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Environmental Groups Back In Court To Help Fellow Rich White People

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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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A short while ago we carried a strange claim from a group of ethicists at Oxford.  Not only should abortion be okay, actual children should be aborted even after they are born.

They're ethicists so they can be dismissed rather quickly. Tomorrow they are just as likely to be arguing there should be no abortion at all if you can't abort newborns.  Yet there is growing concern that the government doing more things for more people in the best interests of overall society is leading to a resurgence in the social authoritarian rationalizations that gripped the country (and really, the world) the last time progressives held any power. 
It's been said that science fiction can sometimes turn into science fact.

In that same vein, it may be that stories from The Onion (More U.S. Children Being Diagnosed With Youthful Tendency Disorder) may one day become part of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
We carry some press releases on Science 2.0 and of course that is what Science Codex in our sidebar is. It's been an intentional effort since the communications arm of Science 2.0 began in 2006. The first, and most important reason, for that is because we think the audience is smart and don't need journalists putting context to most stories. Our audience just wants to know first so if something looks interesting, it will hit this page on the minute the embargo lifts. Everything else is written by scientists or at least (mostly) knowledgeable people(1).
The National Academies Press will roll out some new national science standards for K-12 educators and for the first time, those standards will include guidelines on teaching climate change.

Good luck with that.  As No Child Left Behind showed, positive results and the welfare of kids will not matter in a political fight - any attempts to create an education standard and accountability are going to flop unless education unions buy into it and any attempts to create a science standard for climate education will flop unless teachers do.  And a lot of them don't.
Did an environmental issue disappear because activist groups got a check?  It would seem so.  The Natural Resources Defenses Council and Santa Monica Baykeeper sued the city of Malibu in 2008 for 'groundwater' pollution.

The settlement they reached?  Malibu has to 'fix' 17 drains, easy enough to rationalize since water can pick up garbage as it falls due to that nature thing that happens  - but then they also have to donate $750,000 to the two groups that filed the lawsuit.  How is that helping the environment?  It isn't, but it keeps those environmental corporations in business so they can hire more lawyers to raise more money.
Unless he gets hit by a bus, Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee and be given the opportunity to lose in the election this fall.