In recent years my emphasis has been on the science and economics of climate change since climate is surely the poster child for the increasing madness of the environmental movement. The principal problem, I have argued, is the failure of USEPA as well as the environmental movement to use good science and economics in a number of their regulations and policy proposals.
These problems started early in the Agency’s history by its decision to ban the very effective and safe pesticide DDT. Although they conducted a careful review of the science behind the safety of DDT use, the then Administrator ignored this evidence and succumbed to the political and emotional arguments advanced by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring. There were few repercussions in the US because of earlier US efforts to reduce and end malaria in the US, but this action soon led to banning DDT in many less developed countries where malaria was prevalent and is much more effectively controlled by using DDT than any other pesticide. The result has been estimated to be about 50,000 deaths in these countries. EPA did not force these other countries to abandon DDT, but it clearly played a very important role in the resulting disaster.
Environmental Movement Has Become Ever More Radical and Irresponsible
As the environmental movement has aged, it has become ever more radical and irresponsible. It has advocated more and more government regulation of increasingly less important and even no environmental concern. The poster child of this is climate alarmism, where it advocates reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, a vital gas necessary for life on Earth. The world needs more, not less carbon dioxide, as frequently discussed on this blog. Until this year the environmental movement has increasingly taken over USEPA, particularly during Democratic administrations, culminating in the Obama Administration, where it exercised almost unfettered access.
Although many of the early EPA regulations were based on good science and economics, there has been a disturbing pattern, particularly during the Obama Administration, of ignoring or even distorting the science and economics in order to try to justify ever more strict regulations based on bad economics or science or both. Where this has occurred, the EPA is making the world worse, not better, at the expense of the US taxpayers and population. My book gives a number of examples. Other examples are discussed here and here, among other places.
Thinks for providing a link to a book by Stephen Milloy. The book sounds substantive and provocative. As you would know better than many, critical opinions about environmental science are no longer published by many presses and journals.
This has hurt the quality of environmental science, because dissenting views are dismissed or excluded, rather than reconciled and incorporated.
Happy 2018 Doctor Carlin!
It’s brutally cold Here. Shoveled snow and had to drive thru white out conditions yesterday. The Earth is not Warming!
However Trump and Pruitt are heating up in relation to the CIC and the Fake News media. The Boss is wise to the climate change fraud. It’s a Gore, Obama, Hillary, Merkel pile of garbage less credible than the Steele dossier.
I suspect the cancellation of DDT is of modest practical import. This is just speculation but it would seem easy to tweak the original formulation of DDT by adding an extra atom of this or that and sell almost the same stuff just under a new name.
If you go to a garden or farm supply store, they still have plenty of pesticides for sale. A USEPA registration number helps sell the chemical, much like beef is labeled USDA inspected.
This helps also explain stuff like POPs. The US touts to the UN that it banned DDT in order to market our current product line of pesticides that bear different names.
The arcane world of regulating chemicals within commerce probably allows ways to circumnavigate poorly justified decisions like the cancellation of DDT and render them unimportant. Yes it was bad science behind the cancellation, but pesticide makers could adjust.
The stakes are a lot higher when attacking fossil fuels. Meddling in the name of preventing global warming drives up the prices of energy supplies and hurts consumers, businesses, and economies. This is more economically impactful junk science.
One way developing nations may have been fed Eco lunacy about shunning DDT could have been thru a UN forum called PoPs. This stands for persistent organic pollutants. Organic in this context means carbon.
DDT qualifies as a POP. During the Clinton administration, the USA supported a PoPs program thru the UN. This would have encouraged developing countries to emulate the US and not use DDT to combat malarial mosquitoes.
It was still up to developing countries to decide their own antimalerial programs.
The PoPs treaty may have helped teach developing countries to be wary of rich nation Eco activists who are more interested in their own crusading agendas than in the wellbeing of local people in other nations.
poor nations still have the right to define their own insect management programs and can choose to ignore UN mediated advice from rich nation environmentalists as regards DDT.
The worsening trend is in the construct of scare narratives.
The Globalists once fretted about destroying the planets ozone layer via CFC refrigerants. These chemicals were replaced. The UN supposedly saved the planet. Probably nonsense but wonderful practice for the ensuing global warming farce.
The ozone farce had a costly but feasible solution of redesigning refrigeration about different materials. However the global warming narrative is vastly more costly and does not have a convenient solution.
The scammers may have thought this is great because the threat will never abate. But people get tired and fed up with Eco nonsense without end. It’s endless defeatism and negativism and cost. So global warming as a scare narrative was always destined to run out of steam and public backing.
This makes it especially vulnerable to President Trump. Trump is all about winning and making America great again. No Hollywood celebs deploring your carbon footprint. it’s all BS he said in a debate. And trump is right. Instead of raising the price of electricity, lets generate more energy and lower the price, to lift living standards. Take a machete to the Federal jungle of Green Tape Eco regulations.