Why the End is Always Near, but Never Arrives

By Alan Caruba

If you were to depend on the Huffington Post for your knowledge of the world, you would remain appallingly ignorant. As a leading website for liberal news and views, it is a platform for sheer nonsense and the wonder of it all is that so much is produced on a daily basis.

Take, for example, the June 20 post “State of the Ocean: ‘Shocking’ Report Warns of Mass Extinction from Current Rate of Marine Distress.” I doubt that most HP readers have a clue how vast the oceans of the world are. They compose the majority of the Earth’s surface, some 70 percent, and contain 97 percent of the world’s water.

According to its website, the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) gathered at the University of Oxford, for “A high-level international workshop”, described as “the first inter-disciplinary international meeting of marine scientists of its kind… designed to consider the cumulative impact of multiple stressors on the ocean, including warming, acidification, and over-fishing.”

“The 27 participants from 18 organizations in 6 countries produced a grave assessment of current threats - and a stark conclusion about future risks to marine and human life if the current trajectory of damage continues: that the world's ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.”

Please, someone, please tell me the last time an international group of scientists did not get together and then announce to the world that some horrid future awaited everyone?

According to the IPSO geniuses, “We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children’s and generations beyond that.” The scientific panel concluded “that the degeneration in the oceans is happening much faster than has been predicted” and, therefore, all the coral reefs “could be gone by 2050.”

Why is it that every one of these apocalyptic groups always predict something “could be”, “might be”, “is expected to”, and a whole raft of wishy-washy terms that add up to “We don’t know, but we want to scare the crap out of you just the same”?

Implicit in this latest prediction is that human actions are responsible for whatever they claim is happening to the oceans. Never mind all the other creatures on Earth, gazillions of insects, millions of birds and all manner of mammals, not to mention all the fish, it is always humans despoiling the Earth.

Have we not lived with this tiresome nonsense since the early days of the environmental movement and, in particular, the creation of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? A recent editorial in The Washington Times exposed the way the latest IPCC pronouncement that “the entire world will soon depend on renewable energy” was lifted from a paper whose primary authors were from Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council!

The IPCC has managed to destroy the integrity and the trust in science that has taken centuries to be built. Its constant flogging of the bogus global warming fraud has caused everyone except the Green Kool-Aid drinkers to conclude that scientists cannot be trusted.

Many can’t. Over the years, they have been seduced by billions in government funds for research that always seems to confirm whatever the political agenda is at the time. Galileo was put under house arrest by the Vatican because his findings conflicted with the teaching of the Church at that time. Now governments just buy scientists by the boatload. In addition, the scientists working for government agencies such as NASA know where their paycheck comes from.

A caveat, please. I am privileged to know quite a few scientists as the result of spending the last thirty years debunking global warming. A relative handful of very brave men and women risked their academic and professional careers to dispute the IPCC and other charlatans. From June 30-to-July 1, the Heartland Institute will convene its sixth international conference devoted to the truth about "global warming", i.e., that it is a massive lie. So, yes, there are many good scientists and interested parties who fought the good fight.

Compounding the problem here in the U.S., the nation’s schools have been totally co-opted by the Green agenda and whatever passes for science is mostly some version of the Gaia religion spoon-fed to the kiddies in pre-school, kindergarten, and up to graduation. The process continues at most colleges and university. The result is a generation or two of enviro-robots for whom science is little more than propaganda.

So, like the marine prognosticators, be polite, listen to their ravings, and ignore them. Be serene and secure in the knowledge that the sun, the oceans, the clouds, the volcanoes, and other factors affecting the Earth are immune to any but the ancient cycles that were known by Chinese, Mayan and druid astronomers long, long ago.

That is why the end is always near, but thankfully never seems to arrive.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Germany's Nuclear Panic

By Alan Caruba

The likelihood of a major earthquake in Germany is slim. The possibility that it would be followed by a catastrophic tsunami is unlikely. These are the events that caused the failure of the Fukushima plant in Japan, but that has not deterred Germany from its recent announcement that it would close all 17 of its nuclear reactors by 2022.

