More PFAS excitement
Ever since Erin Brokovich dramatized it, there has been much heartburn about a common class of chemicals known as PFAS that are widespread in the environment. It is widely used in industry and most Americans as a result have some of it in their blood. And is bad for rats if you give it to them. So it must be bad for people? Sadly for the drama-queens, it isn't. Over many studies PFAS have been found to be harmless to people in the doses normally encountered.
The latest study is one done in Australia and everybody seems very tense about it. You can read below a claim that the government tried to nobble it. In the washup, however, they had no need to. The researchers once again found no conclusive evidence of harm from PFAS. It was a rather pathetic study but I will bypass that for the moment and simply reproduce the actual findings from the study -- below:
For most of these health outcomes, we estimated the differences between the towns and comparison areas to be relatively small. For others, the differences were of modest size, but our estimates were imprecise, meaning the likely size of each difference could be anywhere between quite small to quite large. Even though our studies included almost everyone who had ever lived in the towns in the years we had available data (in some cases dating back to 1983), some of the conditions studied are uncommon and we observed only a few cases. For these outcomes, we could not precisely estimate the differences between the towns and comparison areas, and there is very little we can say about whether a difference really exists.
Due to the nature of our studies, there were certain design limitations. We were unable to fully account for certain risk factors (e.g. smoking) that could have led to observed differences in rates (or lack of them) between the towns and comparison areas (‘confounding’). In particular, we were not able to account for socioeconomic factors as well as we would have liked. This is important, as socioeconomic conditions are strongly linked to health. In addition, some findings could have arisen just by chance alone and not because an association truly exists.
In light of the above, while there were higher rates of some adverse outcomes in individual towns, the evidence suggesting that this was due to living in these areas was limited. We did not have direct measurements of PFAS exposure and we cannot rule out that the higher rates were due to chance or confounding. Further, there was low consistency in our observations across the three towns (something we would not expect if PFAS caused an outcome), and there is limited evidence from other studies observing similar results or explaining how potential biological processes can result in PFAS causing these effects in humans. Overall, our findings are consistent with previous studies, which have not conclusively identified causative links between PFAS and these health outcomes
https://nceph.anu.edu.au/files/PFAS%20Health%20Study%20Data%20Linkage%20Study%20Report_7Dec2021.pdf
People living in areas with high PFAS concentrations sometimes blame their illnesses on it but that is an unproven and unlikely claimHealth officials asked university researchers to remove references about potential community concern over elevated rates of cancer found in towns contaminated with “forever chemicals”, even as the federal government was defending multimillion-dollar litigation over the pollution.
Emails obtained by the Herald and The Age under freedom of information laws reveal federal health bureaucrats expressed concern to Australian National University researchers about how they reported “very high” rates of certain types of cancer they uncovered in an independent study of residents exposed to per- and poly-fluoroalkyl chemicals (PFAS) leaching off Defence sites.
Samantha Kelly with her son William, 7, in the garden of their new home after they fled contaminated Williamtown. Kelly fears her son’s health issues could be linked to exposure to “forever chemicals” after he was born with high levels in his blood.
The emails reveal the Department of Health circulated the draft version of the study to other Commonwealth departments “for their review of any red-line issues” in October 2021, while Defence was in court defending a $155 million class action over property devaluation caused by the toxins.
In anonymised emails released to the Herald, a bureaucrat told the researchers it was “counterproductive” to mention throughout their report that residents may be concerned about elevated rates of adverse health outcomes in their communities.
The department suggested researchers “highlight the significance of ‘null findings’” and say their study found “no consistent links between PFAS contamination and the health outcomes observed”.
The researchers declined to add the suggested line. “The research team is independent and did not make changes to any parts of the reports where we disagreed,” said Professor Martyn Kirk, who led the ANU research team.
“The research team did not agree to follow any departmental advice to emphasise null findings.
“We didn’t include anything in the report that we weren’t happy saying, particularly as it relates to causes of disease.”
A large number of the changes the department requested were not made by the researchers, a review of the documents by this masthead confirms.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said it did not seek to change the study’s findings but rather to “highlight the findings as presented and draw out the context”.
The spokeswoman rejected suggestions the department tried to “downplay” the findings of elevated rates of certain adverse outcomes in the towns.
“In reviewing the draft reports from the study the minor suggestions made by the department focused on increasing clarity and consistency within the reports,” she said.
“It was a matter for the ANU study team as to how they considered and incorporated any feedback provided.”
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Ford Electric Truck Earns 'RangeLiar' Nickname After Road Trip Disaster: 'Asking for My Money Back'
If you’re buying an electric vehicle that’s approaching the $100,000 mark, you’d expect it to at least tell you the truth about how far it could travel.
Unfortunately, for the popular — if apparently somewhat glitchy — Ford F-150 Lightning, that was a bit tricky for the vehicle. The problem was so bad that the staff of automotive outlet MotorTrend nicknamed its long-term test vehicle the “RangeLiar.”
It’s not that MotorTrend doesn’t like the F-150 Lightning, which has been arguably the most heavily hyped of a gaggle of high-end electric trucks that have come to market in the last few years. The outlet gave the F-150 Lightning Lariat, the high-end version of the vehicle, its award for Truck of the Year in 2022.
Of course, the magazine has made some mistakes with the award before. For instance, the ugly (and not terribly reliable) Chrysler PT Cruiser won the 2001 Car of the Year. So did the Chevrolet Vega in 1971; it was a Ford Pinto rival that somehow racked up a worse quality record, so bad the cars would often begin rusting before they left the dealer lot and the engine would, if the car could be driven long enough to not collapse in a pile of ferrous oxide, begin to melt due to a cylinder distortion problem. (Source: Um, MotorTrend. At least they owned it.)
While there were no melting parts on the F-150 Lightning and it wasn’t a rust-bucket, in a Tuesday report, MotorTrend reporter Frank Markus said the staff was “already off to a starkly different experience with our new Michigan-based Lightning,” and not in a good way.
Markus said that the pickup’s first task — which should have been an easy one — ended problematically.
“This F-150 Lightning awaited us at the airport on a late March evening following a winter vacation in the tropics, but it warmed us quickly. The next morning, battery topped off at home with the cabin preconditioned, the range meter predicted 315 miles — way more than enough for a 130-mile drive north to retrieve our pooch from Grandma’s house,” he wrote.
“We drove with traffic at the prevailing Michigan speed (10 mph over the 70-mph limit) and arrived with less than 120 miles of range remaining — nowhere near enough to get home. Grandma’s house lacks a charger, and her town of Midland boasts just four — all of them 6.5-kW Level 2 chargers.”
Level 2 chargers are the kind often installed in the homes of EV owners, not the type you would normally see at a Tesla Supercharger station, which are classified as Level 3 and charge much faster.
“We talked ourselves into a perch dinner in nearby Bay City to avail ourselves of an Electrify America station boasting four 350-kW chargers, one of which got us from 31 to 67 percent charge (199 miles) in 24 minutes at a peak charging rate of 155 kW (though we’ve observed as high as 182 kW in our SoCal truck),” Markus continued.
“Surely that’s plenty? Nope. Driving 10 over the 75-mph limit on US-10 for the 15 miles back to grandma’s consumed 49 miles of indicated range. Our attempt to creep home at 70 mph, traffic streaking by on the left, failed, forcing a stop at a 125-kW ChargePoint station curiously located inside the short-term parking lot at the Flint airport.”
Markus said the charger “haltingly dispensed 20 miles of range in 10 minutes before faulting out, forcing us to complete the 58-mile run at 65 mph, arriving on electronic ‘fumes.'”
“Had I just purchased this $85,779 truck, I’d be asking for my money back,” he wrote.
Add that to the fact that a gas-powered F-150 would have easily completed the trip on just one tank of gas, according to federal government fuel economy average numbers, and it’s yet another sign that EVs might not be ready for prime time in America.
Furthermore, this wasn’t just an outlier. Markus said that each trip logged in the F-150 Lightning “consumed more miles of estimated range than miles traveled.”
“Remember when you screwed up as a kid, deflected blame, and your parents told you, ‘It’s not what you did, it’s lying about it that disappointed us’? I’m that parent here, and in this age of machine learning and artificial intelligence, I’m disappointed that Ford is either unable or unwilling to give me the bad news about how far this truck will actually travel on a charge — especially when destinations are entered into the native navigation system,” Markus wrote.
“And yes, it was late winter, and we were running some heat. But we’re also operating 20 miles from Ford’s engineering headquarters, so this climate should be no surprise to the truck’s computers.”
