“Here at the Secret Science Club, all scientists are rock stars”

So announces Margaret Mittelbach, as she introduces that evening’s headliner: a microbiologist from Columbia University, who will talk about vertical farming within skyscrapers to create sustainable ecocities.

Ooh, aah...

This is the monthly meeting of the Secret Science Club.

According to a Christian Science Monitor article dated today, "neuroscientists, marine biologists, astrophysicists, paleontologists, and genomics experts have all taken a bow at the Secret Science Club since it started three years ago." Founded by Mittelbach, fellow natural history writer Michael Crewdson, and Dorian Devins, a radio producer, the Secret Science Club began as a publicity event to launch their first book, “Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger.” The original event was "a wacky taxidermy contest," but it went so well that it grew into "a club where people could talk about science in an informal setting."

But the Club is not alone, as it belongs to a growing international community of “science cafes” (or “cafe scientifique” in Europe where they got their start 10 years ago) "where scientists and ordinary citizens can have a lively discussion in a social setting far from the lecture hall or laboratory."

On the whole, I think science clubs are a great idea. In fact, I might start one of my own.

Japan Amends Chemical Control Law

I've documented efforts by Europe, the US, and Canada to change their chemical control laws and/or review their Inventory chemicals. Well, now Japan is getting in on the act. As it has elsewhere, public interest in ensuring the safety of chemical substances has been on the rise in Japan. At the global level, agreements such as the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM) have pushed to minimize adverse effects of chemicals on human health and the environment by 2020. Other regional and international efforts have also put pressure on individual countries to enact changes to their long standing chemical control laws.

So at the end of February 2009, the Japanese Ministry of the Environment issued an announcement that a bill to amend the had been submitted to the 171st ordinary session of the Diet. This bill is aimed at introducing a comprehensive control system to minimize the adverse effects of chemical substances on human health and the environment and at ensuring the international consistency of Japanese regulations on chemicals.

The main changes include:

• Companies that have manufactured or imported any chemical substance, including an existing one, in excess of the specified amounts are newly obliged to notify applications containing quantity and other information to the government.

• Upon receipt of those applications, the government screens and prioritizes substances subject to detailed risk assessment. For these substances, the manufacturers/importers may be required to submit information on hazardous properties for government evaluation.

• Based on the evaluation, the government decides whether to regulate the manufacture/used of the substance and its product, etc.

The Japanese amendments reflect changes recently made in Canada (Chemical Management Plan), Europe (REACH), and potentially the United States, which began hearings last week aimed at reforming the Toxic Substances Control Act.

Mixed Responses - Scientists in US Happy, Scientists in Canada Not So Much

Most scientists didn't miss the obvious reference to reinvigorating and respecting science in President Obama's inauguration speech. The Kansas City Star newspaper had a nice article yesterday about this:

Researchers welcome Obama’s emphasis on science by Malcolm Garcia

In contrast, researchers in Canada have had a slightly different response to science budgets.

Researchers fear 'stagnation' under Tories by Carolyn Abraham

What do you think?

Unintended Consequences - Ethanol is Up/Ethanol is Down

News came this week that USEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson won't decide for several months the tricky issue of how much ethanol should be blended into gasoline. EPA is in discussions with the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Transportation, who are coordinating on the possible raising of the amount of ethanol blended in the US supply, all while trying to agree on a policy for regulating vehicle emissions.

Why is this important? Well, the current US standard is that ethanol can be 10% of the gasoline mixture (whereas in Brazil the mandate is 25% ethanol, mostly from sugar cane). Current law in the US requires that 11.1 billion gallons of biofuels (mostly corn-based ethanol) must be used this year in accordance with the Renewable Fuels Standard. But ethanol demand has fallen because the high prices of gasoline made people drive less, which in turn helped to decrease the price of gas. Add in the large subsidies given to ethanol producers to ramp up production a year or two ago and the now the worldwide recession, and ethanol producers are suddenly operating at about 85% capacity and struggling to pay the bills. One company, VeraSun Energy Corp., the second largest US ethanol maker, actually filed for bankruptcy protection late last year. Raising the ethanol standard would help keep ethanol use high even as fuel consumption drops.

Meanwhile, other issues have been raised as to whether corn-ethanol is a good fuel option or not. The increased use of corn for fuel rather than food had wide-ranging impacts not only on direct costs of eating corn, but also on the costs of beef, milk and other foods that rely on corn as feed. Given that ethanol actually reduces fuel-economy, and the technological difficulties of fuel delivery systems (e.g., corrosion of iron parts, internal wear, and spark generation), some have argued that it is not a viable alternative to gasoline. Yet others point to its advantages as a renewable resource and note that non-food vegetation (i.e., cellulosic) ethanol is being developed, as will innovations to automobile and other fuel delivery systems. All innovations necessitate further downstream innovations (and subsequently, jobs), they say.

What this means, of course, is that we need to be aware of the interconnectedness of our technologies. Changes to one can impact others. So merely switching from one fuel source to another isn't enough - we need to be aware of all the other impacts that such a switch might necessitate.

Revisiting the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976

I have noted previously that there is a big push in this Congress to take a long hard look at the current chemical control regulations in the United States. Well, on Thursday, February 26, 2009 the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection held a hearing on "Revisiting the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.” The hearing was designed to address the perception of critical gaps in the statute and explore how those gaps might hinder effective chemical safety policy in the United States.

The following witnesses, spanning a range of government, advocacy, and industry groups, all testified:

John Stephenson, Director, Natural Resources and the Environment, Government Accountability Office

J. Clarence Davies, Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future (Former EPA Assistant Administrator for Policy in the George H.W. Bush Administration)

Maureen Swanson, Healthy Children Project Coordinator, Learning Disabilities Association of America

Cecil Corbin-Mark, Deputy Director/Director for Policy Initiatives, WE ACT For Environmental Justice (West Harlem Environmental Action)

Michael Wright, Director of Health and Safety, United Steelworkers

Richard Denison, Senior Scientist, Environmental Defense Fund

Kathy Gerwig, Vice President, Workplace Safety and Environmental Stewardship Officer, Kaiser Permanente

Cal Dooley, President and CEO, American Chemistry Council

V.M. DeLisi, President, Fanwood Chemical, Inc., Chairman, International Affairs Committee, Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association

Charles T. Drevna, President, National Petrochemical & Refiners Association

A link to the written testimony and video of the Subcommittee can be found on the Committee web site.

Will the Real Roger Pielke Please Stand Up?

A while back I wrote a piece from a book by Roger A. Pielke, Jr. called The Honest Broker. In my article I mentioned the four idealized roles of scientists in Pielke's view: The Pure Scientist, the Science Arbiter, the Issue Advocate, and the Honest Broker of Policy Alternatives. After I published the piece it was pointed out to me that Pielke is a "climate skeptic." Since I'm about to write a follow up piece on another concept Pielke raises in the Honest Broker, I thought it worth looking into Pielke further. And here the plot thickens.

To begin with, there are two Roger A. Pielke's, Jr. and Sr. Both are professors and both have expressed their concerns about climate science. And both have been offered by climate skeptics as "one of their own." Ironically, the Wiki article on Roger A. Pielke, Sr. says that he "has a somewhat nuanced position on climate change, which is sometimes taken for skepticism, a label that he explicitly renounces." In fact, Pielke, Sr. has said:

the evidence of a human fingerprint on the global and regional climate is incontrovertible as clearly illustrated in the National Research Council report and in our research papers (e.g. see http://climatesci.org/publications/pdf/R-258.pdf).

Similarly, Pielke, Jr. is often used as an icon of the skeptics, yet he too is not so much of a critic as the skeptics would have you believe. Dylan Otto Krider, founder of Whoslying, "a nonprofit devoted to correcting statements that do not responsibly reflect objective reality," today writes in a "Skepticism Examiner" blog called "Who is Roger Pielke, Jr." about his knowledge of the man and what he really thinks about climate change. It's an interesting article and I highly recommend that people read it.

The point is that all of us must be very careful not to simply take at face value what we hear on the news or read in blogs. It is always wise to get information from multiple sources and, whenever possible, go to the original source of the information. Believe it or not, people have been known to "reinterpret" information, either intentionally or through intellectual indolence.

Hey Scientists - Being Brilliant Isn't Enough!

One of the purposes of this blog is to highlight how scientists and policy makers interact. A friend recently sent me a link to an article called "Why turning out brilliant scientists isn't enough," written by Robert Winston and published in the New Scientist magazine on February 3, 2009. [If you missed it, the title has the link to the original article.]

Professor Winston argues that scientists must "engage with - and, crucially, listen to - the public..." It's not enough to be pure scientists, so he suggests that "a two-way dialogue...seems more likely than a one-way lecture to lead to a maturing of viewes and resolution of conflict." And we all know how much scientists (and academics) like to lecture. Winston suggests that if scientists "show we care about the ethical implications of our work, people are likely to be sympathetic."

This, of course, ties in with science literacy, and understanding and appreciating science at an early age. More importantly perhaps, is the ability to teach critical thinking to our youth so that they can consider whether some of the information they receive as they grow older makes sense or not.

