. Protecting them is vital, not just for science but for all of humanity.

Government agencies can never provide such settings in quite the same way universities can. But their scientists must still be allowed to express the results of their research as they see fit. They should also be free to discuss how their research makes an argument for changes in policy, as Hansen sought to do with regard to climate change. In return, scientists have to acknowledge that the line between science and policy is a fine one, and endeavour to distinguish clearly between their scientific findings and their policy ideas.

In its five years in office, the Bush administration has sought to exert tighter control of the branches of government where scientists work. This applies not only to regulatory agencies, where politics are never far below the surface, but also to places such as the National Institutes of Health and NASA, where intramural researchers are used to the freedom of expression enjoyed by their university colleagues.

It is by no means the case that these proud federal agencies or their staff have fallen subject to the executive branch’s decree. Most federal agencies have a deep stock of integrity, which even eight years of the Bush administration will not erode away. Yet Congress, in particular, should be doing much more to defend them from White House interference. And researchers should stand up and be counted with colleagues in the federal government in their hour of need.

Science and the First Amendment

from the Nation:

by PATRICIA J. PRINCEHOUSE

When I was a grad student, I had romantic notions about how knowledge was gained, how science was done and how democracy worked. Little by little, those notions have changed.

One blow came when I was doing field work at a 19-million-year-old fossil site in Africa. This wonderful site had six different species of fossil hominoids all living in the same place at the same time. It had been declared a national monument, and yet the shoestring budget couldn’t muster the funds to bring all the fossils back to the museum. Many had to be left to erode into dust, along with all the knowledge they could have offered.

I had the notion that scientific investigation was always well planned-out, with reasonably clear and specific expectations for how knowledge would advance. This view was challenged when my adviser at Yale explained how a crucial discovery in human evolution actually came about. They were in the field in Africa, he said, and they were really bored. No one had found much of anything and it was too hot to breathe anyway. The only thing they kept finding were piles and piles of fresh elephant dung. It’s not clear how it got started, but at some point somebody chucked a handful of elephant dung at someone, and pretty soon they were in the middle of an elephant dung slinging contest. At one point, he hit the deck to avoid getting plastered, and right in front of his eyes was a fossilized footprint. The dung-slinging escapade led to the discovery of a trail of 3 million-year-old footprints made by three individuals of the same species as the fossil hominid Lucy. Three million years ago, a volcano had erupted, and before the ashfall had hardened, these three had crossed the tuff. Two of the individuals were walking together, and the third, a tiny child, was stepping into the footprints of one of the adults. This wonderful find was the result of serendipitous elephant dung.

That’s not exactly how I thought science worked. But it turns out that gaining knowledge and doing science is a messy business, impinged on by all sorts of prosaic issues like funding and elephant dung. And I’ve come to love seeing how embedded science is in the rest of human endeavor. I’ve learned to value such stories as going to the heart of science as a very creative and very human enterprise.

But what about democracy? What about the noble Constitution? I used to think the US Constitution was fixed, an absolute guarantee of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press in this country. The past five years have shown me that the Constitution is valuable only insofar as people are willing to stand up for the rights it protects. Our freedoms are guaranteed only as long as ordinary, everyday people are willing to claim them--indeed, to insist on them.

People ask me, Why pour so much energy into protecting science education? Why not fight for literacy generally or any of a thousand other educational issues? I have two answers. One is easy: I know about evolution, so it makes sense that I would work on what I know best. The second is harder to grasp. And that is that freedom of religion is the bedrock foundation of liberty in this country. If we allow certain special-interest religious groups to co-opt the public school science classroom, to use it as a vehicle for converting children to religious views their parents don’t hold, if we allow them to spout outright lies about the nature and content of science, what do we really have left? If you can lie about science and get away with it, you can lie about anything.

Evolution is just the tip of the iceberg or, as the creationists put it, the leading edge of “the wedge.” The wedge they are seeking to drive through the heart of American democracy. The lies about science are not limited to evolution. Every day more lies about science seep into public consciousness. Lies about stem cell biology, lies about global warming, about clean air and water, lies about sexuality, about conception and contraception, lies about the effects of hurricanes on metropolitan infrastructure.

