Suzanne Fields has an interesting article at RealClearPolitics with some more "inconvenient truths" for Al Gore and environmentalists generally -- some that I had not heard before.
Did you know that environmentalist objections to DDT, asbestos, and large steel and concrete "sea gates" have each ended up taking a human toll?:
But when politics, fashion and entertainment fuse with scientific "factoids," truth drowns in a flood of misinformation. In his new book, "Eco-Freaks," John Berlau, a policy director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank devoted to environmental policies, catalogs the tragic mistakes imposed on the rest of us by the environmentally correct. After Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring," DDT was banned nearly everywhere. Most of her "evidence" later turned out to be all wrong, but 2 million poor Africans die every year of malaria that DDT was on the way to eradicating. Al Gore, of course, blames global warming.
Asbestos, like DDT, gets a bad rap in the popular media, but nothing else comes close as a shield against heat. The original plans for the World Trade Center called for the interior steel in both towers to be covered with asbestos-based fireproofing material. Asbestos was eliminated when environmentalists objected. Engineers think the twin towers might be standing today but for the politically correct construction. Asbestos would have at least slowed the spread of the fire and the melting of the metal, giving hundreds of those who perished a chance to escape.
Hurricane Katrina need not have been the tragedy it was. In 1977, the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to build large steel and concrete "sea gates" below sea level to prevent hurricane force winds driving storm surges into Lake Pontchartrain, overflowing into low-lying New Orleans. Such gates have been enormously successful in the Netherlands. But the Environmental Defense Fund, which had been a party to the lawsuit leading to the banning of DDT, persuaded a judge that the sea gates would discourage the mating of a certain fish species. Fishy romance trumped the lives of 3,100 Orleanians. "If we had built the barriers, New Orleans would not be flooded," says Joe Towers, who was counsel for the New Orleans District of the Corps.
Of course, DDT, asbestos, and large underwater sea and concrete gates all have their drawbacks. Yet they also have their advantages, and when environmentalists succeeded in persuading us to limit their use, we paid a price -- sometimes a high one.
In fact, every form of governmental regulation has numerous unintended consequences. Look at some of the areas of our society that are a mess -- from airlines that keep passengers waiting for 8 hours to insurance companies that write incomprehensible policies and deny claims unexpectedly -- and you will often find that regulations imposed on those industries have either contributed to or created some of the most annoying problems consumers face. It happens over and over again. Governmental laws and regulations create market distortions; consumers become quite rightly dissatisfied; and then there is a cry for even more regulation. It won't work, of course. You can't regulate yourself out a a problem that was created by regulation to begin with.
As the example of the World Trade Center illustrates, the cost of some regulations is not measured in consumer frustration nor in dollars, but in lost lives.
There are plenty of good reasons to proceed cautiously, if at all, when it comes to the demand from Al Gore and his ilk to do something -- anything! -- about global warming. Two of those reasons are India and China, which are not likely to jump onboard the bandwagon. There are plenty of other good reasons.
We need to choose carefully which battles we will fight. Tilting at global windmills is a quixotic quest that we don't need right now. We have real and immediate battles to win. If we somehow managed to reduce "greenhouse" emissions worldwide through massive effort, but meanwhile Iran and North Korea finished arming themselves with nuclear weapons and used them in a few places, or if terrorists managed to detonate suitcase bombs in a few American cities, what would that do for the environment? What would it do for the quality of human life? Anyone?
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