Environmental Disasters

There’s no end to them. How about red light cameras? In most cases, it seems legislation aimed at improving public safety is more about improving public coffers.

I don’t understand #3, it doesn’t seem like apples-apples. Also, for #2, it may have cost a lot but if deaths were reduced then we might have just purchased the lives of innocent would-be drug victims, and still feel it was worth it.

The inside cover attacks “liberals” over the environmental effects of contraceptives (which seems odd to attribute to “liberals” – not to mention it does not appear to relate to government policy) and it uses the term “liberal” in a derogatory way four times in three paragraphs. This might sell books, but it tends to kill the credibility of the author.

I’m not saying he’s wrong, but when the book’s inside cover sounds like political propaganda, it seems fair to give the book a lot less weight.

Liberty: It’s extremely unlikely that deaths are reduced by the drug war. Prohibition might have prevented a few alcohol-related deaths, sure, but think of the crime and violence it created.

Reilly:
I am not arguing that there necessarily were, but it is worth considering. Perhaps heroin use and overdose would be higher if it were legal. Who knows?

—

As for DDT, I think consensus has come around to the fact that the prohibitions in place have indeed caused an increase in malaria related deaths.

And mosquito nets alone are not an answer! The battle is ongoing, and environmental groups are still trying to prevent countries from using DDT.
For example: http://www.fightingmalaria.org/news.aspx?id=991

Arnold Kling, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Link

I checked to see what the peer-reviewed scientific literature. “Agricultural production and malaria resurgence in Central America and India” published in Nature by Chapin and Wasserstrom tells us what really happened. The graph on the left shows that malaria did skyrocket in India in the 70s. But not because they cut back on DDT spraying because of pressure from environmentalists. The graph shows that they didn’t cut back on DDT, but dramatically increased its use. So how come malaria increased? Well, the increase in DDT use was in agriculture. This caused the insects to become resistant, so they had to use more DDT to get the same effect. This caused more resistance, so even more DDT was used and so on. The end result was that in the areas where DDT was used in agriculture, the mosquitoes became completely resistant and DDT no longer stopped them from spreading malaria, with the disastrous results shown in the graph.

Was this catastrophe predictable? Well, yes. In fact, Rachel Carson warned about it in Silent Spring. If India had followed the example of the United States and banned the agricultural use of DDT and reserved it for public health many millions of cases of malaria would have been prevented. However, India probably could not have afforded the more expensive alternative insecticides to DDT, so this may not have been feasible. But there were other alternatives that would have greatly reduced pesticide use and slowed the development of resistance.

…

So the people with significant responsibility for the resurgence in malaria were the chemical companies that stymied efforts to reduce the agricultural use of pesticides. And it was chemical companies that helped set up the astroturf junkscience site that has attempted to blame Rachel Carson for causing the resurgence. Nice. It’s like a hit-and-run driver who, instead of admitting responsibility for the accident, frames the person who tried to prevent the accident.

liberty, insecticide-treated bed-nets are indeed a very important part of the answer – see various articles in the Malaria Journal in the past few years pointing this out. Your link claims they are ‘inferior’ to DDT, which is not true and in any case makes no sense, since it implies that DDT is better in any situation – what, even when the insects have evolved resistance? Africa Fighting Malaria does not give a remotely accurate picture of the state of research on the subject – hardly surprising, since it was set up for the express purpose of attacking the World Health Organisation’s work on environmental health risks such as passive smoking, and received funding from Philip Morris for that work.

I wish people would actually read the research on this rather important topic rather than getting their ‘facts’ from the likes of Iain Murray and AFM.

countries can be punished in many ways for using DDT–they can lose foreign aid, they can have imports of their crops banned, etc

Sure, all of those things CAN happen! But they didn’t, not when DDT use was in line with the Stockholm Convention, ie indoor spraying for anti-malaria purposes.

The restrictions on crop imports apply even when a country uses DDT on homes, not on crops

No, that’s not true. You may have been misled by a story that did the rounds of anti-environmentalist groups (and the Wall Street Journal) a couple of years ago claiming that the EU had threatened to ban imports from Uganda if they used DDT indoors. There was no such ban.

Bed nets work fine when people are sleeping in them, but you can’t sleep 24 hours a day.

Er, the anopheles mosquito is mostly crepuscular (active at dusk or dawn) or nocturnal (active at night). A rather important point, that.

As for evidence on the effectiveness of bednets, research published a few months ago by the World Health Organisation found that

The widespread distribution of insecticide-treated nets and increased access to artemisinin-based combination therapies have significantly reduced malaria cases and deaths in several countries in Africa [e.g. by >60% in Rwanda in a few years]… Indoor insecticide spraying with the pesticide DDT and other chemicals was used at different times during the course of the study in Rwanda and Ethiopia, but the spraying did not appear to play a significant role in the “steep, sudden declines”

That quote is from a description of the report here, the report itself is here. Nobody expects you to read “everything written on DDT”, but I would have thought you can read that.

I wouldn’t expect Africa Fighting Malaria to welcome these findings, since they run directly contrary to their line that DDT is a much better solution than ITNs. But that line is motivated by ideology and their interest in talking down environmental regulation, not by the facts. Incidentally, the findings also contradict William Easterly’s line that ITNs should be sold rather than given away free – it turns out that a mix of sales and mass free distribution is best.

“The reality is that malaria is a major cause of sickness and death, and it doesn’t have to be.”

I agree completely. The scale and speed of the impacts identified by the WHO suggest that very large reductions in sickness and death caused by malaria are possible given sufficient funding and infrastructure for ITN and artemesinin distribution. For that to happen, we need to stop listening to ideologues like Iain Murray and start listening to people who are doing honest research and honest work on the subject.

