No Savings With ‘Green’ Energy: It’s 4 To 6 Times MORE Expensive

Cheap, alternative energy is the big lie of the century. It’s also a blatant oxymoron. If Biden and his United Nations cronies force us into the “Green New Deal”, we will be facing a minimum of a tripling of energy prices plus serious energy disruptions in the national energy grid. ⁃ TN Editor

By: Stephen Moore and E.J. Antoni via The Epoch Times May 20, 2022

President Joe Biden keeps claiming that wind and solar energy are going to save money for consumers. But more government subsidies to “renewable energy” is a key feature of the White House anti-inflation strategy recently announced by Biden.

He probably got that idea from John Kerry, the administration’s climate czar, who recently claimed that “solar and wind are less expensive than coal or oil or gas.” Pete Buttigieg, the Biden Transportation secretary, makes the same claims about the thousands of dollars that motorists can save if they buy electric cars.

This couldn’t be more wrong.

Proponents of “green” energy boondoggles are often masters at playing with the numbers, because that is the only way that wind and solar electricity generation make any sense. Advocates such as Kerry love to focus on the low operating costs of solar and wind since they don’t require constant purchases of fuel. Ignoring the relatively short lifespan of solar and wind components, as well as the high initial investment, can make it appear as though solar and wind operate at lower costs than fossil fuels or nuclear power.

Let’s get the facts straight. The cost isn’t just what you pay at the retail level for gas or power. It also includes the taxes you pay to subsidize the power. A 2017 study by the Department of Energy found that for every dollar of government subsidy per BTU unit of energy produced from fossil fuels, wind and solar get at least $10.

That’s anything but a money saver.

The reason the subsidies are so high is that solar and wind have additional costs compared to their more reliable competition. “Green” energy sources are non-dispatchable, meaning their output can’t be changed to match demand. The wind doesn’t blow harder, and the sun doesn’t shine brighter, just because electricity use is peaking.

Conversely, fossil fuel entities—such as a coal plant—can ramp up generation when we need it most and ramp down when demand falls.

Widespread adoption of solar and wind generation would necessitate expensive batteries on a large scale to ensure that people still have power when the wind stops blowing or when the sun stops shining—like it does every single night.

So, unlike reliable and flexible natural gas, solar and wind require large-scale storage solutions: massive banks of batteries that are hardly environmentally friendly but are also extremely expensive. And since batteries don’t last forever, they add to both the initial expense and maintenance costs during the life of a solar or wind energy generating station.

The same problem exists with electric cars. The sticker price on EVs is considerably higher than for conventional gas-operated cars, and the so-called savings over time assume that the electric power for recharging is free. But it isn’t and power costs are rising almost as fast as gas prices.

Factors such as these are consistently ignored by Kerry and other “green” energy activists.

To genuinely evaluate dissimilar energy sources and provide an apples-to-apples comparison, the U.S. Energy Information Administration uses the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) and the Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS). These measures consider the initial costs, the lifespan of generation and storage systems, maintenance and fuel costs, decommissioning expenses, subsidies, etc., and compare that to how much electricity is produced over a power plant’s lifetime.

The numbers don’t lie: “green” energy is a complete waste of resources.

The LCOE and LCOS for solar and on-shore wind farms are four times as expensive as natural gas. But offshore wind takes the cake—it’s six times as expensive as natural gas.

Imagine paying four to six times as much every month for the same electricity! That’s the green paradise world that the Biden administration wants for America.

Yet, it’s even worse than that because electric power costs greatly affect the cost of producing nearly everything else. In the case of producing aluminum, for example, a third of the total production cost is electricity alone.

Imagine what quadrupling electricity prices would do to the prices of all the goods and services that people buy. If you think inflation is bad now, just wait until the nation is dependent on wind and solar—then you’ll see REAL price increases.

And despite official government data contradicting its own claims, the Biden administration—including Kerry—continues spouting simple untruths on wind and solar. They hope no one will check their fantastic facts.

To the left, wanting it to be true makes it true.

All the while, the middle class is being crushed by $4-a-gallon gasoline, and businesses everywhere are buckling under $5-per-gallon diesel. The Wall Street Journal warns that electric power blackouts could be coming because of overreliance on wind and solar power.

At some point, if this push for green energy continues, the whole nation will start to look like California, where gas is $6 a gallon, the lights go out, and electric cars are stranded because of rolling blackouts. If that’s our “green” future, then Americans should want nothing to do with it.

Science Must be Reproducible: Three Parts

 By Dr. Jay Lehr |May 9th, 2022|Regulation, Science|10 Comments

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is a non profit organization of academics and independent scholars intent on recapturing the essence of scholarship which was so well respected in the past. We once respected all doctors without questioning their level of knowledge. Perhaps you have heard the joke beginning with the question “what do you call an individual who graduated medical school with a D average” the answer is “doctor”. The same was true for academics, college professors, all those that taught us at a college or university. Sadly as government slowly took over 80% of all academic research the standard of excellence declined . The by-words of too much research became “as the fear increases so does the money” and government involvement.

In hopes of bringing back the level of excellence among teachers and researchers NAS was formed. It does research itself into how schools are performing in the modern era. While there remains much that is good, there is a great deal that is bad.

This is the first of three essays taken from their new publication aptly titled Shifting Sands. It focuses on the failing efforts to reproduce scientific research that too often ends up supporting unnecessary or inappropriate government regulations. Much of their book uses the tremendous flaws in EPA’s effort to tighten the already unsupportable air quality regulation of Particulate Matter smaller than two and a half microns (millionth of a meter) which is called their PM2.5 rule. I wrote about the PM2.5 hearing they held by Zoom on February 25 on these pages in the weeks of March 27 and April 4, 2022. All but two of those who testified opposed EPA’s effort to tighten the current rule. There were 15 of us testifying against their plan. The EPA panel on the conference call did not ask a single question of the 15 people giving testimony in opposition. We suspect they had no interest in even listening to us. We all agreed that none of the evidence EPA was using to tighten the PM 2.5 rule could be reproduced even if their data could be obtained.

An irreproducibility crisis afflicts a wide range of scientific and social scientific disciplines from epidemiology to social psychology. Science has always had a layer of untrustworthy results published in respectable places and experts who are eventually shown to be sloppy, mistaken or untruthful. Herman Muller even won the Nobel Prize for his fraudulent studies of the fruit fly, which is now known to have resulted in the unsupportable Linear No Threshold model that has handicapped work on medical radiation for more than a half century. But the irreproducibility crisis is something new. It’s magnitude has brought many scientists confidence in other’s research to a very skeptical position. And most of today’s work is performed on the public’s dollar. A majority of modern research may well be wrong. How much government regulation is actually built on irreproducible science.

In the NAS text Shifting Sands the authors included 8 sources of misdirection leading to irreproducibility. They include:

• Malleable research plans
• Legally inaccessible data sets
• Opaque methodology and algorithms
• Undocumented data cleansing
• Inadequate or non existent data archiving
• Flawed statistical methods
• Publication bias hiding negative results
• Political or disciplinary group think (political correctness)

Government regulation is meant to clear a high barrier of proof. Regulations should be based on a large body of scientific research, the combined evidence of which provides sufficient certainty to justify reducing American’s liberty with a government regulation.

The justifiers of regulations based on flimsy or inadequate research often cite the “precautionary principle”. They would say that instead of being a regulation on rigorous science, they base the regulation on the possibility that a scientific claim is accurate. They do this with the logic that it is too dangerous to wait for the actual validation of a hypothesis, and the lower standard of reliability is warranted when dealing with matters that might involve severely adverse outcomes. The invocation of the precautionary principle is not only non-scientific, but is also an inducement to accepting poor science and even fraud.

We are living with this right now as the government wants to stop the use of fossil fuels because of a belief that it could lead the earths’ temperature to an unwanted level. No such proof of this exists.

