This Week:

Quote of the Week

Big Cars Safer? For Whom?

Chemicals, Power, and the Media

Greetings,

This week’s issue is a sort-of continuation of last week’s Stroll Through the News. But, using my arbitrary and ever-changing criteria for naming this feature, the pieces this week seem too long to call it an official “Stroll.” So, it is what it is, and next week I’ll have more on the recent performance of the media. Maybe THAT will be “Stroll, Part 2.” Or, maybe, it will also simply be what it is.

I’m sorry to the subscribers to the paper edition for the late mailing last week. I had some technical difficulties. So, we’re early this week!

OK, that’s it for now. So much more to say, but it’ll have to wait until #257.

Hasta la proxima,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

The front page of the New York Times of May 12 gave us this headline: “73 Options for Medicare Plan Fuel Chaos, Not Prescriptions.” The story was about the new discount drug program under which senior citizens on Medicare can supposedly get discounts on their prescription drugs by purchasing a card from one of who-knows-how-many competing insurance companies and health maintenance organizations. As the headline says, there are already 73 options.

To make matters worse, the official government website for information on the dizzying array is riddled with errors, a serious problem for those seniors who have computers and still have good enough eyesight to use them. And seniors – the supposed beneficiaries of this centerpiece of Bush administration domestic policy – are not too happy about the “reform.” Here’s a comment on the new discount cards from 75-year-old Shirley Brauner, interviewed by the Times at a senior center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side:

“All I've got to say is they confuse the elderly, including me. I'm furious. They're taking advantage of the seniors. How can the seniors understand it?”

Big Cars Safer? For Whom?

From the Business Section of the New York Times comes this revealing item. The date was May 5, and the headline was “Average U.S. Car Is Tipping Scales At 4,000 Pounds.” The story is that the average weight for new cars sold in the U.S. last year was 4,021 pounds, which is the highest average weight since 1976. (Deep in the article the Times points out that the new cars may be “even heavier than the statistics show...”) This increased weight is “a principal reason that average fuel economy has stopped improving and the nation's consumption of crude oil has been swelling.”

Despite the headline, the article actually focuses on a “debate” about “the Bush administration's proposed rewriting of national fuel economy regulations.” The Times says that “Though work on the plan is still in its early stages, one important aspect of it could lead automakers to make their vehicles even heavier on average.”

A classic of the “He Said, She Said” form of “balanced reporting,” the article quotes both “sides” of the “increasingly bitter debate.” On the one side are “environmental groups,” which are “distressed by the plan,” and on the other “are industry lobbyists and conservative groups who argue that girth is good, for crashworthiness and because people want more space and power...”

Let’s look at that “crashworthiness” first. The Times quotes a woman from New Hampshire in this regard, who worries that tougher regulations “may force people into vehicles that are smaller, less powerful, and not as safe as our current options.” It’s hard to imagine why the Times would quote such a person, since five paragraphs later they report, accurately, that “Government studies say these giant vehicles are increasing the overall number of deaths in accidents, mainly because of the threat they pose to people in cars they hit in collisions.”

Yet, still later in the article the times quotes Eron Shosteck, “a spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which lobbies on behalf of General Motors, Ford Motor, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota and others.” He says “Studies show that making vehicles lighter has an adverse effect on safety. If all vehicles were made heavier, it would have a positive impact on safety.”

More Than One Way to Kill

While what Mr. Shosteck says is technically true, the laws of physics tell us a larger truth, and that is this: Newton's laws of motion suggest that optimal safety in terms of car crashes would be achieved if all cars had approximately the same mass. That is, they could all be larger, or they could all be smaller, and either way, fewer people would die when cars collide with other cars, because of the physics involved. But, in the real world, all cars are not going to be the same weight, with the result that (in the words of the Center for Media and Democracy) “while heavier vehicles are safer for their occupants, they are actually more dangerous to everyone else—including not just occupants of other cars, but also pedestrians, bicyclists and whatever else they might hit in a single-car collision.”

So, the claim that bigger vehicles are “safer” is wrong even when we limit the discussion to deaths caused directly by auto crashes. But is that the only way cars kill people? No, it’s not.

The article mentioned the increased incidence of asthma that comes with more gasoline being burned by cars and trucks, and that’s a serious and important point, since people die from asthma and it has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. in recent years. In addition, while it’s impossible to assign exact fatality figures to such things, auto exhaust also places “ultrafine” particles of pollution into the air. Such particles “are linked to neurological changes, mild pulmonary inflammation and cardiovascular problems,” which “potentially lead to increased mortality and illness,” according to a 2002 study by researchers at the UCLA School of Public Health. And let’s not forget, although the Times doesn’t deem this “fit to print,” that auto emissions are a huge source of carbon dioxide, which “is the most significant greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.” And who knows how many deaths that will cause as the process proceeds?

And, finally, although it doesn’t appear to have been studied in this country, a 1999 study of the health effects of air pollutants from traffic in Austria, France and Switzerland found that perhaps twice as many people die from air pollution as from auto accidents in those countries. So it is quite possible that, here in this country as well, automobile-related air pollution is responsible for more deaths than traffic accidents.

