Chemistry, Not Trumpistry

 

Another for the most part grim weather day, today. I should have capitalized on the lunchtime weather window to finish the job I was intending to, in the garden: as it turned out, I had plenty of time, until it started raining. The optimist in me had suggested that the weather would hold all day, and that I could set to after I'd been to the village for supplies. Wrong. It's been raining pretty much ever since, and although it's now stopping; it's dark outside. Mañana, methinks; I no longer have to work outside in the rain, if I so choose...

While pondering what to write here - I was considering something about Uranium [random you might think] - when I got a notification from a feed I subscribe to at Chemistry World, which seemed a tad serendipitous given that original thought. It would seem that during Trump's tenure at The White House the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] lost qualified staff hand over fist:

'From 2016 to 2020, more than 560 environmental protection specialists working on environmental defence and pollution control programmes left the agency. 125 jobs were lost in environmental engineering, 44 in chemistry, 15 in chemical engineering and 18 in microbiology...'

‘The numbers are devastating, it is extremely unusual as far as I am aware,’ says Christine Todd Whitman, who led the EPA under former President George W Bush, and now runs an environment and energy consultancy specializing in government relations. ‘You have lost not just raw science and raw chemistry capacity, but also the institutional knowledge about how the agency works and the regulatory requirements,’ adds Whitman, who is also the former Republican governor of New Jersey.'

It would seem that Trump was lobbied hard and considered a soft touch by the big polluters, even to the point of his attempting to dismantle the regulatory body with environmental oversight: science denial writ politick. Who knows what damage the idiot could have wrought given a second term? Science - the clue's in the praxis, eejit...

A recipe. Neutralize Sodium Hydroxide with Hydrochloric Acid to produce a solution of Sodium Chloride, then reduce by evaporation to a crystalline residue. Result: common or garden salt. I've tasted the results of exactly this process twice: once as a child when my uncle Edgar made salt in his laboratory shed; and at school when we performed the experiment in chemistry class.

Science: without the knowledge underpinning it and accumulated by it, we would still be living in caves and frequently dying unexpectedly from things that we simply wouldn't understand without that knowledge. That the most powerful [until recently] man in the world would choose to deny science and its practitioners is as disturbing as it is mind-boggling.