The political consequences have unavoidably had the affect of tempting political activists to skew scientific research in order to impact the manner in which the government weighs evidence. Any formal system of assessment inevitably invites attempts to game it.

To all this we must add the distorting effects of massive government funding of scientific research. Our federal government is the largest single funder of research in the world. It’s expectations affect not only the research it directly funds, but also all research done in hopes of receiving federal funding. Government experts therefore have it in their power to create a skewed body of research which they can use to justify regulations.

A 2020 report prepared for the Natural Resource Defense Council estimates that American air pollution regulations cost $120 billion per year, and we may take that estimate provided to us by an environmental advocacy group to be the lowest plausible number.

It is time for US citizens to know all this and react to it in a manner that begins swinging the pendulum back toward more reliable research conclusions.

Note: Portions of this essay were excerpted from the book Shifting Sands with permission of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) and its authors Peter Wood, Stanley Young, Warren Kindzierski, and David Randall.

Irreproducible science – Part two

By Dr. Jay Lehr |May 16th, 2022 | Science | 80 Comments @ CFACT 

The empirical scientist conducts controlled experiments and keeps accurate, unbiased records of all observable conditions at the time the experiment is conducted. If a researcher has discovered a genuinely new or previously unobserved natural phenomenon, other researchers -with access to his or her notes and some apparatus of their own devising- should be able to reproduce or confirm the discovery. If sufficient corroboration is forthcoming the scientific community eventually acknowledges that the phenomenon is real and adapts existing theory to accommodate the new observations.

The validation of scientific truth requires replication or reproduction. Replicability most commonly refers to obtaining an experiment’s result in an independent study, by different investigator with different data, while reproducibility refers to different investigators using the same data, methods, and/or computer code to reach the same conclusions.

Yet today the scientific process of replication and reproduction has ceased to function properly. A vast proportion of the scientific claims in published literature have not been replicated or reproduced. Estimates are that a majority of these published claims that cannot be replicated or reproduced are in fact false.

An extraordinary number of scientific and social-scientific disciplines no longer reliably produce true results, a state of affairs commonly referred to as the Irreproducibility Crisis. A substantial majority of 1500 active scientists, recently surveyed by Nature magazine coined the urgent situation a Crisis. The scientific world’s completely inappropriate professional incentives bear much of the blame for this catastrophic failure.

Politicians and bureaucrats commonly act to maximize their self-interest rather than acting as disinterested servants of the public good. This applies specifically to scientists, peer reviewers and government experts. The different participants in the scientific research system all serve their own interests as they follow the systems incentives.

Well published university researchers earn tenure, promotion, lateral moves to more prestigious universities, salary increases, grants, professional reputation, and public esteem-above all, from publishing exciting new positive results. The same incentives affect journal editors who receive acclaim for their journal, and personal awards by publishing what may be viewed as exciting new research-even though the research has not been thoroughly vetted.

Grantors want to fund exciting research, and government funders possess the added incentive that exciting research with positive results supports the expansion of their organization’s mission. American university administrations want to host grant -winning research, from which they profit by receiving overhead costs- frequently the majority of the amount in the grant. As one who has experienced and viewed this first hand it will boggle the readers mind as to the huge portions of most research grants that goes to the university as overhead rather than to support actual research costs.

All these incentives reward published research with new positive claims but not necessarily reproducible research. Researchers, editors, grantors, bureaucrats , university administrations, each has an incentive to seek out what appears to be exciting new research that draws money, status, and power. There are few if any incentives to double check their work. Above all, they have little incentive to reproduce the research, to check that the exciting claim holds up because if it does not, they will lose money status and prestige.

The scientific world’s incentives for new findings rather than reproducible studies, drastically affects what becomes submited for publication. Scientists who try to build their careers on checking old findings, or publishing negative results are unlikely to achieve professional success. The result is that scientists do not submit negative results for publication. Some negative results go to the file drawer. Others somehow turn into positive results as researchers consciously or unconsciously massage their data and their analyses.(As a science modeler we call this “tuning”, a technical word for cheating). Neither do they perform or publish many replication studies, since the scientific world’s incentives do not reward those activities either.

