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US government halts study on health effects of coal mining

nature.com

41–50 of 97 posts

Re: US government halts study on health effects of coal mining

#41

Do they really need to conduct a study to determine that spewing black smoke into the air hurts human beings? The Coal lobby must love Trump. Glad millennials won't work for Coal or Oil.

That's not what the study in question was about. It was about the health effects of dumping mountaintops into adjacent valleys, causing the streams to turn acidic.

Re: US government halts study on health effects of coal mining

#42
post #21
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This study is on the health risks of surface coal mining (also known as mountaintop removal) on the surrounding communities, not on the miners. As the article notes there is some evidence of unusually high lung cancer and birth defect rates in communities near such mines.

I was eating dinner with two doctors about a month ago, and they were discussing this. They said it was difficult to prove that coal mining causes things like lung cancer in the miners themselves because it is just about impossible to find a coal miner who doesn't smoke.

It would be interesting to know the coal miner cancer rate compared to smokers in the general population.

Re: US government halts study on health effects of coal mining

#43
Just bring back the rule of law. Tort law would mean that coal burning would be sued to extinction. Accepting the death of all tomorrow so that some may survive today is absurd. The church of pseudo-finance tells us that burning our forests down and poisoning all our rivers is 'growth'. Any child would laugh this away as insanity.

Re: US government halts study on health effects of coal mining

#44

The information age is built on gathering raw data and doing pure research, neither of which are profitable activities. The implied threshold for wastefulness here is offensively low; basically any project that might require one moderately competent PhD researcher for a year.

Even assuming that the 100K doesn't include indirect costs, and is only for one-year (and I'm not convinced either one of those assumptions is correct)...yeah, that's basically "All projects"

Re: US government halts study on health effects of coal mining

#45
post #20

The world will not come to an end yet but this is not a good way to ensure its ensuing survival.

They cut the research. So what? People are free to end their own robbery (paying taxes) to fund the research themselves. The taxes of five working people can finance a PhD.

Re: US government halts study on health effects of coal mining

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can projects that the current government doesn't like. All administrations do that.

Really? Can you show me a legitimate scientific project that the Obama administration shut down?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program

Re: US government halts study on health effects of coal mining

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Can you show me a legitimate scientific project that the Obama administration shut down?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program

Maybe we didn't have the cash sitting around to build up the ISS in the immediate aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the great depression.

Re: US government halts study on health effects of coal mining

#50
post #46

The study's budget was only $1m. Seems like the readership of HN could easily pull that money together and donate the funding, if the researchers could accept it.

I'd be surprised if this "community" could gather money for anything remotely useful.

Also: I'd like to see the outcome of a fundraising, and the demographics of the donators, to see how many pledge outside of CA, and outside of the USA. This would give me an impression about the extent of the Trump is Satan and the world is about to end mindset. (imho nothing changes, things proceed with trump as before. business as usual)

Just to make it clear: I'd not give a single penny for it, I care for the health of US citizens only as much as they care for the health of citizens of other countries.

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