Early Morning Open Thread: Ya Think?

From the Department of Obvious Conclusions:

TOKYO — Japan will scrap a plan to obtain half of its electricity from nuclear power and will instead promote renewable energy and conservation as a result of its ongoing nuclear crisis, the prime minister said Tuesday.

Naoto Kan said Japan needs to “start from scratch” on its long-term energy policy after the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant was heavily damaged by a March 11 earthquake and tsunami and began leaking radiation.

Nuclear plants supplied about 30 percent of Japan’s electricity, and the government had planned to raise that to 50 percent by 2030.

Kan told a news conference that nuclear and fossil fuel used to be the pillars of Japanese energy policy but now the government will add two more pillars: renewable energy such as solar, wind and biomass, and an increased focus on conservation…

Not that we can afford to make fun of the Japanese, of course. If (when) a similar nuclear-power accident happens here in America the Exceptional, a large percentage of our political class will insist that what we must do first is double down on tax subsidies for multinational oil/gas/coal companies, give a few billion dollars to Blackwater/Xe to investigate the possibility that the accident was the result of terrorist activity, and incidentally pass new laws limiting reproductive freedom and/or gay marriage, because 27% of the voting population believes Jeebus has radioactively smote us for our freedom librul wickedness.

On a more cheerful morning note, this is a great story on resilience in the face of tsunamis and other tragedies.

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Your Forever Plant

The Times has a good run-down of the mediocrity of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which probably isn’t as bad as Japan’s toothless, brainless agency, but is far from the strict regulator it should be:

Situated on the banks of the Connecticut River, the 39-year-old Vermont Yankee, whose reactor is similar in design to the stricken plant in Japan, suffered the partial collapse of a cooling tower in 2007. In January 2010, the plant’s operator, Entergy, discovered that nearby soil and groundwater had been contaminated by radioactive tritium, which had apparently leaked from underground piping. Just months before, the company assured state lawmakers that no such piping existed at the plant.

The Vermont Senate, concerned about the problems, voted overwhelmingly last year to prevent the plant from operating beyond the scheduled expiration of its license on March 21, 2012 — invoking a 2006 state law, unique to Vermont, that requires legislative approval for continued operations.

But one day before the quake and tsunami that set Japan’s crisis in motion, the N.R.C. approved Vermont Yankee’s bid for license renewal — just as it has for 62 other plants so far. Its fate is now the subject of a federal lawsuit.

The major issue with the NRC is that they are handing out 20 year extensions to plant licenses like t-shirts at a minor league baseball game. Since new construction is virtually halted, we’re left with a set of 40+ year-old plants, a lot of them with the same design as the Fukushima Daiichi reactors. Each new generation of reactors and plant designs incorporate improvements, and in light of the recent Japanese experience, I have to believe those improvements are important. Fukushima Daiichi, the older of the Fukushima sites, is a multi-billion dollar disaster. Fukushima Daini, which was designed and built a decade after the first Daiichi reactors, made it to cold shutdown. If we had a tougher NRC, I’d be less worried about the 51 year-old plant 21 miles from my front door.

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Only Nixon Could Go To China

This, something pretty much every liberal the last few decades has proposed, will be hailed as courage:

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan called for ending oil subsidies Thursday, further complicating Republican efforts to stay on message about rising gas prices.

The Wisconsin Republican told constituents at a Waterford, Wis., town hall meeting that he agreed that federal oil subsidies ought to end.

“We’re talking about reforming the safety net, the welfare system; we also want to get rid of corporate welfare. And corporate welfare goes to agribusiness companies, energy companies, financial services companies, so we propose to repeal all that,” Ryan said in response to a question about oil subsidies.

A video of Ryan’s town hall meeting was circulated by Think Progress, a blog run by the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In a statement to POLITICO, Ryan’s office said the House-passed budget resolution “clearly states that as part of an overall corporate tax reform, tax loopholes and deductions for all corporations should be scaled back or eliminated entirely. That obviously includes oil companies. Elsewhere, we state that subsidies for all energy companies need to be reduced or eliminated so that we can get government out of the business of picking winners and losers in the market.”

