Capitol Ideas / The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
Bethell, Tom
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare by Tom Bethell S cientific ideas have been shaped by culturally dominant ideas in the past, and in that sense science has always been partly "political." Today,...
...Let us return to simpler ways .. . Simpler and safer...
...Fred Hallett, a vice-president of White Consolidated Industries, makers of refrigeration equipment, told me that "CFCs, and in particular CFC-11 and CFC-12, were ideal for their purposes...
...Al Gore says in Earth in the Balance that after he "announced his disturbing discovery," he "suffered a form of scientific persecution...
...The Senate resolved, by a vote of 96-0, that CFCs should be phased out even more rapidly...
...There are going to be a lot of disgruntled Sunbelt motorists this summer...
...There is no coercive tyranny, merely a tyranny of opinion...
...T he first effects will be felt this summer...
...Last April 15, Boyce Rensberger, the Post's chief science writer, concluded a lengthy, mostly reasonable review of the topic with the following escape clause: "So well are the corrective measures proceeding that scientists who have been looking for effects of ozone depletion say it may not be possible to document any before the massive injection of CFCs into the atmosphere fades away...
...Come now...
...At the time of the negotiations and signing, no measurable evidence of damage existed...
...The environmentalists have been principally responsible for this—although more recently AIDS research has been similarly debased...
...24 The American Spectator February 1994 It is ten miles upwind from the measuring station in McMurdo Sound and its peak is only a thousand meters below the Antarctic stratosphere...
...The U.S...
...Time magazine duly echoed that "danger is shining through the sky," and Senator Al Gore, whose apocalyptical book had been published only a few days earlier, said that parents must teach their children "to think of the sky as a threatening part of their environment...
...0 ne of the best examples of the hijacking of science has been the alarmism about a chemical threat to the ozone layer...
...negotiator, wrote in Ozone Diplomacy that "perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the treaty was its imposition of short-term economic costs to protect human health and the environment against unproved human dangers . . . dangers that rested on scientific theories, rather than on firm data...
...It has never actully been demonstrated as a fact that CFCs significantly impair the ozone layer...
...But the environmentalists are the main interest group to have figured out that science can be hijacked for ideological purposes...
...This "persecuted" scientist, incidentally, became president of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in February 1992...
...One excerpt: "If the latter half of the 20th century has been marked by human liberation movements, the final decade of the second millenium [sic] will be characterized by liberation movements among species, so that one day we can attain genuine equality among all living things...
...For a couple of decades, biology was admittedly politicized...
...Richard Benedick, the chief U.S...
...In what looked like a display of conspicuous green virtue, DuPont had earlier agreed to phase out production ahead of schedule...
...Our modern-day Lysenkos more nearly tell our hapless politicians what to say and think...
...The complex chemical reactions that he describes work out on paper but have not been shown to occur in the stratosphere...
...Today, however, for the first time in democracies, we are seeing a policy-driven activity that superficially resembles science but scorns its underlying methods...
...And no Lubyanka Prison is needed to whip our supine press corps into line...
...know that digging beneath the surface is not expected where the environment is concerned...
...This summer we are going to find out that they do, and at last we may see a political backlash...
...If we are exposed to excessive doses of ultraviolet, there is an increased -danger of skin cancer...
...The greens were maddened by this outbreak of politics...
...They are being developed much faster than the naysayers predicted," he wrote...
...No such evidence exists today...
...In the 1960s, for example, ozone worries (having nothing to do with CFCs) helped block development of the supersonic transport plane...
...Estimates for "retrofitting" units range up to $800...
...In mid-December the EPA contacted DuPont (which manufactures half the CFCs in the country), and was "pretty insistent" that the company should continue making Freon through 1995...
...I gather French scientists are now investigating the volcano...
...The situation in the U.S...
...They will be looking for someone to blame, and Vice President Gore, who has referred to CFCs as "the most dangerous substance known to man," comes to mind...
...The great problem with Rowland's the-ory is that its truth has been demonstrated only in computer models, not in reality...
...This irresponsible comment—what about plutonium?—shows how careless and arrogant environmentalists have become...
...As for the Antarctic hole, it appears to be nothing more than a seasonal variation, generated by the long Antarctic night...
...On the environmental and medical beats today, journalists are under the thumbs of government and private pressure groups and mechanically transmit their press releases...
...But the justification offered by the director of EPA's office of atmospheric programs was more revealing...
...If anything, the flow of authority has been reversed...
...Who is Sherwood Rowland...
...About 20 million cars need air-conditioning services every year, and 43 percent of them are in Southern states...
...many large apartment and office buildings cooled by central chillers will find themselves saddled with EPA regulations, but most important, drivers are going to find that repairing or recharging their automobile air-conditioners has suddenly become much more expensive...
...The alternatives we have had to turn to are all less suitable...
...A few months earlier, while acting president, Rowland had been a prominent signer of the Morelia Declaration, published as a one-third-page ad in the New York Times in 1991...
...In addition, there has been no demonstrated increase in ultraviolet rays striking the Earth, as the Washington Post has conceded...
...The NASA revelations were exquisitely timed to bolster the agency's budget request for its global climate change program, whose funding is slated to double by fiscal 1993," Ronald Bailey wrote in Eco-Scam...