The war on science is a war on democracy itself. And the special weapons and tactics are rhetorical. The enemies of democracy use the language of tolerance to attack it from inside. Why, they ask, are we “censoring” the evidence for “intelligent design”? Why do we deny our teachers the “right” to use their “academic freedom” to teach “critical analysis” of evolution. Isn’t it only fair to teach both the evidence for and against evolution? All these clever ploys play well in the media on this issue and many, many others, and we will see these word games more and more in coming years. I call it the “orange is the new pink” strategy; every time the public cottons on to a catch term like “creation science” or “intelligent design,” they change to a more neutral-sounding term like “critical analysis” or “evidence against.” But defenders of American freedom are learning to stand up and say no, it really is fair to forbid teachers to lie to students, to prohibit school boards from using the power of the state to convert children to other peoples’ religions. Tolerance requires judgment.

So the rhetorical battle is pitched and the enemy is well armed. But it turns out that standing up for freedom and democracy is a lot like doing science. You start with noble principles and do the best you can, but when you get right down to it, you spend a lot of time dodging elephant dung.

Defending the Constitution is a messy business, but is it worth it? You betcha. Our future depends on it.

Putz Griffin on the NASA budget

Tony Reichhardt

Space agency chief answers his critics.

NASA head Mike Griffin was blunter than usual last week, as he defended his scaling back of the agency's science programme. Space scientists have responded angrily to the cutbacks (see Nature 439, 768–769; 2006), but Griffin insisted to two key advisory groups — the Space Studies Board and the science subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council — that the science programme is still healthy. He made it clear, however, that the White House's plan to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars takes priority over increased science funding. And although he is willing to rethink some specifics, he reminded scientists "to be respectful of the political and budgetary constraints we face".

Griffin's stance on...

Whether budget cuts might be reversed

We're willing to reconsider, but reconsideration should be based on community input, not the loudest voice, the longest e-mail or who can use the most capitals.

The outcry over cutting research grants

The community doesn't care if we fly missions; they want money for universities. I find that, to be honest with you, appalling.

A law requiring NASA to try to rescue the Hubble telescope — even though such a mission would take hundreds of millions of dollars from other science projects

I hope the astronomy community likes the decision they lobbied for. They better damn well like it, because they got it.

Cutbacks to life-sciences research aboard the International Space Station

What is the point of funding life-sciences research when I can't put people into space? I need the budget I have to recreate abilities that we once had to fly [beyond Earth orbit], that we don't have any more. It's a sequencing problem.

Deep cuts to NASA astrobiology

I did think astrobiology was less important than traditional space science. It had less intrinsic subject matter to it, and was less advanced. If the community rises up and says it should be funded, we'll rethink it.

Opportunities for science on the Moon

I have to draw the line when people say "I'm not interested in the Moon. I would rather put the money into studying the physics of the tropopause."

OK, great. Glad you have an opinion; everybody gets one. But the people who run the country have decided that we are in fact going to the Moon. It's a question of what scientists would like to do with that.

The importance of finishing the International Space Station

As administrator, I inherit a situation not of my liking. But other nations have spent a very significant part of their own discretionary space funding supporting our agenda. They built their hardware, and they want to see it flown. I want us to honour this commitment.

Climate Researchers Feeling Heat From White House

from WaPo:

By Juliet Eilperin

Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.

Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.

These scientists—working nationwide in research centers in such places as Princeton, N.J., and Boulder, Colo.—say they are required to clear all media requests with administration officials, something they did not have to do until the summer of 2004. Before then, point [out] climate researchers—unlike staff members in the Justice or State departments, which have long-standing policies restricting access to reporters—were relatively free to discuss their findings without strict agency oversight.

“There has been a change in how we’re expected to interact with the press,” said Pieter Tans, who measures greenhouse gases linked to global warming and has worked at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder for two decades. He added that although he often “ignores the rules” the administration has instituted, when it comes to his colleagues, “some people feel intimidated—I see that.”

Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said he had problems twice while drafting news releases on scientific papers describing how climate change would affect the nation’s water supply.

Once in 2002, Milly said, Interior officials declined to issue a news release on grounds that it would cause “great problems with the department.” In November 2005, they agreed to issue a release on a different climate-related paper, Milly said, but “purged key words from the releases, including ‘global warming,’ ‘warming climate’ and ‘climate change.’ “

Administration officials said they are following long-standing policies that were not enforced in the past. Kent Laborde, a NOAA public affairs officer who flew to Boulder last month to monitor an interview Tans did with a film crew from the BBC, said he was helping facilitate meetings between scientists and journalists.

“We’ve always had the policy, it just hasn’t been enforced,” Laborde said. “It’s important that the leadership knows something is coming out in the media, because it has a huge impact. The leadership needs to know the tenor or the tone of what we expect to be printed or broadcast.”

Several times, however, agency officials have tried to alter what these scientists tell the media. When Tans was helping to organize the Seventh International Carbon Dioxide Conference near Boulder last fall, his lab director told him participants could not use the term “climate change” in conference paper’s titles and abstracts. Tans and others disregarded that advice.

[full text...]

Once Upon a Forest

from truthout:

By Kelpie Wilson

I was on a radio program out of Detroit last week and the host asked me how things were going in the great forests of the Pacific Northwest. “Do people still sit in trees there?” he asked. “Are they still cutting down the big trees?”

My answer to both questions was yes. People do still sit in trees and protest logging. But these days, the protests rarely make the national news. The mainstream media has never allocated enough space to cover environmental news (while most newspapers have special sections on health, science, and technology, special environment sections are rare), and what space there is goes to the hottest issue of the moment. These days, understandably, it is global warming.

But the health and stability of the climate is intimately tied to the health and stability of forests. Destruction of forests and other wild land is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the total.

For this reason alone, the newest assault on America’s forests, House Resolution 4200, should be big news. HR 4200 passed out of the House Resources Committee last week (with the votes of 6 Democrats - showing that the timber industry spreads its influence around liberally). It goes to the Agriculture Committee for mark-up this week and then to a vote.

Also known as the “Walden logging bill,” after its sponsor, Oregon congressman Greg Walden, HR 4200, the “Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act” would mandate logging after natural disturbances like fires, droughts and windstorms. This bill would exempt salvage logging from every relevant environmental law, including the Endangered Species Act. The bill includes no protections for old-growth reserves, roadless forests, salmon streams or other sensitive areas. Making matters worse, it is an assault on public safety that would steal taxpayer dollars from fire prevention work in order to subsidize commercial logging.

Proponents of the Walden logging bill claim they need to slash environmental protections for burned forests because otherwise environmentalists will use the protections to appeal logging plans. Often, they say, appeals can drag out long enough that the burned timber rots and becomes worthless and if the timber can’t be sold then there won’t be enough money for replanting. Thus the politicians, who know best, must override the misguided environmentalists in order to “save” the forests.

There are two very large problems with this line of reasoning: the science and the facts. Chris Mooney, in his book The Republican War on Science, has documented the Right’s extremely well-orchestrated attack on science. Republicans have invented something they call “sound science,” which is basically any science that gives them the results that they want, as opposed to independent science that gives the wrong answers.

The attacks on science have been many and varied, ranging from distorting and misrepresenting reports from agencies like the US Fish and Wildlife Service to the outright silencing of scientists like NASA’s James Hansen who try to sound the alarm about climate change. In the case of salvage logging, there is a particularly bizarre story to tell.

The story starts with the ignition of the Biscuit Fire in the Siskiyou National Forest in the summer of 2002. The fire eventually burned through about 500,000 acres. Some acres burned heavily, some burned lightly, and some not at all as the fire skipped and swirled its way through the steep, wild canyons of the Siskiyou terrain.

With so much acreage burned, environmentalists knew that the pressure to log dead and dying trees, known as “salvage logging” or “post-fire logging” would be intense. Even though such logging does not help a forest recover, they prepared themselves to work with the Forest Service to design a salvage logging program that would do the least possible damage, and a plan to log about 100 million board feet moved ahead.

