Source: https://lvgaldieri.com/tag/science/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 16:15:33+00:00

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Why did Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue abruptly cancel the planned two-year mineral withdrawal study in Superior National Forest? Why has he so far failed, or refused, to turn over findings from the first twenty months of that study, despite repeated requests from congressional leaders? If, as Perdue claims, the study “did not reveal new scientific information,” what’s there to hide?
You failed to live up to your words when you announced in September the abrupt cancellation of the mineral withdrawal study. Twenty months into a twenty-four month study review. Twenty months of collecting public input. Twenty months of science-based assessment. And all you released was a one-page press release. And that’s completely inadequate. We still have not seen any of the science behind the science-based decision. I have sent multiple letters, first in November and then again on March 1st, along with the Chair of the Natural Resources Committee, asking your agency to release the relevant documentation from the twenty-month review. Your own press release said the review included …”a mineral resource report, a biological and economic impact assessment, potential impacts to water resources, wilderness areas, and cultural resources.” Secretary Perdue, were all those reports completed as part of the environmental assessment?
Perdue: I can’t answer that question directly, Ma’am.
McCollum: So if you don’t have complete scientific reports to review before making your decision to cancel the withdrawal, one has to ask what your decision was based on. Do you have any idea what your decision was based on, sir?
Perdue says he does have an idea, but in the exchange that follows, he manages only a jumbled statement.
When I learned that Minnesota really has the last vote on this as a state government, and where the governor had determined already that he was not going to allow this to go forward, it made no sense to me to proceed to — certainly, there’s been not one permit issued, there will not be one permit issued until it’s a complete environmental impact statement and study, based on that, and it looked to me it would be duplicative after I realized that, after my statement to you in May of 17 at my first hearing, and therefore the state of Minnesota has the last vote on this, and I would expect them to do what the citizens of Minnesota would decide.
If I may venture a paraphrase: the Secretary of Agriculture cancelled the scientific study of mineral withdrawal, because — try to follow the reasoning here — once Superior National Forest is no longer subject to withdrawal, and the permitting process for new mining can get underway in earnest, there will be environmental impact assessments done. Those assessments will involve science, or “study.” Why finish the two-year study to determine whether any mining should be done at all, when we’re just going to do more scientific study later, in order to issue mining permits? And since the governor and the people of Minnesota seem to be against the whole thing anyway, science is irrelevant.
McCollum was not satisfied with any of this — why should she be? — and she reminded Perdue that his actions have already had serious consequences.
Well, sir, I respectfully disagree with your analysis of this. Once the Forest Service didn’t go forward on the study, BLM started moving forward on lease renewal. Once the study wasn’t completed and I asked for all the information on it, taxpayers paid for it, I have not received it. So sir, I feel that the Forest Service did not fulfill its congressional obligation by moving forward with the full two-year study, and the watershed that the Boundary Waters is in, all water’s precious, but it makes no sense to me at all that the Forest Service abandoned its due diligence research… Your stopping the study started a rollercoaster of events that will lead, possibly, to the destruction of these pristine waters.
McCollum has once again raised the alarm. Where are the whistleblowers?
Read more posts about the Boundary Waters reversal here.
This entry was posted in Business and Society, Lake Superior, Louis V. Galdieri's Blog, Prosperity, The Boundary Waters Reversal and tagged administrative procedure, administrative record, anti-science, arbitrary and capricious, Betty McCollum, Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Boundary Waters Reversal, corruption, mining, Science, Sonny Perdue, Superior National Forest, Water on April 16, 2019 by lvgaldieri.
Intriguing: but for now, the best I can do is provide a little context.
As the timeline shows, the meeting at the US Embassy in Santiago, Chile in the week of April 26th took place during a period of intense activity around the Twin Metals project. It was held just a little over a week after Mr. Arriagada had written directly to then-Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, requesting an in-person meeting in Washington, DC, on either May 2nd or 3rd. (Arriagada would come to Interior for the first time on the 3rd. Internal emails show that he met on that occasion with several officials at the Department of the Interior, but Zinke is not among them, at least not on the calendar entries I have seen; and if Arriagada met with Zinke separately on May 3rd, there is no entry for any such meeting on Zinke’s official calendar.) So perhaps the embassy in Santiago serves as a way station of sorts, a first stop for Arriagada on his American tour.
