When one reads that it takes, on average, five hours of cable TV news to get about one minute of environment news, and another minute or so on science and technology, it was all in all a pleasure to pick the SF Chronicle off the front steps this morning. The Tracker’s one-time, longtime employer has two big enviro science pieces up front and big. Kudos for that. This happy talk is, natch, a run-up to some doubts about these pieces. It’s way-too-long rant time.

The larger story has less to pick on. The hardcopy hed is great, “Waste Not, Want Not” over the intriguing story by Kelly Zito. It’s about treating and re-using water to reduce power demand for AC or for heat. But holy Reddy Kilowatt, it doesn’t explain the details terribly well at all. Online the hed outright calls wastewater an energy source with no hint of metaphor. A cutline under a photo of an impressive rank of tall cylinders says, “Large vertical filters clean the wastewater before it is used for irrigation or to produce energy.” From water, energy? In a hydroelectric dam the shorthand is understandable but not here. The first quote has a water agency man saying “Recycled water is the new energy source.” An inside hed says it again: water is a power source.

Put this in the cranky quibble department, but using water as a means of carrying or storing or absorbing energy, geothermal or otherwise, doesn’t make it a source any more than your car’s flywheel produces the energy to propel it down the road. And deeper, when Zito brushes rapidly through the technology, one gets only “refrigeration devices” that move energy in or out of water, and a “compressor (that) converts that heat energy into warm or cold air.” The overall story is useful and interesting. But it lacks a sure grasp of the meanings of words or the process it reports. The topic is not discovery of a new energy source. The topic is how to do things with less energy. To be just as good is not to be the same.

Second and more troubling is Jane Kay’s story under the hed, “Health woes in wake of pesticide spraying.” Again it’s on a serious issue – an ongoing effort by state ag officials to stop a potential crop pest by spraying a pheromone-laced brew over densely-populated communities in the SF Bay Area. She includes vital news, such as that proprietary concerns have led the spraying program to conceal the full list of ingredients from the public. It also carries word that regulators have decided to reveal them before the next round of spraying. It is a scandal indeed that gov’t agencies legally can have squirted chemicals over a town while refusing to say what they all are.

But the epidemiology in this story isn’t. Kay leads on a family fearful their infant son’s respiratory illness was triggered by the spraying (a near simultaneous event), and understandably furious that nobody at the state seems to care. This is an old but dangerous formula in enviro writing: Something unusual occurs in the air or water or food supply. People get sick. Looks like cause and effect. Here are profiles of frightened, sick people and their families. If one goes no further than that, what is a reader to think other than that the reporter is convinced those ailing are, in fact, victims of bad policy?

The story has next to nothing on such important questions as whether the anxiety is backed by any suggestion of more illness than usual, or the ease with which a segment of the public can see a link where none exists. That’s human nature. Readers are owed more than passing mention of all hypotheses, including the possibility that the rates of ailment are unremarkable for any day, any where. That random outbreaks are sometimes really random. And there’s always the inverse placebo effect: a few people may start to feel sick after merely hearing that something’s perilous in the environment. Like suddenly feeling queasy when informed that the egg salad one just ate spent an hour in the muggy sun with flies on it. Kay reports instances of people feeling burning eyes and tightness in the chest during sprays. Just how different are these anecdotes than what happens in any similar event? To quote this fellow is hard on my soul but, as Dick Cheney said when told that public opinion disapproves US war policy, “So?”

One more thing: calling the substance a pesticide without much elaboration tilts readers toward belief the stuff falling from the sky is poison. The bugs don’t just curl up and die. The prime ingredient is a pheromone that leads male moths to get confused in their hunt for females. Well along, Kay describes how it works. But to start off by calling the spray a pesticide brings to mind those who equate contraception in people with homicide.

Again, the other “secret” ingredients are a justifiable public worry. It could also be that scaring the public is in itself a good enough reason, along with low odds of exterminating the pest, not to go squirting houses, backyards, and people willy nilly (see a fine, earlier Jane Kay story and post here). But without persuasive evidence of harm stories such as this should aim more to inform and less to inflame.

Pic: That’s Reddy Kilowatt up top. More info here ; Bottom: light brown apple moth.

-CP

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.