The timber sale planning was almost complete by the summer of 2003, when the Forest Service put it on hold for some new information - a study paid for by the Douglas County Commissioners on behalf of the timber industry. The study, conducted by forest engineer John Sessions at Oregon State University, showed that, with advanced engineering methods, loggers could feasibly pull 2 billion board feet - twenty times more wood - out of the burned areas. This was the study that delayed the logging plan. Environmentalists had nothing to do with it.

Implementing the Sessions Report delayed the start of logging by a year. During that year, micro-organisms went to work on the ash and fallen needles, turning them to soil. Seeds sprouted and tiny fir and pine trees rooted themselves, their first bright green branches unfurling. Tall trees, blackened and dying, continued to stand and provide shade for the tender seedlings, and homes for woodpeckers and other creatures as the ancient ones slowly rotted under the remains of their cindered bark.

The upshot of this corporate-sponsored delay? By the end of 2005, about 70 million board feet had been logged. Meanwhile, a group of graduate students at Oregon State University completed a study of forest regeneration in the Biscuit burn. They found that without logging, forests were beginning to re-grow on their own, but where salvage logging had occurred, new seedlings were killed as heavy equipment scraped the ground and disturbed the soil. The study was submitted to the prestigious journal Science, and accepted for publication.

But the study enraged proponents of Walden’s logging bill, as well as some pro-salvage logging professors in OSU’s Department of Forestry (which gets about 10 percent of its funding from the timber industry). They asked the editors of Science to pull the report. Science refused. The paper had gone through the regular peer-review process and been accepted.

Then, after report appeared in Science, the Bureau of Land Management, which had funded the study, put a hold on the remaining funds left in the grant. BLM officials said the students had violated their contract by attempting to influence legislation pending in Congress - the Walden logging bill.

So, to recap the situation: when a forest engineering study that is funded by timber industry boosters is used to bolster legislation proposed by a congressman who is funded by the timber industry (Greg Walden gets more money from the timber industry than any other House member - over $100,000 in 2004 alone), that is called “sound science.”

But when a group of independent graduate students studying ecology go out and make observations and measurements on the ground and get their paper accepted for publication by the most prestigious scientific journal in America, and that paper happens to contradict assertions used to justify pending legislation, that is called “junk science.”

“Proponents of expedited logging can’t provide a significant body of evidence that a nationwide program of logging in forests recovering from disturbance is scientifically justified,” said Dominick DellaSala, PhD, a forest ecologist for the World Wildlife Fund. “Of the more than 30 scientific papers on post-fire logging published to date, not a single one indicates that logging provides benefits to ecosystems regenerating after disturbance.”

Walden’s bill is wrong on the science. And Greg Walden has lied to justify the need for his emergency logging law, blaming environmentalists for the delay in the logging plan that was actually caused by the timber industry’s logging study.

America is beginning to wake up to the fact that the scientists were right about climate change all along, and that while the media is guilty of ignoring those warnings, the Bush administration is guilty of both censoring the science and of outright lying. It would be tragic to let a similar pack of lies bring the ax down on our last native forests.

The Siskiyou Project has a gallery of images that illustrate effects of post-fire logging along with sample letters for communicating with your legislators about this issue.

On Global Warming

Someone on Slashdot writes:

The problem with environmental issues is that, contrary to your assertion, the free market doesn’t work unaided. It’s an example of what economists would call an “externality”, because it’s a cost which doesn’t fall on the players in the market, and hence cannot supply information to that market.

The notion that if we don’t reduce our carbon emissions now then the world we be an ugly place in 50-100 years time simply can’t be accounted for without giving the free market a helping hand, because unaided there’s no mechanism by which that potential future event has a dollar cost for the companies and consumers involved in energy transactions today.

This is specifically the situation that governments are for - they are able to apply to a cost to something and hence influence the market in a way that accounts for this externality. For example, raising the tax on gasoline is a very direct way of applying some of that external cost into the appropriate market. The free market still does it’s work, we’ve just made the cost of gasoline what it “should” be to take account of future global warming. The market can then decide what to do about it, whether it’s building more efficient cars, taking fewer journeys, or investing in alternative fuel sources.

No need for fancy tax credits or pork barrel schemes. Just make the price of gasoline (and other carbon-emitting fuels) reflect the future global warming risk, and let the usual action of the market do it’s work.

EPA Dumbing Down its Research

Shrinking Environmental Research Budget Siphoned Off to Other Tasks

Washington, DC — The ability of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to conduct timely, cutting- edge research is threatened by diversion of money from a shrinking budget and by failure to defend its science from political manipulation, according to congressional testimony delivered today. After seven straight years of declining research budgets, President Bush has again proposed further cuts, aggravated by raids on the remaining research dollars to finance homeland security and public relations programs.

In addition to money woes, EPA’s research program is plagued by suppression of findings for non-scientific reasons and lack of protection for its scientists, according to testimony presented by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) Executive Director Jeff Ruch before the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Environment, Technology, and Standards. The hearing examined the proposed EPA Science and Technology budget for fiscal year 2007.

“There appears to be a deliberate policy of marginalizing EPA science on issue after issue, so that the agency is becoming increasingly irrelevant to emerging environmental threats,” Ruch testified, pointing to internal surveys showing a growing pessimism by agency scientists about the direction of EPA. “EPA’s public health research agenda has been neutered.”

Among the examples PEER raised before the Subcommittee are that EPA —

• Has kept its risk assessment for dioxin, a deadly yet widespread agent, in draft form for more than 12 years. The final assessment has still not been released;
• Diluted its recommended perchlorate safety standards so that states have been forced to step in and set their own standards. Perchlorate is a defense munitions compound that has been found in drinking water supplies in more than 20 states and is considered by many the leading Clean Water Act threat of the 21st century; and
• Is giving corporate contributors direct influence over which research projects are undertaken by entering into a record number of joint ventures.

EPA currently spends $557 million directly on environmental and health research and another $173 million on environmental technologies. While the Bush administration is proposing a slight increase in the overall combined budget for science and technology,

• The scientific research budget represents a 16% decline over the past three years when adjusted for inflation. Some areas, such as ecological research, would drop by more than one-fourth;
• New security programs for water supplies are being funded wholly out of research funds, as are questionable new public relations and information technology programs; and
• EPA contends it cannot afford its $2.5 million network of libraries, which it seeks to slash by 80%.

“The one group not being asked to testify about agency science is the EPA scientists themselves,” Ruch added. “Unfortunately, EPA has forbidden its own specialists from speaking without political clearance.”

EPA Closing its Midwest Library

Holding Will Be Stored Indefinitely; Public Access to Research Compromised

Washington, DC — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is closing its Midwest Regional Library serving universities, the public and its own staff in a six-state area, according to an internal email released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The agency is acting without waiting for Congress to approve the proposed budget cuts that are the basis for dismantling EPA’s entire library network.

In a March 13, 2006 memo to employees, EPA Midwestern Regional Administrator Thomas Skinner wrote that “the library will close in the near future” so as “to allow time for an orderly relocation of our library collection.” The affected library located in the Chicago regional headquarters serves the six-state region of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

The memo cites a 90% loss of funding for the regional library in President Bush’s proposed 2007 budget as the reason for closing the library, even though the proposal has yet to be voted on by Congress and the new federal fiscal year does not begin until October 1, 2006. The Midwest Regional Library is one of 27 libraries across the country whose budget the administration has proposed to reduce by 80%.

“By putting its research collections into indefinite storage, EPA might as well start burning books because these works are not likely to see the light of day again,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that the agency has allocated no money for moving collections to other libraries or digitizing the holdings so that they would be available online. “The loss of access to this research will remove potentially key information from the hands of researchers, inspectors and decision-makers.”

The plan to slash library funding is among the $300 million in EPA budget cuts proposed by the Bush administration. As originally proposed, the plan would also have de-funded the electronic catalog maintained by the EPA Headquarters library. When it was pointed out that eliminating the electronic catalog would make it impossible to find any holding within the network, EPA announced last week that it would restore the $500,000 reduction to its headquarters for the catalog. Unfortunately, EPA indicated that it would compensate for this action by spreading even deeper cuts cut among the other libraries.

In his email, Regional Administrator Skinner pledged that limited electronic access to research will remain available to EPA’s own staff but it is unclear what happens to the tens of thousands of research reports that are now only available as hard copies. At the same time, employees in other EPA regions are reporting parallel scrambles to cutback library services in anticipation of adoption of the agency’s FY 2007 budget.

“EPA might want to wait for Congress to act before its shutters its libraries,” Ruch added, noting that EPA spends more than a half-billion dollars a year on research and the total library network budget is only $2.5 million. “EPA’s national research plan is supposed to build on what we already know; but effectively deploying our existing knowledge base will be increasingly difficult if decades of research are locked away in storage.”

Read the email announcing the library closure (pdf)

Learn more about the Bush plan to close the EPA library network

Rewriting The Science

from 60 Minutes:

As a government scientist, James Hansen is taking a risk. He says there are things the White House doesn’t want you to hear but he’s going to say them anyway.

Hansen is arguably the world’s leading researcher on global warming. He’s the head of NASA’s top institute studying the climate. But this imminent scientist tells correspondent Scott Pelley that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science.

But he didn’t hold back speaking to Pelley, telling 60 Minutes what he knows.

Asked if he believes the administration is censoring what he can say to the public, Hansen says: “Or they’re censoring whether or not I can say it. I mean, I say what I believe if I’m allowed to say it.”

What James Hansen believes is that global warming is accelerating. He points to the melting arctic and to Antarctica, where new data show massive losses of ice to the sea.

Is it fair to say at this point that humans control the climate? Is that possible?

“There’s no doubt about that, says Hansen. “The natural changes, the speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface.”

Those human changes, he says, are driven by burning fossil fuels that pump out greenhouse gases like CO2, carbon dioxide. Hansen says his research shows that man has just 10 years to reduce greenhouse gases before global warming reaches what he calls a tipping point and becomes unstoppable. He says the White House is blocking that message.

“In my more than three decades in the government I’ve never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public,” says Hansen.

[full text...]

From Teapot Dome to Gale Norton

from truthout:

By Kelpie Wilson

The rights of the public to the nation’s natural resources outweigh private rights.
—Teddy Roosevelt

Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded.
—John Muir

As the Teapot Dome scandal of Warren G. Harding’s presidency was one milestone in the history of American resource piracy, the tenure of Gale Norton as Secretary of the Interior is surely another.

Harding’s Interior Secretary, Albert Fall, failed in his scheme to sell off the Teapot Dome oil reserves and pocket the money. He was prosecuted and sentenced to a year in prison. Gale Norton’s timely exit on the heels of the Abramoff scandal that implicates top Interior Department officials could mean that she is worried, but it is not likely that she will face any prosecution for her giveaways to industry.

Harding, like G.W. Bush, had little regard for proper English - Harding called for a return to “normalcy,” while Bush says we should not “misunderestimate” him. On Harding’s death, the poet E. E. Cummings said: “The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.” But just as Bush surpasses Harding as a mangler of language, so the Bush administration far outstrips the Harding administration in the game of looting.

Gone are the days when corrupt officials took payments in “little black bags,” as Albert Fall received his $100,000 payment for the Teapot Dome oil lease from Harry F. Sinclair. Fall also received a shipment from Sinclair of “six heifers, a yearling bull, two six-months-old boars, four sows and ... an English thoroughbred horse.”

Today our new reality is that the tycoons and the officials are actually the same persons, or at least part of the same hive. Like insects that go through a complex life cycle from larva to pupa tof egg-laying adult, people like Gale Norton and her deputy secretary Stephen J. Griles will go from lobbyist to regulator to corporate board member. At every stage of the life cycle they have one purpose: to direct the flow of resources back to the corporate nest.

And so, when Norton claims she is leaving the Interior Department to set “new goals to achieve in the private sector,” you know that she will be well supplied with hogs, heifers and whatever lucrative lawyering job she wants.