Ryan’s comments come as Republicans are trying to quell the political furor caused when House Speaker John Boehner left the door open to hiking taxes on oil and gas companies, telling ABC News Monday that Congress “certainly oughta take a look at it.”

Democrats quickly pounced on the opportunity, issuing statements commending Boehner for seeing the light on the issue.

Welcome aboard.

As a side note, every time I get frustrated with Obama and some of the things he is doing that I adamantly disagree with, I usually will pop off at the mouth here on the blog, and then a short while later cool down and realize the environment he is operating in. Only in our truly screwed up times could Ryan suggesting we end subsidies to oil be somehow considered courageous. Oil companies are wildly profitable, will remain so, all the while creating catastrophic disasters to our environment, and doing so producing a product we should be discouraging and will eventually be replaced. In no sane world would they ever be subsidized- it’s simply insane. And smarter folks have been pointing this out for quite some time, and are simply ignored.

But now that a Republican has suggested it, I guess it is “serious” enough that something might happen.

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It Takes a Village

There’s a good story in today’s New York Times about the cozy relationship between nuclear regulators and utility companies in Japan, with details about the way that a whistleblower who revealed issues at Fukushima Daiichi unit 1 was punished for what turned out to be true revelations.

In Japan, the web of connections between the nuclear industry and government officials is now popularly referred to as the “nuclear power village.” The expression connotes the nontransparent, collusive interests that underlie the establishment’s push to increase nuclear power despite the discovery of active fault lines under plants, new projections about the size of tsunamis and a long history of cover-ups of safety problems.

One of the key differences between Japan’s regulator and our NRC is that Japan relies on industry experts to write nuclear regulation, in part because industry has stifled independent nuclear research at universities:

Unable to conduct research, skeptics, especially a group of six at Kyoto University, languished for decades as assistant professors.

One, Hiroaki Koide, a nuclear reactor expert who has held a position equivalent to assistant professor for 37 years at Kyoto University, said he applied unsuccessfully for research funds when he was younger.

“They’re not handed out to outsiders like me,” he said.

Japan, like the US, still has plants on fault lines without enough portable generators.

Meanwhile, back at Fukushima, TEPCO is still revising (upward) the amount of fuel damage to its reactors, and it is undertaking the risky operation of filling unit 1’s containment with water. Japan’s health ministry released results of new radiation studies showing that some areas as far away as 24 km will expose residents to almost five times the allowed yearly dose for a nuclear plant worker.

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Fukushima, Pennsylvania

ProPublica reports that Pennsylvania is limiting the ability of inspectors to cite operators of hydrofracking operations:

The memos require that each of the hundreds of enforcement actions taken routinely against oil and gas operators in Pennsylvania each month now be approved by the department’s executive deputy secretary, John Hines. The memos are raising concerns that the state’s environmental inspectors can no longer act independently and that regulations could be overridden by the political whims of the state’s new governor, Tom Corbett.

“What this apparently is saying is that before any final action, the inspector must get approval by two political appointees: the secretary and the deputy secretary,” said John Hanger, who headed the DEP until January under former Gov. Ed Rendell and worked to strengthen the state’s oil and gas regulations. “It’s an extraordinary directive. It represents a break from how business has been done in the department within the Marcellus Shale and within the oil and gas program for probably 20 years.

ProPublica also reports that there are 120,000 deteriorating gas wells across the country, some of which are leaking gas into homes and causing explosions. Some of those wells are close to 100 years old.

As Fukushima dumps radioactive water into the sea, and it’s revealed that the Japanese government didn’t release projections that showed high levels of radiation far from the plant, it’s worth remembering that it isn’t just nuclear energy that leaves a toxic legacy, and that the Republican decision to leave frackers to their own devices will probably be causing problems long after the last victim of thyroid cancer is buried in Japan.

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These Are The People In Your Neighborhood

Went to an after-work rally in Toledo last night to oppose the anti-union bill that is moving through the Ohio legislature. There was a steady cold rain and the turnout was still quite good. The gathering was near the intersection of two busy roads, and we got lots and lots of support from rush hour drivers, blowing their horns and waving.

