One More Air-Pollution Study

In the last post I confused this study (PDF) with an earlier one by the same group of researchers; I wrote about the earlier one, but linked to a post on Paul Whiteley's blog about the more recent one, which was published just last November.

(I also started describing this one, and then switched to describing the earlier one; in my last post, only one of the studies I mentioned used air-pollution data from the EPA's air-monitoring stations. The earlier study by these authors only used proximity to high-traffic roadways as their variable indicating pollution exposure.)

This paper combined the methods of the two studies I wrote about in the last post; it used the same pool of children born in California between 1997 and 2006 and drew on two sources of data on air pollution at the time and place those children were born: the EPA's air-quality data that I wrote about yesterday, and a computer model of average traffic flow, and exhaust emissions, along California's major roadways.

To some extent, you could see it as a more geographically dispersed version of the study I described yesterday that looked at prenatal exposure to air pollution in just Los Angeles County. 

(Weirdly, the LA-County-only study, though restricted to a smaller geographic area, involved way more people than the two traffic-related studies: 7,603 autistic and 75,782 control subjects, as opposed to this study's 279 autistic and 245 control subjects.)

But the relatively straightforward EPA data, which are direct measurements of the concentration of various pollutants at regular intervals, and which are only abstracted from each child's actual prenatal exposure in that 1) they do not measure what concentration of those pollutants actually got into the mothers' bodies, much less the fetuses', and 2) they were taken at sites some distance away from where the children actually live. 

So it's not a perfect data source, but it's still a lot more directly reflective of reality than this computer model seems to be:

The principal model inputs are roadway geometry, link-based traffic volumes, period-specific meteorological conditions (wind speed and direction, atmospheric stability, and mixing heights), and vehicle emission rates. Detailed roadway geometry data and annual average daily traffic counts were obtained from Tele Atlas/Geographic Data Technology in 2005. These data represent an integration of state-, county-, and city-level traffic counts collected between 1995 and 2000. Because our period of interest was from 1997 to 2008, the counts were scaled to represent individual years based on estimated growth in county average vehicle-miles-traveled data. Traffic counts were assigned to roadways based on location and street names. Traffic volumes on roadways without count data (mostly small roads) were estimated based on median volumes for similar class roads in small geographic regions. Meteorological data from 56 local monitoring stations were matched to the dates and locations of interest. Vehicle fleet average emission factors were based on the California Air Resource Board's EMFAC2007 (version 2.3) model. Annual average emission factors were calculated by year (1997-2008) for travel on freeways (65 mph), state highways (50 mph), arterials (35 mph), and collector roads (30 mph) (to convert to kilometers, multiply by 1.6). We used the CALINE4 model to estimate locally varying ambient concentrations of nitrogen oxides contributed by freeways, nonfreeways, and all roads located within 5 km of each child's home. Previously, we have used the CALINE4 model to estimate concentrations of other traffic-related pollutants, including elemental carbon and carbon monoxide, and found that they were almost perfectly correlated (around 0.99) with estimates for nitrogen oxides. Thus, our model-based concentrations should be viewed as an indicator of the traffic-related pollutant mixture rather than of any pollutant specifically.

So, to arrive at an estimate of how much of a certain category of air pollution (traffic-related air pollution) each mother and child in their study had been exposed to, they used a computer model to come up with average emissions for vehicles all over the state, traveling at various average speeds corresponding with their various categories of roads, for each year in their study. Then they entered that, along with all the other types of data mentioned above (winds, atmospheric conditions, traffic volume, road layout) into another computer model to arrive at the final answer.

I'm not criticizing their model; it actually seems like a pretty good one to my untrained eye. But my point is that there's a lot of extrapolating, averaging, assuming that what's true for location x will also be true for location y, and other things that make the model work but aren't grounded in direct observation and thus might not actually be true. 

That will be the case for any model, and this one has a few serious gaps in its data pool. They're missing eight years of traffic data from their eleven-year "period of interest," so they have to guess at what those numbers might be based on expected growth in traffic volumes. They're also missing traffic counts for some roads, so they estimate them based on the counts for other, similarly-sized roads.

It bears repeating that this model was not their only source of data on pollution exposure; they also used direct measurements taken by the EPA air-monitoring station(s) nearest to study participants' houses throughout the study period.

