Environmental news you may have missed: don't mess with the honesty police; buy a gas guzzler; surrender that electric vehicle. (Green Matters Environmental Policies).

We editors are always coming across some news item or fact that's interesting or bemusing, but we never quite find a place to work them into an issue. So we squirrel them away until we no longer remember why we saved them.

Following, therefore, are some of those bits and pieces, rescued from the recycling bin for your consideration.

For example, we recently read a New York Times story about Danish author Bjorn Lomborg, who was scolded about being too optimistic about the future of the environment in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Unfortunately, there were those who thought his good cheer was less than scientific, and they decided to do something about it.

Scientific Dishonesty

They could do something because the Danes have something called Committees on Scientific Dishonesty. Wow, we thought, we could use something like that in the U.S., what with rants about junk science, a blizzard of contradictory statistics, and unabashed prevarication. Wouldn't it be nice to have someone settle all those arguments once and for all?

On second thought, we are a nation at least partly founded on the premise that any lunatic can say what he will on just about any subject, no matter how nonsensical. The proof of the pudding is that they can and do. We won't name names.

The honesty-police began to look less and less like a good idea as we read on: