Keep this in mind the next time
you are about to repeat a rumour or spread
gossip.
In ancient Greece (469 - 399 BC), Socrates was widely lauded for his
wisdom.
One day an acquaintance ran up to him excitedly and said, "Socrates,
do you know what I just heard about Diogenes?"
"Wait a moment," Socrates replied, "Before you tell me I'd like you
to pass a little test. It's called the Triple Filter Test."
'Triple filter?" asked the acquaintance.
"That's right," Socrates continued, "Before you talk to me about
Diogenes let's take a moment to filter what you're going to say. The first
filter is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell
me is true?"
"No," the man said. "Actually I just heard about it."
"All right," said Socrates, "So you don't really know if it's true or
not. Now let's try the second filter, the filter of Goodness. Is what you are
about to tell me about Diogenes something good?"
"No, on the contrary..."
"So," Socrates continued, "You want to tell me something about
Diogenes that may be bad, even though you're not certain it's true?"
The man shrugged, a little embarrassed.
Socrates continued: "You may still pass the test though, because
there is a third filter, the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me
about Diogenes going to be useful to me?
"No, not really."
"Well," concluded Socrates, "If what you want to tell me is neither
True nor Good nor even useful, why tell it to me or anyone at all?"
The man was bewildered and ashamed.
This is an example of why Socrates was a great philosopher and held
in such high esteem.
It also
explains why Socrates never found out that Diogenes was shagging his
wife.
SYDNEY (AP) — The government agency that oversees Australia's Great Barrier Reef on Friday approved a plan to dump vast swathes of sediment on the reef as part of a major coal port expansion — a decision that environmentalists say will endanger one of the world's most fragile ecosystems.
The federal government in December approved the expansion of the Abbot Point coal port in northern Queensland, which requires a massive dredging operation to make way for ships entering and exiting the port. About 3 million cubic meters (106 million cubic feet) of dredged mud will be dumped within the marine park under the plan.
Environment Minister Greg Hunt has vowed that "some of the strictest conditions in Australian history" will be in place to protect the reef from harm, including water quality measures and safeguards for the reef's plants and animals.
But outraged conservationists say the already fragile reef will be gravely threatened by the dredging, which will occur over a 184-hectare (455-acre) area[that is 0.7 squares miles, or a mere 0.0005% of the total Reef area]. Apart from the risk that the sediment will smother coral and seagrass, the increased shipping traffic will boost the risk of accidents, such as oil spills[I thought they were shipping coal which presents very little risk, even if there is an accident]and collisions with delicate coral beds, environment groups argue.
On Friday, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority — the government manager of the 345,400 square kilometer (133,360 square mile) protected marine zone — approved an application by the state-owned North Queensland Bulk Ports Corp. for a permit to dump the sediment within the marine park in a location that does not contain any coral or seagrass beds.
Bruce Elliot, general manager for the marine authority's biodiversity, conservation and sustainable use division, said in a statement that strict conditions would be placed on the sediment disposal, including a water quality monitoring plan that will remain in place five years after the dumping is complete.
"By granting this permit application with rigorous safeguards, we believe we are able to provide certainty to both the community and the proponent while seeking to ensure transparent and best practice environmental management of the project," Elliot said.
The ports corporation's CEO Brad Fish has argued that the sediment has been extensively tested for contaminants and was found to be clean.
"This is natural sand and seabed materials ... it's what's already there," Fish said in an interview last month. "We're just relocating it from one spot to another spot, in a like-per-like situation."
Rachel Campbell, spokeswoman for the ports corporation, said the group didn't anticipate the conditions would cause any delays to the dredging plans.
Australia is home to vast mineral deposits and a mining boom fueled by demand from China kept Australia's economy strong during the global financial crisis. Though the boom is now cooling as demand from China slows, Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his conservative government have vowed to focus their efforts on reviving the industry.
In a report released in 2012, UNESCO expressed concern about development along the reef, including ports, and warned that the marine park was at risk of being listed as a World Heritage site in danger.
In response, Queensland Premier Campbell Newman said his government would protect the environment — but not at the expense of the state's economy.
"We are in the coal business," he said at the time. "If you want decent hospitals, schools and police on the beat we all need to understand that."