Part of the problem is that, unlike competitors designed to be EV-only from the start, the Ford F-150 Lightning is just what it sounds like: the Ford F-150’s body paired with an electric drivetrain.
Thus, compared with competitors such as the Rivian R1T — which was designed from the ground up to be electric-only — the F-150 is, to use Markus’ description, like “shoving a big barn door through the air.” The drag coefficient is 0.44 for the F-150 Lighting, compared with 0.30 to the R1T.
(An EV sedan, the Lucid Air, had a drag coefficient of 0.21, for comparison.)
“Drag force varies with the square of the speed and the added horsepower required to overcome that drag varies with the cube of speed, so while the difference in drag between 70 and 80 mph is 31 percent for any vehicle, the change in actual drag force and horsepower as speeds rise is dramatically higher for the Lightning than in other long-term EVs our Michigan staff has experienced,” Markus wrote.
Now, naturally, the folks in the auto industry aren’t just making internal-combustion vehicles like “a big barn door” because their disregard for the environment is such that they spend their evenings lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills and then tossing them into industrial vats of oil just to cause mass pollution.
Bigger vehicles are safer and roomier, both passenger- and cargo-wise. They’re also a great deal lighter, considering the batteries add a hefty weight penalty to every vehicle.
Nor is this a phenomenon that was just noted by MotorTrend.
A reviewer for the Detroit News reported last year that he only got about 170 miles of range from the vehicle, far from the advertised 280 from Ford.
Earlier this year, a YouTube influencer found that his Rivian R1T could only get about 100 miles of range while towing another vehicle in cold weather.
And another YouTuber, Tyler Hoover, sold his F-150 Lightning after finding its “winter battery performance was a disaster,” noting in a video that mileage could sometimes dip by almost 50 percent in cold weather
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Save the planet … sacrifice a child?!
Augusto Zimmermann
In my previous article, I expressed the view that modern environmentalism resembles a pantheistic religion in that it contains a vision of sin and repentance, damnation and salvation. Indeed, many activists are Gaia theorists who worship ‘Mother Earth’ as a living entity and believe that the world has a cancer, and that cancer is called the human race. Their view of the ‘environment’ is intrinsically anti-human and backed by social Darwinist doctrines linked to nature-worship, elitism, and neo-paganism. Such environmental activists often attack our Judeo-Christian tradition for emphasising ‘the supremacy of a male God’, in contrast to ‘Mother Earth’ in which one must ‘acknowledge the animistic traditions of our ancestors’.
The Christian view of the environment is remarkably different from the one advocated by the Gaia worshippers within the environmental movement, and perhaps best articulated by St Francis Assisi. He is known as the patron saint for ecologists because he had a love of nature and animals. Instead of seeing humans as diabolical creatures who are raping ‘Mother Earth’, St Francis called Earth our sister and viewed humans and nature as united creations under God the Father. This view, of course, confers infinitely more dignity to the human race because it communicates that we should care about our planet and about human life.
Naturally, a reasonable concern to avoid pollution and our natural resources in a responsible manner is a commendable ethical position. We should take care of the earth but also help humanity, at the same time. However, the ‘environmentalist’ efforts of governments to cut carbon emissions make energy less affordable and accessible, which drives up the costs of consumer products, stifles economic growth, costs jobs, and imposes especially harmful effects on the Earth’s poorest people. Arguably, allocating monetary resources to help build sewage treatment plants, enhance sanitation, and provide clean water for poor people would have a greater immediate impact on their plight than would the battle over alleged ‘global warming’.
By contrast, one of the hallmarks of the modern environmentalist movement is its apparent indifference towards human life.
To give an example, on April 25, 2021 a British Vogue article with the title, Is Having A Baby in 2021 Pure Environmental Vandalism? ponders whether having children is an ‘act of environmental vandalism’. The author asks whether it is ‘possible to live an ecologically responsible life while adding another person to our [sic] overstretched planet’.
‘There are few questions more troubling when looking the current climate emergency than that of having a baby. Whether your body throbs to reproduce, you passively believe that it is on the cards for you one day, or you actively seek remain child-free, the declining health of the planet cannot help but factor in your thinking.’
