Skeptical Science New Research for Week #4, 2020

Suggested suitable pairings

While openly lamenting inability to accurately categorize aquatic features in the country and promising to catalog these at some time in the future, the US EPA has exploited this very lack of information to redefine the term "navigable waters." Formal announcement of this policy change took place at the annual convention of home builders in the US, a subtle clue about who is being served by the EPA. The change will help making messes easier and more convenient for people with an interest in making messes. In a sufficiently motivated reasoner's mind, ignorance reveals an ocean of possibilities.

Among other backward effects EPA's new chart built from incomprehension will allow land developers and others to pretend that the world ends at their own property line, which is of course a fallacy. "Object persistence" is something grasped by everybody save infants and people who have personal reasons to be oblivious. We all know that homeowners are not permitted to truncate sanitary sewer lines at their property lines, because "stuff" doesn't actually vanish when it's out of immediate sight and it's not fair to put "stuff" where it affects other people who don't want that "stuff" stinking things up. The commonsense concepts and rationales behind this intelligent convention scale to all levels.

As with going forward, retreat from progress requires steps. Degradation doesn't happen out of thin air. A tactical mechanism employed by the current presidential administration of the US in fostering regulatory degeneracy is that of attacking scientific input to policy formulation at all levels, annoyingly often under the cosmetic guise of "improvements." A critical review of EPA's "transparency" proposal (pdf, journal link below) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science helps to expose the disingenuous methods employed by the Trump administration as it strives to dial the clock back to a romantic era of unfettered freedom to avoid personal responsibility for making things difficult for other people.

Cleverly cultivated ignorance will come at a cost. Several articles in this week's GHG sources & sinks, flux and Biology & global warming sections of our research news illustrate the importance of wetlands to our future well being, information of the kind EPA's present leadership is intent on hiding from.

Regulations pair with things needing protecting. Unlike wine with a meal this is a reluctant pairing; nobody really likes or wants regulations. Equally, anybody with a basic grasp of human nature understands that environmental regulations are what we must tolerate in a world where a few people just don't care about others and need to be coerced into taking charge of their own effluvia. We're seeing another illustration of this uncorked before our very eyes.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #4, 2020

Suggested suitable pairings

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