Fake Banner
Young People Have Become Jaded To Emotional Appeals On Screens - And That Is Good

Running a pro-science nonprofit is a poor business model. Especially compared to lawyer groups...

The Feel Good Fallacy Of Sugary Drink Taxes On Reducing Obesity

Social authoritarians like to make people more reliant on government and then control what people...

Environmental Groups Back In Court To Help Fellow Rich White People

The Usual Suspects of the anti-science movement, Center for Biological Diversity(1), Environmental...

Batteries Are Stuck In The 1990s Because Solid-State Batteries Keep Short-Circuiting

The electric car industry is held back by reliance on conventional energy. Despite spending trillions...

User picture.
picture for Fred Phillipspicture for Tommaso Dorigopicture for picture for Hontas Farmerpicture for Atreyee Bhattacharyapicture for Patrick Lockerby
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 »

Blogroll
Decades before solar and wind took over green marketing dollars, back when environmentalists still promoted natural gas and hydroelectric power, heat pumps became an energy-saving fad.

The problem with them became evident nearly as fast as that electric car range you think you'll get - it is only under ideal conditions in a lab. So if you bought one because you were told it is "400 percent efficient", you probably also bought organic food because someone told you it doesn't have pesticides. In other words, you were just believing in magic.
The Hill
When I was young, conservatives and liberals had equally high levels of trust in science. And it was high. Only progressives thought science was not a force for public good.
America is one of the most religiously, racially and ethnically diverse countries in the world, but that doesn't mean Latinos, Asians or Blacks believe that Democrats and Republicans want them as anything more than reliable voting blocs.

A new analysis finds that though voting eligible Asians were up 35 percent between 2010 and 2020, Latinos increased 23 percent and the Black population increased by 6 percent even as Whites decreased 2 percent, minorities didn't vote in numbers similar to their eligible voter population.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, government health officials went to Congress to ask for more funding to help with Ebola. Prior to that they asked for more funding to help stop Teen Vaping. Prior to that they asked for more funding to stop the Prediabetes Epidemic.

After the pandemic they created regulations to keep landlords from evicting deadbeat tenants. They created regulations to force COVID-19 vaccines on everyone...except fellow government union employees. 
Republicans joined the anti-vaccine movement in 2021 but you might not know it xisted prior to that. Academics and allied journalists would roll out surveys showing that the anti-vaccine movement was similar on both sides to rationalize the behavior of their tribe - while ignoring actual data.

Data like that that coast of California had more vaccine exemptions for school kids than the rest of the US combined. Some coastal schools had vaccine rates of just 26%. Fortunately, we had physicians like Dr. Richard Pan on our side, willing to defy his political party to save kids. We pressured the Governor to sign a law banning arbitrary exemptions and now California is nearly as high as Mississippi and Alabama in vaccine uptake.