Posted on 10/10/2002 11:56:47 PM PDT by Avoiding_Sulla
DDT Delirium [or A Misanthrope's Dream Fulfillment]
Pseudoscience: On the Senate agenda is ratification of the Stockholm Treaty, which would virtually ban the pesticide DDT. The payoff is the death of millions.
Numbers don't lie. DDT is the most effective means to fight malaria, a mosquito-borne disease. Take India in the 1940s, where 75 million people contracted malaria and 800,000 died each year. By 1961, thanks to DDT, the number of cases dropped to 50,000.
In Sri Lanka, DDT use began in 1946. By 1964, the number of cases dropped from 3 million to 29, with zero deaths.
DDT came under attack in the 1960s, beginning with the book "Silent Spring," by Rachel Carson, which claimed that "a minute quantity can bring about vast changes in the body."
Scientists criticizing her book included San Jose State entomologist Gordon Edwards, known for consuming spoonfuls of DDT to make his point. He's alive and well today.
Nonetheless, the campaign against DDT grew. In 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency held hearings to listen to evidence for and against DDT from 125 witnesses over 81 days.
The hearing examiner concluded: "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. The uses of DDT under the registrations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on fresh-water fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."
The EPA was supposed to decide whether to ban on the basis of the examiner's recommendations. Less than two months later, William Ruckelshaus, then EPA administrator, banned DDT for all practical purposes in the U.S. He never attended any part of the hearings and later admitted he had not even read the transcripts.
It was a victory of politics over modern science. DDT use dropped. Malaria cases rose. A disease that had been all but wiped out half a century ago returned.
According to a 1996 U.N. report: "Sub-Saharan Africa is the worst affected area for malaria with about 90% of all malaria and 80% of deaths. This means about 1.5-2.7 million people, mainly children, die each year from malaria."
The Stockholm Treaty on Persistent Organic Pollutants, which focuses on 12 chemicals, permits public health exceptions to allow developing nations to use DDT against malaria. But its practical effect will be to discourage DDT use. Some nations that once used it have already stopped.
Fifty nations must ratify the treaty to make it international law. The U.S. should not be one of them. The Senate, either in the current session or the next if senators are too busy to vote this week, has the rare opportunity to try to save millions of Third World children's lives.
The inconsistencies of all those liberal sops crying about how one program or another is always "for the children" while at the same time allowing half-cocked theories and deliberate falsehoods in the name of "environmentalism" lead to the death of millions of children ought to regularly and relentlessly be dumped on the heads of those liberals. The media leaves the impression that to be a liberal means you don't need to be sorry for your half-baked notions.
One may be environmentally concerned and not be liberal, but the liberals, with their media propagandists, will let no conservative lay claim to the title. Okay. Two can play that game.
Issues like this give conservatives license to call liberals who've become callously disconnencted from the consequences of their ideologies, cold-blooded killers. Too bad so few have the courage needed to deliver that charge with conviction.
Who said? Who says that when one quarter of the world's nations ratify this treaty that the ban becomes effective in those who DIDN'T ratify the treaty?
The Conference of the Parties in the IUCN, the bureaucrats who will make a career of enforcing this treaty.
This is Global Governance under the UN, and the ICC is to make it enforceable.
The worst of this policy is that, even if the goal were to reduce global population through disease, it doesn't work. When people are poor and can't work because they are suffering from disease, they have more kids, in part to play the law of averages upon their chances of survival. It is a policy that virtually guarantees overpopulation, environmental destruction, and mass starvation.
The UN is a crime against humanity.
Too bad so few have the KNOWLEDGE needed to deliver that charge with conviction, because they don't have a trustworthy alternative by which to manage the environment.
However, I have to sadly admit their choice of the word "payoff" is no doubt rhetorical. They aim to get their decent readers thinking of what they undoubtedly consider secondary consequences of such inhumane international legal spinning. They are not meaning (yet, anyway) what I always try to demonstrate is proven by the preponderence of evidence in our compendium. While that might be good enough to win for the plaintifs in civil <G> court, our opponents employ far too many spinners and jokers to easily affect policy with any speed. It will take time and patience.
Please look for opportunities to find a way, in your own words, to turn the tables on these megalomaniacs. Their utopian thinking is definitely not inclusive. These monsters would make the ashes of the Holocaust appear minimalist after they are through. They would console themselves that they are doing it all for our own good. C.S. Lewis somewhere noted that merely greedy tyrants might tire of their enslaughts and give you respite; it's those who think they're doing you a favor, who know no limits nor are plagued by conscience, who will track you down and allow you no rest. Permitting them no illusions NOW could save billions.
God Bless you.
-Av
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