Some readers did not like my last News and blog. An old friend in California who recently retired from a career running AID projects in Africa emailed back that my Hawkhill News came at the same time that the tragedy in Haiti was the big news. That tragedy made my feeble “playing with numbers re Mississippi” unwelcome to him. Another friend and former student of mine in Ohio criticized my criticism of the EPA on the grounds that many thousands of people in his home county in Ohio stood to benefit from reductions in parts per billion in the air. And finally a reader from Colorado who specializes in water issues wrote: “I feel like you’re stretching to make a point. In actual fact, changes on the order of a few ppb for exposure to a number of different contaminants can make major differences in human (as well as animal) physiology, if you look at endocrine disruptors, we’re down to ppt (parts per trillion). I don’t know the science behind the ozone levels and correlations to health care costs, but I think you owe it to your readers to study that in some detail before you come out essentially wholesale poo-pooing that science.”
All of these readers have good points and I stand corrected if not totally repentant. In my defense I don’t mean really to wholesale “poo-poo” environmental science, much less the legitimate and often useful work of the EPA. For one thing, I admire very much the chemistry that is indeed able to detect ppb (and now even parts per trillion!). And I admire the enormous progress we have made in cleaning up the air, earth and water just in my lifetime. My point is (and I think that was Mark Twain’s point in the Mississippi story) that there is a point of diminishing returns for anything, including environmental pollutants. Sure, we probably could save a few lives (or even a few hundred or a few thousand lives) by extreme control of smokestacks, river effluents, toxic waste in landfills, etc, etc. Getting rid of that last fraction of a percent, however, may not be worth the cost. For instance:
We would probably be killing way more than a few hundred or a few thousand–probably in the range of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people–by drastically curtailing energy production, manufacturing output, innovative advances in drugs, agricultural production, etc., etc. These unintended results of extreme measures in environmental control (including current climate change proposals) would translate very quickly to soaring unemployment, rising crime, lower living standards, disastrous spikes in world-wide poverty, less and poorer health care, etc. etc. We would end up sending even more of our manufacturing to China, doing less for Haiti, abdicating leadership in combating radical Islam, letting the AIDS and malaria epidemics in Africa get worse, etc. etc.
Another for instance–personally I do think it would be wise for us to phase out coal and oil, but it will take a lot of time and it is not yet clear what the best alternatives are. I think nuclear power would be fine and non-polluting (I know many environmentalists would disagree). Solar is a possibility, but the solar-voltaic variety at least would use a lot of rare earths, some which could also be quite dangerous in the environment. Not to mention that almost all of the rare earths now come from a single spot in China where the pollution is really horrendous. As some wag said “there is no free lunch.”
One prominent biochemist who agrees with me on this issue is Bruce Ames, the world-renowned biochemist at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the inventor of the Ames Test, the world-wide standard laboratory test to decide whether a given chemical is carcinogenic or mutagenic. A web site interview might interest some of my readers:
Here is one relevant quote from the interview: “‘I’ve gotten very suspicious of a lot of the activists because I just feel that they are not good problem solvers. If you push in the wrong direction, then you’re counterproductive. If we are spending $125 billion a year on EPA regulation, and it’s not effective, that kills people, because it diverts resources from important things and it takes money that could be used for starting new companies and generating wealth and generating money for science.”
Bruce Ames is also one of the scientists interviewed for our popular DVD program: SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: GLOBAL ISSUES OF THE 21ST CENTURY. Other scientists and environmentalists on that same DVD include: Richard Burgess, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Bernard Cohen, University of Pittsburgh; Richard Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Thomas Lovejoy, Smithsonian Institution; Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute; Howard Odum, University of Florida; Jeremy Rifkin, environmental activist; and Julian Simon, University of Maryland. You can get this DVD and 100 others now at a whopping 70% discount in our new 2010 sale. See full description on our web site.
Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill