Understand Your Mission
If we learned anything from the pandemic it is that science is not our savior. It can be wrong. Moreover, science does not consider everything. While it projected deaths and disaster, it failed to account for what would come from the social upheavals created by our efforts to stave off its projections. We learned that science is but one tool in the leadership arsenal and we learned that somethings are simply beyond science’s ability to get right. Putting man on the moon or nuclear weaponry are relatively easy problems compared to the science necessary to deal with things like epidemiology or climatology. Big data statistically analyzed is not the same thing as the physical certainty of a pitched baseball. But some, it seems, have not learned these lessons.
Taegan Goddard quotes a New York Time piece:
“Under President Trump, the EPA plans to stop tallying gains from the health benefits caused by curbing two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone, when regulating industry.”
“It’s a seismic shift that runs counter to the EPA’s mission statement, which says the agency’s core responsibility is to protect human health and the environment.”
For the record, I have not read the Times piece – I ain’t paying them a dime. But I know what I need to know based on this pull quote. There are two things people need to understand before they push the outrage button over this.
Thing you need to know one – the so-called “tally of gains from human health benefits” are darn near made up numbers to begin with. They are certainly no more reliable than the covid death projections. These calculations are based on a number of presumptions and other less than fully reliable projections. Each projection fed into other projections raises the uncertainty (room for error) present in the calculation. And presumptions are, well just that. And one can choose the presumptions to steer that calculations in a specific direction – like one that grants the E.P.A. more regulatory power. So, what is being abandoned here is far, far from some rock solid certainty that this rule, whatever it may be, will save X number of lives. It might or it might not.
Which leads to the second thing you need to know. The data is still rolling in, but we already know that many health issues have arisen because of the covid shutdown. While we fought that disease other health issues ran rampant. And frankly we lack the data to properly analyze whether we lost more people to untreated health issues that were not covid than we saved from covid. We certainly have anecdotal evidence that such is the case. And then there is the health damage that may or may not have occurred from children that lost access to school meal programs that took care of their nutrition when their home did not. We know that alcohol and drug abuse increased during the isolation of the shutdowns – how much health damage did that produce?
The rules the EPA creates have secondary consequences. They put people, sometimes businesses, out of work. That will have health consequences. We know, for example, that EVs may not have tailpipe emissions, but they consume tires at an extremely rapid pace due to their excessive weight and that the tire degradation produces massive amounts of pollution. What are those health effects? On Friday we looked at battery fires – ‘Nuff Said. Giving up the automatic adoption of a regulation because less than 100% reliable projections show it will save a certain number of lives does not equate to the loss of those lives. Other lives may be saved or improved by not passing that reg.
But of course, as far as the NYTimes is concerned the Trump Administration can do no good so this bureaucratic, administrative change is somehow an abandonment of principle. It’s not – it’s just a different way of going about things. Probably a better one.
The post Understand Your Mission appeared first on The Hugh Hewitt Show.
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