A Stitch in Haste

Andrew Kenny by way of Tim Blair:

Ideology comes in three colours: red, brown and green, representing Marxism, fascism and environmental extremism. The death toll (difficult to measure) is roughly, Hitler's holocaust 6 million, Stalin's famine and terror 8 million, and Mao's famine 30 million. But the greens have topped them all. In a single crime they have killed about 50 million people. In purely numerical terms, it was the worst crime of the 20th century. It took place in the USA in 1972. It was the banning of DDT.

I first blogged about DDT here, when the principal critic of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, died and both Carson's fans and detractors had cause to revisit her claim (which Edwards vehemently disputed) that DDT, through the food chain, softened the shells of bird eggs, threatening certain species including the beloved American Bald Eagle. Carson's cabal also argued that DDT was a significant cancer risk in humans, particularly children.

As it turns out, there is compelling evidence that the entire "Silent Spring" thesis was a fraud:

The testimony of Dr. Edwards and others during Environmental Protection Agency hearings in 1971 on whether to ban the insecticide led to an EPA administrative law judge ruling that, "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man. The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."

So why did the EPA ban it anyway? Simple — The Politics of Pull:

Inexplicably — or so it seemed — DDT was nonetheless banned by EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus. Dr. Edwards investigated and uncovered disturbing statements and troubling connections between Ruckelshaus and anti-DDT environmental extremist groups.

In a May 1971 speech before the Wisconsin Audubon Society, Ruckelshaus acknowledged being a member of the anti-DDT National Audubon Society and to have "streamlined" EPA procedures so that DDT could be banned even before the administrative hearings had been completed.

After Ruckelshaus left the EPA, he began fundraising for the Environmental Defense Fund, a spin-off of the National Audubon Society and the lead petitioner to have EPA ban DDT.

The probability that Ruckelshaus had made up his mind to ban DDT regardless of the facts is increased by his refusal of requests made under the Freedom of Information Act and by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to turn over the documentation on which the ban was based.

One eco-freak activist bureaucrat places warm fuzzy feelings ahead of science (and economics) and 50 million people die of malaria. So much for being "environmentally friendly."

Could you imagine if one FDA super-official had sole authority over the drug approval process (and was in bed with the pharmaceutical industry to boot)? Or if one lone educrat, perhaps an Intelligent Design advocate, had carte blanche authority to approve, reject or edit school textbooks?

Yet how much more damage to humanity did this lone EPA radical cause, not just in the U.S. but throughout the developing world?

Madness.

The entire record on DDT must be wiped clean and new, unbiased research should commence immediately, with an eye on potentially lifting the ban on DDT, discrediting the ongoing DDT hysteria and ending the malaria scourge crippling the world.

We ended the Brown Terror, we ended (most of) the Red Terror. It's now time to end the Green Terror.

Fifty million dead is enough.