The concept of statistical significance is being tortured to the point that literally hundreds if not thousands of useless papers claiming that significance, appear everywhere.

Researchers try to determine whether the relationships they study differ from what can be explained by chance alone by gathering data and applying hypothesis tests, also called tests of statistical significance. Most commonly they start by testing the chance that there is no actual relationship between two variables which is called the “null hypothesis”. If that fails and it is likely their is relationship they go on to other hypothesis. How well the data supports a “null hypothesis” (no relationship) is a statistic called a p-value. If the p-value is less that 5% or .05 it is assumed there may be a relationship between the variables being studied.

The governments central role in science, both in funding scientific research and in using scientific research to justify regulation, adds tremendously to the growth of flimsy statistical significance throughout the academic world. Within a generation statistical significance went from a useful shorthand that agricultural and industrial researchers used to judge whether to continue their current procedures or switch to something new, to a prerequisite for regulation, government grants, tenure and every other form of scientific prestige and also essential for publication.

Many more scientists use a variety of statistical practices with more or less culpable carelessness including:

• improper statistical methodology
• biased data manipulation that produces desired results
• selecting only measures that produce statistical significance and ignoring any that do not
• using illegitimate manipulations of research techniques

Still others run statistical analyses until they find a statistically significant result and publish the one result. This is called “p-hacking”. Far too many researchers report their methods unclearly and let the uninformed reader assume they actually followed a rigorous scientific process.

The most insidious of all scientific cheating is p-HARKING. That is when a scientist chooses a hypothesis only after collecting all the data that produces a desired result. A more obvious word for it is CHEATING. Irreproducible research hypotheses produced by HARKING sends whole disciplines chasing down rabbit holes.

Publication bias and p-harking collectively have degraded scientific research as a whole. In addition, for decades surveys show that researchers are unlikely too publish any negative results their studies uncover.

A false research claim can become the foundation for an entire body of literature that is uniformly false and yet becomes an established truth. We cannot tell exactly which pieces of research have been affected by these errors until scientists replicate every piece of published research. Yet we do possess sophisticated statistical strategies that does allow us to diagnose specific claims that support government regulation. One such method- an acid test for statistical skullduggery is p-value plotting described in detail in the the National Association of Scholars handbook, SHIFTING SANDS. A brief paper back I can not recommend too strongly

Note: Portions of this essay were excerpted from the NAS book SHIFTING Sands with permission of the National Association of Scholars and its authors Peter Wood, Stanley Young, Warren Kindzierski, and David Randall.

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) recognition of a scientific duplication crisis – Part 3

By Dr. Jay Lehr May 23rd, 2022 | Science | 23 Comments @ CFACT Part One, Part two

EPA regulations rely on environmental epidemiological literature, without applying rigorous tests for reproducibility, and without considering the environmental epidemiology discipline’s general refusal to take account of the need for Multiple Testing and Multiple Modeling. Such rigorous tests are needed not least because earlier generations of environmental epidemiologists have already identified the low hanging fruit.

These include massive statistical correlations between risk factors and health outcomes such as the connection between smoking and lung cancer. Modern environmental epidemiologists habitually seek out small but significant risk factors and health outcome associations. These practices render their research susceptible to false positives as real results. They risk mistaking an improperly controlled co-variable for a positive association.

Environmental epidemiologists are aware of these difficulties, but regardless have made their discipline into exercises in applied statistics. They do little to control for bias, p-hacking and other well known statistical errors. The intellectual leaders of their discipline have positively counseled against taking measures to avoid these pitfalls. But environmental epidemiologists, and the bureaucrats who depend on their work to support regulations, proceed as a field with unwarranted self-confidence. They have an insufficient sense of the need for humble awareness of how much statistics remains an exercise in measuring uncertainty rather than establishing certainty. Their results, do not possess an adequate scientific foundation. Their so-called “facts” are built on Shifting Sands, not on the solid rock of transparent, and critically reviewed scientific inquiry.

