All-Electric v. Hybrids

While my wife drives a Prius, I'm still driving a 1994 beater (18 mpg city, 28 highway) as I await a plug-in hybrid. I do most of my driving within 25 miles of home. I would like to buy a car that I can use as an all-electric vehicle for those trips. But it should also have the capacity to shift over to a gasoline or alternative liquid fuel option on those rare occasions when I venture farther from home. And I would like to ride in a car of at least moderate size and comfort for either of those trips.

Yesterday, Nissan announced that it would introduce an all-electric vehicle by 2010. Its chairman, Carlos Ghosn, told reporters that "“I want a pure electric car. I don’t want a range extender. I don’t want another hybrid.” Top range? 100 miles. I can see it now: an enclosed golf cart. He just lost my business.

I sometimes think auto executives are the stupidest people in business. How can men arrive at the top of these large organizations without a clue about what their customers want or need?

Rejuvenating Public Sector Science

The following is reprinted from Common Dreams.org:

by Kirsten Stade

Budding young scientists are taught that the nation's
scientific enterprise reflects an unblinkered search
for truth, conducted by dispassionate researchers
divorced from preconceived bias or monetary gain. Alas,
in the real world, far too many scientists have hired
themselves out to the highest bidders - corporate
interests that use their science-for-hire papers to
cast doubt on the facts that our planet is warming,
smoking kills, and toxic chemicals can cause birth
defects.

In recent years, these ongoing campaigns to stop
regulations that would reduce carbon emissions, clean
up our food, air and water, or control tobacco have
been joined by a war on government-funded science
itself, targeted against scientists who work to promote
public health and a cleaner environment. Budgets have
been slashed. Good scientists have been turned into
whistleblowers because their global warming reports
have been quashed, their clean air analyses ignored and
their species protection plans shelved.

In the health care arena, where skyrocketing costs are
the primary reason 50 million Americans do not have
insurance, drug and medical device companies have
staged a money-driven friendly takeover of the practice
of medicine. Physician-researchers on industry's
payroll publish papers touting the latest pills or
technologies based on flimsy or no evidence, and then
write a clinical practice guideline suggesting the new,
pricier technology ought to be used. Then some of these
very same researchers hide their conflicts of interest
when publishing in the medical literature, all to
further their and their sponsors' bottom lines.

Fortunately, the tide is beginning to turn on this
corporate-driven war on science. Laws have been
proposed that would protect government scientists who
blow the whistle. Congressional investigations have
exposed administration efforts to silence scientists
and uncovered hidden drug industry payments - such as
those to the psychiatrists who were responsible for
promoting anti-psychotic-drug use in thousands of kids.
Laws have been proposed to eliminate conflicts of
interest on federal advisory committees.

This progressive counteroffensive in the war on science
will be highlighted at the fourth national Integrity in
Science conference on July 11 in Washington, sponsored
by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. This
year's theme, 'Rejuvenating Public Sector Science,'
will illuminate a path out of the current morass. Only
by bolstering the resources available to government
agencies charged with protecting public health and the
environment and affirming their authority to do their
jobs can industry's efforts to undermine sound science
be defeated.

The conference will feature award-winning climate
scientist James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies and who was the first to
focus global attention on the growing urgency of the
climate crisis when he testified before a Senate
Committee in 1988. Hansen is recognized as one of the
world's foremost authorities on the need for immediate
action to avert climate disaster, and can attest to the
powerful forces that have fought to keep his message
from reaching the public.

In addition to Hansen's talk, other panel sessions will
focus on insulating alternative energy research from
industry attacks, protecting scientist whistleblowers
from retribution, enforcing rigorous conflict of
interest disclosure policies by scientific journals,
and restoring scientific integrity to government
agencies entrusted with conservation of wildlife and
natural resources. Congressman Brad Miller, Chairman of
the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the
House Committee on Science and Technology will speak on
'Preserving Scientific Integrity: The Role of
Congressional Oversight.'

The conference begins at 9:00 am on July 11, 2008 at
the Ronald Reagan International Center in Washington,
DC. Register and see the full agenda at http://cspinet.org/integrity/conflictedscience_conf.html.

Science and the rationality it brings to government
decisionmaking has a crucial role to play in solving
the climate, energy and health care crises. CSPI's
Rejuvenating Public Sector Science conference will be
of interest to anyone interested in helping to put
these issues squarely on the agenda of the next
administration.

Kirsten Stade manages the Integrity in Science Project
at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Pushback on Federal Preemption

California sued the Environmental Protection Agency yesterday over the Bush administration's refusal to allow the nation's largest state to impose stricter greenhouse gas emission rules than those contained in the milquetoast energy bill signed by the president last month. More than a dozen states are supporting the suit.

California has always been a leader in environmental standards, and more than 60 requests for waivers from weak federal rules over the past four decades have been granted. Given that track record, it's not surprising that the EPA career staff warned the administration that its first ever denial would trigger a lawsuit, and the government would lose. It also faces the wrath of Congress, where Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) have launched investigations into a decision that, as Waxman put it last month, defies science and common sense.

This case is one more reminder about the extent to which President George W. Bush turned the world upside down during his disastrous eight years in office. There once was a time when the Republican Party believed in limited federal intervention in the economy and upheld states' rights. No more. This president abusively wields executive power to thwart state efforts to deal with significant environmental and social problems that the administration militantly refuses to confront. It has used the executive branch to trample on civil liberties, violate habeas corpus, sanction torture, and interfere with justice.

States have always been our laboratories of democracy, taking the lead when the federal government refuses to act. Republicans once championed that approach. It was the Democrats who used the strong arm of the national government to end the patchwork quilt of state economic regulations that bred inefficiency or lagged behind a high standard (raising the national minimum wage is a typical example). Democrats have also wielded federal power to override actions by states -- such as those of the Deep South during the 1960s -- that denied citizens their civil rights and liberties.

No doubt we'll see a re-reversal of these roles should the Democrats win the White House next year as well as maintain their control of Congress. Bush has taught everyone that federal preemption is a two-way street. It once was a tool to set high standards. This president has shown that it can also be used to drag the country into the gutter.

How to Fight Climate Change Without Soaking the Middle Class

The following commentary by Peter Barnes, a co-founder of Working Assets, is reprinted from the On The Commons website.

Fighting climate change is going to cost all of us money. That’s because the price of dumping carbon into the atmosphere must, necessarily, rise. Whether the price rise is prompted by a tax or a cap makes no difference — we will all pay more.

This politically inconvenient truth has long been trumpeted by the coal industry. Environmentalists, for just as long, have glossed over it. But numbers are now coming in from reputable quarters, and they’re big enough to send a message to policy makers: don’t deny the problem, solve it.

Last month, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Peter Orszag, told Congress [1]that the average American household would pay $1,160 a year in higher prices when carbon dioxide emissions are cut 15 percent. A new report by James Boyce and Matt Riddle [2] of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says the CBO’s numbers are low: the average family will pay $1,570 a year in higher prices when emissions are cut by just 7 percent.

That, of course, is only the start. As emission cuts rise toward the ultimate goal of 80 percent, our disposable incomes will take a sizeable hit.

Hardest hit will be low-income families — higher prices for energy and energy-intensive goods will impose a larger burden, relative to income, on them than on the rich. But the middle class will also be soaked, and therein lies the political problem.

Any solution to climate change has to work for forty years or more. A policy that soaks the middle class won’t last longer than a few election cycles. The middle class must be protected. The question is how.

A few ideas are floating about. One is to give tax rebates that offset higher energy prices. Al Gore, for example, proposed in his Nobel acceptance speech that payroll tax refunds be given to every U.S. worker who pays them.

That’s a good start, but it leaves out too many people who are poor and middle class. Nearly half of households in the bottom fifth would receive no payroll tax rebates because they have no taxable wages. Also excluded would be retirees, students, stay-at-home parents and workers outside the formal economy.

The simplest and fairest way to protect the poor and middle class is to give equal rebates to everyone. The money would come from either a carbon tax, or an auction of carbon emission permits.

Boyce and Riddle support a plan called Cap and Dividend. Just as every Alaska resident receives an equal dividend from revenue from state oil leases, so every American would get an equal dividend from carbon permit auctions. The dividends would be wired monthly into people’s bank accounts, much like Social Security payments. They’d help families pay their monthly bills.

There are several nice features of such a plan. One is that it’s automatic — as energy prices rise, so do dividends. Another is that how you fare depends on what you do. The more energy you use, the more you pay. Since everyone gets the same amount back, you gain if you conserve and lose if you guzzle. This is fair to everyone, whether rich or poor. And it takes politicians off the hook for rising energy prices. If voters complain, politicians can truthfully say, “The market sets prices, and you determine by your own energy use whether you gain or lose. If you conserve, you come out ahead.”

A further appeal of Cap and Dividend is that it’s progressive in its economic impact. Even though higher energy prices hit the poor the hardest, the poor actually gain when dividends are added in. What’s more, much of the middle class gains as well. Indeed, according to Boyce and Riddle, more than 60 percent of Americans would come out ahead.

There’s also an attractive premise behind Cap and Dividend: the atmosphere is a commons that belongs to everyone. Those who pollute the commons should pay to do so. And the income should go to the commons’ owners, one person, one share.

If I were a Presidential candidate, I’d latch on to Cap and Dividend in a flash. After all, what’s not to like? With Cap and Dividend, we’d limit carbon emissions, spur private investment in clean energy, create jobs, and send money to everybody. Who wouldn’t vote for that?

Gerberding and Her Censors

The Associated Press yesterday reported that the administration's censors inside the Office of Management and Budget changed testimony given by Julie Gerberding, the head of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, on the impact of global warming on health. Today's New York Times and Washington Post report that she's okay with that.

"I said everything I needed to say," she said.

Democrats in Congress and public interest groups like Physicians for Social Responsibility are attacking the White House for its political interference with science. But that charge is growing stale. We know where the Bush administration stands on the role of science in policymaking. It's opposed to using it if it stands in the way of the special interests it chooses to represent.

The more interesting question in this flap is where does Julie Gerberding stand? Doesn't there come a point where public officials, especially those charged with protecting public health, have a larger responsibility than protecting their own careers? The issue is not whether the nuances of how global warming may impact public health were sufficiently aired in a single hearing on Capitol Hill.

The more important long-term issue worth raising, especially as we contemplate the post-Bush years, is what rules should govern the relationship between high government officials and the politicians at whose pleasure they serve. Of course presidents get to appoint their cabinet members and hundreds of other high-ranking officials across the government. But once they get in those positions, their first loyalty should be to what is in the best interests of the American people. When a White House -- any White House -- steps in to manipulate the performance of that job for political reasons, you're on the slippery slope to the next Katrina and "you're doing a heckuva job, Brownie."

The political police had no business editing the remarks of the nation's highest-ranking public health official. Even before it became publicly known, she should have resigned her post in protest. This incident tells us more about Julie Gerberding than it does about the Bush administration, whose views on science and global warming are well known.

Workplace Cancers Underreported

"The Secret History of the War on Cancer" by Devra Davis, just published by Basic Books, isn't getting the attention it should. Perhaps a new study by UK researchers reported by the BBC will help focus needed attention on one of its central claims: that the environment is a major contributor to cancer causation and any effective strategy for reducing incidence of the disease must focus attention on the workplace and community toxics that can lay hidden time bombs in peoples' bodies.

The new study claims that the British government’s 26-year-old figures on occupational cancer grossly underestimate both the numbers of workers exposed to cancer risks and the number who develop work-related cancers.
The existing figure, which estimates 6,000 work-related cancer deaths annually in the UK, are based on an influential 1981 study by Richard Doll and Richard Peto, commissioned by the now defunct U.S. Office of Technology Assessment.

That study, later published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, has been cited in over 441 scientific articles to debunk claims that environmental causes are significant contributors to cancer. Critiques of the Doll and Peto study point to the authors’ sole reliance on epidemiologic studies of workers in large industries and their failure to consider exposures in smaller workplaces, as well as the limitation of their analysis to deaths in those under age 65.

Last year a group of European researchers revealed that Doll had financial relationships with a number of industries that manufacture cancer-causing chemicals, including Monsanto, the Chemical Manufacturer’s Association, and Dow Chemical.

The new study, led by Andrew Watterson of Stirling University in Scotland, estimates that UK work-related cancer deaths are between 12,000 and 24,000 every year. Watterson and one co-author, it should be pointed out, have consulted with law firms representing workers involved in occupational cancer lawsuits.

DDT-Breast Cancer Link Found

A study suggesting that there is no link between DDT use and rising breast cancer rates on Long Island got a lot of attention a few years ago from conservative groups pushed for increased DDT use to kill mosquitos to curb malaria in the developing world. Now this story based on this study suggests that California women exposed to DDT in their prime childbearing years may have four times the breast cancer risk of unexposed women. This controversy isn't going away anytime soon. As a precautionary measure, global health authorities should encourage the use of alternatives wherever possible.

Annals of Government Science

The regulatory agencies of the federal government that rely on scientific analyses to carry out their functions, whether it be protecting the environment or approving new drugs, routinely appoint outside committees to evaluate their work. The scientists on these committees are usually drawn from academia, but the specialized expertise needed to conduct these sophisticated reviews often leads agencies to pull scientists from independent research institutes and consulting firms, which often receive research funds from private firms.

To protect the process from undue influence, the government 35 years ago passed a law that said scientists who serve on these review panels could not have conflicts of interest, in other words, they couldn't have recently worked for a firm or a trade group with a direct stake in the outcome of the committee's deliberations. Nor should they come to the committee with a preconceived bias about its outcome. There were exceptions written into the law. The agency could waive a conflict of interest if the person's expertise was highly specialized, couldn't be obtained elsewhere, and needed to successfully carry out the committee's task. And scientists with perceived biases (having already written or conducted studies on the subject and come to strong conclusions, for instance) could also be appointed as long as their views with balanced by someone with a contrasting view of the subject.

There's been numerous studies, political strife and litigation over the make-up of these committees in recent years. The Bush administration's penchant for appointing religious conservatives to committees dealing with reproductive health or prominent global warming skeptics to committees contemplating climate change clearly violated the bias provisions of the law. The Food and Drug Administration has been challenged for its excessive use of conflicted advisers on its drug approval panels. The FDA reform law that goes to conference committee next month will consider limiting the number of waivers to one per committee.

The Environmental Protection Agency has received less scrutiny in this decade, but it, too, suffers from a surfit of conflicted scientists passing judgment on government studies that directly affect their employers' economic interests. This week, a coalition of consumer and environmental groups attacked the EPA for larding a proposed panel that will review its scientific evaluation of the health and cancer risks of acrylamide with scientists with close ties to companies and trade groups that either use or make the chemical. In a letter sent yesterday, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Environmental Law Foundation, and seven scientists pointed out that at least six of the 21 scientists being considered for slots on the panel have either worked or consulted for companies or trade groups that produce or use acrylamide.

Moreover, one nominee, a Harvard-based epidemiologist, clearly has a preconceived bias about the issue, since she has already written that acrylamide poses little or no cancer risk to humans. "The EPA needs to do a lot more work before the public will be assured that the final roster is balanced and free from conflicts of interest," the letter noted. "EPA’s failure to do so will cast a permanent cloud over the integrity and reliability of the committee's work."

Acrylamide, a commonly used industrial compound that is also produced by frying starchy food, is already listed as a neurotoxin and probable human carcinogen. The update to the EPA's risk assessment, which is due out September 15 and will be peer-reviewed by the panel, may impact a 2005 lawsuit by the California Attorney General, which is seeking cancer warning labels on acrylamide-containing foods. Food processors are looking forward to the review since they believe recent science would downgrade the chemical's danger thresholds and thus void the lawsuit, according to a May 8 Risk Policy Report published by Inside Washington Publishers (subscription required). "I suspect that the calculation of risk will be less than the existing [EPA] assessment," said Robert Fensterheim, president of RegNet Environmental Services, which provides consulting services to the chemical industry.

The EPA's decision to include Lorelie Mucci of Harvard Medical School on its list of candidates violated some basic rules of scientific conduct. She has authored several epidemiological studies in recent years that suggest there is no link between acrylamide and some cancers. Her first study was harshly criticized by experts in the field. "[Mucci's] published conclusions and public statements indicate excessive confidence in insensitive epidemiology studies to detect acrylamide's possible carcinogenicity. . . and a strong bias in favor of acrylamide’s non-carcinogenicity," the consumer and environmental groups noted in their letter.

It's likely that the EPA's draft risk assessment that will be released in September will at least make reference to her work. If it comes out the way industry expects it to come out, it is probable that it will rely on her conclusions, since she is one of the more prominent researchers in the field. That means that if the EPA puts her on the committee, it will put her in the position of evaluating her own research.

That is not an acceptable process. Yet it happens with some frequency at the EPA. When Congress gets done with their work on the FDA, the relevant committees might want to turn their attention to industry's close involvement with the advisory committees that set the nation's environmental standards.

Water, Water Everywhere . . .

I witnessed one aspect of the global water crisis two weeks ago during a stroll through the central market in Mae Sot, a small trading town on the Thailand-Myanmar border. To my surprise, peasant farmers were selling stacks of yellow corn, a quintessential new world crop. Their stands were right next to stalls carrying frogs, turtles and snakes. My 13-year-old daughter couldn’t understand how people could eat their pets. I couldn’t understand the corn.

A few hours later, as we drove past the rice fields south of the town heading toward a scheduled rendezvous at a malaria clinic on the Moei River, I got my answer. Over one rise, the paddies gave way to rolling hills of corn. Their golden tassles atop ten-foot stalks indicated the ears were nearly ready for harvest.

My physician guide, Francois Nosten of the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit, explained that growing water shortages in the region were forcing farmers away from their traditional rice crop, which is about as thirsty a staple as exists on earth. The problem in switching to the less water-intensive corn, he said, was that it made the farmers dependent on U.S. multinationals for their seeds since the hybrids sold in Asia, as in the U.S., are sterile. “It’s a form of dependency,” he said, “and not everyone appreciates that.”

It wasn’t my only run-in with the water issue during my trip. While in China, reports in the controlled press from Chungqing, a city of 31 million souls, were scary enough to make me begin hoarding the potable water that had been provided in my hotel room (you’d have to be out of your mind to drink what came out of the tap). Southwestern China had gone 70 straight days without rain – even as the southeast coast was being flooded by a monsoon. According to the press accounts, fields were in ruins, wells were running dry and thousands of people were being forced to flee their homes in search of water.

Naturally, this experience sensitized me to a new report out today (my first day back) from the International Water Management Institute, which is based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The report saw many disturbing trends in the outlook for global water supplies over the next 50 years, but also held out hope for a world that will increase in population by 33 percent over that period.

The great pressure on global water supplies will come from agriculture, which consumes nearly 80 percent of all water. It takes anywhere from 400 to 5,000 liters of water to produce one kilo (2.2 pounds) of grain. But it takes 10,000 liters to produce a kilo of meat. With global wealth rising, each one of us is using more and more water, primarily through the food we eat. The average person’s caloric intake increased from 2,250 kcal per day in 1961 to 2,800 kcal in 2000 (South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are exceptions to this broad improvement). The prospect is that billions more people will be entering this meat-eating class in the next half century.

To cope, agricultural productivity will have to continue to rise dramatically. Output per acre doubled in the past four decades. The good news is that agriculture accomplished this goal without a commensurate increase in water consumption. Can agricultural and water productivity continue its rapid ascent?

The report was not sanguine. Many river basins around the world are overcommitted and, in some cases, no longer reach the sea. Water tables in China, India and Mexico are declining sharply in their most populated areas and are in danger of becoming exhausted. Water quality is being degraded by soil erosion, pollution, salinization, nutrient depletion and the intrusion of seawater, the report said.

Meanwhile, irrigation in developing countries is expanding rapidly. That increases agricultural production, alleviates poverty and facilitates industrialization by freeing up agricultural labor. But it simultaneously increases environmental degradation. Industrialization, itself a water-intensive process, puts additional strains on water supplies.

And all of this will take place in the context of global climate change where temperatures are rising and precipitation falling. Agriculture near the equator, where countries are usually poor, will be the first affected, the report points out.

The report offered no real solutions beyond “better governance.” What more could they say? Declining water resources, like global warming, is one of those mega-issues of the 21st century. It will shape human history. Governments and people will deal with it because they have to, and probably not a moment sooner. But as Asian rice farmers growing corn show, entire cultures can be transformed - and damn fast, too - when they are hammered by larger-than-life events.

On Vacation

When I told people I was going to Bangkok and Tokyo in August, they said I must be crazy. But as I prepare to leave the Washington, DC area, the local temperature is hovering somewhere north of 100 degrees fahrenheit. Can it possibly be any hotter than this? See you in late August.

The Insurance Industry Take on Global Warming

Last week, I wondered aloud why the insurance industry was financing some prominent global warming skeptics. Environmental Science & Technology reporter Paul Thacker wrote me today pointing out that the industry has a long-standing interest in global warming studies, and over the years has supported research by a range of scholars. He also alerted me to a fascinating interview he conducted with Evan Mills, a staff scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who closely monitors the insurance industry's response to global warming. One interesting factoid: weather related insurance losses in 2005 approached $80 billion, four times the losses of 9/11.

Here's Evans on why they're so concerned:

Insurers are better equipped to understand and evaluate the science than most other industries, and they have no particular vested interest in propping up polluting industries. To the contrary, pollution liability is one of the emerging (often insured) risks that keep them up at night. They are also more vulnerable to the impacts; they can’t afford to overlook or be wrong about the science. Insurers who have looked at the climate-change issue closely see more burdensome economic costs from inaction than from prudent action, and, in fact, they are developing business opportunities associated with climate-change mitigation and adaptation solutions. They are also quick to recognize that investments in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions can be highly cost-effective in terms of reduced energy expenditures.

Insuring Doubt on Global Warming

With hurricane season hard upon us and Al Gore’s new movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in theaters, global warming dilettantes (and I include myself in this category) getting up to speed should sample the rancorous debate that gets triggered every time even a minor story appears on this topic. In today’s New York Times, John Schwartz reports on two new studies that support claims that warming oceans are increasing the intensity of hurricanes.

“Cherrypicking!” shouted Roger Pielke, Jr., a young University of Colorado professor whose Center for Science and Technology Policy Research is seeking to position itself as a “third way” in the global warming debate. (A quick perusal of his Center’s annual report and website shows it gets virtually all of its funding from government sources, although it co-sponsored a conference last week on projecting financial losses from climate change that was funded by Munich Re, the German insurance conglomerate.) Pielke’s posting on the Center’s Prometheus blog complains that Schwartz failed to reference other recent “peer-reviewed studies” that provide “important context” for these latest reports, which, while “certainly newsworthy,” were chosen because Times’ editors and reporters “have decided to pick sides in the political debate over climate change.”

One of the ignored studies recently appeared in an American Geophysical Union publication (the study was underwritten in part by a charitable arm of Lexington Insurance, an arm of the American International Group) while the other was co-authored by none other than Pielke himself (funding not disclosed, but his four co-authors hailed from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and spoke for themselves, not the government agency).

The former “study” was in fact a reevaluation of data that had appeared in a number of previous studies and involved a series of statistical manipulations that would take a better person with more time than me to dissect. Likewise, the “study” by Pielke et al in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society was not a study at all, but a review of a number of recent studies (with a generous dollop of media criticism) that concluded increasing hurricane damage had more to do with increased construction in vulnerable zones than global warming. Moreover, Pielke concluded, “the state of the peer-reviewed knowledge today is such that there are good reasons to expect that any conclusive connection between global warming and hurricanes or their impacts will not be made in the near term.”

I quote Pielke at length because it is too simplistic to say that all global warming skeptics are hacks on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry (an allegation that animated a Paul Krugman column last week). Indeed, the seriousness of Pielke’s arguments can be judged from the response he got. Within hours of his posting, the Times’ chief global warming reporter, Andrew Revkin, had written in to defend his colleague’s article (full disclosure: Andy and I went to journalism school together). “For you to assert that this one story is clear evidence of some editorial bent on the part of The Times is not that different than when an over-eager environmentalist asserts that a particular hurricane is clear evidence greenhouse gases must be curbed,” he wrote.

Today's brief side tour through global warming land leaves me wondering: Why is the insurance industry interested in funding scholars who question whether scientists have appropriately concluded that human activity-caused global warming is cause for concern? Clearly, insurance premiums for coastal properties (not to mention all of our rates) are going to dramatically rise if predictions of more intense storms due to global warming prove accurate. Moreover, when the really big one hits, it will probably be financially catastrophic for the insurance industry.

So, as they like to ask in the theater, what's their motive? It seems to me that companies who insure against acts of God wouldn't mind having humans to blame when the tide rolls in.

Who You Gonna Call?

Does your company manufacture or use a chemical that may be poisoning people and the environment? Do you need to seed the scientific literature with studies questioning those scientists who raise such questions?

Who you gonna call?

After some investigative digging, Environmental Science and Technology reporter Paul Thacker came up with the answer: The Weinberg Group.

For more on this consulting group that mixes science and public relations to whitewash chemicals, click here.

Pombo's Assault on Endangered Species

The Union of Concerned Scientists has put out an emergency alert to rally scientists to oppose a recently passed House bill that would gut the Endangered Species Act. There's a high likelihood that the Senate will pass some kind of measure, according to UCS. So as action shifts now to the Senate, they are hoping to put pressure on key Senators like Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) to stave off what could be the most significant environmental rollback of the Bush era.

House Bill 3824 was sponsored by Rep. Richard Pombo, a Republican from California who, according to a League of Conservation Voters official, "tops the list of history's most ruthless environmental bad boys." There isn't a part of the country that he doesn't want to drill, mine or develop, he said. (For a good backgrounder on Pombo, see today's Grist (an online Magazine), where an outstanding young journalist named Amanda Griscom Little plies her trade.

Pombo's bill, according to a National Wildlife Federation analysis, would remove protection for habitats that species need for survival and recovery. It also would undermine the scientific underpinnings of the act, according to UCS, by allowing political appointees rather than scientists to decide what is the best science available. The implications for other science-based laws -- think clean air, clean water, safe food, safe drugs, etc. etc. -- is truly frightening.

UCS is asking environmental scientists to sign a protest letter that it plans to distribute to all Senators in early February. Interested readers can learn more about how to stop this pernicious legislation here.

Don't Like the Data? Pay Someone To Reinterpret It

The Wall Street Journal carried a front page story today on how an industry, seeking to effect the way the government regulates a pollutant, hired scientists to reinterpret and ghostwrite changes in a Chinese study that suggested it was toxic. It's a chrome-plated tale that perfectly illustrates the growing problem of corporate influence over science and science-based policy. I can't link to it here because the Journal requires a subscription for online access, but don't miss it.

Richard Berman and the Corporate War on Science

In this busiest, most expensive advertising season of the year, readers of this morning's New York Times saw a visually stunning full page ad that contained just six words: "Hooked on Mercury Hype? Fish Scam.com.

This ad is the latest blast from Richard Berman's Center for Consumer Freedom, a non-profit "group" supported mainly by the restaurant and food industry. (I put the word "group" in quotes for a reason, which I'll get to later.) This expensive ad follows by a week the appearance of massive billboards in Times Square touting the same website. The temperature is rising on the mercury-fish issue.

The fishing industry has numerous academics willing to champion its position on the playing fields of science, whether that be in the academic literature, federal advisory committees, or on the National Academies of Science panels that have reviewed the mercury in food issue. Just recently, a study funded by the fishing industry appeared in a prominent academic journal that touted the benefits of fish fats in limiting heart disease and, perhaps, maintaining mental acuity. The study received widespread media coverage -- without mentioning that it was funded by the fishing industry.

The science of mercury is complex. But most scientists -- no matter where they stand on the issue of regulating and labeling fish -- agree that the levels of mercury in most fish species do not represent a danger to most consumers. On the other hand, most responsible scientists also admit that vulnerable populations -- the very young, women who are pregnant or nursing -- should probably think twice about how much fish they consume.

There is no debate at all about whether mercury can cause severe mental retardation and congenital deformities in people who are exposed when in utero or very young. Remember Minamata Disease? The only question is what levels can prudently be deemed safe.

You won't find any of that rational scientific discussion on Berman's website. Instead, he launches his long-standing attacks on consumer and environmental groups (including the Center for Science in the Public Interest where I work) which have raised concerns about mercury contamination and sought warning labels on food products like canned tuna that contain higher levels than what some consider prudent for populations at risk.

Berman accuses such groups of scare tactics. He also uses his heavy-handed public relations machine to attack the mainstream scientists who have conducted research in the field, even though there are plenty of scientists, most industry-funded but some not, who have engaged in the debate on the other side.

You have to dig deep into Berman's website to find out that food producer groups fund his organization. But he doesn't reveal to what extent. Filings with the IRS don't reveal his sources of funds, but in 2003 -- the most recent filing available -- the Center for Consumer Freedom pulled in $2.8 million, with $1.8 million of that going for "media and messaging." He spends $350,000 a year on his website alone, with another $650,000 poured into conducting negative research on environmental and consumer groups promoting consumer safety. The essence of this so-called consumer group is an industry-funded public relations machine.

For his efforts, Berman makes out very well, thank you. His management company pulled in $1.1 million in 2003. Using traditional yardsticks, it would appear that most of that was paid as direct salary to Berman himself since he also reported that the Center for Consumer Freedom put $115,000 into Berman's personal retirement fund.

The fishing industry and other food producer groups have every right to engage in public debates over the issue of how much mercury should be allowed in food before it is considered unsafe for vulnerable groups. But when they engage in well-funded public relations attacks on those who engage in the still evolving science, they become part of the dark forces that are seeking to undermine science itself.

Like the old saying about fish, an industry hooked on that kind of behavior is rotting from the head down.

Look Who's Misrepresenting Science Now

Should DDT be reintroduced across the developing world to control mosquito-borne malaria? For several years now, conservative scholars at think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute have been beating the drums for this solution. Their secondary goal (I’ll grant them sincerity in wanting to end the several million deaths a year caused by malaria) is to bash the environmental movement, and by extension, Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring highlighted the environmental damage caused by widespread use of pesticides like DDT.

A number of high profile journalists have taken up this conservative cause. Sebastian Mallaby, writing in today’s Washington Post, called environmentalists’ failure to embrace the DDT solution for malaria “no different from the Bush administration’s indifference to scientific sense on climate change.” He follows in the footsteps of Tina Rosenberg of the New York Times, a writer I admire a lot, who a year-and-a-half ago in the Sunday Magazine issued a 4000-word clarion call headlined “What the World Needs Now is DDT.”

The trigger for Mallaby’s more recent outburst was hearings on Capitol Hill two weeks ago featuring several university scientists testifying that DDT does not do substantial environmental harm. The argument for DDT goes something like this: Most of the damage caused by DDT, which is less than Carson feared, occurs in animal species where the pesticide bio-accumulates and only then because of its widespread use in agriculture. Used sparingly around home portals and windows as mosquito repellant, it can be quite effective in reducing malaria incidence. Under such circumstances, its environmental effects are minimal.

Mallaby cites the examples of Uganda and South Africa, which had spectacular success in reducing the incidence of malaria by using DDT. He drew those examples from testimony offered by the AEI’s Roger Bate on the Hill a few weeks ago.

It’s too bad Mallaby didn’t go searching for the other side of the story. In his book, Bate cites the example of Sri Lanka, which all but eliminated malaria by spraying DDT in the 1960s. The disease reemerged only when the spraying stopped, according to Bate.

Wrong. As Gordon Harrison points out in his Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man, malaria in Sri Lanka didn't reemerge because DDT spraying stopped. It reemerged because the mosquitoes grew resistant to the pesticide. “Within a couple of years, so many Anopheles culicifacies survived that despite the spraying malaria spread in 1975 to more than 400,000 people. So in 1977 they switched to the more expensive malathion, and were able to reduce the number of cases to about 50,000 by 1980. In 2004, the number was down to 3,000, without using DDT,” wrote Harrison (thanks to Brad DeLong's website for this quote).

The Post headlined Mallaby’s column, “Look Who’s Ignoring Science Now.” DDT probably can provide some short-term help in many developing world situations. But history suggests the relief will only be temporary. Pundits who suggest it is quick fix are probably more interested in bashing environmentalists than in grappling with this issue’s complexity.

Animal House

The Washington Post this morning gave front page coverage to the rotten medical care given animals at the National Zoo, which resulted in at least five needless deaths in the past several years. It's too bad the paper couldn't find room in its pages to cover a report issued yesterday that documented the systematic political abuse of federal government scientists who care about animals.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the Union of Concerned Scientists recently sent surveys to the 460 scientists who work at the National Oceanographic and Atmosphere Administration. More than half the 124 respondents (53 percent) were personally aware of situations where “commercial interests have inappropriately induced the reversal or withdrawal of scientific conclusions or decisions through political intervention.”

In addition, more than a third of respondents with direct responsibility for the nation's fisheries have “been directed, for non-scientific reasons, to refrain from making findings that are protective” of marine life with nearly a fourth reporting that they have been “directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information from a NOAA Fisheries scientific document.”

Last week, Sen. Larry E. Craig showed just how far some politicians will go to shut up government scientists bearing unwelcome news. The Idaho Republican inserted a rider in the energy bill that would close the Fish Passage Center, which since 1980 has been documenting the damage done to salmon and other fish populations by the Bonneville Power Administration's Columbia River dam system in the Pacific Northwest. The special interests behind Craig include local farmers (irrigation), shippers and industrial, commercial and residential users of the BPA's cheap power.

Michele DeHart, manager of the Center, was courageous enough to speak out about the attempt to silence her agency. "Maybe this is one of those deals where when you don't like the message, you kill the messenger," she told the Post.

The survey's results can be found here.

Vaccines, Mercury Exposure and Autism

Over the past 14 years, the estimated incidence of autism in the U.S. rose from about one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 – a fifteenfold increase. This steep rise coincided with the sharp increase in the number of vaccines given children, most of which were preserved in thimerosal. Thimerosal contains mercury, a potent neurotoxin.

The case linking the autism epidemic to mercury-preserved childhood vaccines has become one of the most contentious issues in environmental medicine. It has pitted a small but vocal coalition of affected parents, environmental groups, epidemiologists, trial lawyers, and even some conservative Republicans against the entire U.S. scientific and pediatric establishment, starting with the Centers for Disease Control and Food and Drug Administration and extending to the drug industry and even some of its more vocal critics like Rep. Henry Waxman, the liberal Democratic of California.

The vaccine manufacturers began phasing out thimerosal in the late 1990s after the first alarm bells went off. But as late last year, the industry – with a helping hand from the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration – continued selling stockpiles to the developing world. The case linking vaccines to autism received a powerful boost yesterday from Robert Kennedy Jr. on Salon.com (it’s very long, and you’ll have to sit through a Microsoft commercial to read it online).

Kennedy, best known for his environmental activism, wrote that “I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral crisis that must be addressed. If, as the evidence suggests, our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children, their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine.”

I spent a few weeks earlier this year reviewing some of the evidence linking thimerosal to autism. I spoke with a number of leading environmental health epidemiologists, many of whom remain skeptical. How can one tease out early childhood exposures to mercury in vaccines from other exposures like power plant pollution, not to mention the swelling sea of neurotoxic chemicals that persist in the environment and cause similar disorders?

Indeed, some scientists argue that the rise in autism is an artifact of better diagnosis, not an actual increase in disease. But people who work in the schools and have been inundated with these children scoff at such assertions. But there is a way to tell. Because of the phase-out, most American children vaccinated in this decade have not received the same high levels of mercury as those vaccinated between 1989 and 2001. If there is a link, it should start showing up soon in sharply falling autism rates.

What’s needed now is an accurate, long-term epidemiological study of America’s children – one sufficiently large enough to gauge the incidence of diseases like autism that only affect a small percentage of the population. Fortunately, such a study has been in the works for five years and is ready to be launched. Unfortunately, the Bush administration is about to back out of its commitment to fund it.

I’ll write about the National Children’s Study – and why people should begin putting pressure on Congress and the National Institutes of Health to fund it – in my next posting.

New Study Calculates the Economic Costs of Mercury Pollution

It was one of those small blips, duly noted and immediately forgotten by the mainstream press. Eleven states sued the Bush administration this week for failing to protect their citizens from the damage caused by mercury emitted from power plants.

The new mercury rules, enacted by the Environmental Protection Agency earlier this year, slowed the pace of mercury reduction (levels were steadily reduced during the Clinton years) and gave coal-burning power plants an additional decade to meet the health standards on mercury and other toxic emissions set in 1990. They also instituted a controversial trading scheme that would, in essence, shift pollution around without getting rid of it.

Environmentalists argue that this will leave many areas of the country with “hot spots,” a troubling prospect if one of the hot spots happens to be where your kids are growing up. About 70 percent of the mercury in the environment comes from coal-fired power plants, chloralkali production, waste incineration and other industrial activities. Once airborne, it travels long distances before landing in soil and water and entering the food chain. It reaches very high concentrations in predatory fish like swordfish and tuna. A potent neurotoxin (this was first learned in the 1950s when mercury-exposed Japanese mothers at Minimata had severely deformed and retarded children), mercury imposes its harshest penalties on developing fetuses and infants – the years before the blood-brain barrier is completely formed.

But instead of moving rapidly to control this known hazard, the utility industry has dragged its feet for years. Now, a new study from the Center for Children’s Health and the Environment at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York has calculated the price our society is paying for this short-term boost in utility company profitability.

According to Leonardo Trasande and colleagues, anywhere from 316,000 to 637,000 children have cord blood mercury levels above the levels associated with a loss in IQ. The authors calculated that this neurological damage costs society anywhere from $2.2 billion to $43.8 billion a year in lost economic activity, largely through lost productivity.

Unfortunately, the EPA didn't take these costs into account when calculating the potential benefits of its new rule. In fact, it deliberately ignored its own study showing a much higher benefit from stricter controls. According to the Bush administration's EPA, your brain-damaged kids are your problem or the school system's problem, not the companies' problem.

This latest study on the health effects of mercury pollution was funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and Physicians for Social Responsibility and two environmentalist foundations. It can be found at http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/members/2005/7743/7743.html.

You Get What You Pay For

Science is objective, right? The scientific method requires that results be reproducible before they are considered fact. If two scientists testing the same hypothesis by the same methods come up with different results, then either the theory is wrong, or, as they say at the end of nearly every scientific article, more testing is required.

Of course, in the real scientific world, with its conflicting agendas and competing theories, studies on controversial topics almost always come up with varying results, often depending on who sponsored the study. That doesn't mean the world is inherently unknowable. In these cases, scientists who want to be objective must go with what is called the balance of evidence. This is especially true if they work at regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration where decisions have to be made with less than perfect knowledge.

This brings us to a fascinating report in today's Los Angeles Times on a study that just appeared in a government-sponsored environmental health journal on the effects of a common plastic on human hormones. The study evaluated 115 academic studies of bisphenol A or BPA, which is found in virtually everything made of hard plastic and can now be found in the blood of nearly every American.

The analysis showed that 94 of the 115 studies published on BPA in recent years found the chemical mimics estrogen, blocks testosterone and harms lab animals. Many toxicologists are especially concerned that toxics that mimic sex hormones do serious damage to sensitive areas like the brain or sex organs in developing fetuses and children. Frederick vom Saal of the University of Missouri, author of the study and a long-time proponent of the idea that BPA is harmful, told the Times that the evidence was now overwhelming.

Well, anytime you are dealing with a chemical that is in everything from baby bottles to plastic water containers, you can be sure that the companies involved will be deploying their own scientists. In this case, the American Plastics Council paid the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis to conduct its own study (the Harvard Center, by the way, is where John Graham, head of the regulatory affairs office in the Bush administration, came from).

Their analysis, conducted last year, found that the evidence is weak. Vom Saal had an answer for that, too. In his paper, he divided up the studies in his sample into those funded by industry and those funded by government or other non-industry sources.

Here's what he found. Of the 11 studies funded by industry, none found any elevated risk to humans. But of the 104 other studies, over 90 percent showed that the chemical had harmful health effects.

I have no idea if regulators will agree that the jury is no longer out on whether the buildup of BPA in the environment poses a risk to humans. But the "theory" that he who pays the piper calls the tune is starting to look like an incontrovertible scientific fact.

Chemicals and Kids

The Environmental Protection Agency just took $2 million from a chemical industry trade group to study the effects of pesticides and chemicals in children. Environmental Working Group president Kenneth A. Cook, quoted in the Washington Post , justifiably attacked this gross conflict of interest. "This is a government function," he said. "We should be investing government funds to be absolutely sure it's independent."

Paul Gilman, the director of the EPA's Office of Research and Development and a political appointee, defended taking money from the fox to study the chickens. "We're comfortable with the fact that it's our study design."

It was a good story as far as it went. The subtext is that the Bush administration over the past four years has steadily whacked away at the EPA's R&D budget, which has remained frozen at just under $600 million a year. Gilman hasn't uttered a peep. Meanwhile, career scientists inside the agency, whose job it is to discover and measure the environmental hazards jeopardizing our air, water and environment, are left wondering which division will be put on the chopping block next.

In a previous era, an industry-funded study like this children's study would have raised the hackles of numerous scientists inside the agency. Today, they just keep their heads down and allow the corporate takeover of the agency to proceed apace.

The Bush Administration's War on Clean Air

The New York Times Magazine's cover story today exposes how the Bush administration and the electric power industry conspired to gut the Clean Air Act. The rules in question involved New Source Review, which until Bush's EPA radically liberalized them forbade companies from substantially rehabilitating coal-fired plants (and thus vastly increasing their electricity output and use of coal) unless they installed scrubbers. Coal-fired plants are major contributors to acid rain, ground-level ozone, soot and mercury pollution, which has been much in the news lately.

The article didn't cover the latest news. A number of state attorneys general have sued the government and won a temporary stay of the new rules. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled Senate Environment Committee last December asked the National Academies of Science -- the organization whose studies are usually considered the gold standard on scientific investigations -- to study the impact of the rules as a sop to Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), whose state is a victim of ambient air pollution from power plants in states to its west.

But something strange is happening with that study. The NAS appointed a prominent global warming skeptic who has written for the right-wing Hoover Institution to chair the panel. Princeton University physicist Dr. William Happer's other interesting credential is that he was fired from his post as chief of research for the Department of Energy by the incoming Clinton administration because of his views on global warming.

In late March, several former EPA enforcement officials wrote NAS to protest Happer's appointment, and asked that Happer be removed from the panel. In my role as director of the Integrity in Science project at Center for Science in the Public Interest, I uncovered Happer's appointment and informed the broader environmental community about his impending role.

The question now is whether the NAS will allow someone with preconceived biases and who may hold a grudge against environmentalists chair one of its prestigious panels. Is this another case of the Bush administration manipulating science?

Putting out fires along the Potomac

(This article first appeared in the November 7, 2003 Chicago Tribune)

The calamitous fires that blackened the parched suburbs in southern California last week should have sparked a heated discussion about the real causes of the conflagration. As it was, the Bush administration proved once again its uncanny ability to use disastrous circumstances to wring favors for corporate contributors from a compliant Congress.

The fires, which consumed more than 750,000 acres, destroyed 3,500 homes and led to more than 20 deaths, had little to do with the health of that state's national forests. Yet even before the last flames had been extinguished, the administration had rolled over the final roadblocks in Congress to pass its so-called Healthy Forest Initiative, which only affects federal lands.

If anyone on Capitol Hill read press accounts (as opposed to simply watching the firefighters and flames on television), the disconnect between the fires and the health of the national forests would have been readily apparent. Article after article showed how the real culprit was sprawl, the unplanned and unmanaged exurban growth that was born in Southern California and now plagues most metropolitan areas around the nation. "Houses sprout among flora that needs to burn," read one Washington Post headline. The subdivisions consumed by the fires were ones that had pushed dangerously far into the chaparral-covered hillsides of Southern California.

It wasn't only the sprawl that led to their demise. These homeowners bring their own vision of the good life to the brown hillsides of the arid west. It's a vision that stands in the way of proper management of their surrounding environment. Controlled burns to reduce the fire-prone underbrush? Please don't ruin my blue heaven with the air pollution. Adopt stricter building codes like flame-retardant roofs? We'll never be able to make it affordable, the developers say. Pay higher taxes to build fire breaks? These subdivisions voted overwhelmingly for Arnold, the tax terminator.

More to the immediate point, few if any of these subdivisions are surrounded by national forests, which are managed by the U.S. Forest Service and subject to the Healthy Forests Initiative. They are built on private land, and are almost always surrounded by state and county lands.

National forests were hit by the fires, of course. In recent years, the great pine forests of the Far West have been besieged by a bark beetle infestation, which is a byproduct of drought that many observers blame on global warming. These dead and dying trees have become a tinder box and are badly in need of careful pruning by their federal overseers. About a quarter of the so-called Cedars Fire in San Diego County, which consumed nearly 300,000 acres, was on federal land.

But would the Healthy Forests Initiative tackle this problem head on? Hardly. While the bill, which overwhelmingly passed the Senate recently, authorizes $760 million to thin about 10 percent of the 200 million acres under federal land management in the West, the legislation simultaneously makes it more difficult for environmentalists to mount court challenges to the Forest Service's decisions over which acres to prune. When announcing his initiative in August 2002, President Bush seemed more interested in the procedural issues than forest fires. "There's so many regulations, and so much red tape, that it takes a little bit of effort to ball up the efforts to make the forests healthy," Bush said.

Are crazy tree-hugger lawyers really the ones standing in the way of prudent forest management? Not according to a Government Accounting Office study. Their review showed that 95 percent of logging projects approved in 2002 were approved within the standard 90-day review period.

So why is the administration so intent on sweeping away the green groups' ability to mount administrative protests? To environmentalist groups like the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club, Healthy Forests is a smoke screen. What the administration really wants is to open old-growth forests to the timber industry. Much of that timber will be the least fire-prone parts of the forest. After all, how many logging companies want to take out the beetle-infested pine trees of San Bernardino National Forest outside Los Angeles? That's contract work with nothing worth selling at the end of the day.

There's good reason for environmentalists to be concerned about how the Forest Service will use its new-found cash. Before entering the administration, Mark E. Rey, the undersecretary for the Department of Agriculture who oversees the Forest Service, was Sen. Larry Craig's (R-Idaho) chief aide on forest matters and helped write legislation that would mandate tree harvest levels and eliminate citizen oversight. Prior to going to work on Capitol Hill, he spent nearly two decades working for the American Paper Institute, the National Forest Products Association and the American Forest and Paper Association. In other words, he was an industry lobbyist.

That doesn't mean that the Forest Service won't do the right thing when it comes to spending money on pruning federal forests that might be fire prone. But with Rey as its boss and reduced citizen oversight, that's a faith-based initiative.

What's Needed Now: Economic Security

(This article originally appeared in The America Prospect Online. It has been widely reprinted and delivered as a Marketplace Commentary on National Public Radio.)

Over the next few weeks, America will be consumed by debate about how life in this beacon of freedom may have to change to confront the terrorist threat. Liberals will have to think creatively about how to protect civil liberties in an era when it has become apparent that there are cells of people within the U.S. who are willing to engage in indiscriminate mass murder to further their insane politics.

But we have to do more. We must use this moment of national grief and unified purpose to advance a positive agenda that speaks to all Americans, who are desperate for a way to contribute to the war effort. Issues of economic security and policy have not gone away --they have only been upstaged for now by the terrorist threat. Here are a few questions that should not be overlooked:

First, the nation must immediately embark on a crash program to wean itself from dependence on foreign oil. That means substantially weaning itself from oil itself.

The most fitting memorial to the dead of September 11, 2001 will come if, decades from now, the assault is recalled as the event that triggered the end of the era of oil. Oil, as Daniel Yergin wrote in his Pulitzer Prize winning book "The Prize," fueled both economic growth and the great geopolitical conflicts of the 20th century.

But in the 21st century, it has become an albatross around the advanced industrial world's neck. It is the primary source of not only air pollution and global warming, but of geopolitical instability. The nations that, through the fluke of geography, are the source of much of the world's oil, have largely squandered the patrimony that flowed into their wallets. Their spiritually and economically impoverished peoples have become the seedbeds of the fanaticism that has needlessly taken so many lives.

The technologies already exist to accomplish the goal of eliminating half of our oil usage over the next decade. The automobile industry must be given generous tax incentives and subsidies to ensure that every new car that rolls off assembly lines within five years uses clean technologies like fuel cells that are either oil-free or are hybrids. Car fleet fuel efficiency standards should be doubled with generous financial awards for date-certain completion. And then they should be doubled again.

The government should also jump start massive new investments in non-polluting and non-oil using technologies for producing electricity. Solar, wind, geo-thermal and biomass -- these are the energy sources of the 21st century, not oil and natural gas from politically unstable regions.

The debate over changing our travel habits in the U.S. in response to the horrific hijackings cannot be limited to adapting new security precautions at the nation's overburdened airports. There were undoubtedly many ways the terrorists could have eluded our slapdash airport security precautions. Long lines of harried travelers brushing past the underpaid rent-a-guards at x-ray checkpoints pose almost no deterrence to the determined mass murderer.

Yet the outlook for the nation's airports in the coming decades promises even bigger crowds and longer lines. Moreover, as long as the current economics of the airline industry are in place -- with their thin operating margins in good times and massive losses in bad times -- improving the quality of airport security could prove very difficult to finance.

But there's a way around this dilemma. The nation should resolve now to end gridlock at its airports by eliminating all flights of up to 300 miles. How? By building a high-speed rail system in this country that will get people to their business and pleasure destinations just as fast, if not faster, and at less cost and with more comfort than current air travel.

A crash program now could have a modern, high-speed rail system in place in ten years that would largely eliminate the Washington-New York and New York-Boston shuttles; link the cities within Florida and Texas; hub-and-spoke the checkerboard-patterned cities of the Upper Midwest; run up and down the West Coast. It's a crash program that would create tens of thousands of new jobs in every section of the country.

Then, the airlines could adopt continental schedules that fill up their planes. Do competing airlines really need to send planes from Boston to Los Angeles every hour that are only one-third filled?

Businesses can adapt by altering their business schedules, and airlines can drop their ruinous competition for the limited trans-continental market. High-speed rail and full planes will mean less frequent aircraft departures and less crowded airports. That will give the airlines and airport authorities time to carry out the sophisticated and appropriate security measures that must be adapted in the wake of this week's terrorist assault. Those flights may cost more, but it's a small price to pay.

These are just some of the home front programs that the American people can unite behind now to combat terrorism within our borders. They're practical. They're high-tech. And they will give the economy a boost.

And most important, they will unite the home front in the war against terrorism in a way that doesn't sacrifice our basic freedoms.