This is pure panic and not something one would expect from Germans who have always excelled at the development and use of new technologies. Other than Japan that has good reason to close Fukushima and reconsider its use of nuclear energy, few other nations have indicated any change in their policies regarding it.

The world is in desperate need of real grownups to run its various nations and, instead, the only growth industry to which one can reliably point is stupidity.

The endless blather about “alternative” or “renewable” energy sources has led to the waste of billions on wind and solar power, neither of which would exist if governments did not lavish subsidies or issue mandates for its unpredictable and unproductive delivery of electricity.

Germany has long had a Green Party and its Chancellor, Angela Merkel, heads of Social Democrat-Green coalition. In general, environmentalists worldwide hate the generation of energy by any source, but particularly if it is nuclear or coal. Ironically, by shutting its nuclear plants, Germany will have to use coal, dubbed “dirty” by mindless opponents of anything that might let you turn on a light bulb.

If you Google “nuclear energy” you will learn that nuclear power provides about six percent of the world’s energy and an estimated fifteen percent of its electricity. The U.S., France, and Japan account for about fifty percent of the electricity generated by nuclear power.

There have been nuclear and radiation accidents. Fukushima was the result of unprecedented geological events, something no amount of planning and caution can prevent. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster was largely the result of its staff manually overriding its safety control systems. The Three-Mile Island accident in 1979 did not endanger anyone. It coincided with a film “The China Syndrome” that had no basis in fact.

Simply stated, nuclear power plants are not atomic bombs that go off when a “meltdown” occurs. Under normal circumstances plants can be shut down in the event of a malfunction.

Germany’s over-reaction to the Fukushima accident has nothing to do with reality, science, economics or any other sensible response. Nuclear power provides about 23% of its electrical energy and, despite that, Germany’s electricity prices have “more than doubled in the past decade” according to a Wall Street Journal report. The decision to phase out nuclear power will affect Germany’s ability to remain competitive in the global marketplace, particularly as regards its heavy industries that require large amounts of electricity.

The decision was part environmental, part political. It is entirely idiotic as is always the case when these two factors come together. To no one’s surprise, one of its largest utilities, E.ON, announced it would sue the pants off the government to compensate for its financial losses. Others are likely to join it.

Environmentalism in all its many forms is opposed to any and all forms of energy generation and use with the exception of wind, solar, and the so-called biofuels. Here in the U.S. Greens have fought any expansion of the use of coal, despite the fact that just over half of all electricity generated depends on it. The Obama administration has waged a public war on the extraction, refining, and use of oil. Nuclear power generates about twenty percent of the electricity in the U.S.

It is the growth of government that lies at the heart of so many of the problems the West has encountered. Coupled with the environmental movement’s insanity, we get bans on the incandescent light bulb, insane requirements for increased mileage from a gallon of gasoline that is required to include ethanol, a chemical element that actually reduces mileage!

We have all just escaped the ravages of a massive, global campaign to convince everyone that the Earth was rapidly heating as the result of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is still insisting that it be regulated as a “pollutant” even though all life on Earth depends upon it as the “food” that generates every piece of vegetation, crops, forests, and beautiful flowers.

It is stupid to shut down perfectly good nuclear plants as Germany plans to do. It is stupid to insist on covering areas the size of several states to generate solar energy or spoil the landscape with wind turbines that kill hundreds of thousands of birds and bats every year while, combined with solar, contribute barely three percent to our electrical supply.

Ordinary people know that stupid people are in charge of making decisions like Germany’s nuclear energy panic or the moratorium on drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ordinary people understand the need for more energy based on traditional sources.

Ordinary Americans know it is stupid to require an environmental impact study in order to shoot off some fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Ordinary Americans know that there are some very bad, even evil, decisions being made that will undermine our future.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Earth Day Predictions of 1970.

I do not know the author who compiled these quotes, but they are a good reason why they were wrong in 1970 when Earth Day was established and continue to be wrong today, Earth Day 2011.