A NAS study showed how one particular set of statistical techniques simply counting and p-value plots, can provide a severe test for environmental epidemiology. Meta analyses must be used to detect p-hacking and other frailties in the underlying scholarly literature. We have used these techniques to demonstrate that meta-analyses associating PM 2.5 and other air quality components with mortality, heart attacks and asthma attacks fail this severe test.

The NAS study also demonstrates negligence on the part of both environmental epidemiologists and the EPA. The discipline of environmental epidemiology has failed to adopt a simple statistical procedure to test their research. The EPA failed to require that research justifying regulation be subjected to such a test. These persistent failures undercut confidence in their professional capacities as researchers and as regulators.

Both environmental epidemiology as a discipline, including journals , foundations and tenure committees and the EPA must adopt a range of reforms to improve the necessary reproducibility of their research. However, NAS directs its recommendations to the EPA and more broadly to federal regulatory and granting agencies.

They have reluctantly come to the conclusion that scientists will not change their practices unless the federal government credibly warns them it will withhold government grant dollars until they adopt stringent reproducibility reforms. NAS has also come to the conclusion that federal regulators will not adopt stringent new tests of science underlying regulation unless they are explicitly required to do so.

The National Association of Scholars recommend the following eleven actions be taken by the EPA in order to bring their methodologies up to the level of Best Available Science which is mandated in The Information Quality Act of 2019.

The EPA should adopt resampling methods as part of its standard battery of tests applied to environmental epidemiology research/

1. The EPA should adopt resampling methods as part of its standard battery of tests applied to environmental epidemiology research.
2. The EPA should rely for regulation exclusively on meta-analyses that use tests to take account of endemic questionable research procedures, p-hacking and HARKing.
3. The EPA should redo its assessment of base studies more broadly to take account of endemic questionable research procedures, p-hacking and HARKing.
4. The EPA should require preregistration and registered reports of all research that informs regulation.
5. The EPA should also require public access to all research data used to justify regulation.
6. The EPA should consider the more radical reform of funding data set building, and data set analysis separately.
7. The EPA should place greater weight on reproduced research.
8. The EPA should constrain the use of “weight of evidence” to take account of the irreproducibility crisis.
9.  The EPA should report the proportion of positive results to negative results in the research it funds.
10.  The EPA should not rely on research claims of other organizations until these organizations adopt sound statistical practices
11.  The EPA should increase funding to investigate direct causal biological links between substances and health outcomes.

NAS has used the phrase “irreproducible crisis” throughout this essay, and they note that distinguished meta-researchers prefer to regard the current state of affairs as a challenge rather than a crisis.

You do not need to believe it to be a crisis. These current scientific practices are simply not the best available science. We should use the best scientific practices simply because they are the best scientific practices. Mediocrity ought not be acceptable.

If this is the first article you have read in this series please go back to the past two weeks at cfact.org to read the even more extensive parts 1 and 2 or click on my name at the beginning of this article and all my previous article titles will pop up on a list. Click on any title and the full article will appear.

There is no doubt that all CFACT readers question many EPA regulations. After you read this series of articles extracted from the National Association of Scholars booklet, SHIFTING SANDS, you will question even more.

Note: Portions of this essay were excerpted from the book Shifting Sands with permission of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) and its authors Peter Wood, Stanley Young, Warren Kindzierski, and David Randall.

Author

• Dr. Jay Lehr

  CFACT Senior Science Analyst Jay Lehr has authored more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books. Jay’s new book A Hitchhikers Journey Through Climate Change written with Teri Ciccone is now available on Kindle and Amazon.

To Be or To Do, Which Way Will You Go? End Joint Membership Now!

By Rich Kozlovich 

As most of you know I left the OPMA because I couldn't resign from NPMA due to joint membership.  I can tell you from conversations, that discontent isn't isolated.  While others have expressed the same discontent with NPMA as I, they've chosen to remain within OPMA,  always hoping for the best, and trying to see the benefits offered, and I can understand that.

