John Stewart has some razor-sharp analysis of the stem cell veto by President Bush. You have to watch this.

Incidentally, Senator Feinstein provides a crucial bit of information on the debate:

The Castle-DeGette legislation now approved by both the House and the Senate would make available for use stem-cell lines derived from embryos left over from in vitro fertilization clinics — embryos that are already slated to be disposed of and, therefore, it is difficult to understand the objections.

[…]

Let us be clear: We are talking about embryos that will be destroyed, whether or not this bill becomes law. It is an indisputable fact these embryos have no future.

I can think of nothing more ethical than using embryos that would otherwise be wasted, to generate new, viable stem-cell lines offering medical hope and promise to so many.

Is it that the President just opposed to progress? Hates science? How can it be that he would rather cells be destroyed than used to cure people of terminal and debilitating illnesses?

Maybe it’s just me, but this puts his position on emissions control and global warming in perspective. The official response seems to be that no one, even scientists, can really be certain of anything and therefore life as we know it must go on unchallenged. This reminds me of a VP many years ago who launched a product against the advice of the infosec team because “they can’t prove the risk is absolute”, whereas he said his resolve and faith of success were absolute. The company lost over $250K for the next seven days as their site failed and that VP was eventually let go because the negative economic impact of his highly anti-scientific approach was so readily apparent.

A similar theme apparently emerges with regard to the Bush administration’s new policy on agriculture and ranching. Environmental scientists and conservationists were recently told that they will not be allowed to form an opinion after only one year of apparent destruction by ranchers — a minimum of two years of data is required. In addition, the new policy is based on the declaration that “cattlemen themselves are the best stewards of the land”. Scary reasoning, as many have tried to point out:

“That’s an extremely unbalanced requirement,” said John Buckley, executive director of the Twain Harte-based Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, “unless they’re also requiring that the public’s costs are taken into account.”

Buckley said that would mean the economic costs associated with degraded watersheds and damaged wildlife habitat also should be weighed in determining the future of public-land grazing.

Another case of externalities, where those who care about a balanced outcome try to show the long-term harm of not taking action, and the Bush administration shows its disdain for people who want to use a truly scientific approach to factoring risks.

Imagine this type of governance in information security or structural engineering, where experts would be told that they could not warn of critical flaws until months after discovery and users were already clearly harmed. Software companies gotta’ make money, right? Even then a security team might be told that software developers are the best stewards of the software and thus should ultimately decide when to fix a bug, if at all.

Back to economic and social considerations, it’s important to note how the Bush administration bends the term to suit their purpose. A look at the bigger picture makes it seem that they should reverse their own policy:

The ranchers pay $1.35 per animal unit month — the amount of forage required to feed a cow and a calf for one month.

This fee has remained unchanged for years, and is lower than fees charged for state or private lands. Past efforts to revise the grazing fee — including a 1991 proposal passed by the House to boost it to $8.70 — have collapsed on Capitol Hill.

“It really, truly is an abuse of the taxpayers to not at least charge fair market value,” Buckley said.

Ranchers clearly have some lobby power. Who will pay, though, if turns out that they were taking unfair advantage of the land and causing residual and external harm? Have you experienced the pesticides and herbacides that ruin drinking water and kill off the local flora and fauna? What about heavy metals from industry? Who pays for the clean-up of someone else’s folly? What if they are drunk or delusional? Differing values, it seems, are at the heart of the issue especially when obvious harm takes many years to see.