Having attended many lefty-liberal-political rallies over the years, I have to say the composition of this crowd was really interesting. I cannot recall standing next to a group of off-duty policeman holding signs while the hippie at the podium plays the harmonica before. Former Fox News personality turned very unpopular governor John Kasich has certainly brought people together.

The other thing that occurred to me, standing there listening to the fireman with the bullhorn, was that a lot of the workers attending the rally appeared in the coloring book I got in kindergarten. “Your Community”, I think it was called. I don’t know if you got one of those at public school, but I think you know what I mean. There’s the brick schoolhouse, the teacher, the school bus driver and the crossing guard in the foreground, with the police officer waving the fireman in the fire truck through the 4-way stop in the background. That’s what came to my mind.

This is what comes to radical Republican and morality expert Rick Santorum’s mind when he views the same crowd, apparently:

“Just call them what they are. Public schools? That’s a nice way of putting it. These are government-run schools”.

Just insane, that these people and places are now portrayed as sinister and scary. I don’t care how many times paid conservative mouthpieces repeat this utter nonsense, when you’re standing next to these completely ordinary but all-of-a-sudden reviled public workers, the carefully orchestrated national campaign against public workers seems bizarre.

Anyway, here’s a coupla links if you’re in Ohio and want to see for yourself. I’ll be at one of the Saturday morning rallies.

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Here We Are, Again

This came up during the debate on climate change legislation, and I haven’t seen it addressed. That I haven’t seen it addressed doesn’t mean much: I don’t follow environmental issues. I do know how debates degenerate, however, and how nuance gets lost, and I sometimes pal around with environmentalists.

Ten moderate Senate Democrats from states dependent on coal and manufacturing sent a letter to President Obama on Thursday saying they would not support any climate change bill that did not protect American industries from competition from countries that did not impose similar restraints on climate-altering gases.

The letter warned that strong actions to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases would add to the cost of goods like steel, cement, paper and aluminum. Unless other countries adopt similar emission limits, the senators warned, jobs will migrate overseas and foreign manufacturers will have a decided cost advantage.
The 10 senators were Evan Bayh of Indiana; Sherrod Brown of Ohio; Robert C. Byrd and John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia; Bob Casey and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania; Russ Feingold of Wisconsin; Al Franken of Minnesota; and Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.

As I understand it, the midwestern liberals, Levin, Stabenow, Brown, Franken and Feingold had three concerns: manufacturing, agriculture and home heating costs.

Climate change legislation, of course, failed, so now the focus shifts to the E.P.A.:

But there is a Plan B. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases like CO2 could be considered pollutants and gave the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the power to regulate them under the Clean Air Act. Although that authority went unused in the waning days of former President George W. Bush’s Administration, the Obama EPA has spent much of the past year preparing the groundwork for regulation. In the absence of a climate bill, the EPA has the power — and is legally mandated by the Supreme Court — to step in and address carbon emissions.

And….. Senator Brown has the same problem he had in 2009:

The coal industry and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, don’t agree on much. But both are trying in their own ways to stop President Barack Obama’s administration from imposing rules this year on new or upgraded power plants and large factories that use coal because, both say, the rules would hurt Ohio manufacturers and consumers.

The political context cannot be ignored, say players in this debate, because Brown would be hammered with TV and radio commercials if he favored environmental rules that critics say will drive up energy prices and lead to job losses. But they also say they believe Brown’s interest in stalling immediate regulation is based on a genuine concern for manufacturers and jobs in a state that relies heavily on coal for its electricity.

Sherrod Brown (who is my Senator) is a liberal populist. He was a liberal populist in the House before it was fashionable, and he’s a liberal populist in the Senate. He has a consistent liberal voting record, and has probably earned the benefit of the doubt. I think he has a valid argument. Before we set this up as Sherrod Brown and the polluters versus the EPA and the Clean Air Act, can we discuss the concerns of Brown, Franken, Stabenow, etc. within the context of EPA regulation of greenhouse gases?

Republicans and conservatives have decided not to engage at all in any practical or serious way on this issue, as on all other issues, so just put them in the “no solutions” column. Fine. What about Democrats and liberals? Do we have a real problem here?