Of course the question everyone should be asking is: Would I act differently if I was still active, in the leadership and not retired?  No, I wouldn't, and those who know me best don't doubt that!   While I intended to do a piece on this later this year, this article has been inspired by a post by Peter D'Abrosca, Ohio Attorney General Silent After Texas, Others Leave NAAG, appearing in the Ohio Star discussing a letter addressed to Iowa Attorney General Thomas Miller (D), the president of NAAG.

After the top attorneys in Texas, Montana and Missouri announced that they would be leaving the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG), Ohio appears poised to remain part of the group.  “The attorneys general of Texas, Missouri and Montana have decided to withdraw our states’ membership from NAAG,” said a letter penned by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R)..........

The article goes on to show how they've approached the leadership about "the Association’s leftward shift over the past half-decade has been intolerable. Indeed, this liberal bent has fundamentally undermined NAAG’s role as a ‘nonpartisan national forum’ that ‘provides a community … to collaboratively address’ important issues,” the letter said. “We can no longer spend our taxpayers’ money to sustain our membership with NAAG under these circumstances.” 

All of which accomplished nothing.  What conclusion did they arrive at?  It was never going to be fixed and they ended their relationship with their national association. 

The article goes on to note Ohio and 18 other states almost immediately ended their relationship with the National School Boards Association because of their position that parents who were exercising their Constitutional rights protesting what their school boards were up to were domestic terrorists, and wanted to sic the FBI on them.   

Both associations hold values antithetical to the values of many of their members, and quite frankly, to the nation's values. 

So, what's this have to do with NPMA?  Below is information I've published in the past. It's nothing new and shocking, but it is the truth, and it needs to be taken seriously.

In my years I have seen our industry go from being ardent defenders of pesticides universally, to a substantial number who are almost as anti-pesticide in their approach as anyone from the Sierra Club or the NRDC, especially with their embrace of "green" pest control, and IPM.  I find this especially true with those holding advanced degrees in our industry, any or all of whom I'm still willing to publicly debate, irrespective of position or education. 

Over they years the NPMA did some excellent work for our industry, and they should be commended for it, but having done something right doesn't give anyone a pass on the rest of life.   Over the years I've yet to see them take a truly heroic stand against leftist green positions.  School Environmental Protection Act?  They supported it.  Our members went to Legislative day and told our representatives Ohio did not. If Ohio could stand up against this, why couldn't NPMA? 

The EPA spent untold millions promoting a structural pest control system that doesn’t exist.  IPM!  In point of fact there is no such thing as IPM in structural pest control. (Please see The Pillars of IPM.)  NPMA embraced it. 

When the EPA instituted regulations to impose restrictions on the use of pyrethrins and pyrethroids based on dubious conclusions, industry played into this.    

Perhaps I missed it, but as far as I can tell they've been silent on repealing the Food Quality Protection Act, and some even claimed it was a good law.  But time is the great leveler of truth.

This law was originally intended to be a pro-pesticide bill fixing the Delaney Clause, the foolishness 1958 Amendment of the of the 1937 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.  An amendment that unscientifically declared if something tested carcinogenic at any level, it was carcinogenic at every level.  But the EPA turned this into one of the most corrupt anti-pesiticde laws since the EPA banned DDT.   As a result, we lost Ficam and Dursban, (carmabates and organophosphates) because of EPA's irrational and radical changes regarding risk and unending testing.   

Neither were banned in spite of what you may read. The manufacturers pulled their registration for structural applications.  There was very little argument, and when Dow decided not to fight it the other companies manufacturing chlorpyrifos gave up. Chlorpyrifos: A Hostage of the Secret Science Rule?   Then there was the EPA's unscientific demands regarding endocrine distuptors. 

It has seemed to me that over the decades the NPMA has far too willingly embraced a philosophy of appeasement with the neo-pagan secular psuedo-religous movements of the left.

