Why Doesn't The Precautionary Principle Apply Here?

Precautionary double standards - Wind turbines kill birds and harm people. Why doesn’t the “precautionary principle” apply?

 Rich Kozlovich 

 

Editor's Note:  I originally published this on June 19,2013, and was updated on 6/20/2013 with input from Paul Driessen. None of the links work any longer work. RK

Jessica Marszelek, federal politics reporter for Australia’s News Limited Network, recently posted an article titled, “Australia: Wind power 'terrorising' rural communities.” Some 150 people turned up for a three-hour rally at Canberra’s Parliament House, she reported, to express their concern about the health effects of wind turbines.

The residents from small towns around the country complain that the giant turbines cause “a constant rumbling and pulsing in their heads and a feeling of oppressive anxiety,” she noted. “Everyday farmers” are upset over growing numbers of turbines in their communities. 

“Retired Naval electronics engineering officer and beef farmer” David Mortimer receives Aus$12,000 a year to allow these avian Cuisinarts on his land, and 17 more are planned. However, Mr. Mortimer says he now “suffers night-time panic attacks, acute anxiety, heart palpitations, tinnitus, earaches, headaches and angina-like pains, and his wife has dizzy spells.”

Doctors can’t find anything wrong, but the problems continue, and he claims that he gets “this sensation of absolute acute anxiety, and it feels like someone is pushing an x-ray blanket over me and weighting me down into the chair and I can’t get out. We’ve got this constant turmoil, constant pulsing in our head, constant rumbling,” he continues, and is afraid the added windmills will kill him and his wife.

Clean Energy Council Policy Director Russell Marsh dismissed the claims, saying no international research has confirmed the health impacts attributed to wind power. One rally attendee said there is “not enough research into the effects of wind energy.”

I don’t know whether more research needs to be done – though the dearth of such studies seems unjustifiable – or if these monsters of the skyline really are causing any or all of the health problems these people are suffering. However, there is a monumental lack of consistency in all of this.

These are essentially the same kinds of complaints, comments and anecdotal evidence that the green movement repeatedly raises over just about every chemical on the market, and every drilling, pipeline and other hydrocarbon development proposal they dislike. These are the same speculative, anecdotal arguments that prompted governments all over the world to pass anti-chemical regulations such as the European Union’s costly, burdensome and complex regulatory system known as REACH.

 

In the USA, REACH has inspired the Safe Chemicals Act of 2011 ( SCA), which is intended to replace the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), supposedly to “modernize” the country’s chemical laws. In promoting the bill, the late Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) said it would impose “a mandate on companies to confirm safety before chemicals reach the market.” 

 

In short, he wanted to impose the Precautionary Principle (PP), which asserts two precepts.

• First, all products must be proven totally safe under all circumstances before they can be used – which is physically and scientifically impossible (and the greens know it). It’s like demanding that spouses prove they aren’t cheating on their mates; it can’t be done. 
• Second, even if there is no scientific evidence of harm, everyone should assume there is harm and forbid the sale and use of – well, just about everything.

As one observer noted, with the Precautionary Principle, “no evidence is needed that something is harmful or even could be harmful.” In many cases, no amount of scientific evidence is ever enough to counter the argument that a refinery, pipeline, nuclear power plant or other technology  is “not proven safe” beyond all doubt – even if it is “astronomically unlikely” that a particular harm would occur.

“The Precautionary Principle insists that no new technology should be permitted until it can be shown that it will pose no threat to human health or the environment,” environmental analyst Paul Driessen adds, “even if there is no evidence that cause-and-effect dangers actually exist.” 

 

This too is impossible.

The PP “focuses on the risks of using chemicals and technologies – but never on the risks of not using them,” Driessen notes. “It highlights risks that a technology might cause, but ignores the risks that the technology would reduce or prevent.” 

This brings me to the thrust of my concern. Why aren’t these assertions of adverse health effects from wind turbines – especially from citizens who are receiving royalties for having turbines on their property – just as important as wildly speculative claims by green activists regarding insecticides and other chemicals?  Why isn’t the Precautionary Principle being applied in this case?

We absolutely know these monsters are killing at least 573,000 birds every year, including some 83,000 eagles, hawks and other raptors – in clear violation of US laws. Other estimates put the toll at closer to 13,000,000 birds and bats annually. Why are the “precautionary” activists stone-cold silent about that? 