In short, there are high costs in public health and quality of life for the entire nation that are being escalated by the decreasing fuel efficiency of automobiles that is being encouraged by the Bush administration. If I were the editor of the Times, I’d place this story on the front page, and not in the Business Section. I think it’s also time for a Nygaard Notes Alternative Headline. How about “Bush Pushes to Weaken Fuel Standards, Threatening Public Health.”

Chemicals, Power, and the Media

Paging through the Business Section of the New York Times (“All The News That’s Fit To Print”) of April 2nd, I ran across an important article about the environment. Or, maybe it was an important article about official government corruption. Or, maybe it was an important article about corporate power. Well, it was an important article, anyway, as much for what it did NOT say as for what it did.

The headline was “White House Undermined Chemical Tests, Report Says.” The report they are talking about is a report issued April 1st by California Democratic Representative Henry Waxman called “A Special Interest Case Study: the Chemical Industry, the Bush Administration, and European Efforts to Regulate Chemicals.” That’s a long title, but the gist of it is as follows:

The European Union is in the process of adopting a new law called “Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals,” or REACH. According to the Waxman report, “REACH is an effort by the European Union to require chemical manufacturers to provide safety data about chemicals they produce. It would also give the European Union the authority to ban especially hazardous chemicals.” The article tells how “the Bush administration worked with the United States chemical industry to undermine” REACH. A little background is in order here.

REACH is important for a number of reasons, the main one being that it attempts to write into law for all of the European Union the “Precautionary Principle,” which I explained briefly in Nygaard Notes #225 (“Teeny-Tiny Nuggets of News and Stuff”). That principle, in a nutshell, says that we need to KNOW for certain that a given chemical or technology is not harmful before we release it into the environment. Given that, as the Times points out, “Under current rules, about 99 percent of the total volume of chemicals sold on the markets have not been subjected to testing requirements,” the REACH effort stands to shake things up quite a bit. The chemical industry in this country is not happy about it. The way things are now, before any regulations are imposed on a chemical, someone has to PROVE that it is harmful. Under the current rules, in other words, the industry is currently considered “innocent until proven guilty.” Guilty, that is, of poisoning people with any of the 30,000 “widely used” chemicals that are currently on the market.

The last thing the chemical industry wants is to have to take responsibility for the health and environmental effects of the chemicals they sell. That’s where the Bush administration comes in. “Behind the scenes,” the Times tells us, “the administration was working with the chemical industry to devise a plan” to weaken or destroy REACH. The Times politely refers to the U.S. efforts as “lobbying,” but it was a little more than that. For instance, “One e-mail message from the [U.S. government’s] trade officials urged the chemical industry to ‘get to the Swedes and Finns and neutralize their environmental arguments.’” In the interest, presumably, of “balance,” the Times contacted Greg Lebedev, the president and chief executive of the American Chemistry Council, who predictably said “The questions the U.S. government is raising about the global impact of REACH are perfectly sensible.” Sensible from a business standpoint? Yes. From an environmental standpoint? No.

Breaking the Story

At first glance, I was proud of the Times for publishing an article on this important report from Rep. Waxman, even if they did consider it a “Business” story, and relegate it to the second page of the Business Section. After all, it was the only paper in the U.S. to mention the Waxman report when it came out on April 1. But then I did a little digging and, much to my surprise, this was not a new story. In fact, the Wall Street Journal broke the story ‘way back on September 9th, 2003, nearly five months before Rep. Waxman’s report came out.

The Journal’s story – “A Global Journal Report: U.S. Opposes EU Effort to Test Chemicals for Health Hazards” – reported that “Documents gathered by the Boston-based Environmental Health Fund under the Freedom of Information Act show that the Bush administration has been a leader in fighting the EU chemical-testing proposal.” The EDF is a small non-profit, which perhaps explains why the Journal’s story of their ground-breaking work was not picked up by any U.S. media at the time – they don’t have enough political power to make their study “fit to print,” y’see.

So, off to the European press I went, where I discovered much important information that I, unlike the Times and ‘most everyone else in this country, think is “fit to print.” As usual, the tone of the articles were completely different than those in the U.S. press. For example, the Times reported that “The lobbying efforts of the United States appear to have succeeded. The European Union revised the proposal...” The London Sunday Herald made the same point with these words: “When the commission's final REACH scheme was published last October, it was a poor shadow of its original self.” This sort of difference in wording is not just semantics – it reveals a different understanding of the power and the intent of the U.S. effort. The European press’s understanding is similar to the understanding revealed in the Waxman report.

Here was the conclusion drawn by Rep. Waxman’s report: “The documents described in this report provide a case study in how a powerful special interest can influence the nation’s foreign policy. The chemical industry is one of President Bush’s biggest political supporters. As the documents reveal, the industry succeeded in using its access and influence to persuade the Administration to intervene to weaken a major environmental initiative in Europe. Members of the public and environmental organizations — even those closely following the REACH initiative — had no comparable opportunities to shape U.S. policy.”

That’s pretty important news, in my view. And it was known – and published in the largest-circulation daily paper in the United States – five months before the Times considered it “fit to print.” And, worse, no other paper in the country, to this date, has seen fit to investigate the story for themselves. Since we still have grassroots organizations like the Environmental Health Fund doing such good work, shouldn’t we also have a “free press” that lets us know about it?