> Ah, American politics.  Even if I agree with the basic 
> conclusion
> ("ROHS restriction of lead-based solders is silly"), a 
> report from
> our government organizations (EPA, in this case) inspires 
> such anti-
> confidence that I'm back to square one.  Sigh.

You could actually try looking at the contents:-).

What surprised me initially was that it appeared to be a 
tool box of methods and data with almost no obvious 
conclusions being drawn. It had tables of things like pre 
manufacturing impacts in a range of areas such as mining 
requirements, energy usage etc and post use impacts such as 
landfill leachates etc.

Given the great difficulty of getting good information in 
such areas it seemed that anyone who was interested could at 
least look at what they say and how they say they obtained 
the data and what methods they used to get it and present it 
and see if it looked objective enough to be useful to prop 
up whatever preconceived position the user already had. 
(That is what one uses this sort of thing for, isn't it?).

Compare this with the IPCC approach of massaging the basic 
statistical framework to make it impossible [yes, I know 
what that word means] to make much data do anything except 
fit their mould. This approach appears to work well, given 
the significant amount of IPCC supporting commentary that is 
made, when such matters are referred to, that completely 
avoids addressing the claim that the emperors clothes have 
been taken away and burned.

I have no mandate for the EPA -  I can believe that they are 
not what they were, even though I have seen them do some 
'good stuff' [tm] in the past,  but I would have thought 
that a look through the report would be a reasonable 
precursor to slanging them over it. I had no idea what I was 
letting myself in for when I presented this. It seemed like 
a gold mine of basic resource (also a tin mine, lead mine, 
silver mine, tin mine and more) and I commented on how 
surprisingly conclusion free it seemed. I can now see why. 
They must be staggering shell-shocked from one report 
release to the next wondering how to please anyone at all 
:-).



        Russell




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