Larry Katzenstein, in his chapter in the book Silent Spring at 50, credits Rachel Carson’s work as the inspiration for the so-called “principle.” The PP can certainly be traced to Europe, where it was first brought up in the context of the 1969 Swedish Environmental Protection Act. That’s probably why the “principle” is so deeply entrenched in the EU, compared to the rest of the world, and was included in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. 

As Katzenstein points out:

 

“In the united States Silent Spring’s popularity spurred enactment of key federal laws that embody aspects of precaution regulation: the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act; the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act; the Safer Drinking Water Act, Environmental Pesticides Control Act, Toxic Substances Control Act and Endangered Species Act.” The PP may be a European creation, but “it was inspired by Silent Spring, as was REACH.”

Rachel Carson’s real legacy, the Precautionary Principle, has become a potent weapon for anti-technology activists. The problem with regard to consistency get larger as we come to realize that whatever they support is permitted; whatever they oppose violates the precautionary principle. They support windmills; therefore there is no violation. They oppose fracking; therefore it violates the principle.

Moreover, as Driessen has observed, eco-activists “never use the precautionary dictum to control regulatory excess, by insisting that regulators refrain from implementing new regulations, policies or energy programs, until they can prove their proposed actions will not harm people, wildlife or the environment.” In the view of activists and regulators, regulations exist to delay, block or destroy things they oppose. The fact that regulatory actions may well cause prolonged energy deprivation, poverty, unemployment, disease, malnutrition or premature death is irrelevant to them. 

Returning to where we started: Why do “eco-minded” activists, regulators and politicians fail to use the Precautionary Principle to assess the harmful effects of wind turbines on birds and bats, and thus on insects and other pests that these creatures control? Why do they fail to consider the impacts that constant subsonic noise and vibrations from wind turbines have on human health and welfare?   

 

Because these are deliberate oversights!

The hard reality is that the green movement does not care about facts, wildlife or humans – and logical consistency is totally alien to them – because advancing environmentalism as the secular religion of urban atheists is all that matters. Green elites “know” what is best for all of humanity. The Precautionary Principle is merely another weapon to promote junk science and Hard Green ideologies, in order to destroy every advancement mankind has made over the last 100 years – advancements that have given us better, longer, healthier lives than at any other time in human history – and keep others from enjoying them.

We need to understand that and stop pandering to these misfits. Why is that so difficult to grasp?

A Prince Who Was Potty, is Now a King Who is Potty, and Dangerously So!

By Rich Kozlovich 

This from a piece I wrote in 2014, and  given his recent lunatic blathering at COP 28, I think this is information that needs to be brought forward to reaffirm the fact a Prince who was potty, is now a King who is still potty, and is still dangerously so.  

When he was Prince Charles he was criticized a lot over the years, including for claiming how ‘crucial’ it is to talk to plants. He claims:

"I happily talk to the plants and trees, and listen to them. I think it's absolutely crucial," "Everything I've done here, it's like almost with your children. Every tree has a meaning for me."

I’m willing to bet the ancient Druids felt the same way.   One thing we must come to understand about these ‘green’ loons is this.  The issue is now and has always been, the battle between nature worshipers and worshipers of God. Modern environmentalism is nothing more than a secular neo-pagan nature worshiping movement that is irrational, misanthropic and morally defective, dressed up to appear modern and science based in its approach and thinking.

I’ve been reading R. Mark Musser’s Nazi Oaks, which outlines the historical accuracy of my statement. The policies, philosophy and programs promoted by the Green movement in the West, including the Prince’s, originated in the dark mist covered forests of ancient Germania and the nature worship of the ancient Celtic religion of the Druids, who were the educated, professional class of their culture, and, whose function was to be the intermediaries between the gods and mankind. They would make the decisions for their people.  Sound familiar?

In the mid to late 1800’s German philosophers attempted to define these pagan originated concepts into a modern philosophy, and people like Martin Heidegger, who promoted his green claptrap well into the 20^th century, helped to develop it into codified law under the Nazis. Everything the green movement has espoused in modern times is nothing more than a carbon copy of Nazi green laws, including the Precautionary Principle.

It has been claimed that the Precautionary Principle originated in the 1970's, with the German green movement and the influence of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. That may have been a strong influence for adopting it in the Maastricht treaty, but while the origin is clearly German, the philosophy goes back much further. According to Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen in a chapter which appeared in the book “Interpreting the Precautionary Principle” edited by Tim O’Riordan and James Cameron, the Precautionary Principle;

“evolved out of the German Socio-legal tradition, created in the heyday of democratic socialism in the 1930’s, centering on the concept of good household management. This was regarded as a constructive partnership between the individual, the economy and the state to manage change so as to improve the lot of both society and the natural world upon which it deepened for survival. This invested the precautionary principle with a managerial or programmable quality, a purposeful role in guiding future political and regularity action.

In short, under the concept of Precautionary Principle, which no matter what is claimed is virtually indefinable in the real world, or if you will, unendingly re-definable according to someone's whims, was codifying central planning for everything by elitists bureaucrats that “know best” for everyone and who would make all the decisions using ‘saving the planet’ as a theme to justify tyranny. Remember who ran Germany in the 1930’s? Adolph Hitler! A monstrous incompetent whose:

“Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick considered those who were mentally ill, incurable sick or handicapped to be useless eaters”. He was one of the primary authors of Nazi euthanasia law. Accordingly his contribution to “Nazism was to envisage the monstrous and cloak it in law”.

Please keep that sentence in mind as we go along.  The Prince has been quoted as saying:

 "I got a lot of flak for a lot of things”….."I mean, potty this, potty that, loony this, loony that." 

Well, maybe there’s a reason for those expressed views.  They're accurate!

This is a future monarch who privately ‘consorts’ with government ministers to promote his pet policies, including his views on climate change, modern agricultural practices, genetically modified organisms, which he claims:

 “despite all evidence to the contrary, will lead to mass extinction of our species”. 

And he knew this how?  If all the evidence was to the contrary, how does he justify saying all that will lead to the extinction of our species?    One journalist, Jeff Randall, suggested to the Prince that the future of farming perhaps should be with industrial-scale production, the Prince 'exploded' saying:

'That would be the complete destruction of everything!'  

Okay, and just how is that destruction to come about, and what is the "everything" he's so worried about?  Just like all these leftist loons he's strong on emotional and rhetoric, but stunningly low on facts, and/or specifics.  If he wasn't a royal would any rational person listen to anything he says?   And yet after all his blathering over the years he was frustrated because no one in government will go along with his ‘potty’ views on things like 'complementary medicine’, which would include coffee enemas as a cure for cancer.  Coffee enemas for a cure for cancer, imagine that. 

Quite frankly, before Prince Charles, I never understood why the British has a Constitutional Monarchy that’s not permitted to express opinions, privately or publicly.  Now I know.

It’s claimed Charles isn’t an unkind man, in fact it appears just the opposite according to one writer, but the caliber of his mind must be called into question. It’s been said:

“If you are waiting to be the King of the United Kingdom, and you’ve waited a very long time, you genuinely have to engage with something or you’d go spare.” 

Well, perhaps that’s the problem. This is man who has lived an amazingly privileged life, for which he did nothing to earn, and desperately desires to be meaningful.  Well, he chose poorly, and from my viewpoint, he’s a failure, and I think that's the way he'll go down in history!

One writer noted;

“While he is always accorded the reputation of being a 'progressive', in fact, he is a spectacularly reactionary figure, whose ideal vision of Britain is a kind of pre-industrial paradise — which never existed.“

There are a number of things we know for sure. The policies Charles promotes are:

“renewable energy only, no pesticides, no industrial-scale farming — would lead to a crippling increase in the prices of everything from home heating to the cereal we feed our children.” “The point is that all the technological advances the Prince detests have been designed to reduce the cost of living for the public. Yes, the companies that make those breakthroughs are motivated above all by the desire to increase profits — but that does not make their achievements contemptible. “

As for Nobel-Prize winner Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution which saved untold millions in India - the Prince denounced it. Truth is the sublime convergence of history and reality, and the ‘self sufficient and sustainable’ practices the Prince promotes “slaughtered millions of populations on the subcontinent”. Is it possible he can’t be aware of that? That’s a historical fact he must be aware of.  The Prince is, as all the world’s leaders, at the center of the information world.  How can he be unaware of the history of what occurred before modern agriculture?

Norman Borlaug was what Prince Charles would love to be: A truly great man!  Who may have been the greatest man to live in the 20^th century for his “Green Revolution”, possibly saving the lives of a billion people from starvation. A man who earned all the accolades accorded to him including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and India’s second highest civilian honor, the Padma Vibhushan.

When Borlaug's work has been challenged by these prominent pampered people like the Prince he states:

'They have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be outraged that fashionable elitists were trying to deny them these things.”

Charles is dangerous in a number of ways because he has a platform on the world's stage:

1. He’s is either historically ignorant, or chooses to be.  
2. He is intellectually and scientifically ignorant, or chooses to be.    
3. He must be morally clueless, and clearly chooses to be.
4. He’s chosen to ignore the history and science showing all his views are irrational, misanthropic and morally defective.
   

Charles and his misanthropic cohorts make the claim they’re saving the planet, but the reality is they’re codifying or attempting to codify laws that would be monstrous to billions of people. They’re not saving the planet they’re attempting to impose a worldwide government that will plan and execute laws at the expense of the people living on it. The number one thought that's shared by all these greenies is there are too many people on the planet.  The 'moderates' among them wish to eliminate between four and five billion people.  The minority wishes for mankind to cease to exist.   The ancient druids would be totally comfortable with the modern green movement since they share the need for human sacrifice. 

Just like the Nazis, the green movement, along with the wealthy elite pushing these insane initiatives, "envisage the monstrous and cloak it in law”.  I've often wondered if a man that clueless could be elected to a position of power and authority, and then I found out.  Joe Biden became President of the United States.

Viewpoint: Farmers’ crops are failing, and Europe’s precautionary assault on neonicotinoid insecticides is to blame

David Zaruk | Genetic Literacy Project | March 8, 2019

As the present leaderless European Commission limps to its pathetic end, Europeans will want to forget its five year string of failures and missteps across a wide range of issues. One section of the European population who will never forget the last five years of incompetence will be farmers, who have suffered from an endless stream of cowardly precautionary fixes that went against scientific evidence, political compromises that played into interest groups over agriculture and the rising influence of the organic food lobby and neo-Marxist greens hell-bent on furthering a confused, medieval perception of the countryside.

Yes, The Risk-Monger is angry. Farmers’ crops are failing at an alarming rate and someone should inform these proud precautionistas in Brussels that it’s their bloody fault.

A litany of failure

Before these civil servants in DG Santé raise a glass to celebrate their achievements over the last Commission in defending what was never under threat; before they empty their desks and move on to lucrative new careers; before they try to write a positive spin on the last five years of regulatory negligence, it seems reality is coming to bite them in the face. This Commission will leave office aware they have decimated European farming far greater than any wide-scale drought or war could ever have done. The impact on EU agriculture from the precautionary zealots in DG Santé should be compared to swarms of locusts being left to consume the land.

A reminder of the European Commission’s litany of failure towards EU farmers:.......To Read More....

Precautionary Principle: We Must Ban Driving To Whole Foods

Alex Berezow March 18, 2019 @ The American Council on Science and Health 

"Better safe than sorry." That's a great lesson for a child when a parent explains why she should wear a helmet when riding her bicycle. But "better safe than sorry" makes for terrible public health policy.

" Why? Because humans in general (and politicians in particular) are terrible at understanding risk. The reason is because to fully comprehend the concept of risk, a person must have a very good understanding of statistics and data analysis. The average person has neither.

What do you think is more dangerous, walking to the corner grocery store to eat GMOs every day or driving to the nearest Whole Foods to avoid GMOs? Most people would probably pick the former; in reality, the latter is, by far, more dangerous. Each year, about 40,000 Americans die in fatal car crashes, a substantial number of which happen close to home. Nobody has yet died from a GMO.

If we were to implement a "better safe than sorry" policy in this situation, the data make the decision obvious: People should be banned from driving to Whole Foods.

Of course, that "common sense" policy is pure gibberish. As a society, we have decided that the benefits of driving outweigh the associated risk. Yes, there is a very real chance that you will die on your next trip to Whole Foods, but the risk is quite small. Even though we don't consciously realize it, we tacitly acknowledge this risk-benefit ratio every time we climb into a vehicle.

NYT Editorial Endorses the Precautionary Principle

The "better safe than sorry" policy has an actual name: The precautionary principle. It has been enshrined into EU law, and many environmental and health activists believe something similar should be implemented in the United States. In a recent editorial titled "Why Does the U.S. Tolerate So Much Risk?", the New York Times echoed that sentiment.

The article begins reasonably enough. It questions the FAA's delayed decision to ground Boeing 737 Max 8 planes while many other countries were quicker to act. The editorial argues that Europe's precautionary mindset led them to make the right decision faster, while America's tolerance for risk delayed the right decision. Then, the editorial draws a parallel to bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical found in plastics, which it apparently believes should be banned on precautionary grounds due to its alleged "endocrine disrupting" ability.

