One of the most annoying assumptions in current politics is that Republicans and conservatives don’t care about the environment. I’ve lived on a river much of my life, so I know from experience that a clean environment is an essential part of a healthy culture. I’ve seen people dump latrines and trash into my front yard, a water-way that thousands of people use every day. The health hazards of pollution and the real world effects of mutilating natural keepsakes are readily apparent for anyone willing to look closely.
But looking at the current Waxman-Markey Climate bill, I don’t see any hint of responsible environmentalism. Driving the razor thin passage of the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill in the House on Friday was the reasoning that global warming and the growth of man-made greenhouse gases present such a serious problem that decisive action must be taken to stem its effects. According to Al Gore and his acolytes the time for science is over, and the time for action is now.
This troubling contention, that scientific debate must be suspended and replaced with hard charging policies, has been made in the past with disastrous consequences. Let‘s take a trip back through the last fifty years and examine some of the other times we were told Mother Nature was in danger and the apocalypse was nigh.
Claim #1: DDT Poses a Major Environmental Threat
The impetus of the current environmental movement was the campaign to ban Dichloro-diphenyl-dichloromethane, otherwise known as “DDT.” Most grade school kids have read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which told of the horrible consequences DDT use had on bird populations and humans. To this day, many people do not know that much of the evidence Carson presented was exaggerated and even incorrect, including her incendiary claim that DDT is carcinogenic.
The fledgling environmental movement seized on this book, and instead of practicing scientific due diligence on Carson’s claims, they pursued an alarmist course of action that had grave consequences. Carson may have been correct that large amounts of DDT can hurt specific populations of birds, but the environmental pursuit of an outright DDT ban ignored the chemical’s utility in controlling malaria.
After WWII, the chemical saw widespread use for mosquito and malaria control in the Third World. It was incredibly successful. Ronald Bailey at Reason Online writes, “In 1943 Venezuela had 8,171,115 cases of malaria; by 1958, after the use of DDT, the number was down to 800. India, which had over 10 million cases of malaria in 1935, had 285,962 in 1969. In Italy the number of malaria cases dropped from 411,602 in 1945 to only 37 in 1968.”
When Carson’s book came out in 1962 environmentalists pushed hard to ban the chemical. Their campaign worked; many countries and international organizations banned the pesticide. Without DDT, malaria resurged and killed 1 million people each year according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In 2006, the WHO reinstituted indoor DDT spraying citing its effectiveness and saying that “DDT pose[s] no harm…to humans.” Many environmental groups part of the rush to judgment, such as the Sierra Club, have now revised their positions and endorse the WHO stance.
The unjustified worldwide ban on DDT let a contained disease make a deadly comeback that has claimed at least 47 million lives in the last 50 years. In fact, some in the environmental movement realized deaths were mounting, but viewed it as a good thing. An official with the Agency for International Development was quoted as saying it was preferable that Third World peoples were, “Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing.”
Claim #2: Overpopulation Poses an Immediate Existential Threat
This brings us to the next environmental scare, overpopulation. Environmentalists stubbornly tell us that overpopulation means food shortages, a larger carbon footprint, and a miserable future for human existence. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, wrote, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…”
Huh? Obviously, none of this came true, and none of it was based on scientific evidence. Depressingly, despite being utterly wrong, Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation genius award in 1990 for his contributions to “greater public understanding of environmental problems.” In keeping with a mistaken belief in “the population bomb,” some environmentalists continue to insist we’re killing the planet by having babies. One woman in Britain not only aborted her baby, but had herself sterilized because she says, “Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet.” This type of reaction is extreme, but who can blame her, considering the daily influx of doom and gloom we hear about the fate of the world?
Claim #3: Genetically Modified (GM) Food is Dangerous
The Population Bomb hypothesized that population growth would outstrip food production leading to mass starvation. If that’s true then it is imperative we find new ways to increase food production. GM crops hold great promise for realizing this by increasing the nutrient levels in crops, increasing crop yield, and increasing crops’ resistance to drought, disease, and insects.
Yet, many environmentalists have sounded the alarm about this new resource. Instead of embracing this opportunity, environmentalists have taken to calling GM foods “Frakenfood,” scaring people with stories of how GM foods might lead to environmental disaster and using non-representative research experiments to encourage panic. Greenpeace, the leading light of environmentalism, convinced Zambia, a starving African nation, not to accept hundreds of tons of GM food aid on trumped up charges the food was unusable. We’ll never know how many people starved because of this lie, but the environmental movement has a disturbing tendency to dictate Western environmental standards to people in poverty, often with dire consequences.
These might be the worst excesses of environmentalism, but the next is my favorite because it shows environmental rhetoric stubbornly clings to alarmism despite having made similar predictions that, with the benefit of hindsight, now appear ridiculous.
Claim #4: Global Cooling
Global cooling, when the Earth chilled slightly between 1940 and 1970, is often cited as proof pro-warming climate scientists are mistaken about anthropomorphic climate change. This isn’t quite right, because it’s perfectly consonant with scientific principles to shift positions as new evidence comes to light. But this episode illuminates how unwise a rush to action can be. Newsweek ran an article in 1975 that considered this phenomenon such a dire problem that it suggested melting the polar ice cap by covering it with soot to counteract cooling trends. They also, in their wisdom, admitted that such a solution might cause more problems than it solved. Just a few years later temperatures began to rise, rendering such extreme measures unthinkable in hindsight.
Those drastic measures sound similar to so-called geo-engineering solutions being talked about by scientists today, such as launching satellites to block the sun’s energy. We should take heed of the arrogance we previously displayed trying to predict natural trends.
Why it matters?
Given the track record environmentalists have predicting ecological disaster, let’s take a step back, a deep breath, and admit we still have some work to do enhancing our scientific knowledge. The desire to take action and solve problems is admirable, but doing so without a clear picture of what we’re facing is a recipe for disaster and can lead to legislation like the Waxman-Markey debacle.
Do all these erroneous predictions mean that global warming isn’t real? No. But when you hear environmentalists, liberals, and legislators braying at the top of their lungs that the time for action is now, that the science is settled, that the end draws near, consider the track record of those screaming the loudest.
In fact, I would encourage everyone to read the Newsweek article from 1975 and a similar Time Magazine article from 1974. The pieces are strikingly, and eerily, similar to any number of climate stories written today.
Environmental stewardship is important, but the alarmism we see today isn’t going to help us make better decisions.
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July 6th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Apparently 1934 is still the warmest year on record.
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