PRECAUTIONARY NONSENSE

We would never get out of bed if we applied the "precautionary principle" consistently. Heaps of everyday activities (like driving a car or dining out) are far more dangerous than the things Greernies fuss about

Once again, proponents of the precautionary principle have tried to convince us that we are always "better safe than sorry." Dr. Bruce Barrett recently published an article in favor of using this poorly defined doctrine to govern public health issues, making it in effect an institutionalized "fear factor."

The UN Rio Declaration of 1992 states that "In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation." As applied, the principle would cause various scientific activities and technologies to be banned, even after tests have failed to show demonstrable harm. It turns out that there may actually be more risk in using this principle than in not using it, as it often leads to rejection of the same technological advances that have enhanced human health and longevity.

Advocates of the precautionary principle make arguments that reveal their stance as ideological and anti-technological. Barrett dramatically claims that due to under-researched chemicals and industrialization, "humanity now threatens the existence of hundreds of species, and perhaps the long-term health of the planet as a whole." He argues that there are "ethical responsibilities" to interrupt even alleged and potential threats posed by humans. He should remember, though, that we also have an ethical responsibility to use technological resources to move humanity forward and save lives. Barrett calls for more regulation and "better science." Clearly, though, "better science" comes only from research and innovation.

Proponents of the precautionary principle must know that nothing is completely risk-free. Of course, risks must be evaluated for any new product or technique, but limits must be set as to how much proof of risk is necessary before innovations are banned. No matter how many risks we prove untrue there will always be unknowns, and focusing on these minor or hypothetical threats will greatly impede productive activities. The risk of inaction must also be considered when bans are placed on the development of potentially groundbreaking procedures and practices -- banning them can produce risks in itself. ACSH president Dr. Elizabeth Whelan cites the examples of pesticides and pharmaceuticals in a 2000 editorial and uses the case of chlorine to counter the precautionists. Chlorine, while poisonous at high exposures, is needed to disinfect our water supply, to make necessary pesticides, and to create lifesaving medications. While there are no proven harmful effects from appropriate use of chlorine, and while it has proven to be lifesaving, precautionary principle advocates still argue against chlorine because of hypothetical risks. Further examples can be found in the cases of blood transfusions and organ transplants, both undeniably major advances in medical therapy. Furthermore, had the precautionary principle been used fifty years ago, virtually no pharmaceuticals would be available today. Had it been in effect one hundred years ago, the automobile and air travel would never have been developed.

In addition, fearing all of the possible minor risks of a product or activity takes up time, money, and resources that should be used instead on research, prevention, and treatment efforts -- such as water chlorination.

The precautionary principle is an anti-progress, anti-technology ideology that would cause the health of our nation to stagnate instead of steadily improving. Proponents of this principle are blind to the benefits of technology and want amateur critics to have ultimate power to inhibit the work of qualified scientists -- "just in case."

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FEARFUL RESPONSE TO "HOCKEY STICK" PROBE

What have they got to hide?

Top scientists have reacted angrily to a US Congressman who has demanded to see the full financial and research records of three climate experts. The Congressman, Joe Barton, says questions have been raised about a study the experts did on climate history and which is at the heart of the current understanding of global warming.

The dispute surrounds a pair of papers written by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes at the end of the 1990s suggesting that the past decade was probably warmer than any other in the last one thousand years.

A graph from the papers, showing a sudden up-turn in temperatures in the 20th Century, has been dubbed the "hockey stick" diagram, and has become an icon of global warming.

As such, it has drawn much of the fire aimed at climate science from sceptics. The strategy, in the words of one scientist, appears to be guilt by association: if the hockey stick is wrong, then other science indicating global warming must also be suspect.


Republican Congressman Joe Barton waded into the controversy late in June. In his capacity as chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Mr Barton wrote to Mann, Bradley and Hughes.

He demanded they should send details from the whole of their careers, covering sources of funding, whereabouts of raw data, and full computer codes. His letters also talk of "methodological flaws", "data errors", and of questions about the authors' willingness to share their data. To quote:

"...in recent peer-reviewed articles in Science, Geophysical Research Letters, and Energy & Environment, researchers question the results of [the hockey stick] work. As these researchers find, based on the available information, the conclusions concerning temperature histories - and hence whether warming in the 20th Century is actually unprecedented - cannot be supported by the Mann et al studies... ".

Mr Barton also wrote to the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reproduced the hockey stick in its 2001 scientific assessment of global warming, and to the director of the National Science Foundation, which funds much of the climate science done in the United States.

The letters were also signed by the Republican chairmen of the Sub-committee on Oversight and Investigations - a body that has previously looked into the Enron and oil-for-food scandals. The committee is concerned, the BBC was told, that a climate policy that could cost trillions of dollars must be seen to be based on solid data.

Many scientists have reacted with astonishment at the aggressive tone of the letters, and the extent of their demands.

Henry Waxman, a Democrat member of the committee, wrote to Mr Barton asking him to withdraw them. "Some might interpret them as an attempt to bully and harass climate experts who have reached conclusions with which you disagree," he wrote. Now, the three scientists are making their own formal responses.

Raymond Bradley, with only a hint of irony, welcomes the Congressmen's interest in "the basis for President George Bush's recent statement" acknowledging the consensus on global warming and mankind's role in it. He adds that "it's absurd" to think the conclusion of the IPCC's assessment on global warming rested on any one figure or table.

Dr Bradley told BBC News he thought the intent behind the letters was to undermine confidence in the IPCC which is currently working on its next assessment due to be published in 2007.

Dr Thomas Crowley, of Duke University, whose own climate reconstructions resemble those of Mann et al argues there is a more general intent to intimidate climate researchers. He warns about the direction Mr Barton's detailed requests could lead.

