Another warning, to the US, about the risks of Republican Party scientific policy

[billvon]

Energy lost in transmission and distribution: About 6% – 2% in transmission and 4% in distribution – or 69 trillion Btus in the U.S. in 2013

Right - but that's sort of the opposite of what you said before. Those transmission losses INCREASE under conditions of high load. In other words, they are wasting a lot of electricity during high usage, but less during times of low usage.

Well that supports my statement that having lots of electric cars will not place an additional burden on the grid, but use the otherwise unused energy.

It will utilize otherwise-unused CAPACITY - not energy. Charging EV's at night will increase wasted energy, just because the load on the grid will go up. However, we will not need to build new power plants to support them.[/quote]

 

[iceaura]

In the debate over some of this Republican administration's new regulations of government funded science, we discover that the EPA administrator overseeing the implementation of one of the worst (and most politically "sensitive") new rules does not know what he is doing:
https://blog.ucsusa.org/gretchen-goldman/wheelers-breathtaking-ignorance-of-science-in-one-comment

Yesterday at the EPA’s Science Advisory Board meeting, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler made comments on the agency’s proposed Restricting Science Rule that raised eyebrows for anyone who understands the basics of health studies. In his defense of the rule (which the scientific community agrees will severely hamstring the agency’s ability to rely on the best available science in its decision-making), Wheeler asserted that the EPA should be more like the FDA in its data transparency. The FDA uses double-blind studies and the EPA should be taking that approach, he suggested.

Background: https://science.sciencemag.org/cont...uth-code=c0422d13-96b9-4113-9403-aa01f0d34606

Political background, briefly: https://mikethemadbiologist.com/2019/06/10/thatthats-not-what-double-blinded-means/

This is not a Trump-specific phenomenon. It is just Dubya-era reality manufacturing, applied to domestic policy. And like it did back then, it’s going to kill some of us.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

 

[Speakpigeon]

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1007218

What this says is that in the normal human environment of US civilization convergent evolution is driving common human-associated bacteria,
even those who are as yet only infrequent pathogens, i.e. not being targeted with antibiotics,
to evolve mechanisms of antibiotic resistance which have no apparent vulnerability associated with them. They do not decrease fitness in any known way.

They are not self clearing, in other words. They are permanent residents.

If they ever become virulent, they will be antibiotic resistant from day one. If they ever exchange genetics with a pathogen, the pathogen can gain resistance immediately and without evolutionary cost.

How come?
EB

 

[iceaura]

Republican policy makers don't want their science advisors close at hand, and they don't want them to contradict Republican claims at all. Ways to accomplish that include cutting off their funding, moving politically inconvenient researchers into non-productive bureaucratic backwater jobs, and making lots of rules enforced via political overseers concerning what they are allowed to tell people about their findings. Such things have been done in Republican administrations since Reagan, ramped up especially under W, and now even more under Trump. But that can look bad. It reminds people of how the Soviets trashed their biological sciences for decades.

A better way, less accountable, is to get key researchers to quit and then never replace them, preventing them and their former agencies from publishing their findings or even having findings at all, while moving the rest of the operations to someplace far from Republican policy makers and little populated by journalists and other pests:
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article...es-thats-really-bad-news-for-climate-research

The effort comes after the Trump administration suggested cutting the Economic Research Service’s budget by nearly one-third, and after the USDA issued a mandate that its scientists refer to published research as “preliminary.” Taken together, employees say the move to Kansas City amounts to little more than an effort to stifle their research.