...The idea, then, is that ozone is a valuable natural shield, which human beings endanger with their foolhardy and reckless tinkering with nature...
...Erebus, has all along been a factor in Antarctic ozone seems not to have been taken seriously by Government Science until a year or so ago...
...Some are less efficient, and all are more expensive...
...The Soviet Union may seem an obvious precedent, but the analogy, while enticing, is misleading...
...By then, though, pseudo-science supported by budget conscious agencies had produced far-reaching political and technological change without any political debate at all—an astounding achievement by the environmentalists...
...Suddenly he was no longer invited to address as many scientific meetings...
...In a nutshell, that is the scare...
...The "lesson of Watergate" may have been "Do not accept government statements uncritically," but that's all water under the bridge...
...The Third World will be particularly hard-hit...
...Ozone (an oxygen compound) is valuable because it intercepts ultraviolet rays...
...D The American Spectator February 1994 25...
...Furthermore, no global (as opposed to Antarctic) depletion of the ozone has yet been demonstrated...
...So the theory fails on both counts...
...The additional production was okay, he said, in view of "the relatively small change in the ozone layer...
...They have been emboldened, of course, by the total absence of Republican opposition on environmental issues, ever since the Environmental Protection Agency was founded by President Nixon...
...Melvyn Shapiro, chief of meteorological research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told Insight: "What you have to understand is that this is about money...
...But with Stalin as the all-powerful tyrant, Soviet scientists rationally kowtowed to him...
...When George Bush became president he was from the outset eager to do the enviros' bidding...
...John Dingell, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, told why...
...The New York Times and Newsweek, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...There's a danger of "a possible consumer backlash," he told the EPA administrator...
...Neither ozone loss nor ultraviolet increase has been demonstrated...
...Not enough time has elapsed to show an abnormal trend...
...But the New York Times reported last December 26: "The industry does not think these [recycling] initiatives can entirely head off a shortage unless a replacement is developed that can be easily substituted for CFC-12 in older cars...
...Now it was being urged to cook up another 76 million pounds of life-threatening substance...
...The Communists hoped to create New Soviet Man, and agronomists such as Trofim Lysenko obligingly claimed to have bred New Soviet Wheat (which could grow in the tundra...
...It was first measured in the 1950s, long before CFCs could have been responsible...
...In 1974, F. Sherwood Rowland, a political chemist from the University of California–Irvine, propounded the theory that chlorofluorocarbons (a DuPont trade name)—chemicals used in refrigeration and air conditioning—make their way into the stratosphere, where they supposedly gobble up ozone...
...It matters a great deal," the late Dixy Lee Ray, the former Atomic Energy Commission chairman, wrote in Environmental Overkill, "because our entire food transportation and marketing system depends on refrigeration, which in turn depends on CFCs...
...Other ozone-threatening candidates have included atomic testing and chemical fertilizers...
...Now they tell us...
...Hoover Institution Wesson fellow Sally Baliunis makes the same point...
...When he says jump, the EPA says how high, because bureaucrats' jobs are at stake...
...Did the noble Native Americans have air-conditioned wigwams...
...The possibility that an active, chlorine-spouting volcano, Mt...
...Companies "have been working on such a product, but they have not produced a breakthrough...
...In some cases this will be more than the car is worth...
...In no time they were on the phone to Wilmington, Delaware, and DuPont (with some reluctance, apparently) said it would comply...
...He might have said: "CFC depletion of the ozone has not been measured, and after CFCs are banned it still won't be measured...
...Then he was silenced...
...Air conditioning in general is going to become more expensive...
...According to Fred Singer, director of the Washington-based Science and Environmental Project, such reductions as have been measured are well within the normal (and wide) ozone fluctuations...
...Exhibit A in the environmentalists' case has been the so-called ozone hole above the Antarctic, which is not a hole but a thinning...
...There was no pretense of a free press, which was purposefully (and logically) suppressed...
...There was a follow-up scare in 1992, with a NASA press conference warning of a dangerous new ozone hole opening up above the United States...
...Despite this kookiness, the anti-CFC mission has succeeded beyond the environmentalists' dreams...
...is quite different...
...It's suggestive that the ozone scare began decades ago, long before anyone was worrying about CFCs...
...Seemingly scientific public statements can frighten politicians into changing laws, and government agencies that will profit from the scare have increasingly collaborated...
...As Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute said, the last thing in the world the environmentalists want is any public suspicion that their freewheeling regulatory activities cost us money...
...The integrity of many medicines, vaccines, inoculations, and the entire supply of blood for surgery and transfusions also depends upon refrigeration...
...F or all its doom-mongering, Gore's book has nothing but good news about the prospects for replacing CFCs with more benign substitutes...
...nations to sign, at Montreal in 1987, a treaty agreeing to phase out the chemicals...
...was among fifty-nine...
...A letter from Rep...
...Recently, however, the Clinton administration has shown signs of recognizing the political danger of unchecked green fanaticism...
...President Bush signed on the dotted line, ordering a production ban by the end of 1995...
Vol. 27 • February 1994 • No. 2