Environmentalists were infuriated by Friday's decision, saying that the reef is already vulnerable, having lost huge amounts of coral in recent decades to storm damage and coral-eating crown of thorns starfish.
"We are devastated. I think any Australian or anyone around the world who cares about the future of the reef is also devastated by this decision," said Richard Leck, reef campaign leader for international conservation group WWF. "Exactly the wrong thing that you want to do when an ecosystem is suffering ... is introduce another major threat to it — and that's what the marine park authority has allowed to happen today."
Over the past few years, natural gas has taken the energy sector by storm in the United States. The newly discovered technology allowing for efficient extraction and production of shale gas has rejuvenated the energy sector in the U.S., putting the country in a leading position in the global energy market. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. natural gas production–which was 23.0 trillion cubic feet in 2011–is projected to surge by 44% to 33.1 trillion cubic feet by 2040. This substantial increase in U.S. domestic production is largely due to a massive rise in shale gas production in particular. The improved extraction technology of shale gas in recent years has enabled the U.S. to produce more natural gas than it consumes and to rely almost wholly upon its own domestic supply.
The Shale Evolution
Shale gas refers to natural gas that is trapped within shale formations–fine-grained sedimentary rocks which can be abundant sources of petroleum and natural gas. In the past, releasing this gas from shale was a problematic process—one that was both costly and technically challenging. However, new advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing over the past ten years have made it possible to access large volumes of shale gas. Previously, accessing this gas would have been economically infeasible. Now, U.S. shale gas production comprises about 40% of the country’s total dry production; moreover, shale gas production is projected to rise by a staggering 44% by 2040 (Figure 1).1
Figure 1: Changes in U.S. Dry Natural Gas Production | Data Source: EIA
Increased Northeast Production
From 2008 to 2013, natural gas production in the northeastern United States has increased more than five times, from 2.1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) to 12.3 Bcf/d.2 This additional supply has supported greater use of natural gas in the Northeast (especially for commercial users like power generation stations) while reducing the net inflows of natural gas from other regions such as the Gulf of Mexico, the Midwest, and eastern Canada. Figure 2: Northeast Production vs. Nat Gas inflow | Data Source: EIA
Although there are six regions that produce the majority of shale gas (plays) in the U.S. (Bakken, Niobrara, Permian, Marcellus, Eagle Ford, and Haynesville), the Marcellus region alone accounted for about 75% of natural gas production growth among all regions. In December 2013, the Marcellus region, located in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, is expected to provide 18% of total U.S. natural gas production.3Although vast shale plays in the Marcellus region have a major role in the rapid development of U.S. natural gas production, the improved efficiency of new wells has also played a significant role in increasing production volumes. Despite the declining number of drilling rigs in the region since 2012, production from wells has continued to grow. Marcellus wells have begun producing higher volumes due to the removal of resource constraints in the takeaway capacity as a result of the discovery of abundant shale plays, along with recent infrastructure upgrades in West Virginia and Pennsylvania (Figure 3). Figure 3: Marcellus Rig Count vs. Production | Data Source: EIA
Since 2012, production growth in the northeast region has driven the future prices of natural gas at the Columbia Gas Transmission Appalachia hub below Louisiana’s Henry Hub prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). The graph below (created in ZEMA with data from NYMEX) shows the drop in futures prices for the Columbia Gas Transmission Appalachia hub in the Northeast region compared to Henry Hub futures. This drop is most notable since January 2012 (Figure 4). Figure 4: Henry Hub Natural Gas vs. Columbia Gas Appalachia Futures | Data Source: NYMEX
Shale Gas and the Global Landscape
In June 2013, a joint EIA/Advanced Resources International study reported that China is the only country outside of North America that has registered commercially viable production of shale gas, although China’s commercially viable volumes contribute less than 1% of the total natural gas production of the country.4This means that the U.S. and Canada are the largest producers of natural gas from shale formations in the world. In 2012, U.S. shale gas production (25.7 Bcf/d) as a share of total natural gas production (65.7 Bcf/d) was 39.1%, whereas this number for Canada was 14.3% (Figure 5). Figure 5: Shale gas as share of total dry natural gas production | Data Source: EIA
In 2012, Canadian shale gas production from two major shale plays—Horn River and Montney— averaged 2.0 Bcf/d, whereas the total Canadian production averaged 14.0 Bcf/d. Gross withdrawals from Horn River and Montney averaged above 2.5 Bcf/d in 2013, but higher production levels are currently constrained by limited pipeline infrastructure (Figure 6). Comparing the two major shale plays of Canada and the Marcellus region, the production from the Marcellus shale plays is expected to reach above 6.0 Bcf/d by the end of 2013 (Figure 3), whereas Canadian production is less than half of that level. Figure 6: Gross Withdrawals from select shale plays in Canada (Jan 2005 - May 2013) | Data Source: EIA
Shale Gas Production and Environmental Concerns
The combustion of natural gas emits significantly lower levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulfur dioxide than does the combustion of coal or oil. Furthermore, natural gas combustion can emit less than half as much CO2 as coal combustion (per unit of electricity output) when used in efficient combined-cycle power plants. Hence, natural gas is cleaner fuel than coal or oil, although it is far from being environmentally friendly!
Natural gas is not wholly environmentally friendly for several reasons. First of all, a large amount of
water is needed for the fracturing of wells in shale gas production, which affects the availability of water in surrounding areas for other uses while negatively affecting native aquatic habitats. Secondly, water, toxic chemicals, and sand used in hydraulic fracturing fluids can contaminate surrounding areas if managed poorly—that is, if spilled or leaked due to human error, or discharged as a result of faulty well construction. Additionally, the water waste that occurs as a byproduct of fracturing requires a lot of care when treated and disposed, as it is extremely toxic. Finally, according to the United States’ Geological Survey, hydraulic fracturing occasionally causes small earthquakes that are not a safety concern. If wastewater from the fracturing process is injected into deep wells in the subsurface of the earth, though, larger earthquakes that are a safety threat may occur.
Final Words
Although shale gas production has entered a new phase in North America since 2010, the Northeastern United States has the largest growth in natural gas production due to its massive shale reservoirs. The Marcellus plays (in the Northeast between Pennsylvania and West Virginia) are awash with shale reserves that have changed market dynamics. Historically, natural gas prices in the Northeast were high because of the high demand of the region. However, increased production due to the abundant shale plays and infrastructure upgrades in the Marcellus region have pushed down domestic natural gas prices in the U.S. and have reduced imports from other regions. Plus, natural gas is a cleaner fuel to consume when compared to oil and coal, which makes it more desirable for power plant operators in the Northeast region. Typically, cold temperatures and a high population density in this region have exerted upward pressure on electricity prices; however, the boom in Northeastern natural gas resources may lower electricity prices in this region. Nevertheless, the hydro fracturing procedures used in the production of shale gas would not make shale gas less environmentally damaging than any other fossil fuel.
In brief, the Northeast is sitting on a wealth of shale gas reserves that have changed energy trading for the region and the U.S. as a whole. The shale gas boom has even caused oil producers in the Middle East to carefully follow the rise of shale gas production in the U.S., as the country’s appetite for petroleum could be seriously affected by this phenomenon. It is interesting to speculate as to whether the shale gas boom in the U.S. may be the silver bullet for the Land of the Free in its present economic situation!
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I’ve been thinking about spring. It’s just been that kind of winter, described by a Wisconsin native in our local paper as “a cold spell,” which is definitely one way to talk about a week when the windchill dropped to -50 Fahrenheit.
When I look out the window – it’s just been that kind of winter – I try to look past the drifts of snow and see trees leafing into green, a bright chorus of birds in the branches, backyard cookouts, spring evenings with steamed shrimp and cold wine. One of harbingers of warm weather here in Madison is the arrival of trucks packed with seafood from Galveston, Texas. The fishermen park alongside a gourmet wine shop, hoist a banner proclaiming “Never Been Frozen” – which is, yes, slightly ironic here on the Midwestern tundra – and simply wait for customers to cue up.
Imagine me in that cue, as I have been for many years, breathing the balmy spring air and loading up on seafood from the famous bay. And imagine how dismayed I was when I discovered, while doing some background reading on dioxins, that the state of Texas has been allowing that and other notable industrial compounds – to seep into those waters – and, of course, into the fish that live there. The dioxins, in particular, have been directly traced from waste pits on the edge of the San Jacinto River as it rambles from Lake Houston and into this, one of our country’s great estuaries.