"For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza.

Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.

Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Stanford's Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling.

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.

Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live."

http://www.ihatethemedia.com/earth-day-predictions-of-1970-the-reason-you-should-not-believe-earth-day-predictions-of-2009

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Earth Day and Environmental Insanity

By Alan Caruba

Anyone who has been paying any attention to the environmental movement has got to have concluded it is insane.

• While the United States stands poised on defaulting on its ever-growing debt—the highest in the nation’s history;

• While wars and insurrections are waged in the Middle East, across northern Africa, and in the Ivory Coast;

• While Japan struggles to deal with a major earthquake and nuclear plant meltdown;

• While Islam wages terrorism worldwide, and

• While European nations attempt to deal with their own financial crisis, the environmentalists—Greens—engage in the most absurd frauds and nonsense since the Dark Ages.

In news from the United Nations—a misnomer if ever there was one—Bolivia is proposing a UN treaty that will give “Mother Earth” the same rights as accorded to human beings. It has just passed a domestic law that grants these rights to bugs, trees, and all other natural things in its own country.

According to the Bolivian proposal, humans have sought to “dominate and exploit” the Earth in ways that threaten the “well-being and existence of many beings” such as malaria-bearing mosquitoes, lice and ticks that spread disease, trees that provide timber for shelter and countless other uses, venomous snakes, and every other creature upon which we depend for food---beef, chickens, and fish, to name just three.

The Bolivian law, if successful, will end the extraction of all natural resources in that nation, thus effectively plunging it into insolvency. That is a definition of insanity. It is also a description of the United States of America where access to its vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil is being systematically denied by the government.

This is occurring as the Environmental Protection Agency continues its effort to declare carbon dioxide (CO2) a “pollutant” that must be regulated, despite the fact that is vital to all life on Earth.

In America, there has been a resurgence of bed bugs, formerly controlled by DDT. The EPA recently awarded $550,000 in grants to the University of Missouri, Texas A&M University, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Rutgers University, and the Michigan Department of Community Health, for bed bug “education, outreach, and environmental justice departments.” So, instead of authorizing the use of a pesticide to rid us all of bed bugs, it wants to “educate” us to live with them. That’s insane.

The U.S. Forest Service scientists will hire field crews “to gather information on the conditions of forests from approximately 1,000 sites in five western states, Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington, “for a comprehensive study on the health of trees in urban areas.” No mention of the millions this will waste, but it is heralded as part of Obama’s “America’s Great Outdoors Initiative.”

At the same time, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has just announced that the department will spend $1 million in “cost-sharing funding for children’s programs in 18 States and Puerto Rico, furthering USDA’s commitment to connect young people around the country with America’s great outdoors.” Why?

A rational nation that’s $14 trillion in debt, borrowing 40 cents of every dollar it spends, would not do such things, but the United States does while its President calls for higher taxes. And why not? The Obama administration spent up to $200 million to promote Obamacare. While that was happening, 26 States joined in demanding its repeal and a U.S. federal court judge declared it unconstitutional.

As the nation struggles to reverse an unsustainable trend toward financial doom, Greens are trumpeting an “Extended Producer Responsibility” program to achieve “waste reduction and increased recycling” that would make manufacturers “liable for the cost of recycling TVs and other electronics at the end of their useful lives” and alter the way they package goods. This is not the manufacturer’s responsibility and will increase the cost of everything everyone purchases.

On Earth Day, everyone will be exhorted to engage in “A billion acts of Green” and to purchase “Green” products, all of which cost more than everything else one purchases in the normal course of everyday life.

We are only now recovering from the greatest fraud of the modern era, “global warming.” The United States wasted an estimated $50 billion on so-called scientific research, all of which existed for the purpose of advancing this hoax. It is rarely mentioned any more except for its fraudulent new name, “climate change.”

As we approach April 22nd, designated “Earth Day”, it would be well to recall that it is the birthday of Vladimir Illich Lenin, a devotee of Karl Marx and a man who plunged Russia into more than seventy years of Communism until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Environmentalism, worldwide and in the United States of America, is devoted to the collapse of every scientific and technological advance of the past century, along with the capitalist system that made them possible.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Obsessed with Food

By Alan Caruba

“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.” -- Thomas Jefferson

My late Mother, Rebecca, taught the art of gourmet cooking in New Jersey adult schools for over thirty years. When the troops came back from the war in Europe, they had been introduced to its cuisine and they encouraged their wives to prepare it.

Mother studied cookbooks like scholars study ancient manuscripts. She would author two cookbooks and the title of one perfectly captured her outlook, ‘Cooking with Wine and High Spirits.’ “There are people who just eat to live,” she would say, “and those who live to eat”, meaning people who loved good food, lovingly prepared.

Neither I, nor my Father or Mother ever got fat. We ate well and enjoyed wine with our meals, but we were never over-weight in any fashion although, as we got passed our fifties, both my Dad and I did acquire the paunch typical of older men.

In the best book ever written on the subject, “Fat: It’s Not What You Think”, by Connie Leas (Prometheus Books, 2008), she noted that ”It’s the male sex hormone, testosterone, that’s responsible for this selected buildup of fat in (men’s) abdominal region.” And, listen up girls, “An adult woman has about twice as much body fat as the average man” and this is likely due to natural selection over the millennia.

“The fat you carry around has useful functions,” wrote Leas. “It stores energy for future use, produces important chemicals, builds cell membranes and neural structures, provides padding, insulates against cold, supplies fuel, and supports your immune system. Fat can be your friend!”

I’m not talking about obesity here. I am talking about carrying a comfortable amount of weight that is not dictated by self-appointed arbiters. Your body size is determined by your DNA, your genes, your inheritance from prior generations. After that, it’s up to you to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Something is very wrong when the government, local, country, state or federal, passes laws regarding what you can and cannot eat, whether dining out or at home.

Perhaps, because we live in a society that provides an abundance of foods and an abundance of choices among foods, that accounts for why our society is so obsessed with eating and obsessed with weight.

Just count how many food-related or diet-related commercials you watch on television every day. Consider, too, the many channels and programs devoted to the topics of food and dieting. Then add in all the magazines, food columns, and blogs devoted to cooking.

Lynne Finnerty, the editor of the American Farm Bureau Federation newspaper, recently took note of “Health officials (that) are sounding alarms about our obesity epidemic. Maybe the issue isn’t the food itself,” said Finnerty, “but our preoccupation with it. Maybe it’s just up to us, as it’s always been, to decide how much is enough.” I agree!

It should come as no surprise that the same scoundrels who propagated the global warming hoax in order to get rich selling “carbon credits” and mandating that utilities use wind and solar energy, are also involved in trying to determine everyone’s dietary choices.

Tom DeWeese, founder of the American Policy Center, recently connected the dots of the United Nations’ Agenda 21 “sustainable development” hogwash with its endless efforts to control every aspect of the Earth’s population. Noting its emphasis on vegetarianism, DeWeese cited research by Dr. William Campbell Douglas who writes a blog called the Daily Dose.

Douglas wrote, “When researchers studied 300 vegetarian patients at Hiranandani Hospital (India) for a year, they were stunned to find that 70% of them were either suffering from heart disease or were at high risk of heart attacks.” Nearly all were badly deficient in vitamin B12, an essential nutrient found in meat.

DeWeese warned against Wal-Mart’s aggressive goals for allegedly improving ways that food is grown and transported across the globe. “In other words, Wal-Mart is now going to enforce sustainable farm policy on all of the suppliers and customers, just as Whole Foods. This is not free markets, it is huge global corporations playing footsy with radical environmental groups and pretending it’s for the common good.”

A history professor of mine used to say, “No government is more than two weeks away from being brought down if it cannot feed its citizens.” In the last century, however, both the Russian and the Chinese communists were responsible for the deaths of millions from famines, some deliberate, some avoidable.

