MacKenzie Scott does not give Science 2.0 any money. I wish she did. For a minute fraction of her $57 billion we could increase the science literacy for Americans quite a lot. 

I am not criticizing her, just a few months ago she pledged $4 billion to nearly 400 groups, from food banks to community colleges. She didn't have to do that, no rich person does, it is wonderful she did. 

It would even be great if funding science nonprofits carried the same cultural cachet as funding environmental lawyers, who rake in $2 billion a year from progressive foundations and corporations.

You know what is a terrible call to action? Telling people their food is safe. Chemophobia and corporate conspiracies are where the money is at.

It's become increasingly hypocritical for wealthy countries to declare a hard stop on CO₂ emissions before poor countries even have centralized energy for cooking and water, but a new simulation finds that Draconian caps on quality of life in developing nations may not be needed.

Deb Haaland is the U.S. Representative for New Mexico's 1st congressional district since 2019. Predictably, she is a lawyer. Less common is that she was a casino executive.

If you are wondering if any of those count as qualifications to run the Interior Department, you are not alone. In the Washington Examiner today, I outline some of the science concerns that people on the left and right who care about wildlife refuges should have when it comes to someone with a fringe political agenda handling public land.

Is it more sustainable to have 2 billion people burning wood and dung for energy than to have centralized coal? Any objective look at the science says coal, while not perfect, is better for emissions, public health, and quality of life than individual fires but the U.S. government, guided by lobbyists, refused to provide World Bank funding for developing nations to create centralized energy - unless it was wind or solar.

All those countries could afford to maintain was coal. Instead of giving them centralized energy we put the sustainability buzzword as a mandate.

In past years there has been ongoing concern that not enough people got the annual flu vaccine.

Some of it was laziness, some of it was lack of education. There were few outright deniers that flu was a problem. Instead, it seemed to be the opposite. If someone had a bad cold they still said they had the flu, and some said they think they might have the flu, which led most doctors to remind people that if you think you have the flu, you don't have the flu.

The real vaccine deniers were more coastal elites who believed a discredited former doctor, Andrew Wakefield, who was interested in selling a competitor to existing vaccines, and used a tiny sample of hand-picked kids to claim that vaccines caused autism in a paper that was then retracted.

For much of 2020, it looked like media was trying to pivot the anti-vaccine movement from being predominantly left wing to one afflicting right. More right-wing people than left in America didn't want to wear masks, after all, so it seemed easy to claim they would be less likely to take a vaccine.