Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Environmentalists and Priorities


Don Roberts, Prof. of Tropical Public Health, Uniformed Services University: "If you look at the amount of money going into a vaccine, it's probably in the billions" Roberts says. "Look into what's gone in to drugs to treat malaria and that's probably in the tens of billions. Then there's the environmentalist fight against DDT, which has probably also consumed billions of dollars," he notes. "But how much is being spent on an insecticide that would be less controversial and yet could be more effective at killing mosquitoes than DDT? Zero."

He adds, "For me, it's a failure that's almost breathtaking."....Defeating Malaria with both High and Low-Tech, Michael Fumento, TCS Daily, 4/4/2007

Failure? Naivete about politics is one of the sweeter (but treacherous) aspects of a scientist. What the environmental movement succeeded in doing by a UN-mandated ban on DDT (now partially lifted) was to allow more than thirty million people to die who might otherwise have lived. How did they get away with actions that killed five times as many people as the "Final Solution" in Nazi Germany? There wasn't any difference in their publicly declared rationale of "cleansing society". There wasn't any real difference in the primary population of victims. The Jews were regarded in German law as non-human. The principal victims in malaria's toll are dark-skinned and live in poor countries. There's no specific label of non-human attached, but, if one class of humans is regarded as worth saving and another, as easily identifiable, as expendable, what's the difference? What Michael Fumento and Don Roberts look at is the most horrifying example of doing good without a thought about consequences, the worst kind of Left-wing politics, and one of the world's great evils.

Luther

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