A Malarial Plague

Greenist Luddites 

The Damage and Death They Cause


Bob Brockie
Stuff

Greenie alarmists spread needless fears about science.  They have long spread misinformation and lies about genetic engineering (GE), claiming it has never done any good, only harm. But these claims fly in the face of scientific evidence.

In separate reports, the OECD and the American Academy of Sciences reviewed more than 1000 scientific studies of GE earlier this year. They found that farmers using GE got bigger crops, made more money and used less insecticide than conventional farmers. They concluded that GE has never harmed anybody, nor harmed the environment.  Greenie Luddites so put the wind up the New Zealand government that it passed ludicrous restrictions on harmless GE imports and GE research here. We are the poorer for that.

Nuclear Greenies claim that nuclear radiation killed thousands of people at Chernobyl. In fact it killed only 68 men – those who first rushed into the stricken plant.  Repeated United Nations surveys show Chernobyl has produced no more deaths, birth defects or cancer than any other Russian city.

Alarmists also predicted that hundreds of thousands could become ill or die as a result of the Fukushima explosion. In fact nobody died, nobody became ill and nobody's radiation readings approached danger level.  Many fear that low levels of radiation will harm future generations but this idea gets no support from geneticists, who point to the children and grandchildren of Hiroshima and Nagasaki's survivors. They are as healthy as those in any other Japanese city.

Greenies hate fracking, claiming it pumps hundreds of chemicals into rocks and these contaminate aquifers. But they're wrong – 99.5 per cent of the anti-fracking fluid is sand and water, and the miniscule remainder is a mix of 13 chemicals which you would find in your kitchen, bathroom or garage.

While Rachel Carson was writing her influential book Silent Spring she was dying of breast cancer. She blamed her cancer on DDT. However, it has subsequently been shown that DDT has nothing to do with cancer nor any other illness, even though Greenies still condemn the insecticide as a human poison.  So effective was that propaganda that DDT is banned from all countries, including the malaria- and zika virus-ridden. Many say Carson and that decision are responsible for more than 100,000 malaria deaths annually.

Dioxin gets its lethal reputation from injections given to hamsters in the 1940s, animals a thousand times more sensitive to dioxin than are rats, mice, guinea pigs and humans. Subsequently several factories have blown up in Europe and the United States, drenching staff with dioxin, but leaving workers unharmed.  The most telling evidence for the harmlessness of dioxin comes from the failed Russian attempt to assassinate the Ukrainian presidential hopeful Victor Yushchenko with dioxin-laced soup in 2004.  He drank 50,000 times more dioxin than he should have. He fell ill with disfiguring acne but recovered after a few months to resume his political career.

Cellphone towers, fluorine, 245-T paranoia . . . I could go on.

You might ask, "what does he know about these things?".

A lot, because for several years in the 1980s I was convener of the Royal Society's Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (Scope), which looked into these spurious claims in some detail.