On January 5, Bloomberg News, citing the United Nations reported that “World food prices rose to a record in December on higher sugar, grain and oilseed costs… exceeding levels reached in 2008 that sparked deadly riots from Haiti to Egypt.” Some of those riots were the direct result of redirecting massive amounts of corn from livestock feed and in food production to the mandated production of ethanol to be mixed with gas.

The global cycle of colder weather that began in the late 1990s will account for fewer crops just as it did during the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. It had profound affects on history over the course of five hundred years, bringing down monarchies and ending serfdom in Europe.

Modern farming technologies, genetically modified crops, and other advances such as fertilization and the proper application of pesticides and herbicides ensures that a mere two percent of the U.S. population feeds the rest of us and still has plenty for export. Food exports in 2011 are expected to generate $113 billion.

The Greens and their counterparts who pretend to represent consumers spread endless lies about agricultural methods, chemicals used to safeguard and preserve the shelf-life of foods, as well as the foods we choose to eat. They destroy production by getting water shut off to farming areas by claiming some specie is endangered. They threaten the freedom we savor along with a delicious meal.

Everywhere petty politicians seek to pass laws regarding where one can dine, what can be on the menu, and how it must be prepared. Those who dine at home find packaging loaded with food warnings. It is deliberate and it is baseless.

These busybodies, nags and harridans should be driven from the marketplace with torches and pitchforks.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Eco-Insanity and ANWR

By Alan Caruba

The abject desperation and evil intentions of so-called environmentalists can be seen in the call to turn the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) into a national monument on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its designation.

This would provide ANWR with the same status as the Statue of Liberty—only there aren't billion of barrels of oil under the Statue, nor at George Washington’s birthplace in Virginia.

The idea of conferring national monument status on ANWR is so stupid that it should be laughed out of existence, but unfortunately we have a President who is so intent on denying Americans access to the vast treasure trove of energy resources—oil, coal, and natural gas—that common sense has nothing to do with his decisions.

Reporting from Anchorage, Alaska, for the Associated Press, Mary Pemberton noted that “National monument status could be an estimated 11 billion barrels of recoverable oil beyond the grasp of oil companies forever.” And that means beyond the use of Americans for the countless uses of oil that they depend upon every day for transportation, heating, lubrication, and the manufacture of thousands of products.

The usual nitwits have sent letters to the President, a combination of 80 members of Congress, 170 unidentified “scientists”, some 300 businesses and organizations (that might benefit if oil was in short supply), and 22 religious organizations. Nobody in Alaska supports this idiocy.

There are some well-known facts worth considering.

Alaska comprises 378 million acres.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuse consists of 19.5 million acres.

The area in question where the drilling would occur involves only 1.5 million acres and, of that, only about 2,000 acres would be utilized.

By comparison, Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. takes up an area that is five times as big, fully 11,000 acres.

The area designated for drilling is far from a “pristine” wonderland. While there are parts of Alaska that are breathtakingly beautiful, ANWR is a perfect definition for “when Hell freezes over.”

After visiting Alaska in 2001, Jonah Goldberg, a nationally syndicated columnist, wrote in 2001 that the more beautiful parts of Alaska are far from ANWR and, in particular, “The oil is on the coastal plain at the very top of ANWR on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. And it ain’t beautiful.” The greatest population of wildlife there are trillions of mosquitoes.

“Winter on the coastal plan lasts for nine months,” noted Goldberg. “Total darkness reigns for 58 straight days. The temperatures drop to 70 degrees below zero without wind chill.”

Far from being a tourist’s mecca, ANWR said Goldberg “is a colossal fetid petri dish for some of the worst flying pestilence you can imagine.” In addition to the mosquitoes, there are nostril flies that infest caribou and parasitic warble flies that make life on the plain a hell for its local fauna. The caribou, by the way, had in 2001 increased their population “fivefold since oil exploration began decades ago in nearby Prudhoe Bay.”