Then there was the Butterfield Bill, as I outlined in my article, The Butterfield Bill: Activity as a Substitute for Accomplishment, Part II, which NPMA wanted us all to support.  Why?  I read it, and outlined to the leadership what was wrong with it.  I was told I needed to see the positive aspects of that bill.  I asked - what were they?  I didn't get an answer.

Well, it didn't pass, and if it had, it wouldn't have done anything to relieve the plague of bed bugs in America.  If passed it would have been an expensive waste, and an ineffectual imposition on our industry and the public.  In short, more government, less results.  And we were supporting this why? 

Why? That’s the question I kept asking over the years, and I've never  gotten a satisfactory answers.  I've gotten a lot of logical fallacies and obfuscation, none of which was satisfactory. 

Over the years the rates of cancer have consistently dropped, and yet we still hear the irrational – and unscientific – mantra that pesticides cause cancer. If you were to take a plastic overlay of our modern demographic and put it over the demographics of those living in 1914 and those living in 2014 you would notice two very distinct differences. Very few people smoked and very few people lived past 65, the two major areas of cancer related deaths. The decrease I spoke of would be even more dramatic if we reduced the demographic of smokers and the aged from our modern demographic chart.

Now that whole narrative has been shown to be blatantly false, so what did they do?  Now the big ones are endocrine disruption (and here), Colony Collapse Disorder, and the junk science surrounding the Sixth Mass Extinction.   All of which have been proven false by time and real science.   None of which, as far as I can tell, the NPMA stands up against, and in point of fact, collaborates on. 

When the federal government banned DDT industry rose up as one to defend it, and it was the same for chlordane. Then came the Food Quality Protection Act and which brought about the irrational elimination of Ficam and Dursban (chlorpyrifos), [Neither were banned in spite of what you may read. The manufacturers pulled their registration for structural applications.  There was very little argument, and when Dow decided not to fight it the other companies manufacturing chlorpyrifos gave up.

Was it a business decision? You bet!

Chlorpyrifos was out of patent and it represented a very small percentage of their annual intake, at least from structural pest control, and the lawsuits kept coming. It is interesting that the last time I looked it’s still used as an agriculture product under the brand name Lorsban. But since then we've now learned just how deceitful the EPA has been with it's Secret Science on Dursban. Why aren't we demanding Dursban's return?

The makers of Ficam W (bendiocarb), which I understand is still used in Australia and New Zealand and I’m told still works on bed bugs, gave up also. Why? We lost two whole categories of pesticides [organophosphates and carbamates] from our arsenal with that terrible piece of legislation called the Food Quality Protection Act, which wasn’t about food or protection. It was about making it too expensive to keep pesticide registrations active, thereby banning pesticides without having to go through all those nasty and potentially messy legal and scientific steps - where they would have lost.

Now we come to those new restrictions on pyrethroids, and there was hardly a peep, except from Ohio’s pest controllers. People at the national level may not like it, but if the Ohio pest controllers – who are responsible for the very existence of NPMA – can stand up to be counted, and fight the good fight, why can't the NPMA?

A fight the entire industry should have been fighting and should still be fighting. But nothing happened. Quietly as church mice, passive as sheep and as rational as lemmings, NPMA did nothing useful to maintain our ability to use pyrethroids as we've been doing for decades.  Oh, I can hear the screams now about how much NPMA did, but the proof is in the pudding.  We have unreasonable restrictions.  

What’s worse it appears the manufactures of pyrethroids, known as the “Pyrethroid Working Group (PWG), an industry task force whose members are AMVAC, Bayer, Cheminova, DuPont, FMC Corporation, Syngenta and Valent", were part and parcel of this pesticide reduction scheme. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the Pyrethroid Working Group was formed. 

I wonder, does this whole thing sound conspiratorial to anyone besides me?  I know…I know…. there’s no such thing as a conspiracy.   I often wonder why the people who have never read a history book are so ardent in that view. Just a thought!  