For what it’s worth, $400 million is not a number Antofagasta uses in its communications with shareholders or in its financial statements. (See, e.g., here, here and here.) The number routinely associated with the Twin Metals project in these communications is black, not red: $150 million — the value PWC, Antofagasta’s auditor, assigns to the project as an “intangible asset.” When it comes to investments, both the 2015 and 2016 Antofagasta annual reports note a decrease in exploration and evaluation costs, reflecting a “general decrease” in exploration activity “at the Centinela District in Chile and the Twin Metals project in the United States.” There is the added minor discrepancy that this letter characterizes Twin Metals as a “mineral development project, currently in the exploratory phase,” while in the 2016 and 2017 annual reports, the project has already advanced from the Exploratory phase to the Evaluation phase. It appears shareholders and US government agencies are being told two different stories about Twin Metals. In any case, the big round $400 million number is the thing that sticks. It’s used to intimidate and spook. A year later, Zinke will tell Representative Betty McCollum that the Obama administration’s decision exposed taxpayers to “hundreds of millions of dollars” in takings litigation. He was probably recalling Arriagada’s number, or Benedetto’s spin on it.
We now know that Zinke and the Department of Interior were doing Arriagada’s bidding all along, and they’d gotten started well before this letter was written. (And if WilmerHale did in fact draft this letter, then it’s really just some stage business, to create a paper trail for a meeting to discuss an ongoing effort coordinated by WilmerHale.) Interior officials appear to have been less concerned about the exposure of US taxpayers than about the risk the mining company had taken on: “our past and future investment now hangs in the balance,” Arriagada writes in April of 2017. He asks to meet with Zinke to discuss “a viable path forward” for the Twin Metals project. The letter lists three obstacles the Obama administration put in Antofagasta’s way: the M-opinion issued by solicitor Hilary Tompkins; the decision by the Bureau of Land Management to rescind the Twin Metals leases, based on the M opinion; and the withdrawal of thousands of acres of Superior National Forest from mineral development initiated by BLM and the US Forest Service. Remarkably, before Zinke resigned in disgrace, he, Deputy Solicitor Daniel Jorjani, and other officials at the Department of the Interior (and the Department of Agriculture) came through for the Chilean mining company on all three counts.
How any of this work on the mining company’s behalf at Interior bears on the meeting in Santiago, Chile, and what any of it has to do with Carol Z. Perez, the US ambassador to Chile, is hard to say. It’s still not clear why Arriagada thought he should stop first at the embassy in Santiago. A courtesy? An opportunity to get some pointers on how to deal with the new administration? Or something even more specific? To get a better idea, I’ve filed two FOIA requests with the Department of State for communications and documents that will help illustrate the meeting Perez had with Arriagada, but the State Department has labeled the requests “complex,” and I have yet to receive any responsive documents.
The meeting at the embassy in Santiago needs to be seen in the context of this coordinated push to overturn Obama era decisions, sideline science and environmental protections, and turn Antofagasta’s much-touted investment to a tangible asset — a working mine. Without some response to the Department of State FOIA requests, context will have to substitute for content. Why should the State Department have been asked to intervene in the Twin Metals matter?
Perhaps the aim of this meeting was not to involve the State Department at all. That may not make a whole lot of sense, on the face of it. Perez made her career in the State Department, serving in various posts around the world since the 1980s. She worked for Condoleezza Rice, did a brief stint in Italy, and coordinated State Department anti-drug trafficking efforts before President Obama appointed her US Ambassador to Chile in 2016. She appears to enjoy no special favor with the Trump administration, and she was slated to be replaced by a Trump nominee: Andrew Gellert, who was nominated to the post on January 4th, 2018. And Gellert would be much more closely aligned with the White House than with foreign service officials in the State Department.