For traffic-related air pollution --- the type of pollution exposure they modeled rather than measured directly --- they found a difference between the highest- and lowest-exposure groups (with the former three times as likely to develop autism as the latter), but no difference between the lowest-exposure group and the two groups in the middle.

For the specific pollutants measured at EPA air-monitoring stations --- coarse and fine particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, ozone --- they found an increased likelihood of autism associated with greater exposure to particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, but not ozone. This effect was strongest during the third trimester of pregnancy. 

Unlike the other study I described that used the EPA air-quality data, this one did not find any change in the pattern when they adjusted for sociodemographic variables like child's sex, race/ethnicity, parents' educational level, mother's age, or mother's smoking during pregnancy.

Volk, H., Lurmann, F., Penfold, B., Hertz-Picciotto, I., & McConnell R. (2013). Traffic-Related Air Pollution, Particulate Matter, and AutismAir Pollution, Particulate Matter, and Autism JAMA Psychiatry, 70 (1) DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2013.266

Bizarre Things Purported to Cause Autism: Early Exposure to Air Pollution

A quick note: my (very) occasional "Bizarre Things..." series was never intended solely as a crank roundup. No, in my mind I resolved to cover every autism hypothesis*, however well- or ill-founded, plausible or implausible, that I ever heard of and thought "well, that's weird!"

Indeed, I have tagged (though not titled) a post discussing a pretty rigorous, well-thought-out study investigating something that's been common wisdom for a long, long time with the "bizarre hypotheses" label just because its tentative conclusion --- that there may be something more to the relationship between autism diagnoses and social class than the fact that rich people can afford to get their children seen by specialists and poor people can't --- surprised me.

So sometimes bizarreness is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

Anyway, on to the business at hand.

Paul Whiteley has written a couple of posts on the idea that exposure to air pollution might play a role in determining whether a kid develops autism; he talks specifically about these two studies working with the same two data sets: the state of California's Department of Developmental Services' records of all children diagnosed with autism in the state, and where they lived at , and also data from the federal Environmental Protection Agency's Ambient Air Monitoring Program.

I've written about the former data set before, but not the latter. The EPA measures six major outdoor air pollutants (I'm sure they do a lot more, too, but these six are the ones that affect air-quality indices): two sizes of "particulate matter" (dust, ash, soot, smog), the "coarse" particles measuring between 2.5 and 10 micrometers in diameter or length, and "fine" particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers; carbon monoxide; nitrogen oxides; sulfur dioxide; lead; and ozone. They have monitoring stations set up all over the country, particularly thick on the ground near big, sprawling cities. How often the stations record measurements varies with what kind of equipment is being used to take them; some pollutants can only be measured daily, or once every few days, though some can be measured hourly. Either way, it's a huge volume of data.

The authors of the more recent study (PDF) restricted their analysis to Los Angeles County, so I can actually tell you how many monitoring stations' data that would encompass.

Map showing the locations of all the EPA air monitoring stations in LA County --- made by me!

This PDF lists, among lots and lots of other things, all the EPA air-monitoring stations in California and where they are located. Within Los Angeles County, it looks like there are nineteen: one in Commerce, one in Azusa, one in Burbank, one in Industry, one in Compton, one in Glendora, one at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), two in Long Beach, two in Los Angeles, one in Pasadena, one in Pico Rivera, one in Pomona, one in Vernon, one in Reseda, one in Santa Clarita, one in Santa Fe Springs, and one at the Van Nuys Airport. So I guess that's technically five that are somehow part of LA or attached to it. Not all of them measure every one of the six pollutants, either, but you can see which of them track what in the PDF I linked earlier.

The earlier study** focused on families living near highways throughout the state of California, and while I might theoretically be able to put together a list of all the cities and towns that have highways running through them, and cross-check that with the EPA's records of where their monitoring stations are (assuming they publicize them all), it sounds like more armchair detective work*** than I want to do. So I can't tell you how many stations are contributing their data to this study, but I'd guess that it's more than the LA County-only study used.

Anyway, both studies involved matching the geographic location of each autistic child in the study with some other spatial variable: for the earlier study, this other variable was distance between where they were born and a freeway or major road; for the more recent study, it was the EPA monitoring station nearest to where they were born. In that study, the researchers looked at the measurements for each pollutant recorded nearest to each child's birthplace averaged over each trimester of gestation.

