Now, some biofuels advocates want Congress to direct EPA to ignore or underestimate the greenhouse gas impacts of biofuels.  They want the EPA to look the other way when it comes to this important issue.

See what the Washington Post and the New York Times have to say about this.

Using data from the National Center for Health Statistics, National Academy of Sciences and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Timothy Dall, et. al. of The Lewin Group documented that reducing calories by less than 5% would produce economic benefits of about $100 billion. Adopting the most anti-salt interpretation of the medical evidence (i.e. Ignoring evidence that sodium reduction would produce no net health benefit), the authors found that reducing salt by more than double that amount (>12%) would yield benefits of $5 billion. Dall declared: "One of the most revealing finding was just how big an impact of 100 calories less per day can have compared to the more modest benefit of sodium reductions." (And, he failed to note that the sodium reduction was two-and-a-half times more severe than the curtailed calories).

Put another way, using the Dall analysis, reducing calories by less than half the magnitude being advocated for salt reduction would put national economic savings at $243 billion a year.

ConAgra's diet foods reduce both calories and sodium, but as Dall concedes: "Although many adults could benefit from cutting back on both sodium and calories, the return on investment for long-term health is clearly greater for calories."

The media are handicapping the upcoming vote on the Waxman-Markey bill as though it were The Kentucky Derby. In today's 24-hour-a-day news cycle, reporters, anchors and pundits are asking whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has the votes for passage, whether the bill could be more costly than previously anticipated by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and they are dissecting President Obama's comments delivered in the Rose Garden yesterday afternoon.

If the science of global warming is changing, the concept has had prominent skeptics from the beginning. Doubters were overwhelmed by alarmist activists who made dire warnings a favorite media theme. Efforts to secure access to the scientific studies underlying the global warming promotion have been systematically thwarted. Proponents have labeled skeptics as "deniers," affixing them with a popular image akin to those who deny the well-documented Holocaust.

Whatever our personal views on the legitimacy of the science on global warming, there is an eerie parallel process running in the nutrition-and-health debate.

Prominent independent scientists note the absence of evidence for a health outcomes benefit among those consuming low-sodium diets. Questions remain unanswered about the efficacy of reducing and sustaining lower population sodium intakes and, in particular, about the untested hypothesis that substituting low-sodium foods will reduce an individual's sodium intake. Independent analysis of government-funded data is systematically foreclosed. Skeptics are lambasted personally for failing to toe the policy line in a broad pattern of intimidation. And the food industry has resorted to an acceptance of the sodium hypothesis and based its defense on the unfeasibility of some of the remedial policy responses (akin to complaints that cap-and-trade would export American jobs and crush economic vitality). Finally, alarmists press for urgent action with warnings of dire consequences.

The WSJ editorial concludes:

[Climate change opponents] in the U.S. have, in recent years, turned ever more to the cost arguments against climate legislation. That's made sense in light of the economic crisis. If Speaker Nancy Pelosi fails to push through her bill, it will be because rural and Blue Dog Democrats fret about the economic ramifications. Yet if the rest of the world is any indication, now might be the time for U.S. politicians to re-engage on the science.

Those who would stand in the path of cap-and-trade have an uphill fight against a Congressional majority with vigorous White House support. Science hasn't been able to gain traction in the public debate.

The very different scientific issues at play in the salt and health controversy are headed down this same pathway unless we can, as the WSJ says, "re-engage on the science."

One other parallel: Climate, like physiology, responds to immutable laws of nature, whether we understand those principles or not and whether our policy responses anticipate the consequences of our interventions.

So, let's work for re-engagement on the science, greater data transparency and, above all, a focus on the quality of the data upon which our momentous public policy decisions are based.

Canada is currently in the midst of a national initiative aimed at reducing the sodium content of the diets of Canadians. It has appointed a Multi-stakeholder Working Group on Dietary Sodium Reduction (Sodium Working Group) to oversee this process. The compulsion to reduce sodium in Canada is being driven by the international group of advocates belonging to WASH (World Action on Salt and Health) who believe that significant salt reduction will reduce population-wide blood pressure to a point where many thousands of lives will be saved. These assertions are based on the speculations of some blood pressure experts - not on any scientifically derived clinical data. In fact, there are many blood pressure experts who disagree with this notion, but despite this, the Canadian Government has embarked upon a journey that appears to have only one outcome - a reduction in salt consumption.

The Salt Institute has taken part in some of the meetings of this Sodium Working Group and has urged a full consideration of all the scientific evidence and has cautioned prudence in implementing population-wide salt reduction programs since the data on health outcomes clearly does not warrant such an approach.

Today, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published a special report on "National trends in rates of death and hospital admissions related to acute myocardial infarction, heart failure and stroke, 1994-2004, " by J.V. Tu et al. The report, also covered on "theHeart " website, states that the rates of death from cardiovascular disease, including myocardial infarction, stroke, and heart-failure mortality rates, have significantly decreased in Canada over a recent 10-year study period. From 1994 to 2004, cardiovascular disease mortality declined 30%, while the rate of myocardial infarction, stroke, and heart-failure mortality decreased 38.1%, 28.2%, and 23.5%, respectively. This precipitous decline has taken place without any reduction in the consumption of salt. In fact, in a recent Salt and Health Newsletter , the Salt Institute compared Canada's excellent cardiovascular performance over the last 30 years, without salt reduction, to Finland's - the only country to achieve significant salt reductions during the same time period. The data, taken from the WHO Global Cardiovascular Infobase, shows how much better Canada fared over Finland. This latest report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal confirms this fact

Since Canada has done so well in reducing cardiovascular disease outcomes, it brings the Canadian sodium reduction initiative into serious question. The salt reductionists' dire predictions on salt and cardiovascular heath appear to be incorrect because Canada is doing very well indeed. In fact, today's report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal states that, despite Canada's great overall cardiovascular performance, more women than men are dying of cardiovascular disease, particularly elderly women. As it happens, according to a very recent Statistics Canada report, "Sodium consumption at all ages ," women eat far less salt than men and elderly women in particular, are the one group that consumes the least amount of salt and is closest to the Government's sodium intake goals - yet their cardiovascular performance is the worst of all Canadians.

Perhaps, it is time for the Government to actually read and respect its own data and acknowledge when it is well off.

In health, that translates to preventing disease or treating the afflicted. In our national healthcare debate, everyone's for prevention as much as everyone is for "reform." With trillions of dollars at stake, we should be asking ourselves whether it's true that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Is prevention cost-beneficial and, if so, is all prevention justified or should our prevention efforts be targetted where they'll deliver the biggest bang for our bucks? Time magazine made prevention its cover story this week, summarizing the issue:

As the cost of health care continues to climb (60% of U.S. bankruptcies in 2007 were due to medical costs), the health of our nation is not getting any better. Heart disease remains the No. 1 killer of Americans (as it has been for all but a few years since 1900), our collective waistline continues to bulge, diabetes rates march ever higher, and after steadily declining in recent decades, the smoking rate among high schoolers is leveling off. The U.S. boasts the best cutting-edge medicine in the world, yet 75% of our health-care costs are attributable to chronic, preventable diseases. In all, about 40% of premature deaths in the U.S. are caused by lifestyle choices -- smoking, poor eating and inactivity.

But while prevention -- intervening in patients' lives before they get sick -- has long been part of the medical lexicon, programs to educate and encourage patients to adopt healthy behaviors have never truly been embraced. Ours is a system that rewards pills and procedures and nurtures a clinical culture in which the goal is primarily to fix what goes wrong. "I never saw a well patient in my life," says Cosgrove of the years he spent as a heart surgeon. "They were all sick. We are in the sickness business. We need to get into the health business." This idea is at the heart of how President Obama wants to reform health care in America; he argued that the U.S. medical system is designed to provide disease care rather than health care. In a letter to Senators drafting health-care-reform legislation, Obama cited the [Cleveland Clinic] as a model: "We should ask why places like the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, and other institutions can offer the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm. We need to learn from their successes and replicate those best practices across our country," he wrote.

...

Will prevention work? And will our health system finally embrace the strategy over prescriptions and procedures? We don't have many other options. Prevention is a timeless idea, one our species has always practiced: pioneers preserved food to prevent starvation in the winter; modern workers invest in 401(k)s to prevent destitution when they're older. Applying the same ethos to medical care ought not be that hard -- especially since the country's health, economic and otherwise, may depend on it.

In fact, the President is personally modeling as well as cheerleading the prevention effort. Capitol Hill newspaper Politico carried a story earlier this month by Carrie Budoff Brown entitled "Coach Obama: Shape up now." Brown points out that the prevention push is controversial ideologically ("To some, it smacks of a 'nanny state on steroids'"), noting that Obama has imported into the senior ranks of his Administration "officials who, in their previous jobs, outlawed trans fats, banned public smoking or required restaurants to proivde a calorie count with that slice of banana cream pie." She warns: "Obama needs to (avoid) coming across as a public scold or killjoy." She quotes a frustrated David Harsanyi, a Denver Post columnist and author of the book Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America Into a Nation of Children, saying: "If you care about the sorts of things I do, then you are going to be losing big-time for the next four to eight years,"

Obama's effort is more than ideology, however, Brown continues. The major argument is that prevention will save money.

The public health community has worked intensively in recent years to build a body of evidence in support of the very initiatives Obama and lawmakers are now embracing. They frame the issue as one of money: Chronic diseases account for 75 percent of the nation's $2 trillion in medical costs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And if the government encourages healthful lifestyles, it could slow the rising cost of health care, though the exact savings are debatable.

Yes, prevention IS debatable. Earlier this year, Rutgers economics professor Louise B. Russell addressed the subject in an article in Health Affairs, "Preventing Chronic Disease: An Important Investment, But Don't Count On Cost Savings." Dr. Russell explained:

Over the four decades since cost-effectiveness analysis was first applied to health and medicine, hundreds of studies have shown that prevention usually adds to medical costs instead of reducing them. Medications for hypertension and elevated cholesterol, diet and exercise to prevent diabetes, and screening and early treatment for cancer all add more to medical costs than they save. Careful choices about frequency, groups to target, and component costs can increase the likelihood that interventions will be highly cost-effective or even cost-saving.