But this is very faulty reasoning. Two crashed airplanes constitute substantial evidence of harm. There is no comparably damning evidence, however, for BPA. It's not even clear if endocrine disruption poses any health risk whatsoever to humans. A review published in Toxicology Letters in 2013 concluded: 

"Overall, despite of [sic] 20 years of research a human health risk from exposure to low concentrations of exogenous chemical substances with weak hormone-like activities remains an unproven and unlikely hypothesis." [Emphasis added]

The reason BPA is used by manufacturers is because it is a useful plastic. It is even added as a liner to cans in order to prevent food from spoiling. It's perfectly legitimate to ask if the chemical is safe. But we should also be prepared to accept the answer (yes) after we investigate. The NYT fails to grasp this. The editorial writer argues:

"The United States Food and Drug Administration insisted there was no evidence of danger. It did not remove the chemical from its list of approved substances in baby bottles until after manufacturers of baby bottles, concerned about a consumer backlash, stopped using BPA voluntarily."

This is very poor reasoning. The job of the FDA is to objectively analyze data for evidence of safety or harm. It's job is to ignore the will of the mob, not succumb to it. Data, not political pressure, is what should drive the FDA's decisions.

The editorial also praises Europe for banning neonicotinoids, a useful pesticide that has been erroneously blamed for killing honey bees. In reality, the honey bees are fine.  Ultimately, this is why the precautionary principle is bad policy. Far too often, the people responsible for implementing it -- politicians responding to noisy, uninformed voters -- make "common sense" policies that aren't rooted in scientific reality.

That puts us on the road to banning people from driving to Whole Foods.

ALARA : An alternative policy tool to the precautionary principle

Posted by riskmonger on November 14, 2017

In my last blog, I briefly outlined seven reasons why the EU’s dependence on the precautionary principle (EEA interpretation) as its main environmental-health policy tool was destructive (to the public trust in science, to the environment, to public health and to a sustainable supply chain). Although a natural impulse, precaution uses a non-scientific logic that allows it to be manipulated by environmental activists and policy-makers. It should be relegated as a policy tool and certain EU directives and regulations should be revised and clarified before the damage becomes irreversible.
Revised to what? You cannot just remove a major policy tool without considerations for how people act or respond to situations. Fortunately there is an alternative to precaution that we also have been using, but the tendency is less reactive, more rational (and it does not lead to catastrophic consequences).............

ALARA stands for As Low As Reasonably Achievable. It is not a new concept, it is how researchers and responsible businesses think and act. I would call it “common sense”. Any research engagement, any innovation first discovers, then develops and then refines. Any human aspiration is to make things better, and where there are risks, it is natural to want to reduce exposure to them.

Unlike precaution, which is black or white (prove to me that mobile phones are safe, then you can sell them), ALARA promotes a continuous process of improvement. The discussion is not over whether something is safe or not, but rather, given the risks, costs and benefits, what is reasonably achievable. Reason enters into the dialogue: is this the best product, substance or process to achieve this benefit; if so, how can we reduce the risks further or refine the process? Can you meet that target? In what time-frame? This is what happened with the mobile phone industry and they were very successful (although I had personally witnessed how the EEA’s David Gee threatened the mobile phone industry at a Commission EMF conference in 2009 that their mandate could be revoked).........To Read More....

Steven Pinker: 'Solutions Create New Problems'

By Alex Berezow — June 22, 2017  

 

The Breakthrough Dialogue is an annual meeting of a politically diverse group of scientists, professors, journalists, think-tankers, and others who discuss technological solutions to environmental and social problems*. Referring to themselves as "ecomodernists," they represent everything environmentalism should be: pro-science, pro-technology, pro-human, and bipartisan.

One of the featured speakers at this year's Dialogue was the preeminent Harvard scientist Steven Pinker. He is an optimist who believes that, in general, the world is getting better. (Sadly, only 6% of Americans agree with him.) Dr. Pinker concluded his talk with the following insight:

"Problems are inevitable. Problems are solvable. Solutions create new problems."

How profound. It is worth examining this in the context of biotechnology.........If we don't solve them, we die. If we do solve them, we will eventually face a new set of problems. This pattern repeats indefinitely.........People died of bacterial infections. To overcome that problem, we discovered antibiotics......Bacteria developed resistance to antibiotics. We responded by finding and synthesizing new antibiotics. But the bacteria persisted; we now have bacteria that are resistant to most or perhaps all antibiotics.  Does that mean we give up? No! We keep looking for new antibiotics...............To Read More....




