Gasping For Air and Energy
CHICAGO BOYZ BLOG
By Shannon Love on Science
Environmentalists claim they aren't extremist. They claim they don't want to make radical and dangerous changes to our technological life-support systems, they just want to make a few minor adjustments to protect not only the environment but the health and safety of humans as well.
They're lying. When it comes down to it in the real world, environmentalists will kill people just to gain an utterly trivial environmental benefit. As a political movement, environmentalism has crossed over into a kind of religious fetishism.
Look at the example of the banning of CFC asthma inhalers. [h/t Instapundit] Here we have a clear-cut tradeoff between the deaths of thousands of asthmatics and prevention of a degree of damage to the ozone layer that is so small that we can't even begin to consider measuring it.
It's important to understand that when we use a particular technology to treat millions of patients even a minor increase in risk can kill large numbers of people. When you allow those deaths to accumulate over a span of decades the body count gets high in a hurry.
About 20 million people in America suffer asthma, and about 2 million of those suffer asthma so severe it poses a threat to their lives if untreated. About 5,000 people or 0.25% of severe sufferers die every year. Over the span of 10 years, 2.5% or roughly 1 in 40 severe-asthma sufferers will die of the disease.
Let's suppose that the difficulty in using the new environmentally friendly inhalers increases the asthma death rate by just 1%. That comes to 50 unnecessary deaths a year or 500 unnecessary deaths over a decade. Roughly 150 of those deaths will be children.
And what do we gain by adopting the new system? Nothing. The amount of CFCs in inhalers has an impact so small that we couldn't even detect it. CFCs used to be used in a wide range of technologies. Every cooling system of any kind used CFCs as did virtually every spray can. Dozens of other less visible technologies also used and released millions of tons of CFCs a year into the atmosphere. It took this decades-long accumulation of great gobs of CFCs to produced an effect on the ozone layer. By contrast, the amount of CFCs vented from one small compressor would fill hundreds of inhalers. Even if everyone in the world used CFC inhalers we wouldn't be talking about enough CFC release to have a measurable impact. One volcano erupting anywhere in the world would destroy more ozone than centuries of CFC inhaler use.
Since we've eliminated CFCs from every other technology, the amount of CFCs put into the atmosphere by inhalers will have zero effect on the ozone layer. Any effect it might have hypothetically will be swamped by the noise of the natural variation in ozone levels.
So, we've traded zero environmental gain for the very real deaths of people. Why did this decision get made? Certainly, the economic self-interest of companies making the new inhalers played a role. As with the ban on CFCs in other technologies, this ban forced consumers to stop using old CFC technologies that existed in the public domain, and instead to use new, proprietary replacement technology owned by a few companies. Dupont alone made a killing. Likewise with inhalers, anyone could manufacture a public-domain inhaler but only a few companies own the patents to manufacture non-CFC inhalers.
For their part, many environmentalists clearly supported the inhaler ban merely out of quasi-religious fetishism. Their mystical reasoning divides the world into good substances and bad substances. A substance that is bad in one instance is bad in all instances. They have no concept of tradeoffs. CFCs are bad for the ozone, so they have to be rooted out everywhere regardless of the degree of harm or the cost in resources or lives. It's the symbolism that matters, not the physical reality.
It's like ultra-orthodox Jews building entirely separate kitchens for meat and cheese. It's just an exercise in moral vanity. They express their commitment to the environmental cause by taking their changes to the extreme of killing people. They simply don't care if the ban accomplishes any actual physical good. They merely care that others see them going to such an extreme.
For less radical environmentalists, the ban shows how the enshrinement of "the environment first" into government policy leads to perverse and dangerous outcomes. Had you told someone twenty years ago, in 1989, when the ozone banning Montreal Protocol was signed, that it would lead to the banning of medical technology for zero environmental gain, people would have laughed at you. Yet here we are.
What does this suggest about future tradeoffs such as replacing coal with unreliable weather-dependent power sources? Environmentalists claim they won't chose to starve us for power to save the environment and they mock anyone who suggests they would, yet the example of the asthma inhalers should give everyone pause. If they can rationalize the dramatic dangers of putting asthmatics at risk they can readily rationalize the much more subtle harms of starving the economy of power. chicagoboyz.net |