Russell's been quoted a lot recently as the healthcare debate heats up. She told Janet Adamy of the Wall Street Journal that many previous government prevention efforts aimed at costly chronic diseases have had little success in reducing illness or costs: "It is not going to cut costs. We already do a lot more prevention than other countries. We are not healthier." Adamy's report continues:

[Russell's] findings don't question the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, and many preventive measures are effective. The problem is that when testing becomes too widespread, or heavy investments are made in monitoring people with chronic diseases, the rewards often fail to match the costs.

...

The Congressional Budget Office, in a December report, concluded that greater use of preventive care would at best generate modest reductions in costs over 10 years, and might even result in increases.

One reason cost savings are hard to achieve, according to Prof. Russell, is that much of the money spent on disease prevention goes for people who aren't going to get sick anyway. Also, people have trouble making difficult lifestyle changes, such as taking up regular exercise or eating healthier food.

A report published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year examined 279 spending ratios in published studies of health-oriented prevention measures, and another 1,221 on treatments for people who were already sick. Some measures clearly saved money, like screening men in their early 60s for colorectal cancer.

But the report concluded that most preventive measures reviewed didn't save money. For instance, screening all 65-year-olds for diabetes would cost $590,000 for every healthy year of life it adds over just screening people that age with high blood pressure.

Medicare has conducted seven pilot programs in the past decade testing the theory on some of the most costly chronic diseases. Each showed little if any cost savings or measurable improvement in patients' health.

So prevention isn't the magic pill that "everyone" believes it to be. But what I'd call "smart prevention" certainly should play a central role in addressing our national health needs. Smart prevention has two principles: 1) it's evidence-based, not playing to the crowd and, 2) it's selective, focused on interventions and individuals or tightly-defined groups who will benefit. [By that standard, of course, universal salt reduction would be abandoned as a policy].

Dr. Russell would seem to endorse this approach. Her Health Affairs article avers:

Prevention can be a cost-effective, sometimes cost-saving, component of managing established chronic conditions. For example, at $16 per person (1995 dollars), or about $25 today, vaccination against pneumococcal pneumonia reduces medical spending for adults ages 50-64 with congestive heart failure, chronic lung disease, and diabetes, and other chronic conditions...

But, she concludes:

Over the past four decades, hundreds of sutides have shown that prevention usually adds to medical spending. ... 80 percent add more to medical costs than they save. Careful choices about frequency, groups to target, and component costs can increase the likelihood that interventions will be highly cost-effective or even cost-saving."

Thanks for the reminder that a bit more humility and a lot less hyperbole are needed concerning prevention.

Some companies are playing the angles to capitalize on environment-related business opportunities, some with subsidies, some hoping for help from highly-placed friends.  Whether it's getting subsidies for ethanol or fuel efficient cars or producing "alternative" energy without generatating reviled carbon, the government seems to be, increasingly, at the nexus of picking winners in the marketplace.  And that government role means that those with friends "inside" exercise more leverage.

I won't rehash the scientific controversy over global warming; it's certainly a lightning rod issue.  But in the area of alternative energy, there's always been the presumption that the sun will shine, the tides will rise, the wind will blow and Earth's subterranean geo-furnace will go on forever -- even if moderate climates change.  Today's New York Times carries a story about a labor union what I'd call "protection racket" regarding building new solar facilities in California.

Maybe continuation of the sun, moon, the Earth's molten core and, especially, the wind is not a safe assumption according to Eugene S. Takle, a professor of atmospheric science at Iowa State University, and the director of the school's "climate science initiative."  Takle told MarketWatch.com that his research, to be published soon in the Journal of Geophysical Research, has found that U.S. wind strength has declined by 15% to 30% over the past 30 years from the mid-1970s to 2005. Land use and better instrumentation (and climate change itself) account for the decline, he believes.

Ted Kennedy may have the clout to block construction of those windmills off his Nantucket estate, but the bigger threat to his lifestyle may prove to be that his yacht may be as becalmed as the windmills.

It's not just the bias for regulations on citizen (driver) behavior, characteristic of the mayor's style that is making the Big Apple the epitome of nanny-statism in the U.S., nor can one disagree with the appallling toll of roadway deaths and injuries, many of which are entirely preventable -- no, the problem is that the focus is ONLY on the driver when the problem also involves vehicles and roadway conditions.

When it comes to vehicles, their operators are lumped into the category of "vulnerable road users." In short, roads built for commercial mobility and commercial competititveness but congested with animal-driven vehicles, pedestrians and all manner of tuk-tuk-type vehicles traveling at slow and variable speeds, are a given. They need protection.  They're victims, not part of the problem.  It's a flawed mentality.

With regard to roadways, unsafe conditions in roadway engineering, pavement maintenance, signing, marking and, yes, winter maintenance in areas impacted by snow and ice, are also totally ignored. Managing traffic incidents and other special traffic-impeding events like work zones and sporting event traffic is similarly absent.

The Report laments that poorer countries haven't learned the lessons of their more developed peers. Unfortunately, much of that sad-but-wiser experience won't be gained in this report.