 

Time to Get Rid of the EPA? Scott Pruitt May Be Just the Guy to Do It

Trump’s nominee for the EPA Administrator could — and should — abolish the agency

 

by Henry I. Miller December 20, 2016

 

Several commentators have characterized the selection of Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to become the next EPA Administrator as a sharp stick in the eye to the agency and its employees. They’re right — and seldom has any herd of federal bureaucrats been more deserving of it. For decades, in administrations Democratic and Republican alike, the EPA has been relentlessly ideological, politicized, corrupt, and incompetent..........I found the EPA to be relentlessly anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-industry. The only thing it seemed to be for was the Europeans’ innovation-busting “precautionary principle,” the view that until a product or activity has been definitively proven safe, it should be banned or at least smothered with regulation. In fact, during international discussions and negotiations over the harmonization of biotechnology regulations in which I participated, the EPA often seemed allied with the European Union and committed to working against U.S. interests..........Read more

 

 

 

Pathways of the Past are the Stepping Stones to the Future!

By Rich Kozlovich

This article will seem to be somewhat disjointed because I am using two articles that are seemingly unassociated for foundation. In reality I am using them as a way of creating 'coherence through connectives'. Two things must be made clear. First, words mean things but are constantly being warped and twisted by radicals to obfuscate reality. Secondly, everything we are told is a lie. Mostly lies of omission, but the end result of both of these articles is to show that humanity is being duped by prominent people, i.e., leaders in every area of influence. We really do need to get that.

In John Hawkins article, 10 Concepts Liberals Talk About Incessantly But Don't Understand, he starts out with this quote from Ronald Reagan: 

"It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so." 

And this by the character Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride:

“You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means”.

Which is a great lead in to the 10 clarifications about terms in his article that are being redefined so often that they are becoming somewhat indefinable. He covers the difference between how conservatives and liberals define the following terms:

Open Mindedness, Racism, Fairness, Greed, Hate, Investment, Charity, Patriotism, Tolerance and Diversity. 

Why has this become so complicated? That's the easy part! 

As long as we are incapable of defining words and terms properly we can be led in directions that we may not have been willing to go otherwise. This has been a tactic on the left since the French Revolution, refined and promoted by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao. And today it is being practiced by people who have become far more expert at it, the mainstream media, the green activists, statists and leftists who are insatiable in their drive for power and money.

This brings me to another article that I think is equally thought provoking and I will lead in with it by asking a question that I have asked quite often. How many government employees, bureaucrats, boards, commissions, agencies or elected officials picked Microsoft to be a winner? Of course the answer is ….None! 

Government doesn’t pick winners and losers well, however government is often excellent at making winners and losers through taxes and regulations.  Although, when one takes a look at all the 'green' companies that are falling over the precipice into bankruptcy....to the tune of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, one has to conclude that government can't even seem to make winners competently.

Even with all the artificial mandates they have installed to make ‘green’ companies successful they have failed.   The fact that government doesn’t govern well should automatically force us to ask why we would expect it to administer anything involving business with any lesser degree of incompetence. (Interesting wording there don’t you think?)

This brings me to an article by Jim Powell dealing with the real history and reality of what has been touted as a ‘jewel’ of success of the New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority! The truth is somewhat different. Jim Powell is “a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of FDR's Folly, Bully Boy, and Greatest Emancipations” originally wrote this article in March of 2009 appearing in Reason, entitled How Big Government Infrastructure Projects Go Wrong. It is no less profound today (perhaps more so) than it was then.

[The Tennessee Valley Authority] was heralded as a program to build dams that would control floods, facilitate navigation, lift people out of poverty, and help America recover from the Great Depression. Yet the reality is that the TVA probably flooded more land than it protected; much of the navigation it has facilitated involves barges of coal for coal-fired power plants; people receiving TVA-subsidized electricity have increasingly lagged behind neighbors who did not; and the TVA's impact on the Great Depression was negligible. The TVA morphed into America's biggest monopoly, dominating an 80,000 square mile region with 8.8 million people—for all practical purposes, it is a bureaucratic kingdom subject to neither public nor private controls………On top of that, the TVA is exempt from federal antitrust laws and many federal environmental regulations. It's also exempt from some 165 laws and regulations in Alabama and hundreds more laws and regulations in other states in which it operates……..TVA "has the poorest safety record with [nuclear] reactors." …Tennessee coal-fired plant, the dike of a 40-acre holding pond broke, spilling as much as a billion gallons of coal sludge with elevated levels of arsenic. The sludge covered some 300 acres up to six feet deep, damaging homes and wrecking a train. This spill reportedly was much bigger than the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker that went aground in Alaska...

Did you know any of that? If not; do we think that we should be asking why? The TVA has always been touted as an example of how government can do wonderful things for society, yet that is abundantly false.

Where is all of this going? I am laying intellectual foundation to justify a future article that demonstrates that there is a huge difference between businesses and businesses, and their needs and desires. Big business isn't necessarily on the side of businesses in general…. or as we say…. on our side. And the more I involve myself in defending our industry against unwarranted legislation, foolish policies, stifling regulations and completely idiot philosophies such as 'green pest control' I realize that as allies, the ‘big business’ in pest control, i.e., the large chemical manufacturers are at best leaky vessels.

An example of such foolishness can be realized by the American Chemistry Council’s initial support of Sen. Lautenberg’s assault on chemicals known as the Safe Chemicals Act, which if passed, would replace the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA) of 1976. First introduced in 2005 by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), the Safe Chemicals Act (SCA) would require that manufacturers must first prove a chemical is safe before it’s approved for use. As the law currently stands, the EPA must demonstrate that a chemical already in use poses substantial health risks before it can be phased out. This would be the American equivalent of Europe’s legislative insanity called REACH, which was the inspiration for the SCA, both of which are nothing more than a back door approach to imposing The Precautionary Principle on humanity, which requires “that if the evidence about a product, technology, or activity is any way incomplete, it should be prohibited or at least stringently regulated”, which of course creates an unending open door for the activists to find areas of criticism.

Both the Precautionary Principle and the SCA require that you must prove a product safe or it cannot be approved and if it has been approved under old standards must be removed? In order to do any of the things this bill requires will mean massive amounts of animal testing. Testing that other activists will be outraged over, then in turn demanding the government pass legislation that stops the slaughter of these ‘innocent’ animals. Do you see the dilemma?

SCA will be an unending attack on industry at every level at some point. Just because it doesn’t directly deal with pesticides we can be assured, based on past history, if passed, the activists will find some federal judge that will expand the interpretation of SCA to include far more than Congress’ original intention. Let’s face it. Most of the legislative authority of the EPA was not given to them by the legislature. It was imposed by the judiciary.

The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act are being used in ways that the Congress never intended when they voted on it, and Members of Congress openly say so.

Let’s go back to the “you can’t use it unless you can prove it’s safe” idea. You cannot in any way prove something is safe. You can only prove something is unsafe. It is called proving a negative, a scientific impossibility! Why would any chemical company support such nonsense? Worse yet, why would an association that represents chemical companies do so? Although they later rescinded their support, one has to wonder what was wrong with their minds in the first place! Unless of course they believed there was something to be gained. Is it possible that large companies would thrive if their smaller cousins suffered? I will address this in the next article. But remember….there is no such thing as a conspiracy, however, having read a history book or two I have found examples of ….welllll….let’s say behavior that could be construed as conspiratorial.

Previous to the U.S. involvement in WWII the largest manufacturers and lending institutions were directly involved in the buildup of Nazi Germany. Actually, I don’t have a problem with that. There was no reason any of them shouldn't have taken advantage of the financial opportunities of Germany’s new economy.  There was a worldwide economy long before today and even before WWII. Although it was as false economy as Hitler’s economic manipulations were going to come crashing down around his head if Hitler didn’t get his war started according to the book “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. However, many of these ‘big businesses’ would have been more than happy to keep doing business with both Germany and Japan (and did so throughout the war) along with the Allies, with the knowledge of the Roosevelt Administration.  I have a problem with that1

We see pesticide manufacturers doing things that seem incomprehensible. We see government agencies piling on regulations with absolutely no clue as to the end result. We see the negative consequences of these actions, like the current bed bug plague, and we find them continuing on in these obviously failed policies. We see what appears as the chemical manufacturers actively working with the EPA to make fewer products. Why? Is it possible they seem to think there is a way they will gain against their competitors?

That is where this is going and I am merely laying the ground work for a future article. First I wanted to establish two things. Everything must be properly defined to get the correct understanding, and everything we are told are lies of omission, if not outright lies of commission. There is a reason I have chosen, “De Omnibus Dubitandum, question everything”, as my personal motto. Mostly because I have read a history book or two.

As my last thought; I have been absolutely assured by close friends, for whom I have great personal affection, many of whom have never read a history book, there is absolutely no such thing as a conspiracy.

I have been working on them though and I begin to think they may be having doubts.

More to come!

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Green charities: way more evil and dangerous than Exxon or the Koch Brothers

James Delingpole

James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy, Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com. I would like to thank James for allowing me to publish his works. RK

Your glorious green future!

