Welcome to the New
Paradigm, Same as the Old Paradigm
By Joseph L. Bast, February 19, 2000
“To cope with this new type
of danger, we need a new scientific and institutional model designed
specifically for synthetic chemical pollution,” writes Thornton. (343) Thornton
calls this new model the “Ecological Paradigm.” Its four principles are:
# The
Precautionary Principle, which says we should not wait for scientific
proof of harm before prohibiting activities that might be dangerous, so long as
the advocates of prohibition are able to meet a standard of proof called
“weight of evidence”;
# Reverse
Onus, which says corporations that propose to introduce new chemicals into
the environment should first have to prove that they will cause no harm to
anyone;
# Zero
Discharge, which says some chemicals are so very bad that no emission level
is safe; and
# Clean
Production, which says it is better to eliminate the use of bad chemicals
early in the production process than to regulate them at the end of the
pipeline (336-349).
Readers who follow the debate
over environmental policy will notice there is nothing “new” about this “new”
paradigm. Indeed, all of its components were widely discussed in the 1980s.
They were first brought together and called a “new paradigm” (to my knowledge)
in a 1993 article in the weekly British science journal, New Scientist,
written by two Greenpeace staffers and titled “How Science Fails the
Environment.”
Why, if this paradigm is not
new, does Thornton repeatedly represent it as being new? Well, it would be
quite a coincidence that the “new scientific and institutional model” needed to
cope with the newly discovered threat of organochlorides were the same one that
environmentalists have been advocating for different reasons for the past two
decades. What are the odds of that happening? Small enough, perhaps, to think
the threat of organochlorides is being used to advance some other agenda.
Better, Thornton must have thought to himself, to represent old ideas as new
and bury their tracks.
A week after “How Science
Fails the Environment” appeared, an answer appeared in the same journal,
written by Alex Milne. “The Greenpeace approach is not anti-science,” wrote
Milne, “although there is a lot of that about. But neither is it science. So
what is it? It is moral philosophy at least, and religion probably. All that
scientists can say to Greenpeace is: Sorry, your application for membership in
the scientific community has been carefully considered -- and rejected.”
Seven years later, should
Greenpeace’s application still be rejected?
The Precautionary
Principle: Still Junk Science
The precautionary principle,
to begin with, is not entirely wrong in its intent; indeed, it is the
philosophy that underlays regulation of pharmaceuticals drugs and much of the
modern regulatory state. (Some would say much of what is wrong with the
modern regulatory state, but that debate is for another day.) To his credit,
Thornton makes a much more serious run at making a “weight-of-evidence” case
against organochlorines as a class than did Theo Colborn and other past
critics. Besides presenting a circumstantial case composed of a large number of
epidemiological studies, he argues a deductive case can be built on the
“well-understood aspects of the chemistry of the chlorine atom itself.” (204)
In the past, Greenpeace has
used the precautionary principle to smuggle into discussions flawed and
unreliable studies that have been rejected by the scientific community, not
because they fail to separate the effects of multiple chemicals or other faults
that Thornton attributes to conventional scientific practice, but because they
violate much more basic scientific standards such as honest reporting of
results, sound data collection techniques, sufficient sample sizes, and
replicability. Many such studies have been produced over the years, and they
form the myths and legends of the culture of the environmental movement. But
they tell lies.
Thornton, alas, doesn’t rise
above his organization’s history on this score. He states as fact that
organochlorines damage human “reproductive systems by mimicking or blocking the
activity of the steroid hormones that regulate reproductive function and
behavior,” (61) but it is just this claim that EPA, independent scientists, and
the New York Times found unsupported. We get a superficial review of the
debate over the average male sperm count, which Thornton claims today “is about
half of what it was in 1940,” (120) a statement at odds with current consensus
views. He airily dismisses the problems of confounding factors by not reporting
the biggest ones (increased frequency of ejaculation and exposure to artificial
light) and by saying Great Lakes herring gulls “do not wear tight underwear.”
(127)
About those gulls . . .
Thornton tells tales of the feminization of herring gulls in the Great Lakes
(124) without mentioning that they feed primarily from open garbage dumps, not
fish and other wildlife. Similarly, we’re told Lake Apopka in Florida shows
that high doses of organochlorides caused alligators to have “extremely small
penises” (123) but there is no mention of the fact that alligators migrate
between lakes, so the adults at Lake Apopka probably were not born there, and
male alligators are hard to distinguish from female alligators even in the
absence of any supposed “gender-bender” chemicals.
Thornton reports on the
rising incidence of precocious puberty among girls in the U.S., (127) but skews
his report to hide the fact that only black girls are showing any change, a
fact that means the phenomenon almost certainly cannot be explained by exposure
to organochlorides. He reports “a small German study” and two studies of women
in India that might show health effects on women of exposure to
organochlorides, (131) but neglects to report a major American study showing no
relationship between exposure to DDE (a product of the breakdown of DDT) and
breast cancer. He admits (unlike Colborn) that “all of these studies are
subject to common epidemiological problems, particularly small study
populations that may not reflect the characteristics of the rest of the country
and a failure to control for confounding factors,” (131) but the U.S. study of
DDE was relatively free of these problems. Why did he choose not to report it?
He attributes the failure of
fish-stocking efforts in Lake Michigan to PCBs, DDT, and dioxin in the Great
Lakes, (137) an attribution most wildlife experts in the region would say is
far from proven. Like Colborn, he relies heavily on the Jacobson study of
Michigan mothers of newborns who consumed fish, (139, 144) a study thoroughly
discredited by small sample size, data collection flaws, failure to control for
counfounding behaviors, and lack of replication.
He tells the story of Love
Canal in Niagra Falls, New York, but manages to leave out any mention of the
authoritative health surveys that show no harm to any of the residents and,
indeed, no misconduct on behalf of Hooker Chemical Company. (227) He claims
that researchers have found evidence of synergistic effects when humans and
laboratory animals have been exposed to combinations of organochlorides, (281)
but never mentions the infamous Tulane study, the one attempt to gain genuine
scientific credibility for the synergy claim that was withdrawn by its authors
when it was revealed that they had falsified data.
In a chapter titled
“Organochlorines and Cancer,” Thornton repeats claims of a “cancer epidemic”
made popular by Sam Epstein, Ralph Nader, and few others during the 1970s and
1980s. He makes numerous false statements here, at least when compared with
such sources as the National Cancer Institute, which recently reported that
age-adjusted cancer fatality rates in the U.S. are falling, and Sir Richard
Doll and Dr. Richard Peto, who recently wrote, “Overall, cancer mortality among
young adults in the United States is decreasing quite rapidly, and much of the
decrease cannot plausibly be attributed to improved therapy.” (Journal of
the National Cancer Institute, June 1981)
Falling cancer rates are not
a new phenomena: cancer morality rates for every age group under 55 fell
between 1970 and 1989, and the rise in cancer rates in the 55 to 64 year-old
groups was sufficiently low to produce a negative rate of change in cancer
rates for the entire under-65 age cohort. (Statistical Abstract of the U.S.,
1992) Only rates for the over-65 crowd show significant increases, and
experts such as Doll and Peto warn that those rates are unreliable due to the
rising availability of tests that allow doctors to more frequently diagnose
cancers at the time of death. The picture looks even better when lung cancer
cases, attributable to heavy smoking and not exposure to organochlorides, are
removed from the data.
Thornton is blind to all this
data. Instead, we are treated to studies in Sweden (Sweden?); alarming and
unsupported claims that ozone depletion is causing epidemics of skin cancer and
immune system suppression, (164-165) studies that seem to show no
relationship between exposure to organochlorines but which, upon closer
inspection, do; and so on.
This reviewer is neither a
scientist nor sufficiently current on secondary sources to judge Thornton’s
commentaries on Agent Orange, Monsanto workers accidentally exposed to dioxin,
or the “25 million cases of acute occupational pesticide poisonings each year.”
(300) By the time I read these accounts, my confidence in Thornton’s
credibility was too low for them to make much impact on me. If he was
misleading or inaccurate about issues on which I am well informed, why should I
trust him on issues about which I am less certain? The short answer is, I can’t.
Reverse Onus and
Industrial Planning
Reverse Onus, the second
principle in Thornton’s “new” paradigm, requires manufacturers to prove a
negative universal statement -- that their new product will not cause any harm
to anyone -- a logically impossible task, since new data could always be
discovered that disprove the assertion. As Alex Milne wrote back in 1993,
“there can be no absolute proof of ‘safety’ or ‘harmlessness’ even if we want
there to be one. We have to live with risk.” At a minimum, reverse onus would
discourage the process of trial and error that leads to gradual improvement in
safety. The effect of reversing the burden of proof would therefore be to
increase, not reduce, risk.
Thornton hears this criticism
and says he would impose a lower, weight-of-evidence, standard of proof on
manufacturers. (359) But the precautionary principle in the hands of industry
critics trumps anything that manufacturers could say or do to defend
themselves. The existence or absence of past harms, according to Thornton, is
not admissible evidence in the debate over whether or not to ban future
production of a product: only the possibility of injury matters. (360) If we
grant some of Thornton’s many assumptions about toxicology, epidemiology, and
ecosystems (discussed below), then a prima facie case can be built against
virtually any manufacturing process.
Who, in Thornton’s ideal
world, would put manufacturers on trial for the safety of their current and
proposed products (including those unintended products of their current and
proposed production processes)? “A transition planning board that includes
representatives of all affected stakeholders, such as workers, communities,
environmentalists, the general public, and the businesses that use and produce
chlorine-based products.” (356-7)
Once the chlorine industry is
placed under the people’s control and “sunset,” writes Thornton, similar boards
would be created to run other industries. “In this larger context, the democratic
approach like the transition planning process could be extended to evaluate
other classes of substances and technologies as candidates for phaseout and to
implement sunsetting procedures for the ones that are deemed ecologically
undesirable.” (428) Industries on Thornton’s hit list include nuclear energy,
forestry, mining, fishing, and farming. (428)
The true price of
surrendering the principles of conventional science to Thornton’s “new”
paradigm starts to become clear at this point. Scientists are not to be
entrusted with the task of measuring risks (417, 420, 422) and business leaders
are not to be entrusted with the decision of deciding what is or is not
efficient. (400) Instead, we will all sit down around a big table and reach a
consensus on what “our” businesses should do.
It will be a lively dialogue
among “workers (a.k.a. union leaders), communities (a.k.a. non-governmental
organizations), environmentalists (a.k.a. Greenpeace staffers), the general
public (chosen how?), and the businesses that use and produce chlorine-based
products (a.k.a the only stakeholders at the table who are risking their own
capital and stand to lose money if the board’s advice turns out to be faulty).”
I pray the reader doesn’t
think this reviewer is expressing doubt that such a scheme would work in
practice, because I believe it would work very much as Thornton expects.
The board would begin cautiously, deferring to the expertise of business
leaders and the community’s desire for jobs. Then it would gradually stop approving
new products and production processes, citing the precautionary principle. Then
it would call for the gradual phasing out of the manufacturer’s current product
line, to be replaced by a new product (market and price as yet unknown) thought
by the majority of board members to pose a smaller risk to human health and
burden on the environment. The manufacturer will disappear, whether through
bankruptcy, simple abandonment, or stress-induced heart disease, and the
anti-market environmentalist’s ideal will have been attained: No production, no
consumption, no pollution, no disturbance of the global ecological system. (Part III to follow)
Joseph Bast is president of The Heartland Institute and coauthor of Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism.
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