While Winston believes we have come a long way toward improved interaction between scientists and the public, he insists we need to do much more. "We have a duty to conduct research to ensure that the ways we attempt to engage really do have an impact..."

NASA Satellite Crashes Before Reaching Orbit

Under the weather today. But check out this Washington Post article about the NASA satellite that is supposed to measure CO2, but crashed.

Chemical Control, Bobby Rush, and Hearings Start on Thursday

Just a few days ago I reported that it was likely that the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection was planning to hold hearings soon on reform of the current chemical control law in the United States. Well, seems that "soon" is now Thursday, as in this Thursday, February 26th in the Rayburn House Office Building.

The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) has been in place virtually unchanged since 1976, and there have been increasing calls to make changes to the law over the last few years. The current Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, of which this Subcommittee is a part, is Henry Waxman, who introduced the House version of the Kid Safe Chemical Act (KSCA) back in 2005 and cosponsored the 2008 version introduced by Representative Hilda Solis.

The subcommittee in charge of running hearings on TSCA reform is chaired by Representative Bobby Rush, of the 1st Congressional District in Illinois. Some may remember Rush from his rather controversial speech at the news conference in which now-impeached Governor Blagojevich announced he had appointed the now-embattled Roland Burris to fill now-President Barack Obama's Senate seat.

It is expected that this will be the first of several hearings that take place in both the House and the Senate prior to the reintroduction of the Kid Safe Chemical Act. While the KSCA seems likely to be introduced, there is also pressure to come up with a more workable reform of TSCA, perhaps one that incorporates the current and proposed enhancements to the EPA ChAMP program.

Past Director of Health Institutes Lauds Stimulus Funding for Science

A week or so ago I posted some of the new funding for science added to the stimulus package passed by Congress. Well, now the immediate past director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Elias A. Zerhouni, says that "the timing and amount of this stimulus could not have been more opportune." He notes that not only have science budgets fallen steadily since 2003, philanthropic foundations and private gifts that helped lessen the shortfall have been severely cut back as well due to the current economic downturn.

While some complain that funding for science isn't "stimulus," Zerhouni says that he has "testified in Congress that for every $1 billion shortfall in the NIH base budget, an estimated 6000 to 9000 scientific jobs are lost, with an equal number of jobs lost in indirect support activities." Add to that all the other jobs lost as industry lays off scientific staff.

So while the economic stimulus funds will help in the short term, Zerhouni cautions that this is only a partial answer. To be successful in staving "off the loss of talented scientists" it must be "coupled with a longer-term increase in the base budgets of the research agencies." This will be hard to do in tough economic times, but "it may well be attainable given the clear and welcome commitment to science just shown by the new U.S. administration and Congress."

Finally, Zerhouni notes that "A nation's most strategic resource is the strength of its scientific workforce. It is imperative that the entire scientific community coalesce around a quantifiable and shared rationale for rebalancing the base domestic federal research budget beyond the one-time stimulus package." I think most scientists would agree that funding has been severely limiting the ability to make new discoveries and understand the critical issues that face our future. This is a priority that must be kept in mind even as we deal collectively with economic uncertainties.

[Mr. Zerhouni made these comments as an editorial in the current issue of Science magazine (February 20, 2009), which is accessible by subscription (www.sciencemag.org). Photo credit, National Institutes of Health.]

Climate Change Taking Shape for Major Global Activity in 2009

To coin a relevant phrase, the world appears to have reached a tipping point when it comes to taking action on climate change. After many years of debate and non-action, a threshold seems to have been attained in which governments worldwide are acknowledging that action is necessary.

While the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC isn't due until 2014 (the 4th report was released in 2007), the organization has already begun the outlining process, which involves climate change experts from all relevant disciplines and users of IPCC reports, in particular representatives from governments. Input from governments and organizations is expected at the 30th Session of the IPCC to be held April 21-23, 2009, in Turkey. The scoping meeting of experts to define the outline is scheduled for mid July 2009.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) just published its 2009 yearbook, in which it calls for "an intensified sense of urgency for responsible governance in the face of approaching critical thresholds and tipping points" related to climate change and five other major developments in the changing environment. Facts like the breaking up of ice caps, retreating of glaciers, and melting of permafrost in Sweden, Alaska, Canada, and northern Russia only heighten the concern.

In the US, President Obama's filling of key environmental positions has had a distinctly "climate change" based feel to it. New EPA administrator Jackson, several White House advisors, and other key people in the administration all have atmospheric and climate experience and an avowed interest in dealing with the problem. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has gotten into the act, agreeing today to begin high-level talks with China relative to combating both the global economic crisis and climate change. With her on this first official state visit is Climate Change Special Envoy Todd Stern, the point person for the U.S. in climate treaty negotiations.