Sorry, I find Europe so paralysingly depressing I can't possibly blog about it. Instead, here's a piece of investigative journalism to gladden the heart from Norman Rogers – a physicist and senior advisor at the Heartland Institute.

It describes how he cunningly infiltrated his way into the belly of the Green Beast – aka the America's oldest environmental organisation, the Sierra Club – using the brilliantly clever device of paying for membership. Like Greenpeace, like the WWF, the Sierra Club would love you to imagine that it is a plucky little David battling the Goliaths of Big Carbon, Big Industry, Big Pollution, Big Corporate Greed, Big Koch, and so on. In fact – again like Greenpeace, like the WWF – it is enormously well-funded with an $84 million annual budget and 1.4 million members. This would be nice if it didn't use all that money and influence promoting such terrible causes.

As Rogers notes in American Thinker:

The Sierra Club idolizes nature and demonizes man. It glorifies economic parasitism and practices junk science.

The article's fascinating and well worth reading in full, especially for the bit where the Sierra Club's green panelists start squirming over the issue of all the birds that are killed by wind farms. The Sierra Club, of course, is a huge advocate of wind farms.

But the bit that interested me most was Rogers's description of the "linear no threshold hypothesis." It sounds to me rather similar to the "Precautionary Principle" – another of those flimsy, superficially plausible excuses trotted out by the green movement to justify banning pretty much anything that smacks of capitalism, commonsense or scientific progress.

The Sierra Club campaign against coal is motivated by a desire to reduce CO2 emissions to prevent global warming. But since global warming skepticism and global warming fatigue are widespread, the club has opted for a junk science approach to reach its goals. The club tells people that their babies will die, or at least get asthma, if coal plants continue to operate. Although the cause of asthma is not known, it is suspected that it is related to the high levels of cleanliness in advanced countries that denies children and their immune systems exposure to the dirt and filth found in primitive places. This is known as the hygiene hypothesis. The incidence of asthma is about 50 times higher in developed countries compared to rural Africa. For all the Sierra Club knows, coal plants may prevent asthma. Given the hygiene hypothesis, that seems plausible.

With junk science, it is easy to scare people. There are many things that are bad for us that are present at low levels in the environment — for example, mercury, lead, radiation, or tobacco smoke. The junk science approach to trace toxins is to claim that if a high level of the bad thing would cause X people to get sick, then a level 10,000 times smaller must cause 1/10,000 as many people to get sick. Given 300 million people in the country, this math can give you thousands of people getting sick from low levels of mercury, lead, radiation, or secondhand tobacco smoke. This approach is known as the linear no threshold hypothesis.

The Sierra Club and its ally, the Environmental Protection Agency, lean on the small emissions of mercury from burning coal to work up a calculation of deaths from coal. They minimize the fact that much of the mercury falling on the U.S. comes from China, volcanoes, or even from burning dead bodies with mercury-based fillings in their teeth. Mercury pollution becomes an excuse to get rid of coal. Arguing the science behind such claims often degenerates into a paper chase about statistics and what studies are good or bad. From the bureaucratic point of view, the linear no threshold hypothesis is wonderful because it means that problems are never solved and there is always a need for more bureaucratic activity.

I think that of all the things I discovered while researching my book Watermelons, this was the one that shocked me most: the outrageous power wielded by democratically unaccountable environmental NGOs, with the budgets of big corporations and the political philosophy of Marxists. As Donna Laframboise describes in her brilliant book The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken For The World's Top Climate Expert they've heavily infiltrated the IPCC. And as this terrifying video featuring Friends of the Earth green activist turned Labour peer Bryony Worthington shows, they've also had a grotesquely disproportionate influence on British government policy. Meanwhile we learn from FOIAs by Chris Horner that NASA's chief activist-scientist James Hansen was paid (on top of his federal salary) $250 an hour by a Canadian law firm to testify in a campaign against an Alberta oil sand company.

Worth thinking about, next time you hear a green charity bleating about the evils of all those climate deniers out there lavishly funded by Big Oil. God, I so picked the wrong side to be on: if I'd chosen to join the junk science, eco-fascist climate scam, I wouldn't be so worried about what's happening to the global economy. A) because I'd be so rich it wouldn't matter. And B) because I'd probably be quite pleased it was going down the toilet. After all isn't deindustrialisation, the preservation of "scarce resources" and a return to the bracing, back-breaking misery of the Agrarian age what the Watermelons of Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the WWF, NASA and Friends of the Earth been campaigning for all along?


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