“Most people just aren’t aware of this,” Jackie Young, an environmental activist with Texans Together, tells me ruefully. She adds with some cynicism: “The state hasn’t been in a hurry to let people know. There’s a lot of Galveston Bay seafood sold on the open market and there’s a lot of revenue involved.”
Of course, I’m obsessing on seafood and, as Young reminds me, the real story – and the more important one- is that of an environmental disaster years in the making. The San Jacinto waste pits have tainted the soil, the river, the private wells of nearby communities as well as the bay. In 2008, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated the disposal site as a Superfund clean up project.
The agency has scheduled a community meeting tonight, in fact, to discuss further options in managing the slow spill of poisonous materials into the waterways.
But to start at the beginning. In the mid-1960s, the Champion Paper company decided to create a disposal site for the chemical wastes from its mill in Pasadena, Texas. It chose a sandy region along the main channel of San Jacinto, east of Houston, so that it could move the waste by barge. No permit was required. By 1966, the waste pits covered 14 acres and over the following decades they were loaded with a toxic stew of compounds. The EPA lists the worst of them as polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins, polychlorinated furans (dioxins and furans), and some metals. By “some” metals, the agency means lead and mercury, in particular. None of this is what you might call friendly chemistry. The agency classifies dioxins and furans as suspected human carcinogens, and notes that they are also known to be immunosuppressive and implicated in birth defects. Lead and mercury are famously neurotoxic. And they, as well as dioxins, bioaccumulate, meaning that they tend to be stored in the body.
In retrospect, it’s easy to argue that dumping them near a major waterway, that lead into a major fishing resource, was not a brilliant idea. Because, of course, those “safely” stored chemical wastes leaked into the river. (Not an isolated problem, as we all know from recent events in West Virginia).
But not one either that has gotten the same degree of national attention, even though, as Young points out, wells used for drinking water in that area are now measurably contaminated.
In fact, her family lives in one of the at-risk areas, a tidy blue-collar community called Highlands, which (with the Houston area’s famous disregard for zoning), is situated near the waste pits. “It might look like an industrial area but it is surrounded by residential properties,” Young says. After her father unexpectedly developed a festering acne-like skin condition – one of the classic signs of dioxin exposure – she and her mother did a door-to-door health survey, finding what they considered dismaying rates of autoimmune and other diseases. “We found eight cases of lupus on one street.”
Young turned her analysis over to the Texas Department of State Health Services, which concluded that although the community well was just over a mile from the disposal site, it did not believe that tainted ground water should be a health issue. A full copy of that report is archived here.
It was at that point that Young became a dedicated environmental activist. And it wasn’t sick people that brought the issue to forefront; the state has not conducted a full epidemiology assessment. What happened as that dioxin levels started mysteriously rising in Galveston Bay. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality started back-tracking up the San Jacinto and eventually found that the sandy soils around the old waste pits were startlingly high in dioxin levels. A form of analysis called chemical fingerprinting established that the toxic compounds had traveled both into the Houston shipping channel and into the Galveston Bay fisheries. The toxicity levels had not decreased in any meaningful way over the past decade.
As it turned out, the waste pits tucked into unstable sand were simply subsiding into the river. The companies now responsible for the waste pits – International Paper and Waste Management – rather than going through an expensive removal process decided to simply cap the pits and stop the seep.
But so far, that method has not proved entirely successful; due to continued subsidence, the cap itself has started to fail. The corporations are moving to reseal the waste pits but the contamination is now considered so severe that Harris County, where Houston is located, has filed a $100 million lawsuit against them for mismanagement. And tonight’s community meeting is designed to let the EPA get citizen input on whether it should require a complete cleanup of the waste pits, moving the compounds to a disposal site where massive water pollution is not an issue.
Which, of course, brings me back to the issue of tainted seafood. If you go to the website of the Galveston Bay Foundation, you’ll find a detailed page on the health risks associated with eating fish out of these waters. There are four main areas of the bay where even the state of Texas recommends against seafood consumption, three of those are contaminated with dioxins. The highest risks, according to these advisories, are catfish, sea trout, and blue crab. But there are parts of the bay, where the toxicity levels are so high and so wide spread that the recommendation is against eating any species at all.