This is one last piece of context to consider. We don’t know why Arriagada brought the US embassy in Santiago into the loop on the Twin Metals project. It seems tolerably clear, however, that the US embassy in Santiago would have remained in the loop, and in much closer communication with the Trump White House, had Andrew Gellert been confirmed as US ambassador to Chile. As was noted at the time of his nomination, Andrew is the son of George Gellert, a longtime business associate of Charles Kushner. The Gellerts and the Kushners have done business together for decades, often by nothing more than a handshake — no contracts. Andrew is President of the Gellert Global Group, a food importing conglomerate that does some dried fruit and nut business in Chile, and also counts among its holdings and investments “numerous real estate ventures” with the Kushner Companies. After Charles Kushner’s conviction and imprisonment a decade ago, George Gellert started working closely with Jared Kushner on a number of deals, including the disastrous 666 Fifth Avenue deal. It seems worth noting — even if it’s hard to figure out whether it amounts to anything at all — that back in August of 2018, just a couple of weeks after Brookfield Asset Management paid $1.3 billion to rescue Jared Kushner and George Gellert from 666 Fifth Avenue, Andrew’s nomination to be ambassador to Chile was quietly withdrawn.
This entry was posted in Business and Society, Louis V. Galdieri's Blog, Prosperity and tagged ambassador, anti-science, Boundary Waters, Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Carol Z. Perez, Charles Kushner, corruption, Department of Interior, executive branch, Gellert, George Kellert, Grupo Luksic, Ivan Arriagada, Jared Kushner, mining, Science, State Department, sulfide mining, US Embassy, Water, water pollution, White House on February 14, 2019 by lvgaldieri.
Last week, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced that the USDA would cut short a Forest Service environmental study of the risks posed by sulfide mining in Superior National Forest, near the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota. The study, which was launched only at the very end of 2016, “did not reveal new scientific information,” Perdue asserted. Those familiar with Perdue’s efforts to slash funding for research at USDA will not be surprised that the Secretary appeared, on this occasion, to demonstrate little regard for science and the time it takes to do good science.
Perdue offered vague reassurances that we can “protect the integrity of the watershed and contribute to economic growth and stronger communities.” After all, the statement goes on to say, northern Minnesota “has been mined for decades and is known as the ‘Iron Range’ due to its numerous iron mines.” That’s certainly true, and it will probably play to the pride people on the Iron Range take in their heritage; but Perdue never once mentions the kind of mining that is now under consideration — copper and nickel mining, or sulfide mining — and the enormous risks sulfide mining always presents. In fact, his statement does everything possible to sidestep the issue and conflate iron and non-ferrous mining.
The announcement was misleading, and it was all but lost amid the very loud noise created by the Anonymous Op Ed that had come out in the New York Times the day before. It is, however, consequential. Dan Kraker of Minnesota Public Radio rightly characterized Perdue’s announcement as “the Trump administration’s second major reversal of decisions made on mining in the Superior National Forest” — the first being the December 2017 legal memorandum on the renewal of Antofagasta’s mineral leases in Superior National Forest discussed in previous posts.
The apparent purpose of this meeting was to bring the White House, specifically the Office of the General Counsel and the Executive Office of the President, into the loop, or to provide the White House with an update on efforts to reverse this policy of the Obama administration.
The meeting included Michael J. Catanzaro, who was at the time Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Energy and Environmental Policy. He is profiled on DeSmog. His lobbying for oil and gas companies and his work with Senator Jim “Snowball” Inhofe and climate change denial campaigns are detailed there. Catanzaro stepped through DC’s revolving door and returned to his lobbying firm (CGCN Group) in April of this year.
The other White House official in that meeting was Stephen Vaden, who in August of 2017 was serving as Principal Deputy General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Vaden had also been a member of the Trump “beachhead team” at USDA. These teams were sent in to sabotage regulatory agencies and, as Steve Bannon put it, deconstruct the administrative state.
