two good articles today

Well, good is not necessarily the correct word, but interesting, infuriating or important may actually be better for this one. The Union of Concerned Scientists ran a little bit of a survey with the EPA. Just to see really how much current policy is dictating what data they are putting out, how the finding may have been edited by current administration, etc. It turns out to be quite a bit. Coming from someone in a scientific field, I am completely unsurprised by these findings, but at the same time can tell you that nothing is as frustrating to a scientist than someone coming in and manipulating your data to say what they want it to, or to challenge your assessments with no scientific evidence on the contrary. We currently have political officials with no scientific background coming in and changing scientific findings to match what they want, and this is not the first time I have heard of this sort of censorship going on under the current administration. This stuff is bad and really needs to stop.. Anyway, the article says it all better than I can, definitely a good read.

The second article is a study performed by the Environmental Defense Fund. The basic rundown is that they wanted to find out what it would actually cost our economy to put a cap on carbon emissions with a cap and trade program. What they came up with was approximately 1% of the GDP... hardly the crippling cost that we have been led to believe. The other important tidbit is that it will become more and more expensive to perform the longer we wait. So lets get it done already.