And there’s this too, which I’ve pasted in as a direct quote:
Women of childbearing age and children under the age of 12 – DO NOT EAT ANY AMOUNT OF THE SPECIES LISTED!
Women past childbearing age and adult men – DO NOT EAT MORE THAN 8 OUNCES PER MONTH OF THE SPECIES LISTED!
And my point here – as I look out the window and dream of greener days – is that pollution is is never really just someone else’s problem, that the poisons never just stay in some else’s back yard. That’s a fiction we need to let go by, along with that 1960s attitude that we could trust companies like this to do it right. Yes, the risks here are much higher for close by communities. But we share in it.
And it makes no sense to step back while this sludge from our unregulated past seeps into water supplies, taints a river, poisons a fishery, and contaminates not only local residents but people across the country.
I hope that Texans Together makes a lot of noise, that community members pack that EPA meeting tonight, angry and determined and demanding a real clean up. And I hope they get it.
We all deserve, as Rachel Carson said far too long ago, a much better spring.
Images: Courtesy of Texans Together
Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently the best-seller, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. She writes for a range of publications including Time, Scientific American, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times (and even the literary journal, Tin House). She is currently working on a sixth book about poisonous food.
Borophene is made of boron atoms, arranged in a flat disk with a hexagonal hole. Image via Wang Lab/Brown University
After all the hubbub around graphene, the race is on to find more wonder materials—ones that might be even more promising than the Nobel Prize-honoured, 2D carbon lattice.
Earlier this month we reported on a type of sodium bismuthate that had earned itself the nickname “3D graphene” and pointed toward a future of hard drives with ten times their current capacity. Now, another long-theorized nanomaterial looks set to take on graphene on the 2D plane: borophene.
To be clear, borophene hasn’t actually been made yet. But physical chemists at Brown University have made one unit of a boron cluster, called B36, and detailed its interesting structure on a supercomputer. The university claims this demonstrates “that a boron-based competitor to graphene is a very real possibility.”
Boron is next to carbon (which graphene is made of) in the periodic table, but no one has previously demonstrated experimentally how it could be arranged in a similar one-atom-thick sheet.
Professor Lai-Sheng Wang and lead author Zachary Piazza headed up a team that assembled experimental evidence of how borophene might work, and published their findings in Nature Communications.
Graphene is well-known for its honeycomb, or “chicken wire” structure. “However, boron cannot form graphene-like structures with a honeycomb hexagonal framework because of its electron deficiency,” the researchers explained. “Computational studies suggest that extended boron sheets with partially filled hexagonal holes are stable; however, there has been no experimental evidence for such atom-thin boron nanostructures.”
Until now; they showed a two-dimensional boron lattice can be made out of a triangular pattern with hexagonal holes. Their results, they wrote, present “the first experimental evidence that single-atom layer boron sheets with hexagonal vacancies are potentially viable.”
So what does it mean? They only physically made one of the symmetrical 36-boron-atom clusters, not yet a whole graphene-like sheet. But if this precursor structure could be extended into borophene, it’s expected to be a material to rival graphene in terms of the qualities it will possess. It would be strong and two-dimensional, and possibly even more conductive than graphene. As CleanTech reports, “That quality means that borophene could find itself being of more use, in some regards, than graphene.”
Before it can steal graphene’s crown, of course, it actually has to get made. But thanks to this research, that prospect is looking ever more feasible.
I was raised in the homeschool movement. I grew up on its ideas and its rhetoric. And yet, I send Bobby to daycare and Sally to preschool and will be sending both to public school when they are old enough. This runs smack up against the ideals of good parenting I was raised with, and in the eyes of some homeschool parents, it de facto makes me selfish. I was reminded of this by a facebook comment by a homeschool parent I noticed in the discussion of Virginia’s HJ 92.
I highlight this comment because it so fully encapsulates everything I heard growing up about parents who send their children to public school. I learned that public school is “free babysitting” and that parents who send their kids to public school can’t wait to “get rid of” their kids. And there was the same derision about parents freaking out over snow days and delays—were they really so eager to shuffle their kids off on someone else? What was their problem! They must hate their children! I fully agreed with this reasoning.
