With all of the hoopla surrounding recent Supreme Court Decisions, it’s hard to keep up. One of the most recent is Michigan v. EPA. Reacting to the decision, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said, “I am thrilled that, for the second year in a row, the Supreme Court agreed with my Office’s argument that the EPA violated the Clean Air Act in imposing a costly regulation on the American people”. He added that the decision means that, “the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must consider the economic costs of complying with the regulations it imposes”.

The state of Michigan contended in its complaint that in promulgating new regulation, the EPA must consider the costs of compliance. The Court agreed even as the EPA didn’t. According to a CBS the cost of complying with their regulations isn’t something they feel they have to be concerned about. That doesn’t surprise me - regulators essentially operate in a market vacuum, having no meaningful competition and therefore don’t have the ability to “know” the future unintended (or even the intended) consequences of its actions - even if they wanted to.

It just so happens that an article that essentially makes this very point appeared in Scientific American just last week. It references a recent study published by the University of Chicago (my alma mater by the way) and is entitled: “Energy-Efficiency Efforts May Not Pay Off”. What the study shows is that even when the EPA tried to make a cost/benefit case with regard to one of its programs - it got it spectacularly wrong.

Says Scientific American, “In the run-up to the final rollout of its Clean Power Plan, U.S. EPA has consistently promoted energy efficiency efforts as a cheap, easy and financially advantageous way” to achieve its goals regarding greenhouse gases. Saying further, “In fact, EPA has predicted that efficiency improvements undertaken to meet state-level goals will ultimately lower monthly electricity bills for consumers, by lowering overall demand”.

However, the University of Chicago study throws cold water on that thesis. The study tracked 30,000 homes in Michigan (as in Michigan v. EPA referenced above) that were considered eligible for the Weatherization Assistance Program - a program that received a more than 10 fold increase in funding through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (a/k/a “the stimulus”). Said Scientific American, “the study found that while upgrades reduced consumption by about 10 to 20 percent, the total energy savings generated over a 16-year window amounted to less than half of the initial weatherization costs”.

“We were surprised, to be perfectly frank,” said co-author Catherine Wolfram, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “The perception is that energy efficiency is not just the low-hanging fruit, but the fruit already fallen on the ground, waiting to be picked up. The free lunch you’re paid to eat.” Apparently, she hasn’t heard that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Most of the projections made by the EPA are the result of computer modeling. From the University of Chicago website, a quote from one of Wolfram’s colleagues: “Our data-driven analysis that measures the actual returns on energy efficiency investments shows how these projections can be quite flawed. In actuality, the energy efficiency investments we evaluated delivered significantly lower savings than the models predict.”

Wolfram concurred, saying, “At the end of the day, the models don’t capture some of the hard-to-quantify costs involved in making energy-efficient choices…this is another reason why potential energy efficiency investments need to be rigorously tested in real-world conditions before relying too heavily on them to solve climate change.”

But wait a minute, aren’t global warming or “climate change” projections and predictions themselves based on computer modeling? Does she not understand the implications of what she is saying? If the University of Chicago study shows that computer models, which are based on certain assumptions, can be flat out wrong - can’t they be wrong anywhere they are applied and potentially lead disastrous public policy mistakes?

Speaking of computer modeling, I attended the water symposium held at Shepherd University several years back and was told that the nutrient load limits - Total Maximum Daily Loads or TMDLs - for the Chesapeake Bay were arrived at using computer models. The Farm Bureau (both in West Virginia and on the national level) launched court challenge regarding that matter. There’s been no news regarding that court case since the middle of last year.

The reality is that what is presented as “settled science” is not always the case. Take for example dietary cholesterol. According to the Washington Post back in February, “The nation’s top nutrition advisory panel has decided to drop its caution about eating cholesterol-laden food, a move that could undo almost 40 years of government warnings about its consumption”. Apparently, scientists now realize that eating foods that are high in cholesterol has little or no effect on serum cholesterol levels. Said the article, “Cholesterol has been a fixture in dietary warnings in the United States at least since 1961” but that according to Walter Willett, chair of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, “There’s been a shift of thinking.” A tectonic shift at that - and I understand that “things change” - but what that means is that we should be sure that we “do no harm” regarding government policy or regulation based on science that is potentially - well - wrong.

I have a family member that has high cholesterol and hasn’t eaten an egg in 50 years. Sad, since she used to like her eggs very much. I remember growing up eating margarine because my parents believed it was healthier for you. Then we discovered that it contained trans-fats. Oops - sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

I also remember being told that insulating your house and making it more “air tight” will save money and help the environment. Years later I was told that houses need to “breathe” and being “air tight” or too well insulated will trap indoor pollutants inside that are worse for you than outdoor pollutants - and on and on we go. “Science” used to say that smoking was OK. Today in some quarters the media will tell you that the science is “settled” regarding genetically altered foods - that they’re safe. I don’t trust that one, but time will tell. In the meantime, let’s put a label on it so that I can avoid it until I’m convinced.

The truth is that I am not a trained expert and I can only go by what I hear or read in the media - for whatever that might be worth. What concerns me is that what we call science today may only be a propaganda or public relations exercise - by the politically active and special interests. I find it worrisome that for some of my friends, science seems to be more like a religion to them. Senator Elizabeth Warren in her 11 tenets of progressivism says she “believes in science”. Science isn’t about belief - nor is it about faith. It’s supposed to be about proven fact.

Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet, the world renowned medical journal, published a statement recently saying that a lot of published research is downright false. Writing in Lancet, in April he said: “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

Powerful stuff. To the scientists out there struggling with the truth and doing so with courage and integrity, I hope you succeed in getting the train back on the track. I have a dear friend who is a scientist and he assures me that science is “self-correcting”. I tell him that free markets are “self-correcting” also - except when government regulators interfere and prevent those self-corrections from happening as they should and would.

As for the regulators, it’s pretty clear they have no idea how much their actions are going to cost us or the damage they are doing to our standard of living. In the case of the EPA they don’t even appear to care. So the Supreme Court decision in Michigan v. EPA is, pardon the expression, a breath of fresh air.