The area of ANWR where the oil is known to exist is a vast frozen tundra. Not the ecological treasure the environmentalists are always braying about. Oil drilling would require roads, drill pads, and pipelines. The 2,000 acres involved is 1/20th the size of Washington, D.C. It’s the equivalent to twenty of the buildings where Boeing manufacturers its 747s.

If you flew over, it would be a tiny speck in a huge frozen wasteland. And it would provide about two million barrels of oil a day that we would not need to import from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

An Arctic wilderness is not a national monument and it is an obscenity to even consider such a designation.

Editor's Note: For more information, visit http://www.anwr.org/

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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The EPA's Long War on Chemicals

By Alan Caruba

One of the shows I enjoy watching on the Science Channel is “How It’s Made.” All manner of things we use to enhance our lives start out as raw materials and the process of manufacture is a miracle of transformation.

Virtually all forms of manufacturing require some chemical element, often several. Given the indispensability of chemicals in society and commerce, does it strike anyone as odd that, if you were born after 1960, there’s a high likelihood that you grew up being told that “chemicals” are bad?

In 1962 Rachel Carson kicked off this bizarre notion with her bestselling book, “Silent Spring” and environmental groups have maintained a steady drumbeat of scare campaigns to drive home the message that chemicals are dangerous. However, it is rarely noted that most of the claims she made in her iconic book have long since been disproved by science.

One branch of science is called toxicology. Among its most honored truths, attributed to Paracelsus (1493-1541) is that “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.” This has been shortened to the statement that “The dose makes the poison.” The truth of this is obvious to most people and perhaps best illustrated vaccines. By introducing a minute element of a disease into our bodies, our immune systems can build resistance to it.

But problems arise when an ill-informed media latches on to the latest junk science craze and splashes misleading stories across newspapers and TV. Missing from virtually all of these stories are key facts – that a bunch of laboratory rats have been exposed to some chemical in doses far higher than would normally occur, for instance, or in ways that would never happen in real life, and then calling it a threat. But humans are not rats and this kind of sloppy science and extrapolation comes with serious issues of data interpretation.

This is one way in which the Environmental Protection Agency’s long war on chemicals is perpetuated. Much of the EPA’s abuse of power comes in the form of chemical action plans, which involve little oversight, even less transparency and little-to-no public accountability. However their power to over-regulate, remove valuable products from the market, and hobble commerce is almost unparalleled.

Currently in the EPA’s chemical action plan crosshairs are siloxanes, a type of silicone which, in turn, comes mostly from sand. Siloxanes are inert, non-allergenic, odorless and colorless. They’ve been safely used for decades in thousands of consumer and industrial products – everything from medical cream and sunscreen to automobile tires, high-efficiency insulation and spacecraft.

There are a wide variety of siloxanes, but the EPA isn’t saying which ones have been targeted making it almost impossible for outside parties to provide any sort of meaningful input to the process. If you wanted to stack the deck against something, that would be a great way to do it.

Another aspect of this latest EPA caper is that the agency draws much of its power from the Toxic Substances Control Act, otherwise known as TSCA. But TSCA is in the process of a congressional overhaul which will probably spill over into next year when a new and possibly Republican-controlled Congress returns in January. Why would EPA want to rush through a chemical action plan for siloxanes when it knows that Congress is still working on TSCA reform?

An unduly harsh chemical action plan for siloxanes could have devastating effects on our limping economic recovery. There is no single substitute for siloxanes that performs as well so industry would be faced with costly reformulations for their products and their manufacturing processes. If a particular business found this too expensive, they’d have to shut down, throwing more Americans out of work. If they can afford it, those costs would undoubtedly be passed along to consumers. And for what? No amount of research has shown any environmental benefit to banning siloxanes.

Since its establishment by an executive order in 1970, the EPA has become the master of misinformation and disinformation intended to drive all manner of beneficial chemicals out of the marketplace and to maintain a level of public fear concerning anything that involves chemicals. Siloxanes and the people who depend on them are merely in line to become the latest victims of the EPA.

It should be renamed the Ministry of Propaganda.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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