All of this leads up to an international meeting scheduled for December in Copenhagen, Denmark, in which a new global climate treaty is expected to be adopted.

House Subcommittee to Hold TSCA Reform Hearings Soon

Seems the US House of Representatives may begin hearings shortly on the US Toxic Substances Control Act. As I've reported here in the past, there has been much pressure to "reform" TSCA. To some this means a complete rewriting of the legislation in the form of the Kid-Safe Chemical Act (KSCA), which was introduced originally in 2005 and again in 2008. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey has said he plans to reintroduce the KSCA into this Congress within the next few weeks.

In conjunction with the planned reintroduction of the KSCA in the Senate (and an identical companion bill in the House), the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade & Consumer Protection is expected to hold the first oversight hearings on the Hill as early as next week. This particular subcommittee gained the authority for oversight only after newly installed Chair of the House Environment and Commerce Committee Henry Waxman completely reorganized how the committee works.

The news of the subcommittee hearings comes on the heels of a letter sent by the advocacy organization, Environmental Working Group (EWG). EWG's letter, addressed to new EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, strongly supports the KSCA (which they now refer to as "Kid-Safe") and offers a series of suggestions for EPA to take while they are waiting for KSCA - or some other version of TSCA reform- to be passed. The suggestions are:

1) Make children's environmental health a top EPA priority

2) Test umbilical cord blood for industrial chemicals

3) Improve public access to chemical toxicity data

4) Revamp voluntary programs under which industry has submitted data

5) Enforce TSCA

6) Challenge dubious or unsubstantiated Confidential Business Information

7) Keep persistent, bioaccumulative toxins off the market

Jasanoff's "Essential Parallel Between Science and Democracy"

I came across a very interesting article in Seed Magazine call "The Essential Parallel Between Science and Democracy" by Sheila Jasanoff. Jasanoff is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a very well respected researcher on the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and public policy of modern democracies.

Making note of US President Obama's nod to science, Jasanoff queries: "So the question for thoughtful Americans, interested in the future of science and technology and reflecting on President Barack Obama's historic inaugural address, is not, What is science's rightful place?, but rather, What do the president and his administration see as science's rightful place? And, as critical consumers of both science and democracy, is it a vision that we, the people, can comfortably embrace?"

Jasanoff notes that Obama routinely indicates in his speeches that "science and technology will feature in his administration as both instruments and objects of public policy." And many prominent scientists and engineers have been named to key posts, including Nobel Laureate Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy. But she also observes that we must also understand the link between science and democracy. "The very virtues that make democracy work are also those that make science work: a commitment to reason and transparency, an openness to critical scrutiny, a skepticism toward claims that too neatly support reigning values, a willingness to listen to countervailing opinions, a readiness to admit uncertainty and ignorance, and a respect for evidence gathered according to the sanctioned best practices of the moment," says Jasanoff.

This short blog can't do the article justice and I highly recommend people read the entire article here.

And while you're there, check out Seed's The Right Place Project to see how you can contribute to linking science and democracy.

International Calls for Global Database on Toxins in Products

I've mentioned information systems and databases previously. This past week in Geneva, Switzerland there was a call from an international body for a broader database of chemicals in products such as clothes, toys, jewelry, and electronics. The idea would be to have a uniform information system to help governments, businesses, and consumers reduce the risks to hazardous substances.

These calls came out of a United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) workshop designed to set a framework for the second International Conference on Chemicals Management (ICCM2). And ICCM2, which occurs in May, will review the status of the UN Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM). I haven't mentioned SAICM much in this blog, but will likely be doing so more in the future. After many years of discussions by most of the world's nations, SAICM was officially established in 2006 as a framework to "achieve sound management of chemicals" worldwide.

Opening the workshop, the director general of the Swedish Chemicals Agency, Ethel Forsberg, said "As a consumer I want to buy products anywhere in the world that will not pose a risk to my family or be a problem to dispose of, but information on the chemical content of products very rarely exists - even if they contain hazardous substances."

As internet technology has advanced, scientists have contributed substantial data on chemicals and related issues to information systems and databases that are available online. Having access to the information is a good first step. However, most scientific data are not readily understood by the general public, and thus it seems necessary to also look at ways to digest and communicate the information in more meaningful ways. In my opinion, making this jump to the next level in a transparent and unbiased way is needed to avoid having the now accessible data misused by those advocating one position or another.