One month after this meeting, in September of 2017, Vaden would be officially nominated to become General Counsel at USDA. Legal staff at USDA did not exactly greet the nomination with enthusiasm. According to Politico, morale “plummeted.” There were concerns about Vaden’s lack of managerial experience, his hostility to unions, and his previous work for the Judicial Education Project on behalf of discriminatory Voter ID laws — which turned out to be the main focus of his 2017 nomination hearing. Vaden is still awaiting full confirmation in the Senate, but he is busy working at USDA and would no doubt have briefed Secretary Perdue on this matter.
So the meeting where these two Boundary Waters reversals connect comes a little more clearly into focus: Jorjani, with his strong ties to the Koch Institute, Catanzaro, an energy lobbyist hostile to science, and Vaden, with sketchy views on labor unions and voting rights, talking about a Chilean conglomerate’s mining leases in Superior National Forest.
This entry was posted in Business and Society, Louis V. Galdieri's Blog, Prosperity and tagged anti-science, Boundary Waters, Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Boundary Waters Reversal, corruption, Daniel Jorjani, Lake Superior, lobbying, Michael J. Catanzaro, mining, Minnesota, Rainy River Watershed, revolving door, risk, Science, Sonny Perdue, Stephen Vaden, sulfide mining, Superior National Forest, USDA, Water on September 11, 2018 by lvgaldieri.
Earlier this week, the EPA filed its Brief in Opposition to the Motion to Alter or Amend Judgment in Marquette County Road Commission v. EPA, requesting that Judge Robert Holmes Bell stick with his dismissal of the case. Just a day later, State Senator Tom Casperson, chief political architect of the MCRC lawsuit, was defeated by Jack Bergman in his primary bid to run against Lon Johnson for Dan Benishek’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Prospects for the haul road are dimmer than ever, reduced to a fine point of administrative law — namely, whether EPA’s objections constitute “final agency action” or are merely “an interlocutory step” that continues the administrative process. (If the latter, the case remains dismissed.) In the likely event of the lawsuit’s failure, Stand UP, the dark money organization funding it, might fold or it might try to convert itself to other political purposes. As a 501(c)(4) it can legally do that, as long as it continues to satisfy the vague requirements of a “social welfare” organization.
Casperson still has two years left to serve as a Michigan State Senator; and while he was unable to translate gripes about federal overreach into victory on a bigger political stage (to hear him tell it, people below the Mackinac Bridge just don’t get it), Bergman, the Republican candidate, seems just as hostile to effective environmental regulation. He is, for instance, an advocate of the REINS Act (S. 226 and H.R. 427), a cynically designed piece of polluter-friendly legislation that aims to undermine rules like the Clean Water Act and allow politicians and lobbyists to second-guess science. So it’s important to remember that the Road Commission’s lawsuit over the haul road has always been bound up with a larger, coordinated political project, and that project will continue well after the judge considers the last brief in this case.
This entry was posted in Business and Society, Governance, Lake Superior, Louis V. Galdieri's Blog, Prosperity and tagged 501c4, anti-science, Clean Water Act, dark money, environment, environmental regulation, EPA, H.R. 427, haul road, Jack Bergman, Lake Superior, Lon Johnson, Marquette County Road Commission v. EPA, MCRC v. EPA, mining, politics, REINS Act, Science, social welfare, Stand UP, Tom Casperson, Upper Peninsula, Water on August 5, 2016 by lvgaldieri.
The big news out of the J. Craig Venter Institute last week may have been eclipsed by coverage of the ongoing environmental crisis in the Gulf, where the Deepwater Horizon wreck continues to spew somewhere between 5,000 and 95,000 barrels (who can say?) of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, and BP continues to dump tons of toxic Corexit (which, despite its clever name, hasn’t really corrected or set anything right again). But both stories are big science and technology news, and in the past few days I have been thinking about how they are connected – or how they might be versions of the same story.
On the face of it, one is a story about “life” (I put that word in quotation marks for a reason, which I’ll get to in a minute) and the other about death. The ongoing environmental catastrophe in the Gulf – not merely an “accident,” as Rand Paul or BP and its apologists prefer to say; “crime” might be closer to the mark; but let “catastrophe” stand for now – is the story of a dying ocean.