Both studies compared their autistic subjects to same-age, same-sex peers from the same general area (LA County for the one study, not specified for the other); the ratio was 1:1 in the smaller, older study and 10:1 (control:autism) in the bigger, newer one. So the idea was, I guess, to check whether kids living in the same county, city, suburb, or whatever as a kid without autism tended to have lower prenatal exposure to air pollution (new study) or live somewhat further away from the closest high-traffic road (old study), than the kid with autism.

What did they find? It's complicated; in the newer, just-LA-county study, they found that exposure to some of the six pollutants was actually associated with a slightly lower likelihood of having an autism diagnosis, at least in the (more****) raw data. The only pollutant to show a significant increase in odds ratio (a measure of how much more likely a child exposed to a given pollutant is to develop autism than an unexposed child; if it's less than 1, it means less likely, more than 1 means more likely) before logistic regression was ozone, which gave a 1.19 odds ratio. (That's also the biggest increase found anywhere in this study, regression or no).

After adjusting for a bunch of variables they had expected to correlate with pollution exposure (maternal age, maternal education, race/ethnicity, gestational age and others), the odds ratio for ozone went down while the odds ratios for the other pollutants (nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and particulate matter) went up. Where they had been sitting at about 0.8 or 0.9 (i.e., maybe ten, fifteen or twenty percent less likely?), they moved to about 1.05. 

I have only the faintest notion of what a logistic regression actually does, but my understanding of it is that, when researchers have a lot of variables closely intertwined with the variable they're trying to study, they use a logistic regression to "correct for" those other variables. It's like a way to try and zero in on the one strand in the snarl that you're trying to trace.

Anyway, they also did another regression, this time by maternal education only, and compared odds ratios for autism risk associated with each pollutant among three groups: mothers with less than a high-school education, mothers with a high-school education, and mothers with more than a high-school education. Except for ozone, the odds ratio for each pollutant went up slightly as maternal education increased, with the biggest differences between the least- and most-educated categories. 

Somehow, the mother's level of education affects how strongly exposure to these airborne pollutants predicts whether her children develop autism.

I have absolutely no clue what to make of that, if I'm even reading it right.

The roads study's outcome was less brain-twisting: they found a correlation between living near a freeway (i.e., a state or interstate highway) and getting a diagnosis of autism, but they found no such correlation for other high-traffic roads. Since it's probably not the case that different kinds of pollutants are being spewed out by vehicles on highways vs. other big, heavily-traveled roads*****, I'm going to follow David Gorski's lead and write off the freeway association as an artifact of data-dredging.

Becerra, T., Wilhelm, M., Olsen, J., Cockburn, M., & Ritz, B. (2012). Ambient Air Pollution and Autism in Los Angeles County, California Environmental Health Perspectives DOI: 10.1289/ehp.1205827

Volk, H., Hertz-Picciotto, I., Delwiche, L., Lurmann, F., & McConnell, R. (2010). Residential Proximity to Freeways and Autism in the CHARGE Study Environmental Health Perspectives, 119 (6), 873-877 DOI: 10.1289/ehp.1002835

*Yes, I have yet to do posts on the big ones, like mercury, thimerosal (really part of the mercury one, but some people propose mercury-based explanations that don't mention thimerosal, so they probably deserve separate posts --- anyway the thimerosal one would be long enough even if it weren't folded into a larger post on mercury compounds), MMR. It's less a matter of not knowing what I want to say than it is a matter of figuring out whether, or how, to marshal all the available evidence.

**I belatedly find out that this study is actually a precursor to the one Whiteley is writing about, not the same one. The one he writes about takes an approach that looks to me like a blend of the two I'm writing about now: looking at both air-pollution data and proximity to high-traffic roads.

***Actually, it's not even armchair detective work, as I am not in an armchair when I use the computer. It's armless-hard-wooden-chair detective work, which is somewhat more grueling than armchair detective work. 

****I'm not sure how much, if any, of the data in this paper can be considered "raw" when you consider how much tinkering they did with the air-pollution data.

*****You could perhaps make an argument that it could be the case, what with there probably being more trucks on the highways than not, and with trucks using diesel instead of gasoline. I am unsure if that would make a difference in how much particulate matter or nitrogen oxides are produced, and also quite skeptical that such a difference would show up at all in a study like this.