Concerns about population growth are not new. In 1968, ecologist Paul Ehrlich echoed 18th century economist Thomas Malthus when he predicted worldwide famine due to overpopulation and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University and his book, The Population Bomb, became one of the most influential books of the 20th century. This book not only debated population control, but some argue that it also ‘gave a jolt nascent environmental movement and fuelled an anti-population-growth crusade that led to human rights abuses around the world’. According to British writer and journalist Melanie Phillips:
‘The obsession with population control has long been central to the environmental movement even though – ever since Thomas Malthus started this hare running in the 19th century – the dire predictions of catastrophic overpopulation have proved false over and over again.’
Ehrlich’s ideas are a natural extension of Malthusian thought. Malthus argued that the world’s human population would increase faster than the food supply unless checked by restraints such as war, famine, or disease. He also thought that ‘most people should die without reproducing’.
‘Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,’ Ehrlich told CBS News following the publication of his book more than 50 years ago. Needless to say, such bizarre predictions never came true. In spite of all the worry, access to food and resources increased as the global population rose. And yet, this has not stopped many environmental activists from continuing to make similarly bizarre statements about the future of our planet.
The late Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, in 1988 commented: ‘In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.’ Clearly, he felt so strongly about this matter that he subsequently stated the following:
‘I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers that it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist … I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.’
Prince Philip’s neo-pagan predilections for reincarnation could be dismissed as another example of the notorious eccentricities of the British royal family. King Charles III, another committed environmental activist, is reported to talk to his plants and even to blame Syria’s horrific civil war on … climate change!
Unfortunately, the late Prince is not alone in comparing the human race to an ‘infectious disease’. Others have said that our species is a ‘super-malignancy on the face of the planet’ and ‘the AIDS of the earth’. The founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Foundation, once stated the following:
‘Humans are presently acting upon this body [the Earth’s ecosystem] in the same manner as an invasive virus with the result that we are eroding the ecological immune system. A virus kills its host and that is exactly what we are doing with our planet’s life support system. We are killing our host the planet Earth. I was once severely criticised for describing human beings as being the “AIDS of the Earth”. I make no apologies for that statement. Our viral like behaviour can be terminal both to the present biosphere and ourselves.’
It is the view that humans are in conflict with nature and thus there must be a winner. Granted, he expressed an extreme position. In 2023, there is a growing number of environmental activists that have succumbed to the notion that there is nothing special about human life.
Their comments include: ‘When it comes to feelings, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy’, and ‘the millions who died in the Nazi holocaust were equivalent to broiler chickens dying in slaughterhouses’. Yet while animals deserve our protection, people apparently do not. ‘I don’t believe that human beings have the right to life … This ‘right to human life’ I believe is another perversion.’
It is hard to imagine anything more terrifying than living in a culture where human life is made to appear so entirely relative to lesser values.
We have seen discussions arise where a new human life is seen as a threat to the environment, where some candidly contend that new babies represent an undesirable source of greenhouse emissions and consumer of natural resources. This type of thinking is leading conversations about the Western democracies adopting population control measures similar to the communist China one-child policy.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/save-the-planet-sacrifice-a-child/
******************************************************Britain backtracks on coal exit, blaming Putin for Net Zero U-turn
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has squeezed gas supplies to Europe, forcing countries including the UK to look to coal as a potential back-up option for generating electricity in the event of shortages.
The engineering crews and cranes have already arrived at the Drax power station in Yorkshire to dismantle two of the last remaining coal plants in the country.
Over the past decade, four of the facility’s six coal-fired units have been converted to run on wood chips with only two left that can burn coal.
Yet the end of coal combustion in Selby may now be delayed for the second year in a row, as the National Grid seeks to ensure that Britain’s lights stay on this winter.
On Thursday the Grid confirmed it is in talks with Drax about keeping the coal units going until April 2024, to provide an extra source of backup power for the country once again.
It is the latest example of how Vladimir Putin’s energy war continues to frustrate the UK’s attempts to ditch “King Coal”.
The “dirty” fuel was lambasted by Boris Johnson just two years ago at the Cop26 climate conference, with the Government vowing to phase it out completely by the end of 2024.
The promise has proved easier said than done, with the reality of the war in Ukraine colliding with best intentions.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has squeezed gas supplies to Europe, forcing countries including the UK to look to coal as a potential back-up option for generating electricity in the event of shortages.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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