Last week’s announcement from the Venter Institute, on the other hand, was pretty widely heralded as a story of progress, a scientific breakthrough: A Synthetic Cell.
[A] scientific team headed by Drs. Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith and Clyde Hutchison have achieved the final step in their quest to create the first synthetic bacterial cell. In a publication in Science magazine, Daniel Gibson, Ph.D. and a team of 23 additional researchers outline the steps to synthesize a 1.08 million base pair Mycoplasma mycoides genome, constructed from four bottles of chemicals that make up DNA. This synthetic genome has been “booted up” in a cell to create the first cell controlled completely by a synthetic genome.
The press release from the J. Craig Venter Institute goes on to summon the image of the scientist as Master Programmer: “the ability to routinely write the software of life will usher in a new era in science.” The Wall Street Journal said that Venter had given humanity “a new power over life.” We were asked to anticipate “new products and applications such as advanced biofuels, clean water technology, and new vaccines and medicines.” Hope for humanity, or at least, in the short run, for industrial bacteria, sponsored by Exxon Mobil – one of the big corporate underwriters of the J. Craig Venter Institute.
I can’t be the only member of the laity who would like to participate in this dialogue with the high priests of this new science. Unfortunately, the J. Craig Venter Institute does not indicate where the layperson should apply or where or on what dates the dialogue will be held. Where is the plane tree in whose shade we will all recline and discuss the question whether the creation of synthetic cells and the exercise of this new power over life is a wise course for humanity to take?
This much seems clear. Venter himself is eager to call this “‘a philosophical advance as much as a technical advance,’ suggesting that the ‘synthetic cell’ raised new questions about the nature of life.” But in my layperson’s view this new scientific success comes about as close to philosophical failure as I can imagine — the moral imagination in full retreat. Then again, I suppose Venter and I have different ideas about philosophy, just as we have different ideas about the meaning of “life”– the word and the world, the creation it describes.
Tough, unless we are careful about how we use language or decide that “life” and language are ours to guard or lose. It’s clearly an abuse of language to speak in terms of “the software of life,” as if computer technology is the ultimate referent of all creation. Life is not something that is or can ever be created in a scientific eureka moment. That’s the way science works in science fiction. But that view overlooks or deliberately ignores what seems to me the starting point of thinking about life: the very basic understanding of life as the becoming of all creation, together. “Life,” in this older and, if you ask me, fuller sense of the word, implies relationship, reciprocity, an ever-changing balance. When we speak of the “life” of a specific place, a farm, a forest, a stream or an ocean, we grasp this simple truth; we do the same when we talk about our lives, which are lives lived in relation to things and people and places. My dog has such a life; so does the peony growing in the front yard. So do we all.
I realize with growing sadness that old philosophy cannot really contend with the scientific narrative of conquest and new frontiers. It is the latter to which we now owe our cultural allegiance and on which all the money is riding. And Venter is a great master of that conquest narrative – or at least he has some very good PR people. The scientific narrative is about limitless possibility; what I’m calling the moral imagination – which belongs to a tradition of thinking about humanity and the creation — recognizes human ignorance and prescribes limits, counsels restraint and reminds us that we are more likely to produce unintended consequences than great triumphs over life and human destiny.
Which, of course, brings me back to the disaster, the crime still unfolding in the Gulf, and the dying ocean. I am not suggesting some catastrophic synthetic cell or grey goo spill is in the cards; I understand that that, too, may only be a science fiction story. But I am suggesting that the narrative of scientific conquest and new frontiers, to which we entrust our lives and on which we have staked our futures, sometimes helps us forget how ignorant we really are of how creation works, or what life is, and how we ought to keep it.
This entry was posted in Louis V. Galdieri's Blog and tagged biotech, conquest, Exxon Mobil, grey goo, J. Craig Venter, J. Craig Venter Institute, life, moral imagination, moral philosophy, Rand Paul, Science, synthetic cells on May 26, 2010 by lvgaldieri.