Lastly, I’m trying to engage you in a serious discussion here, so it would be nice to see a serious response rather than another glib dismissal.

Seeing as you’ve just approvingly cited a book-length ad hominem attack on environmentalists by Iain Murray, I’ll take that with a pinch of salt. Your lack of interest in evidence of what actually works to combat malaria is saddening.

Ad hominem attacks are usually ad hominem attacks.

People suggest an argument is invalid because they lump the arguer in with “those who argue only by ad homenim”. However, what is claimed to be ad homenim isn’t usually ad homenim. It’s usually just insulting. Showing that enviromentalists usually cause more harm than good isn’t the same thing as saying everything liberals say is wrong because they’re environmentalist.

Also, ad hominem arguments are usually irrelevant to a discussion, but that doesn’t automatically make them wrong. Arguing that DDT must be very effective because people like Tim Lambert say it’s not is similar to ad homenim. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

It’s not that the title is confrontational so much as that the title tells almost everything the author knows.

Anyone who has followed the story on biofuels, for example, knows that it is corporate interests that push for the legislation that make it happen. Charles Grassley is not an environmentalist by any stretch of the imagination. However, he is among the chief advocates of biofuels. That he is also a long-serving, and hence, powerful senator from Iowa, probably doesn’t get a mention in Murray’s book (unless Murray falsely labels Grassley an environmentalist).

Consider this: There is not a single peer-reviewed study in science that calls into question anything Rachel Carson wrote. With more than 1,000 studies confirming the damage DDT did to predator birds, scientists and Americans can be sure that the ban on DDT helped save the bald eagle. (The count was done by Discover magazine — see their November 2007 issue.)

That’s not the story Murray tells. If his story is not based in history, not based in science, what is it based on?

I think Barkley is mostly right, “Jim and Tim Lambert are right about the resistance argument. DDT usage in agriculture was a total disaster, India being the prime example.”

The relevant question though is to what degree. That over spaying for agriculture leads to resisitance is important, but it’s certainly doesn’t lead to the conclusion suggested, but not explicitly stated, by Lambert. Uncontrolled use can be bad, but that doesn’t mean the effective ban on DDT is good. Epecially with the Indian example well known, it’s probably better for countries to determine their own policy.

Don’t know why he should.

That’s great for people post 2001. It’s good to see we’re coming around, but it doesn’t erase the past.

And how prominent is the position? This strikes me as likely analogous to the Bush Administration in addressing HIV in Africa. The official policy doesn’t discrimate for abstinance only programs, but the popular belief, contibuted to by stress on abstinance only by the president’s speech, suggests that we do and institutions act accordingly.

I’ve weighed in on my blog.

Arnold Kling gives a reasonable comparison to consider:

The total death and illness caused by all of the chemical pollution ever created vs. the death and illness caused by the ban on DDT.

Tim Lambert responds by linking to one of his discredited DDT posts. The cited Wasserstrom and Chapin article claims 30 million malaria cases in India in 1977 when malaria cases actually peaked at under 7 million in 1976.

Lambert promises (comment 19) to clear up the discrepancy:

I think the 6.47 million cases are just those confirmed by a blood test, but I’ll check with WHO statistics in the library tomorrow.

Well, Lambert was still commenting in the thread a week later but never did resolve the massive discrepancy. Any guesses why?

Regardless, if this Pesticide Action Network summary is to be believed, it’s overly simplistic to attribute the dramatic rise in India’s malaria rate to the agricultural use of DDT:

Malaria fell sharply in India during the malaria eradiation campaign of the 1960s due to DDT spraying, the success of which overshadowed the small successes of other methods. However, malaria resurged following the close out of the eradication program, peaking in 1976. A new government control campaign initiated in 1977 brought the numbers back down, but there has been a plateau since the early 1980s.

Here’s what the WHO had to say about India’s malaria resurgence:

The strategy of malaria eradication was highly successful and the cases were reduced to about 100,000 and deaths due to malaria were eliminated by 1965-66. Subsequently the programme faced various technical obstacles and financial and administrative constraints, which led to countrywide increase in the number of cases. 6.47 million malaria cases were reported in 1976, the highest since resurgence.

Lambert gets very little right on DDT and is best ignored by all but his true believers – the post at his blog is an attempt to shift the discussion to a warm and friendly environment where he and his lock-steppers can control the discussion.

Ed Darrell, a Lambert protege, puts up some interesting historical posts but his DDT writings are rubbish. In one he supports Rachel Carson’s absurd contention that a DDT user developed and died of cancer within months of using DDT three times. In another post Darrell claims water is carcinogenic. Like Lambert he is best ignored.

1. The total death and illness caused by all of the chemical pollution ever created vs. the death and illness caused by the ban on DDT.

As I understand it, the latter number may well be negative. Bans on the agricultural use of DDT — while still allowing spraying in homes — slow the spread of resistance and thereby save lives.

Murray clearly knows of what he speaks

The above should read “The DDT ban was not imaginary.” Duh.

Barkley Rosser,

I’m a hobby blogger with most of my DDT posts responding to what I see as serial misrepresentation from unreliable sources like Tim Lambert and Ed Darrell. I claim no DDT authority.

The US general-use DDT ban probably played some part in the growth of raptor numbers but I’m far from certain that the ban was a major factor, much less the critical factor. I won’t take the time to look it up right now but there is an interesting large raptor study in Alaska which admits that declining DDT content has unaccountable failed to result in eggshells thickening as much as expected. In short, there seem to be other unknown factors causing raptor eggshells to remain relatively thin. If you want the source I’ll find it and get back to you.