Herb Lindberg: Effective citizens must understand uses of technology

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You can’t pick up a newspaper or watch a news show nowadays without being bombarded by campaigns against all the technology that is going to destroy us.
They say unless we cut fossil fuel use by 32%, our planet is doomed from climate change; fracking is threatening our water supply; pesticides are going to kill us, and genetically modified food is the work of the devil and so must be labeled (the first step to being banned).
This exaggeration has been going on for decades. There was no cancer epidemic as claimed in 1962 by Rachel Carson in “Silent Spring;” the ozone hole was not making rabbits and salmon blind (Al Gore, 1990s); after decades of fossil-fuel use the Earth has not burned up as predicted by vocal environmentalist Bill McKibben in 1989. None of the long list of GMO scares has proven to be true, either.

Carson’s scare about cancer and Gore’s about rabbits and salmon caused manageable damage, but climate change and GMOs are different. Calls for 32% CO2 reduction (from 2005 levels) by 2035 would cost trillions of dollars in lost GDP. Worldwide caps on fossil fuel use are vastly more expensive and environmentally harmful as shown here.
In the case of GMOs, after three decades and many trillions of meals worldwide, there is still no evidence that they adversely affect human health. In fact, there is ample evidence of their environmental and humanitarian benefits. Vitamin-enhanced GMO “golden rice” has been ready to save lives for years, but opposed at every step by Greenpeace.

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Vitamin A deficiency is prevalent among Third World poor, whose diets are based mainly on rice or other carbohydrate-rich, micronutrient-poor calorie sources. Unmodified rice does not contain any β-carotene, which the body converts into vitamin A. Dependence on rice as the predominant food source is therefore leading to Vitamin A deficiency, most severely affecting small children and pregnant women.
In 2012 the World Health Organization reported about 250 million preschool children affected by Vitamin A deficiency, and that providing those children with vitamin A-enhanced GMO golden rice could prevent about a third of all under-5 deaths, which amounts to up to 2.7 million children who could be saved from dying unnecessarily.
Environmentalists have been opposed to neonicotinoid pesticides on the grounds that they may hurt bee populations even though honeybee numbers have been rising in the European Union in the three decades since they were introduced. The effect in Europe has been to cause farmers to return to much more harmful pyrethroid insecticides, which are sprayed on crops instead of used as seed dressing, hitting innocent bystander insects. