March 30, 2017

SCALES #8

Hello!

Yesterday I went to a talk by Gina McCarthy, EPA administrator during Obama's second term. (One of the baldest illustrations of élite privilege at Harvard being access to prominent politicians and government officials hired on after they've left office.) It felt like almost too much to be able to listen to the official in charge of constructing the Clean Power Plan the day after the executive order instructing the new EPA-in-name to dismantle it. (McCarthy's view: all the administrative and legal hurdles to changing existing rules means repealing the plan "will be a fight to the finish".)

I thought McCarthy was great—strong Boston accent, blunt, pugnacious, funny. (And a reminder of what a UMass Boston education can lead to, at a time when the campus is underfunded and financially struggling.) She seemed like just the kind of person I would want administering the EPA—committed to its public health mission, understanding the importance of good science, attuned to and skilled in the personal relationship-building and arm-twisting required to make good policy actually happen. Her explicit framing of her career path as resulting from always having your eyes open to new opportunities, being willing to take risks, and surrounding yourself with talented people was inspiring.

New to me was one somewhat wonky angle on political attacks on science: the chairman of the House, gulp, "Science" Committee's attempt to undercut research on the health effects of fine particles in the atmosphere. ("Lamar Smith and I ahh tight.") To people doing aerosol research, the "Harvard Six Cities Study" (Dockery et al., 1993) is always referenced as the gold standard of a long term multi-site public health study that establishes the human health impact of fine particulate matter. The Orwellianly-titled HONEST Act, which requires "raw data" of any study informing policy to be publicly available, would make it effectively impossible to use any public health study such as the Six Cities Study, because of the requirement to protect the privacy of study subjects. In McCarthy's view, the act is intended to discredit particle health studies in particular because, if the social cost of carbon is disregarded, co-benefits of reducing particle pollution is what supports a cost-benefit analysis of climate policy.

So what is one to do? As McCarthy points out, these sorts of procedural attacks on the scientific underpinnings of what the EPA does are insidious because it's hard to get people to care. I agree she's right to recognize the importance of actions such as the March for Science—reframing the debate with mass rallies seems crucial beyond trying to stay on top of every parliamentary trick. And at the least, yesterday reminded me that a world in which people use the best available science to inform policy that protects the health of humans can in fact exist.

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So I've been listening to this podcast...

Binging on S-Town. ("S" is for "Southern Gothic".)

Ecoacoustics of Cook Strait.

Hrishikesh Hirway talking about Song Exploder on Longform. (So many good Song Exploders in the archive, like Solange and Carly Rae.)

Links

More on that executive order.

"The dividing line between the classes might be starkest between those who spend thousands of dollars on a gleaming smile and those who suffer and even die from preventable tooth decay."

Always bittersweet to first learn about a cultural figure from tributes in memoriam. This week: Robert Silvers of the NYRB remembered by past assistants, Adam Thirwell. (The Review will always remind me of the basement waiting room of my high school piano teacher in Saint Paul.)

Explosive exposé on PB&J in the NBA. Love this line on the Cavs: "the power of the PB&J being wielded as a form of asymmetric nutritional warfare".

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[Boston from a Hot Air Balloon], James Wallace Black, 1860s, via The Met. His flight on the "Queen of the Air" resulted in the first successful aerial photographs in the U.S.

One last Gina McCarthy nugget: "Being focused is not a measure of success."

—Adam