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A Real Predicament

In local news:

West Virginia is at least $1 million short of the funds its regulators need to oversee drilling in the booming Marcellus shale natural gas field, the state’s environmental chief told lawmakers Tuesday.

Environmental Protection Secretary Randy Huffman asked the House Finance Committee to consider the hefty permit fee hikes his department seeks this session.

Outlining the budget his office has requested for the upcoming fiscal year, Huffman explained that Marcellus drillers now pay the same $650 as their shallow-well counterparts. But the cost of regulating each type of well differ considerably, Huffman said.

Tapping the vast, mile-deep shale field requires an unconventional horizontal drilling method. To extract gas, operators must fracture the rock with a high-pressure, high-volume mix of water, chemicals and sand.

Huffman said DEP’s Oil and Gas office issued permits for 1,500 wells last year. While down from the 3,200 permits granted in 2007 and 2008, the number of horizontal wells increased during that time, he said.

“Our revenues dropped by over $1 million. We’re actually in an underfunded, understaffed situation as it exists today,” he told the committee. “We’re in a predicament, to say the least, in the Office of Oil and Gas.”

DEP has proposed increasing the fee to $10,000, in legislation introduced Monday. Huffman said the resulting revenues would fund the additional inspectors needed, while also covering costs of other regulatory provisions in that bill.

But industry groups have objected to the fee hike, and to other rules sought in the pending bill. Delegate Larry Border, R-Wood, asked why Huffman did not propose the fee increase in a separate bill.

These guys are going to make billions of dollars, and no doubt leave an environmental disaster in their wake, but god forbid they pony up a pittance in tax dollars to make sure they aren’t poisoning the watershed or blowing up neighborhoods. The invisible hand wouldn’t have it any other way- they like the regulators underfunded and understaffed. It’s much better that way, because then when shit blows up they can say “HOOCOODANODE!” and blame the regulators.

The move the Corporation is correct- the corporate citizen is a sociopath. If you keep reading the piece beyond what I linked, you will note that there is also work in progress to force homeowners who do not want drilling on their property to give up the rights to the gas underneath them, so the drillers can drink their milkshake from a neighbor’s yard. Ain’t the free market grand?

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Two Losers

I wasn’t able to follow the lame duck session closely, because the weeks prior to the holidays in this office are ordinarily filled with crisis and drama and last-minute filings, plus, I had to decorate two Christmas trees and talk a lot about possibly baking cookies.

I was catching up, and read this on START:

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who led the floor fight for the treaty, said the vote will move the world away from the risk of nuclear disaster. “The winners are not defined by party or ideology,” he said. “The winners are the American people, who are safer with fewer Russian missiles aimed at them.”

Which got me thinking about John McCain and John Kerry, and how the two men were and are portrayed, and how things have turned out, in real life.

McCain and Kerry have quite a bit in common. Both long-term Senators, both lifetime “government employees”, both veterans, hell, they both married wealthy women (the second time around), so there’s some similarity even in their personal lives.

They’re also members of a very exclusive club. They both lost Presidential elections.

And that’s where the similarities end.

After John Kerry lost to George W. Bush, he returned to the Senate and simply did his job there, and he’s continued to do his job there.

Kerry lost, big, on climate change this year and he still rallied and led on START, rather than booking time on cable shows to bitch.

Kerry didn’t subject the country to two years of bitter griping, temper tantrums and petulant demands. Kerry didn’t pursue purely personal vendettas against whole groups of voters who (allegedly) “betrayed” him. Kerry didn’t flip-flop on each and every policy position he has ever held. He voted and votes the same way he always did. John McCain, remarkably, considering what we were told about him, has done all those awful things since his loss in 2008.

In the 2004 Presidential election, political media and pundits portrayed John Kerry as an elitist, foppish, slightly silly “flip-flopper” who lacked character and core convictions. The same political media and pundits lovingly and carefully nurtured the fairy tale that John McCain is a rock-ribbed, Country First, straight-shooter. Events since tell a radically different story.

How can this be? Wasn’t this script supposed to run the other way? Could they have been more wrong?

