Honest Brokers and Concern Trolls

While it’s not based on a systematic study, I get the sense that Roger Pielke, professor of environmental policy at the University of Colorado has been an annoyance to many environmentalists. See this somewhat contentious interview (which apparently was spiked, but which Pielke publishes here) with Brad Johnson with the Center for American Progress. At one point, Dr. Pielke makes allusions to McCarthyism in the interview process (you know, the “are you now or have you ever been a Communist” routine) which while a bit over the top, provided some amusement. I suppose it doesn’t help your environmentalist cred though to be interviewed by professional concern troll John Tierney.

Tierney complains that President Obama’s science advisors aren’t sciencey enough, and are injecting their personal agendas along with the science used to inform the government’s policy making. Not to put too fine a point on things, he asks, “[t]o borrow a term from Roger Pielke Jr.: Can these scientists be honest brokers?”

It’s possible I’m reading too much into this, but trust Tierney to take a reasoned analysis of the interactions of scientists in policy making (Pielke’s book, The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics) and make it into an indictment of science policy for the administration in power:

A scientist can enter the fray by becoming an advocate for certain policies, like limits on carbon emissions or subsidies for wind power. That’s a perfectly legitimate role for scientists, as long as they acknowledge that they’re promoting their own agendas.

But too often, Dr. Pielke says, they pose as impartial experts pointing politicians to the only option that makes scientific sense. To bolster their case, they’re prone to exaggerate their expertise (like enumerating the catastrophes that would occur if their policies aren’t adopted), while denigrating their political opponents as “unqualified” or “unscientific.”

Ok, it’s time to stop the hyperventilating. Dr. Pielke’s book is actually a very useful guide for scientists about the kinds of options they have in advising decision makers, when given the opportunity. The nature of scientific advice will depend on how politicized the issue is (i.e. is there values consensus) and how much scientific uncertainty is present. Depending on the circumstances, one could adopt the stance of a Pure Scientist, summarizing the state of knowledge in a particular field, to help reduce uncertainty and inform a decision, but not engaging in the normative or values debates. When engaged to consider specific policy options, one might adopt the role of a Science Arbiter, similarly focusing on a technical role (framing the problem and presenting the state of knowledge) but again staying above the debate.

However, problems with no values consensus cannot be resolved by reducing scientific uncertainty (Pielke’s context for this is “abortion politics”). The scientist can then choose to help reduce the range of options by becoming an Issue Advocate, aligning with a particular political agenda. If a scientist seeks to expand the range of options to be considered, they can become Honest Brokers of Policy Alternatives, clarifying existing options and identifying new ones. As described in a book review published in the journal Minerva:

Honest Brokers explicitly integrate stakeholder concerns with available scientific knowledge. The former U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, for example, produced reports that identified a range of policy options and showed how they related to disagreements over both science and policy (pp. 17, 95). Interestingly, because Honest Brokers must draw on diverse perspectives to integrate scientific knowledge and policy options in context of uncertainty, they usually take the form of interdisciplinary advisory bodies rather than individual experts (pp. 151, 154-56).

Dr. Pielke views all four of these roles as appropriate, but cautions that issue advocacy should be done transparently, acknowledging political values rather than asserting that the scientist’s preferred policy flows directly from their scientific evidence. This becomes Stealth Issue Advocacy, which politicizes scientific advice and undermines the credibility of science in the eyes of the public.

Seen in this light, Tierney’s use of the term “honest broker” in discussing Steven Chu and John Holdren provokes in me an Inigo Montoya moment. After reading this column, I can only be glad that John Tierney isn’t interested in borrowing any of my ideas. In addition, keeping in mind that Dr. Pielke’s book was published in 2007, I wonder if it occurs to Tierney that it could be referring just as much to the war on science waged by the Bush Administration as to John Holdren’s role as a stealth issue advocate in criticizing Bjorn Lomborg.

Alternative Futures in a Post-Stimulus World

There’s an air of unreality surrounding this week’s passage of economic stimulus legislation. I suspect that many are expecting things to “get back to normal”, if we just fix the foreclosure crisis, get the banks lending again, and get consumers buying stuff again. In the mainstream media I sample, I don’t get a sense that with the economic downturn we’ve turned a corner to a considerably different future.

One vision of that future is the crash of our energy intensive way of life, with scenarios that range from a post-Peak Oil collapse (the progressive version of the Rapture) to a sort of post-industrial feudalism as envisioned in James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency. In this future, the Amish may be the epitome of high technology.

There’s a Green crowd which feels that if you shout “no clean coal” loud enough, this and a lot of hard work will create a vision where life is much better by moving to cleaner production, mass transit and renewable energy. These are the kinds of investments that should be made, because building windmills, weatherizing buildings and restoring strip-mined mountaintops are more useful ways to create jobs than building freeways, but I’m no longer convinced this path alone is going to save us, particularly from adverse climate change. Take John Sterman’s greenhouse gas simulator for a spin and see. You have to drag emissions down quite a bit, very quickly, to have a meaningful impact. However, we’re having a hard time even getting started – people still seem to be confused about the imminence and magnitude of the risk, and long lead time needed to produce any changes, with a significant fraction taking a wait and see attitude on greenhouse gas reductions.

And, according to Dr. Sterman, even smart people are kind of clueless about stock and flow kinds of problems in general (look at the wishful thinking many people engage in when trying to manage their weight), misjudging how feedback loops work with climate change – it seems that people expect climate change to abate quickly once emissions are reduced. The most recent evidence suggests otherwise – we’re stuck with adverse climate change. The challenge is to keep from making it worse.

In contrast to the hunker-down philosophy of getting through the next few centuries (see The Long Emergency), James Lovelock argues in a new book that preserving civilization in the face of adverse climate change will require a massive infusion of high technology. This is seemingly contrary advice from the author of the Gaia hypothesis, but it really is consistent with his message that we’ve now made ourselves stewards of the Earth – wish us luck. You can argue over the details (I think he overstates the effectiveness of nuclear power) but he does make me wonder if the Green crowd is thinking hard enough about what it takes to save us as a species.

This wanders away a bit from the economic stimulus package, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves about what it’s accomplishing. The economic stimulus is really focused on trying to regain our past rather than take us into the future, and the consequences of that choice aren’t pleasant to contemplate.

Another Reason to Avoid HFCS? Trying to Get a Handle on How Much Risk There Is

[Continued from previous posts, here and here.]

Making sense of what the risks are based on the available information about mercury contamination in high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is challenging because there is so little of it. And, I’m trying to get to some kind of blogging closure because there are other topics to move on to. However, before the news cycle leaves it completely behind, I wanted to explore further what kinds of risks there might be from consuming mercury in HFCS, because there doesn’t to seem to be a lot of risk information being provided.

The paper published by Dufault et al., 2009 used the maximum concentration of mercury detected in their samples of HFCS, 0.57 ug/g (parts per million), along with the assumption that an individual consumed 50 g/day HFCS from all sources of food, to calculate an intake rate for mercury of 28.5 ug/day. That 50 g/day ingestion rate was obtained from a study of the amount and sources of dietary fructose among US adults and children conducted as part of the third National Health and Examination Survey (NHANES).

The results from the dietary fructose study were that the mean consumption of fructose was estimated to be 54.7g/day across all age groups and accounted for 10.2% of total caloric intake. The mercury analytical data used to estimate the 28.5 ug/day intake rate was from samples of HFCS straight from the factory. This makes this mercury intake rate a theoretical upper bound, assuming that someone consuming their 54.7 g/day HFCS is getting it all the time from sources that are contaminated with the maximum concentrations reported in the study (0.57 ug/g, or parts per million). Also, in imagining what this exposure scenario looks like, I get the mental image of someone eating HFCS “straight”, and not in food products. In addition, 28.5 ug/day intake rate is appreciably higher than other estimates of total mercury intake rate (the EU estimates dietary inorganic mercury intake to be around 4 ug/day). HFCS being a dominant source of dietary mercury would be a startling finding.

In contrast, the study published directly by IATP (data presented here) used a “market basket” approach, and analyzed mercury concentrations in ready-to-eat foods. Those concentrations are much lower than found in “raw” HFCS from the factory. This is not unexpected, because HFCS will be blended in other ingredients, presumably uncontaminated or less contaminated with mercury, to make the ready-to-eat foods. The highest concentration in food reported by IATP was 350 ppt or parts per trillion (pg/g, or picogram per gram), while the highest concentration reported in HFCS syrup was 570,000 pg/g (0.57 ug/g x 1,000,000 pg/ug). Combining IATP’s residue data with the consumption rates for food groups from the FDA’s Total Diet Survey corresponding to the foods analyzed in IATP’s study gives much lower mercury intake rates associated with HFCS consumption.

The highest mercury intake rate calculated for the ready-to-eat foods is 0.032 ug/day, which is for males aged 14 to 16 (the calculations are here). This isn’t an aggregate exposure analysis because it focuses only on the foods analyzed by IATP and almost certainly neglects some sources of dietary mercury. It would seem implausible this estimated intake rate is neglecting 99.9% of the dietary mercury sources related to HFCS consumption, though someone with more refined tools (and more time, meaning someone getting paid to do it) needs to map the IATP residue data to some other databases, perhaps USDA’s table of foods with added sugars, to get an idea of the total dietary intake of mercury from HFCS consumption.

When the mercury intake rates are converted to a body weight basis then compared with EPA Reference Doses for either inorganic mercury or methylmercury, the results suggest that HFCS consumption is probably a small contribution to someone’s overall risk from exposure to mercury. Again, the caution with this analysis is that it doesn’t account for all dietary sources of inorganic mercury, but the results leave me with the sense that mercury exposure isn’t the best reason to avoid consuming HFCS.