Republicans vs. the EPA - Part II

In this installment of the "Republicans vs. the EPA" series I'm going to focus on one particular legislative attempt to abolish the EPA.

In the spring of 2011, Republican legislators in both houses introduced two versions of a bill that would abolish both the EPA and the Department of Energy, and replace them with a combined Department of Energy and Environment.

This was promoted as a cost-saving measure, but it seems to me that it would also mean the environmental-protection aspect of the combined agency's mission would necessarily be compromised by no longer being the sole guiding purpose of its own agency, but instead one of many different, sometimes competing objectives.

For instance, the proposed DOEE would be responsible, not just for drafting and enforcing regulations to protect the environment and human health, but also for making sure the country's power plants (particularly the nuclear ones) are safe from terrorist attacks, and for research into better ways to generate electricity.

It seems to me very likely that, in the tug-of-war for funding, the counterterrorism and R&D functions would win a greater share of the agency's budget than the boring, stick-in-the-mud regulatory function. I also find it easy to imagine intra-agency pressure building on the regulatory side not to regulate natural-resource extraction too heavily --- especially in areas where the expected energy yield is high, like the use of hydraulic fracturing to get at buried reservoirs of natural gas.

(You don't have to take my word for it that combining these agencies would produce a conflict of interest, either --- here's a short article that former DOE employee Joe Romm wrote for Think Progress explaining why he thinks that would be the likely outcome of such a merger.)

Anyway, that's enough background information. On to the lists!

Here are the seventeen Republican senators who co-sponsored the Senate version of the bill:
Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY)*
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO)
Sen. John Boozman (R-AR)
Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) - wrote and introduced the bill
Sen. Dan Coats (R-IN)
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK)
Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS)
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)
Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY)
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX)
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI)
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT)**
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL)
Sen. John Thune (R-SD)
Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA)
Sen. David Vitter (R-LA)

And here are the eleven House members who co-sponsored the House version of the bill almost a year later:
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) - introduced and sponsored bill
Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH)
Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC)
Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ)
Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX)
Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS)
Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX)
Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO)
Rep. Sue Wilkins Myrick (R-NC)
Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX)
Rep. David P. (Phil) Roe (R-TN)

The Senate bill seems to have died in committee on the same day it was introduced. The House bill, though it bounced around lots of different committees, also seems to have been tabled. Neither one ever came up for a vote.

*I'm really tempted, doing those party-and-state abbreviations, to borrow Melissa McEwan's convention of writing things like "R-Epulsive", "R-Idiculous," "R-etrograde," "R-Eally??", etc. But I figured I'd best stick with writing their actual state, in the interest of providing more information.

**Aren't Wyoming and Utah lucky? Both of those states' entire Senate delegations co-sponsored this bill!

Republicans vs. the EPA - Part I

I read a post on a blog called Brute Reason listing the worst parts of the Texas Republican Party's platform, and the first thing on the list was a call to repeal the Endangered Species Act and abolish the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).


This was not the first time I'd seen the EPA targeted in Republican rhetoric; actually, I seem to read something about how the EPA is too powerful*, too radical**, and ought either to have its influence greatly diminished or be dissolved outright coming from a prominent Republican on a regular basis!


I started to leave a comment to that effect on the other blogger's post, and decided to perform an exercise in just how mainstream this virulent anti-environmentalism is in the Republican Party.

Since Miriam's post was about a state party platform, I think I will start there as well.

Here's a list of all the states whose Republican party platforms include calls for the abolition of the EPA: 
Iowa (PDF - relevant quotes on page 5):

Environment 

9.1 We support the pre-eminence of personal property rights and the freedom for individual property owners to manage their property above the protection of wildlife. We support maintaining an environmental policy that protects the rights of humans before animals, insects, and other creatures.

... 

9.3 We call for closing government branches, offices, and agencies that strip us of economic prosperity in the name of saving the environment. We should eliminate policies and rules related to this.

Nevada:

We support eliminating the ... Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other bureaucracies that have consistently demonstrated wasteful spending and operational inefficiencies. We believe these functions, where needed, should be relegated to the States as defined by the Tenth Amendment.

Oklahoma (PDF - relevant quote on page 34):

WE SUPPORT: 

...6. Abolishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, ... and distribution of [its] powers and responsibilities to state authority.

Texas (PDF - relevant quote at top of page 4):

Protection from Extreme Environmentalists - We strongly oppose all efforts of the extreme environmental groups that stymie legitimate business interests. We strongly oppose those efforts that attempt to use the environmental causes to purposefully disrupt and stop those interests within the oil and gas industry. We strongly support the immediate repeal of the Endangered Species Act. We strongly oppose the listing of the dune sage brush lizard as either a threatened or an endangered species. We believe the Environmental Protection Agency should be abolished.

Wyoming (PDF - relevant quote on page 48):

Be It Further Resolved that the Wyoming Republican Party calls for elimination of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency.

... and here are all the states whose branches of the Republican Party have language in their platforms that, while not calling for the outright elimination of the EPA, seeks to restrict its  
California (PDF - relevant quotes on pages 1 and 4):

Government should create a favorable policy environment supportive of California's farmers and ranchers ... . California's approach, rather, has been one beset by over-regulation, environmental extremism, and restricted access to water, the agricultural sector's lifeblood.

... 

We believe that we can have both a healthy economy and a healthy environment, and believe in environmental policies supported by sound science, innovation, new technologies and incentives rather than regulation, taxation and litigation. Environmental regulations must be balanced and tempered by the effect that they will have on workers and on the economy. We believe that the Kyoto Treaty is fundamentally flawed because ignores the fact that the largest source of greenhouse gas in the world is China, which is exempt from the requirements of Kyoto.

...

We believe that entrepreneurs, using technology, innovation and incentives, are more likely to solve environmental problems than bureaucrats. 

Idaho (PDF - relevant quotes pp. 6-7):

Sec. 1 We believe that it is ultimately the individual's responsibility to act as stewards of their environment. The quality of our natural environment should be protected, and enhanced, while allowing reasonable, orderly growth with emphasis on multiple uses, local control, and minimal government regulation. 

Sec. 2 We believe the administration of federal environmental policy must be modified. These policies must give equal consideration to potential human suffering caused by restriction or elimination of basic human needs such as jobs, energy and overall quality of life. We support federal and state measures to re-establish the primacy of state government for implementation of environmental policy. 

Sec. 3 We discourage international regulations on industry which attempt to halt the production of certain industrial byproducts. Instead, we encourage citizens to adopt buying habits that promote a clean earth.

Maine:

Promote energy independence aggressively by removing the obstacles created by government to allow private development of our resources; natural gas, oil, coal, and nuclear power.

Missouri (PDF - relevant quotes pp. 4-5):

At a time when the state and federal economy is faltering, some in Washington have proposed extreme, job-killing measures to regulate carbon dioxide. While it is important to balance economic growth and the environment, these regulations, which would raise prices on every single person in the country, are a step too far.  

Therefore, the Missouri Republican Party SUPPORTS:

• Efforts to prevent any state or federal cap & trade scheme from taking effect.

• Efforts to prevent EPA from unilaterally regulating carbon dioxide.

...

• Environmental regulation premised upon sound free market principles and elimination of environmental regulation that imposes excessive financial burdens for tenuous incremental benefit.

North Carolina (PDF - relevant quote bottom of page 6):

If regulation is needed to protect the environment, government should only proceed with evidence that the benefits warrant the cost. Humans are a critical component of the ecosystem. Regulations must ensure a balance between humans and the environment.

North Dakota (PDF, relevant quotes pp. 5-7, p.10, pp. 13-15):

RESOLUTION NUMBER 11: ENERGY INDUSTRY... BE IT RESOLVED: The North Dakota Republican Party supports a balanced approach to the environmental and economic issues which will provide resolution to emissions of all sources of green house gases; and  

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: The North Dakota Republican Party opposes efforts like the Kyoto Protocol and legislative proposals such as McCain-Lieberman, Lieberman-Warner, Boxer-Sanders, Kerry-Snowe, Bingaman-Specter, and Feinstein-Carper that impose a cap and trade program that will adversely affect North Dakota's economy without balance to the environmental issues....RESOLUTION NUMBER 13: NATIONAL ENERGY SUPPLY STABILITYWHEREAS: The environmental impact of oil drilling and refineries can be reasonably controlled by modern technology; and  

WHEREAS: The United States needs increased supply of crude oil from North American sources....THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED: The North Dakota Republican Party supports private industry building or expanding more oil refineries in North Dakota and in the nation to lower the cost of gas and reduce our dependence on foreign oil; and  

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: The process for obtaining the permits or expand to build refineries should be changed in a manner that would speed the process; and 

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: The North Dakota Republican Party supports the drilling for oil off America's coasts and other places where it is now restricted....
RESOLUTION NUMBER 24: PROPERTY OWNERS' RIGHTS'WHEREAS: At the national level, some administrative rules and regulations promulgated to implement legislation, such as, but not limited to, "Swampbuster," the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act have usurped the rights of citizens to the beneficial use of private property without just compensation; and 

WHEREAS: As state agencies promulgate rules and regulations to implement state laws, they regularly affect the use of privately-held resources without due consideration of the economic impacts the rules and regulations impose on the owners of those resources; and 

WHEREAS: As governmental agencies (and the regulations they foster) have grown, private property rights have been diminished, and the operating costs of businesses forced to comply with such increased regulation have increased dramatically; and 

WHEREAS: The quality of life for all North Dakotans hinges on the state's businesses being allowed to compete without unnecessary and undue regulations; 

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED: That the North Dakota Republican Party supports any legislation that prevents the taking of rights to the beneficial use of property by its owner without just and actual compensation....RESOLUTION NUMBER 32: OPPOSING DISCRETIONARY REGULATION OF CARBON DIOXIDE BY THE U.S. EPA... BE IT RESOLVED: That the North Dakota Republican Party opposes the delegated discretionary regulation of carbon dioxide by the U.S. EPA or any other agency, and supports that any restrictions on carbon dioxide should be directed only by the elected members of Congress....RESOLUTION NUMBER 35: OPPOSING THE EXPANSION OF FEDERAL CONTROL OVER WATERWHEREAS: The federalized control of "all" waters in the United States means centralized control of the most critical requirement for the sustenance of all life, including human life; 

WHEREAS: The federalized control of "all" water defines a jurisdiction so comprehensive as to constitute control of even ephemeral waters; 

WHEREAS: The management of land and non-navigable waters is fully integrated and cannot be separated, so that federalized control of "all" waters virtually constitutes total control of all agriculture, and all management or development of private land; 

WHEREAS: Therefore, federalized control of "all" waters constitutes nothing other than total federal control and jurisdiction over the water we drink, the production of the food we eat, the measures we undertake to protect or enhance our properties, and provides a tool so powerful as to create a risk of tyranny in its full application;...THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: The North Dakota Republican Party opposes any federal agency rules ... that may be proposed to broaden the authority to regulate water, and urges their immediate repeal ...

South Carolina (PDF, relevant quote on page 25):

1. Environmental risks/concerns must be faced accurately, neither exaggerated nor underestimated; environmental remediation must incorporate the concepts of cost/benefit, risk analysis, and public/private cooperation. 

2. Environmental progress is integrally related to economic development as economic growth generates the capital to pay for environmental gains and as environmental preservation creates an atmosphere conducive to a high quality of life and economic development. 

3. The right to own, use, and dispose of private property is a fundamental political tenet of all free nations. Property rights are not to be violated by the misuse or overuse of government regulation and should dictate due compensation when a taking occurs. 

4. The United States, in the exercise of her sovereignty, should not "ratify any treaty that moves environmental decisions beyond our democratic process and transfers beyond our shores authority over U.S. property" (1992 Republican National Platform).

Vermont:

SECTION III  

BALANCING OUR ECONOMY AND ENVIRONMENT

Vermont Republicans believe we must value Vermont's economic environment with the same respect we value our natural environment. 

Wisconsin:

We believe we can solve our environmental problems more quickly and cost-effectively with innovation and new technology than with more litigation and more government regulation. 

We believe entrepreneurs are more likely to solve America's environmental problems than bureaucrats. 

We support measures to encourage businesses to voluntarily cut pollution.

(A note about the wording on some of these, particularly about striving for "balance" between the environment and the economy, or, more specifically, between a given regulation's benefit to the environment and the cost to industry of compliance with it: the EPA already factors such cost/benefit analyses into its recommendations, so what these stipulations are actually asking is that greater weight be given to the economic-impact side of the cost/benefit equation.)


I was going to have this all be one post, listing not only all the state Republican Party platforms with anti-EPA (or generically anti-environmental regulation) language but also every currently-serving US Senator, Representative, or state governor who has made anti-EPA pronouncements, or acted to abolish, defund, restrict the EPA or block its actions, but the list got so long, and it was taking so long to ferret them all out, that I decided to break it up in the interest of being able to post something this month. (Hyperbole, I hope).

As to this part of the list, I'm not sure whether I'm more relieved to see that my current state of residence is not on the list than I am mortified to see the state I was born in, and still consider my home state, right there at the top. I had thought better of Iowa.

*It's not

**Oh, how I wish

Two Quick Links about Why the Fight over Evolution Matters

So, apparently Kevin Drum, a political commentator I don't read but who is apparently somewhat well-known, has written an article for Mother Jones declaring the fight over how whether biology is taught in public schools an irrelevant sideshow. 


I was nonplussed by this. Obviously, it's not the most important issue in the world --- it doesn't pose an existential threat the way climate change, peak oil/peak everything, overpopulation and hunger do, and it doesn't have the dire social consequences (or moral urgency) of, say, restricting access to contraception, the mass incarceration of people of color and poor people, increasing economic inequality or the deliberate demolition of the welfare state --- but I still felt like it had some importance that went beyond mere cultural border-policing*.


Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon and PZ Myers at Pharyngula both responded to Drum's article, and each of them made points that rang true for me, and helped explain why his statement bothered me.


Amanda:

I have to admit, I'm boggled at Kevin Drum's reaction to the news that nearly half of Americans are young Earth creationists ... . He completely misreads the situation and frankly does so in a way that I personally felt thrown under the bus.

... 

Kevin takes it as a given that fights over what's taught in high school are strictly about symbolism and have no real importance. I suspect that's a much easier view to take if you're the beneficiary of a good public school in a blue area or lucky enough to have gone through or been able to put your own kids through private school. For someone who went to a rural high school in Texas, the notion that high school doesn't matter strikes me as ridiculous in the extreme. 

The reason conservatives target high schools (and junior high schools and elementary schools) isn't because they're playing for peanuts. On the contrary, conservatives understand something liberals don't, which is that if you get people while they're young, you usually have them for life. This is also, incidentally, why conservatives pay more attention to pop culture than liberals. Liberals are great people --- I'm one of them! --- but  we have a tendency towards preening individualism and therefore discount the importance of things like what's in the classroom and what's on TV because we personally feel we're iconoclasts who aren't affected by it. Which can, in this case, cause us to neglect to remember that in fact this is the air that most people breathe, and the quality of that air matters. 

I also had strong feelings of no you're wrong when I read the paragraph in Drum's article where he dismisses "a 10th grade understanding of evolution" as something so piddling as to be dispensed with entirely, so much does it pale in comparison to the understanding of evolution one gets (presumably) in college, or in books on evolutionary biology. PZ, along with a slew of other biology professors in his comments and at Mother Jones, takes him to task for this; they write that, no, actually, they have noticed a change in how readily their students grasp what they have to teach. Almost as if high school curricula were geared toward preparing the students for college ... 


Anyway, what felt unfair to me was his assumption that, if people needed the knowledge, they could always pick it up elsewhere. This made me angry, because for many people there is no "elsewhere," or at least not one that is immediately accessible without guidance. 


(Who has tried to teach themselves a completely novel subject by checking out books on it from the library? Isn't it hard to figure out which books will be the ones you need? Technical books are often overly specific and assume you've already got a grounding in the subject, and are interested in exploring a particular question within it, and books for laypeople might not be thorough enough, and also might not be trustworthy). 


As for college, well, not everyone goes there, most of the people who go there will never encounter evolution in the classroom --- I didn't, and I majored in a biological science! --- and, again, college professors have enough to do without having to burn up lecture time with remedial material and correcting misinformation. Plus, not all colleges are created equal; some 


To top it off, what you know before college helps determine where you go, whether you go at all, and what you study! College is expensive, and for many prospective students (I know I felt this way when I was applying to colleges) the size of the scholarship you can get makes the decision for you. Scholarships for merit, as opposed to need (and there will always be more people who can't really afford college than there are people officially deemed too poor to afford college on their own), depend on how one performs on standardized tests. And what does standardized test performance depend on? What you learned in high school.


There's more: as Amanda also points out, what you're exposed to in high school shapes your interests and aspirations:

[M]y high school biology course didn't teach evolution. Without evolution, biology actually doesn't make sense, and instead it's just an anatomy class. ... I had no idea how fascinating biology actually was until I was an adult, and long past any chance of starting on that as a career path. Not that I think I would, but you can easily see someone like me making that choice as a young woman, but not really being able to because I was never offered that option in a realistic sense to begin with. 

(As someone who did study biology, and who loves Amanda's writing about science- and skepticism-related topics as much as I do her feminist writing, I can see it. Her interest in the subject is obvious, as is her commitment to find out what's true and how we know it's true. While she won't --- can't --- go into the kind of technical details I sometimes do here, her grasp of general, foundational principles is firm enough that I can easily forget she does not possess a biology degree herself.)


To shift to another aspect of why Drum's assessment is so horribly, horribly wrong, I quote PZ:

[T]his is going to be the century of dependence on the sciences. Climate change is going to hit us all; environmental crises are going to rise up all over the place; we're going to face shortages of energy and fresh water; emerging diseases will be a major concern; new biomedical technologies will cause cultural shocks; the whole world is going to change. Most people, I agree, will not be doing the research that leads to changes, and most of these problems will require political and social changes to correct, but how are you going to convince people to, for instance, change their fuel consumption habits when they're in complete denial of basic facts? How can you expect people to appreciate the importance of ecology and global interactions when you tell them that evolution doesn't matter? How will you get them to make rational decisions to control pandemics when they can't comprehend probability, epidemiology, and viral/bacterial evolution on even the most basic level? 

Most importantly, though, this utilitarian attitude that all that matters is what people can directly use in their day-to-day life is a denial of the Enlightenment and principles on which our country was founded. It's a rejection of the liberal idea that human beings should be well-rounded and informed individuals --- the informed citizenry that should be the foundation of a democracy. We can't expect everyone to be biologists or poets or political scientists, but we should expect that one outcome of a public education is an appreciation of the breadth of human endeavor, and at least a smattering of the fundamentals of a wide range of subjects, sufficient that, to make it practical again, students can make informed career decisions and understand a basic argument from evidence from an expert. We lack that now. And to wave away a simple but essential starting fact about our existence as unimportant is deeply offensive.     

I would add to his first paragraph that you don't have to wait for some futuristic nightmare scenario for these things to affect people's lives. Disease-causing bacteria are already becoming resistant to a whole lot of the antibiotics we use to fight them; lots and lots of species have disappeared or are disappearing; sensitive ecosystems are already being stressed, some to the breaking point by human activity, and humans are already failing to see why they should care***.

The picture he paints in that first paragraph has already come to pass, in the way that the proverbial camel is already in the tent, he just needs to take a few steps forward before it becomes obvious to everyone.

I would also add something else that I think denying evolution does: it makes it easier to think of humans as separate from, and above, the natural world and all those other animals. It allows us to think that what we do to it, to them, will never get back to us. 

(You don't have to deny evolution to get to that mindset, though: I see it arising just as readily from the erroneous view of evolution as a teleological process of development from simple to complex organisms, with humans sitting triumphantly at the apex. I've posted before about my annoyance with this picture of evolution.)

*This is what Andrew Sullivan, another famous political commentator whom I know to be obtuse, thanks to driftglass, an obscure political blogger who is quite acute**, has called belief in creationism a "cultural signifier" that describes the group membership of the believer rather than what that person actually believes about reality. That whole line of reasoning makes me queasy, but even if he is right that no one actually believes the Earth is six thousand years old and every animal species living on it was molded from clay and animated with the breath of a god, if that is what they decide shall be taught to children as fact, in place of the full history of life on Earth (as much of it as we know, anyway) and an explanation of how life on Earth has changed as Earth itself has changed, then those children grow up with a much poorer understanding of the world around them. An idea can have consequences in the real world whether people truly believe it or not; all they need to is act as if they believe it. Also, Andrew Sullivan is dumb.

**Hee. I made a geometry pun.

***This is not, at all, meant to be an exhaustive list, or even a primer on any of those subjects. I just put a recent news/research story in every link to make the point that, yes, this stuff is happening, and it's not just one or two isolated incidents.