How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

Re:How Dangerous Is Your Couch? by newbie12 on Saturday September 08, 2012 @04:33PM (#4493913)

The environmental movement in America is worthless. They spent all of their time on lifestyle issues like battery cars, recycling, and global warming (issues that also line the pockets of their large donors) when there are real, profound issues like this. Even if the EPA can't act, how come only one crazy lady is working on building the case?

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Re:How Dangerous Is Your Couch? by dkarl on Saturday September 08, 2012 @05:47PM (#4494113)

I wouldn't blame the movement itself. There's always a buzz around lifestyle issues because there's continual evolution. Every day millions of individuals make millions of choices, so every day the culture is changing in little ways. There's a certain portion of the population that is an easy target for the kind of education and advocacy that scientists are good at. Politics is a lot harder. It's harder to make people care, and the target audience is much more diverse. When it comes to people who aren't as well educated or who aren't members of the reality-based community, you need an entirely different message. You have to go toe-to-toe with industries that pay millions of dollars to lobbyists and trot out doctors who say you're trying to kill kids. And even if you try hard and do a good job, it's still boring stuff that's a lot harder to turn into a story than lifestyle issues. Would this article exist without a glamorous protagonist and the harm-to-children angle?

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Re:How Dangerous Is Your Couch? by 001sky on Saturday September 08, 2012 @06:25PM (#4494223)

When it comes to people who aren't as well educated or who aren't members of the reality-based community,

Please. This is america. We don't need to talk down to people like this.

200/84000 = 0.24%. EPA doesn't have a clue about 99.76% of the registered chemicals for sale? Experts?

It doesn't take a rocket scientis or a member of the tea party to figure out something is odd-ball with that?

It would seem more politically feasible to say, here is some tax money. Lets test this stuff.

Because it looks like the original CA regs. requiring these chemicals was also written to "protect" the public? who's protecting the people from the protectors?

Ya know? its just kind of weird all around.

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Re:How Dangerous Is Your Couch? by dkarl on Saturday September 08, 2012 @06:43PM (#4494279)

I didn't mean to rag on conservatives, though I guess my wording made it sound that way. I just mean people who aren't susceptible to argument with numbers and facts, the kind of argument you would be comfortable making, the kind of argument scientists are good at making.

It would seem more politically feasible to say, here is some tax money. Lets test this stuff.

You're suggesting the most politically appealing pitch would be science and government spending (on something that doesn't create working-class jobs.) I'm not an expert on politics, but luckily we do have an expert opinion to compare that to. The million dollar industry lobbyists thought the most effective appeal would be a scare campaign in newspapers and a venal doctor talking about imaginary suffering babies. They won. I think I'll trust them.

Because it looks like the original CA regs. requiring these chemicals was also written to "protect" the public? who's protecting the people from the protectors?

Whenever we let science affect policy, policy is open to revision, just like science is. We got seat belts right, we got a lot of emissions and pollution laws right, but we're never going to get everything right. It will always be a process of revise, revise, revise as we learn more about the science.

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Re:How Dangerous Is Your Couch? by 001sky on Saturday September 08, 2012 @07:13PM (#4494344)

This is one of those cases where the old saying comes to mind:

Sunlight is the best disenfectant

Good news is that sunlight is cheap and easy.

Science needs to do science. Information needs to flow. right now, the system looks more a bunch of "experts" on the take or incompetent. More worried about securing funding, managing their careers, promoting their pet projects, etc. The [trust me] argument is a political failure, because of these demonstrated problems.

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