The emails hacked from East Anglia University don’t add up to a climate change conspiracy. But now the scientists who were building – or, as one wag at the Wall Street Journal put it, forging – the climate change consensus have lost control of their story. And only two weeks out from the climate conference in Copenhagen. This cannot end well.
This may not be “the worst scientific scandal of our generation,” as Christopher Booker put it in the Daily Telegraph, and Copenhagen may not be “mankind’s last chance…to save civilization on the planet,” contrary to what an Australian newspaper says. But the email scandal gives deniers and demagogues the opportunity they’ve been seeking; and the Copenhagen conference may simply end in confusion.
Self-proclaimed “skeptics,” many of whom are know-nothings with a political or business agenda to advance, will now press their case that climate change is just a big scare, or, as Nick Griffin would have it, an “elite scam.” This is the worst kind of nonsense, and Mr. Griffin himself is, of course, an elite scam artist of the highest order — a Cambridge University graduate, Holocaust denier, former member of the National Front, now Chair of the right wing British National Party — a man who trades on fear, hatred and feelings of disenfranchisement to gain power for himself. That he has been awarded a place on the EU delegation to the Copenhagen conference does not exactly inspire confidence. Look forward to a circus.
One of the more positive things that could come out of this whole imbroglio would be some new awareness of the role that science plays in society, some attention to the authority science has in shaping policy, and some fresh critical thinking about science as a discipline and a discourse — a public discourse, and, even, an ideology. I am aware that this is probably wishful thinking on my part. I’m also aware that scientists like to think that they have no influence on public policy, or not enough; but to my mind they only think that because they haven’t really looked into the matter. Ultimately their concerns are a form of special pleading, and less interesting than concerns about the philosophical deficit on the other side.
Apart from charges of elitism, or scary stories about great wizards behind curtains and the brave new world they are foisting on us — either the world is going to end in a huge polar tidal wave or Al Gore is going to usher in one world government, who can say which? — apart from all this, what language do we have for talking with one another about science? How are we to debate its findings, decide its limits, its proper application or real world consequences, both intended and unintended?
Gore himself seems enthralled to science and scientific thinking. Think about An Inconvenient Truth, or consider the article he published with David Blood just last week in the Financial Times. Here, Gore and Blood discover the causes of the 2008 financial crisis in how “our brains are hard-wired to think short term because evolution has rewarded serial short-term successes such as avoiding predators and other dangers that faced our ancestors.” A good day trader may have all the instincts of Australopithecus; but one wonders why Gore and Blood have to reach so far back into the past, millions of years back, to a dangerous era of hunting and gathering, to make their case. They could just as easily follow Weber back five hundred years to the moral basis of capitalism in the Protestant ethic, or or look at structural changes in the financial markets in the era of Morgan, or review the more recent history of deregulation beginning with Ronald Reagan and continuing right through the Clinton and George W. Bush years. A careful reading of recent history might suggest we are not so hard-wired after all.
Be that as it may, where the authority of science goes unquestioned, one might well ask (with Mark Steyn), who is guarding the guardians? And the answer today is, no one, really. It seems fair to say that philosophy, our philosophy, the kind we use every day to orient ourselves in the world, is not up to the task.
There are many reasons for this – some having to do with the fact that we understand science to be an amoral enterprise, neither good nor bad in and of itself; some having to do with the macroscopic and microscopic scales on which science is conducted, beyond the reach of ordinary human means. And as a society we haven’t cultivated the discipline and habits of mind, or created the institutions, to deal with science’s encroachment on our lives. It’s commonplace to say that over the past century or so, science has delivered enormous social benefits; but scientific advances and the technologies they muster and require have also exacted a social cost that we have yet to calculate. This is a failure, not of science, but of the unscientific community.
This entry was posted in Louis V. Galdieri's Blog and tagged Al Gore, Climate Change, Copenhagen, Evolution, Nick Griffin, Science, Social Science on December 2, 2009 by lvgaldieri.

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