I now am that parent.
We’ve been having delays for the weather, and it sucks. Sean and I look at each other and begin to haggle. “How important is your meeting? Can you miss your meeting so that I can make my class, or should I skip class?” School delays are difficult not because we can’t “get rid of” our kids sooner, they’re difficult because we have work, and when there is a delay one of us has to skip work. Snow days are worse. We’ve had days where we shift the kids back and forth all day, taking turns so that we can both get our most important things done—the things we can’t skip. And even for families with a stay at home parent, delays throw off the schedule, and enough of them make everyone cranky.
And now I am horrified at the things I used to think, to say.
But even as I am now horrified that I used to deride parents like myself for being so annoyed at delays and snow days, I’m absolutely boggled that fully grown homeschool parents do so. When I thought those things, I was a child. I didn’t know what it was like to be a parent with so many responsibilities to handle. But the homeschool parents who say those things? They know that most parents work. They know that things like delays and snow days throw of people’s schedules and sometimes mean taking an unpaid day off of work or missing important meetings or scheduled appointments. They have no excuse.
But it’s more than this. It’s also this all-pervading idea that parents who send their children to school are just sending them for “free babysitting,” and that anyone who sends their children to school must simply not be able to stand being around their children. This idea that the parents who de facto win the parent of the year award are the ones who are home with their kids homeschooling 24/7, that parents who send their kids away for 6 or 8 hours a day must be bad parents.
So let me break this down for them really simply.
Most parents work. While there are stay at home parents who send their kids to school, most parents work. In 2010, over 70% of all families with children under 18 were headed by either two working parents or a single parent. Parents don’t generally send their children off to school and then spend those hours watching Netflix. Most parents spend those hours working, and even those who don’t have things to do—errands to run, laundry to fold, etc. And yes, some parents work when they technically could afford to stay home, but there are quite a few good reasons for that—things like putting aside money for the future, trying to provide their children with the best childhood possible, or building a resume toward the future.
Parents generally send their kids to school to learn. Parents really do send their children to school to get an education, not because they don’t like them and can’t stand to get rid of them. School is not “free babysitting.” I dare any homeschool parent to say that to a school teacher’s face. Public schools may not be perfect, but a lot of them are very good, and even those that have their problems generally do manage to provide at least some education. Most parents also see the school experience itself as a positive thing for their children, including social activities and extracurriculars and the feel of community. There are a whole plethora of good reasons for sending children to school that have nothing to do with wanting to get rid of your kids because you can’t stand them.
But even as parents generally send their children to school both to get their children an education and because they themselves have to work, it’s important to bear in mind that wanting a break is healthy.
This idea that if you really love your children you will want to spend twenty-four hours a day with them seven days a week is not only a lie, it is also toxic. If you are a parent, you need time off from your children, and they need time off from you—and this is not a bad thing. It is natural and good. I love my husband Sean dearly, and yet, he and I still go to work each day, headed in separate directions. To date, I have never heard anyone accuse me of not loving Sean because we part ways every day instead of spending every second of every day together.
I am in a moms group on facebook, and every so often a stay-at-home mom of small children posts there saying she that is about to lose her sanity, asking for someone to tell her it gets better, or considering taking a part time job so she can have a break from the kids. She loves her kids dearly, she explains, but she’s going crazy at home with them and needs time to recharge. And then everyone in the group offers her support and encouragement, because we understand. She is not a bad mother, she is just overwhelmed. Would homeschool parents like the one who left the comment at the beginning of this post tell mothers like this that they are selfish, unloving, bad mothers for wanting a break? I certainly hope not.
It’s also as though homeschool parents who trash talk public school parents as selfish for sending their children to school away all day forget that even they need—and take—breaks. I know my own homeschooling mother did. When I was very little, she would go shopping with a good friend at night after the children were in bed. She and her friend would go up and down the aisles at Walmart, enjoying the bliss of being alone together—just them, chatting and catching up. Sometimes they would stay out for hours, getting home well past midnight, tired but refreshed. When I was older, mom would call up another homeschool mom and they would go out for a lengthy lunch together at Olive Garden or somewhere similar while we older children fed the younger ones sandwiches and carrots and put them down for their nap. Our homeschool community even held “moms’ night out” activities for mothers like mine, with tea and chatting.