"For example, requests could be made to palaeontologists and molecular biologists for all data and files supporting evolution," he writes in EOS, the house journal of the American Geophysical Union. Likewise, radiochemists could be entrained into pseudo-scientific debate because of all the massive and magnificent geochronological data that have been gathered over the last few decades."

The issue became even more complex over the weekend when Representative Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the House Committee on Science, declared a turf war with Mr Barton. As well as saying the Committee on Energy and Commerce has no jurisdiction over climate science, he admonishes the intervention as "at best foolhardy", and argues that the tone of the original letters reflects on the committee's "inexperience" in matters of science.

And support for Mann, Bradley and Hughes has come from the American Association for the Advancement of Science; from the newly appointed president of the US National Academy of Sciences; from the European Geophysical Union; and from a clutch of individual experts, including Nobel Laureate Mario Molina.

But others are standing up for Congressman Barton. Myron Ebell, of the Competitiveness Enterprise Institute and a prominent global warming sceptic, told BBC News: "We've always wanted to get the science on trial", and "we would like to figure out a way to get this into a court of law", adding "this could work".

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SEEKING ZERO POLLUTION CAN BE A BAD DEAL FOR THE ENVIRONMENT

The notion that a zero pollution objective is not necessarily ideal policy is one of the more difficult concepts for environmental economists to convey. After all, if pollution is bad shouldn't we design policy to completely eliminate it? Many of us are drawn to the field based on a genuine concern for the environment and the belief that economics provides a powerful tool for helping solve environmental problems. Yet we are often in the position of recommending policies that appear on the surface to be anti-environmental. How can these observations be reconciled? The answer lies in understanding scarcity: we have unlimited wants, but live in a world with limited means. Economists in general study how people make decisions when faced with scarcity. Scarcity implies that resources devoted to one end are not available to meet another; hence there is an opportunity cost of any action. This includes environmental policy. For example, funds used by a municipality to retrofit its water treatment plant to remove trace amounts of arsenic (a carcinogen) cannot also be used to improve local primary education. Environmental economists are tasked with recommending policies that reflect scarcity of this type at the society level. For both individuals and societies scarcity necessitates tradeoffs, and the reality of tradeoffs can make the complete elimination of pollution undesirable. Once this is acknowledged the pertinent question becomes how much pollution should be eliminated. How should we decide? Who gets to decide? To help provide answers economists use an analytical tool called cost-benefit analysis.

Cost-benefit analysis provides an organizational framework for identifying, quantifying, and comparing the costs and benefits (measured in dollars) of a proposed policy action. The final decision is informed (though not necessarily determined) by a comparison of the total costs and benefits. While this sounds logical enough, cost-benefit analysis has been cause for substantial debate when used in the environmental arena (see the online debate between Lisa Heinzerling, Frank Ackerman, and Kerry Smith). The benefits of environmental regulations can include, for example, reduced human and wildlife mortality, improved water quality, species preservation, and better recreation opportunities. The costs are usually reflected in higher prices for consumer goods and/or higher taxes. The latter are market effects readily measured in dollars, while the former are nonmarket effects for which dollar values are not available. In addition to complicating the practice of cost-benefit analysis (dollar values for the nonmarket effects must be inferred rather than directly observed) this raises ethical issues. Should we assign dollar values to undisturbed natural places? To human lives saved? To the existence of blue whales and grey wolves? If we decide such things are too `priceless' to assign dollar values we lose the ability to use cost-benefit analysis to inform the decision. What then is the alternative? How do we decide? Who gets to decide?

Environmental economists tend to favor cost-benefit analysis in the policy arena because of the discipline and transparency it provides in evaluating policy options. It is easy to evaluate absolutes. Most would agree that reducing nitrogen contamination of groundwater wells, limiting the occurrence of code red ozone alerts, and preserving habitat for grizzly bears are worthy goals. Determining the relative merits of any one of these compared to the others, or compared to non-environmental goals such as improving public education, is much more daunting. Because policy making is ultimately about evaluating the relative merits of different actions some mechanism is needed to rank the alternatives. Without the discipline of cost-benefit analysis it is not clear how the interests, claims, and opinions of parties affected by a proposed regulation can be examined and compared. Criterion such as `moral' or `fair' do not lend themselves well to comparison and are subject to wide ranging interpretation. Who gets to decide what is moral or fair? Cost-benefit analysis is far from perfect, but it demands a level of objectivity and specificity that are necessary components of good decision making.

To begin this post I described an apparent contradiction: environmental economists who consider themselves `environmentalists' will on occasion recommend environmental regulations that do not seek to completely eliminate pollution. Hopefully it is now clear that this is really not a contradiction. Environmentalists come in many forms, including activists, lobbyists, spokesmen, natural scientists, and even economists. Economics provides a structured framework for evaluating outcomes absent hype and advocacy. Cost-benefit analysis is a part of this. By using the tools of their field environmental economists can contribute unbiased information that can lead to better policy decisions, and ultimately better environmental outcomes.

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Big legal victory over climate alarmists: "In a key decision for the future of national energy policy, a federal court upheld the Environmental Protection Agency's refusal to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The Federal District Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit concluded that, even if the EPA possesses the authority to regulate carbon dioxide (an issue the Court did not attempt to resolve), EPA acted within its legal discretion in declining to regulate carbon dioxide. 'This is a great victory for American consumers, who do not have to worry that EPA, under the pretext of unscientific climate alarmism, will force automakers to downsize the average vehicle or make costly modifications pricing larger, safer cars out of their reach,' said Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis, Jr."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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