And why were these restrictions to structural pest control and not to lawn care or agriculture?  We have substantial restrictions against where and how we make pyrethroid applications to structures, while the lawns, fields and shrubs can be covered with pyrethroids by the lawn care and agricultural industries.

Does that sound irrational to anyone besides me?

All this to protect an almost microscopic shrimplike creature known as Hyalella azteca, a creature that is capable of living in extremely adverse conditions, and is one of the most prolific creatures in North America and South America. Pyrethroids are used extensively everywhere. How can that be?  If these products are so deadly to Hyalella here in the United States, or more specifically California, why aren't they in the rest of the world?

I have spent some time going over the information available and there are a number of things I would like to see answered. Since this “shrimp” is so impacted by small amounts of pyrethroid materials; with one study claiming the appearance of chlorpyrifos created a more toxic impact, which I found truly interesting since we are no longer using chlorpyrifos in structural pest control, so where did that come from?  Agriculture!  Until recently there was no real effort to eliminate it for agricultural purposes, but Scott Pruitt, President Trump's first EPA director put a stop to that saying they were going to follow the science. While that's still being litigated, the important fact is this: The chemical companies fought to keep it for agriculture. Why not structural pest control? 

Why hasn't NPMA been more strident on these matters?   But the real questions that need answering are these:

• NPMA seems to have a penchant for embracing leftist narratives on pesticides and junk science. Why?
• Now our national association is deciding if it's going to get involved in "diversity" issues. Why?

  The structural pest control industry has nothing to be ashamed of.  We've accepted people from every walk of life in our industry, regardless of race, religion, sex and even sexual orientation.  In Ohio, in the 1960's one of the founders and first President of what's now the Greater Cleveland Pest Control Association was Bob Caldwell, and is a past President of the Ohio Pest Management Association.  He's black.  In the 1960's Ohio was either the first or among the first to choose a woman for it's state association President, Betty Portwood.  One of our recent Presidents was Molly Patton Marsh.  John Patton's daughter.  

  Betty has now passed and was in her 90's, and Bob is still running his company,  and both were respected and treated accordingly by our industry forever.

• What are NPMA's priorities?  
• Why has the NPMA decided to get involved in social engineering?  
• Is that their job?  
• Where in the NPMA constitution does it outline that as a duty?
• If that became their job, when was that decided, and by whom?   
• Does that mean we can start posting about social issues on the NPMA Open Forum, if it still exists?
  

  In the past anyone doing so would have their posts deleted, and even then, we were subject to unpublished and unknown standards for acceptance, even if the posts or comments met the posted criteria for acceptable posts.  

  I've been there, done that, so I know it's true.  Just like EPA had secret science, it would appear, the NPMA had, secret standards for posting on the Open Forum regarding topic, and who was posting.  But either way, we still have to come back to the main questions. 

• Why is the NPMA getting publicly involved with Social Justice issues?  
• What is their agenda, and why?
• If the NPMA can be so public about social issues that have no bearing on pest control, how can they restrict anyone else from doing so?
• Is that blatant hypocrisy!

I think those are important questions because they've clearly gone in directions that are not part of the real reason they came into existence, which used to be to fight for the structural pest control industry against all adversaries and enemies, in and out of government.

• What is their agenda now?   
• What are their priorities?
• Who articulated such an agenda and priorities and why?
• Do we need to redefine and rewrite the NPMA constitution and bylaws? 

Make no mistake about this, as Thomas Sowell stated: If there is ever a contest for words that substitute for thought, “diversity” should be recognized as the undisputed world champion. You don’t need a speck of evidence, or a single step of logic, when you rhapsodize about the supposed benefits of diversity. The very idea of testing this wonderful, magical word against something as ugly as reality seems almost sordid.

Ohio pest controllers and New York City pest controllers created the NPMA, back in the 1930's, and it's time Ohio walks away.  The fact of the matter is, NPMA Rang the Bell long ago and it's time for Ohio to decide to once again take the lead!  To Be or To Do: Which Way Will You Go?