This idea that parents who send their children off to public school are t he selfish ones also ignores the fact that the choice to homeschool itself can, for some parents, be a selfish one. There are parents out there who homeschool for bad reasons, and who don’t put their children’s needs and interests first. Being a homeschool parent does not de facto make one selfless—and I have seen the idea that it does get in the way of efforts to prevent abusive parents from using homeschooling to isolate their children and hide their abuse—because, homeschool parents tell me, abusive parents would never homeschool. Homeschooling involves being home with your kids all day! Abusive parents would do the easy, lazy, selfish thing, and ship their kids off to public school each day!
Are there parents who send their children to public school who are selfish and continually put themselves first at the expense of their children? Certainly—and there are homeschool parents for whom the same is true. Both homeschool parents and public school parents can be selfish and uncaring, and both homeschool parents and public school parents can be devoted and loving.
Creating a “homeschool parents good / public school parents selfish” dichotomy helps no one.
You are a journalist who has written a great deal about the anti-vaccine movement and you have been asked to participate in a panel on the safety of childhood vaccines. This panel was organized by professional medical and health journalists.
Also on this hypothetical panel would be a prominent scientist, such as Paul Offit, who has authored numerous books rebutting myths and misinformation about vaccines (and more recently, alternative medicine practices). The third panelist would be a persistent anti-vaccine activist, perhaps someone from the group Age of Autism.
I’m guessing that Paul Offit and the science journalist (say, Seth Mnookin) would not want this panel to be derailed or hijacked by an anti-vaccine activist spouting loads of misinformation.
For this reason, maybe they would decline to participate in such a forum. I’m only speculating.
I raise this hypothetical because I just turned down an opportunity to participate in an upcoming panel on GMOs. The organizer initially asked if I would moderate a panel that included scientists and advocates “pro- and con-GMO.” I expressed interest after hearing that the objective was “to foster a lively and factual discussion on GMO’s with a well-rounded panel.”
And then I learned that Jeffrey Smith was one of the invited panelists.
Just to be clear: I am in favor of a robust discussion on any topic, especially one with a diversity of perspectives. (For the anti-GMO side, I suggested the organizer invite representatives from the Union of Concerned Scientists.) But I don’t think that someone with fringe views and assertions wholly unsupported by science can help “foster a lively and factual discussion on GMOs.” And make no mistake, Smith is as fringe as they come. As I have previously discussed here, he has asserted that autism and Alzheimer’s disease, among many other medical problems, can be attributed to GMOs. Did I mention that he has no expertise?
That Smith has become a go-to person for the anti-GMO movement speaks as much to his marketing skills as it does to the kind of forums he is regularly invited to and the lack of vetting by those (who should know better) who invite him to participate in otherwise well-meaning events. It’s unfortunate (but not surprising) that Dr. Oz has irresponsibly given Smith a huge forum (twice!). Science-minded organizers who confer legitimacy on Smith with speaking invitations should ask themselves if they would similarly invite anti-vaccine cranks to expound on the health and safety of vaccines.
Over the past few years, natural gas has taken the energy sector by storm in the United States. The newly discovered technology allowing for efficient extraction and production of shale gas has rejuvenated the energy sector in the U.S., putting the country in a leading position in the global energy market. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. natural gas production–which was 23.0 trillion cubic feet in 2011–is projected to surge by 44% to 33.1 trillion cubic feet by 2040. This substantial increase in U.S. domestic production is largely due to a massive rise in shale gas production in particular. The improved extraction technology of shale gas in recent years has enabled the U.S. to produce more natural gas than it consumes and to rely almost wholly upon its own domestic supply.
Figure 2: Northeast Production vs. Nat Gas inflow | Data Source: EIA
Figure 3: Marcellus Rig Count vs. Production | Data Source: EIA
Figure 4: Henry Hub Natural Gas vs. Columbia Gas Appalachia Futures | Data Source: NYMEX
Figure 5: Shale gas as share of total dry natural gas production | Data Source: EIA
Figure 6: Gross Withdrawals from select shale plays in Canada (Jan 2005 - May 2013) | Data Source: EIA