Gale Norton’s number one tool, which she used like a common thief slips a credit card up a door jamb to spring a cheap lock, is the ideology known as “Wise Use.” The “Wise Use” doctrine is founded on anti-government rhetoric that advocates eliminating any environmental regulations that might restrict economic development. Because she was so well known as a “Wise Use” ideologue, only John Ashcroft was a more controversial cabinet appointment in Bush’s first term.

During her tenure as Secretary, Norton advanced this agenda through regulatory rollbacks, suppression of science, preferential treatment, and collusion with industry. For the most part, she was unable to enshrine “Wise Use” principles in regulations, with the exception of her new National Park Service regulations.

Norton proceeded to revamp the Park Service regulations despite the lack of any identified need for new rules. Now in the final phase of adoption, the new directive drastically changes the mission of our national parks from preservation to commercially sponsored recreation. If these rules are adopted, park managers won’t be able to prevent development that harms wildlife and other natural features, and corporate logos will spring up like daisies.

These rules also require newly hired staff to take what amounts to a loyalty oath to the policies of the current administration. A loyalty oath may be the solution to the sticky problem of science that Norton kept running into. When her agency biologists reported that drilling in the Arctic Refuge would harm caribou, Norton rewrote the report before submitting it to Congress. She also suppressed a finding by the US Fish & Wildlife Service that new Army Corps rules for permitting development would devastate wetlands.

In fact, Norton created a climate of intimidation at the Interior Department that functions almost as effectively as an unconstitutional loyalty oath would: Last year the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility took a survey of Fish & Wildlife Service biologists and found that more than half of the respondents said agency officials had reversed or withdrawn the biologists’ scientific conclusions under pressure from industry groups.

Lying to Congress and suppressing scientific findings. How is it that these are not prosecutable offenses?

In 2001, Oregon potato farmers in the upper portion of the Klamath River suffering from a prolonged drought demanded that the Interior Department give them water dedicated to fish. Gale Norton complied, and in 2002, at least 35,000 salmon died at the mouth of the Klamath. The Klamath runs are now so low that the Fisheries Service is preparing to close the salmon fishing season, ruining a $150 million dollar industry. Gale Norton is responsible. Why can’t she be indicted for ruining a precious and irreplaceable natural resource?

Norton’s supporters, like the National Association of Manufacturers, praise her primarily for her role in opening up the West to massive amounts of new energy development. Interior Department staff began referring to Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico as the “OPEC states,” as the drilling permits multiplied and flew through the bureaucracy with minimal review and consultation with local citizens.

Norton’s own proudest accomplishment, she says, was implementing her “four C’s” program - a supposedly new approach to public involvement that included “communication, consultation and cooperation, all in the service of conservation.”

Unfortunately, the four C’s seem only to apply to industry and not to local people. Take for instance the town of Grand Junction, Colorado. Last September the BLM informed the city that a few hundred acres in the town’s watershed used for drinking water supplies would be offered for oil and gas drilling. Then in December, at the end of the public comment period, the BLM told the town that actually several thousand acres would be leased for drilling. The agency withheld the information because it would otherwise “taint” the competitive bidding process. The town does not want any drilling at all in their watershed. Why can’t Gale Norton be indicted for destroying a town’s water supply?

I can testify that the same process is happening in BLM’s western forest lands where, on orders from Gale Norton, the BLM is tossing the Northwest Forest Plan out the window and preparing to log every last old growth forest that they manage in Washington, Oregon and California. Many public meetings are held, but they are all a waste of time because the communication, consultation and cooperation are not intended for local people but only for the timber industry.

Under Gale Norton’s leadership, the Department of Interior has become nothing less than a big box store for the mining, timber, oil, gas, and coal industries. As CEO, Norton has eliminated all rivals to give her corporate customers “low, low prices every day.” Meanwhile, fish and wildlife and all the rest of us who need clean air and water underwrite the true cost.

Bush’s new nominee for Secretary of the Interior, Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne, is known for his animosity toward protecting the last wild roadless areas in Idaho. Unless something changes in Congress or the White House, unless Gale Norton is somehow made to pay the price for her looting of public resources, there is no doubt that he will keep the store open for business.