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Every Day is a Bad Day

Bill Gates:

Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game. If tomorrow some other country invented cheap energy with no CO2 output, would that be a bad day or a good day? For anybody who’s reasonable, that would be, like, the best day ever. If all you care about is America’s relative position, every day since the end of World War II has really been bad for you. So when somebody says to me, “Oh, the Chinese are helping to lower the cost of it, or creating something that emits less CO2,” I say, “Great.” The Chinese are also working on new drugs. When your children get sick, they might be able to take those drugs. [emphasis mine]

I always assumed Gates wasn’t a Real American, and his denial of our true, exceptional position as Number One country forever and ever, Amen, thank you Jesus, is just another example.

That whole interview is worth reading. Gates doesn’t have any special insight into climate change or energy policy, but he clearly and unemotionally articulates a set of facts about energy and climate change that would cause the average conservative to have an apoplectic fit. I was struck reading it how much of conservative politics are based on denial and its kissing cousin, exceptionalism.

(via)

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BP BS on Stilts

The Washington Post dutifully stenographs a sterling example of political three-card monte in the service of the Plutonomy:

Money concerns didn’t drive Deepwater Horizon decisions, panel counsel says

The chief counsel for the president’s oil spill commission said Monday that concerns about money didn’t drive key decisions made on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig before the April 20 blowout that caused a massive oil spill and killed 11 people.

The conclusion is good news for BP, which has been widely criticized for letting concerns about the roughly $1.5 million a day cost of the drilling rig affect choices that might have prevented the blowout.

“To date, we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety,” said Fred Bartlit, general counsel for the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

He added that he didn’t believe that rig workers “want to risk their lives or the lives of their buddies.” He said: “I’ve been on a lot of rigs, and I don’t believe people sit there and say, ‘This is really dangerous, but the guys in London will make more money.’ We don’t see a concrete situation where people made a trade-off of safety for dollars.”
[...]

BP made the operation riskier with a number of decisions, said Sean Grimsley, one of the commission investigators…

“We think they introduced a certain amount of risk into the situation that may not have been necessary,” Grimsley said…

“The question is, why these experienced men out on that rig talked themselves into believing that this was a good test that established well integrity,” he said. “None of these men out of that rig wanted to die.”

Notice the deft and expert misdirection! The story is no longer: BP corporate policy was to cut corners wherever possible in order to improve the profits available to the executives in the corner office, a policy that eventually led to the deaths of 19 workers and an enormous environmental disaster.

The new, improved, plutonomy-friendly story is: It would be cruel and unproductive to blame well-intentioned middle managers and hard-working rig employees of deliberately making decisions that would kill their fellows and negatively affect the company’s bottom line.

This is why the ‘Kaplan Daily’ is still publishing. In the days of a dying empire, the strategic skills—and strong stomach—required to re-write current events to better serve the Narrative preferred by the ruling class are a very, very valuable asset.

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Global warming vs. healthcare reform ctd.

Joe Romm responds at great length to my post on global warming vs. healthcare reform. I think we’re running into a simple disagreement of priority here. Romm is obviously very concerned with climate change. It is his specialty and his focus on the subject makes him more concerned with climate change legislation than with healthcare reform. That’s fine, we’re all entitled to our priorities.

I’m not going to go into great length countering each and every one of Romm’s points. Suffice to say, he – like many commenters here – sees the risk of not tackling climate change as a very real, clear and present danger. He has a great deal of scientific data which shows the possible effects of climate change now and in the future and it’s pretty scary stuff. I completely agree that something should be done, must be done. He also says that he never said healthcare reform shouldn’t be done at all. Likewise, I never said climate change legislation should never be done at all. We both were arguing over which should take priority. Romm seems to have twisted my argument in such a way as to imply that I don’t favor any action at all on climate change. On the contrary, I favor a carbon tax.

However, I don’t think climate change legislation was possible as the first priority and I think tackling it would have almost certainly killed healthcare reform as well. I think it can be done as a second-term, hopefully post-recession piece of legislation and it can be done through the reconciliation process, but not until there’s enough Democrats on board to get 51 votes in the Senate, and I don’t think there are in an election year.

More »

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Eco-Anti-Terrorists

Bill McKibben and his co-conspirators attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of American History’s Greatest Monster and “Bring solar power back to the White House“:

A few of us have spent the past week carefully transporting a relic of American history down the East Coast, trying to return it to the White House, where it belongs.

It’s not a painting spirited from the Lincoln Bedroom or an antique sideboard stolen from the Roosevelt Room by some long-ago servant. No, this relic comes from the somewhat more prosaic Carter roof. It’s a solar panel, one of a large array installed on top of the White House in June 1979.

When he dedicated the panels, President Jimmy Carter made a prophecy that, like many oracles, came true in unexpected fashion—in fact, nothing better illustrates both why the world is heating and why the American economy is falling behind its competitors.

“In the year 2000 this solar water heater behind me will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy,” he said. “A generation from now this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.” ...

Anybody here can tell us more about McKibben’s 10-10-10 Global Work Party?

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About that offshore drilling moratorium

Over at Think Progress, Ben Armbruster points to the explosion of an oil and gas rig 80 miles off the Louisiana coast today, noting that just yesterday one of the senior employees at Mariner Energy, the company which owns the rig, had this to say about the offshore drilling moratorium:

“I have been in the oil and gas industry for 40 years, and this administration is trying to break us,” said Barbara Dianne Hagood, senior landman for Mariner Energy, a small company. “The moratorium they imposed is going to be a financial disaster for the gulf coast, gulf coast employees and gulf coast residents.”

Of course, the many gloom and doom predictions about the moratorium have not come to pass:

Unemployment claims related to the oil industry along the Gulf Coast have been in the hundreds, not the thousands, and while oil production from the gulf is down because of the drilling halt, supplies from the region are expected to rebound in future years. Only 2 of the 33 deepwater rigs operating in the gulf before the BP rig exploded have left for other fields.

While it is too early to gauge the long-term environmental or economic effects of the release of 4.9 million barrels of oil into the gulf, it now appears that the direst predictions about the moratorium will not be borne out. Even the government’s estimate of the impact of the drilling pause — 23,000 lost jobs and $10.2 billion in economic damage — is proving to be too pessimistic.

So the costs of the moratorium have been minimal – much less than predicted – and already we’ve seen a second rig explode in the Gulf this year. The oil industry should realize by now that cleaning up after a disaster is a far more expensive, messy process than ensuring that it doesn’t happen in the first place. It’s also terrible PR. But, of course, the oil industry does not realize that. Until each rig is inspected and safety on these rigs is ensured, I don’t see how the government can do anything but impose a moratorium. Of course, activist judges think they know better. I wonder how many more spills and explosions need to occur before we implement sensible safety and precautionary measures in our oil rigs? Kicking the costs down the road until something really bad happens is certainly not the answer, even if it is the likely outcome even of a disaster the size and scope of the BP oil spill.

Unlike the Deepwater Horizon, this explosion occurred in shallow water, operating at about 340 feet instead of 5,000 which makes any complications from a spill much more manageable. This, and the fact that no workers were killed, make up the story’s silver lining.

More on the explosion here.

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A Small Victory

Good, strong statement from Mann:

An Albemarle County Circuit Court judge has set aside a subpoena issued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to the University of Virginia seeking documents related to the work of climate scientist and former university professor Michael Mann.

Judge Paul M. Peatross Jr. ruled that Cuccinelli can investigate whether fraud has occurred in university grants, as the attorney general had contended, but ruled that Cuccinelli’s subpoena failed to state a “reason to believe” that Mann had committed fraud.

The ruling is a major blow for Cuccinelli, a global warming skeptic who had maintained that he was investigating whether Mann committed fraud in seeking government money for research that showed that the earth has experienced a rapid, recent warming. Mann, now at Penn State University, worked at U-Va. until 2005.

According to Peatross, the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, under which the civil investigative demand was issued, requires that the attorney general include an “objective basis” to believe that fraud has been committed. Peatross indicates that the attorney general must state the reason so that it can be reviewed by a court, which Cuccinelli failed to do.

Here’s Mann:

“I’m very pleased that the judge has ruled in our favor,” he said in a statement. “It is a victory not just for me and the university, but for all scientists who live in fear that they may be subject to a politically-motivated witch hunt when their research findings prove inconvenient to powerful vested interests.

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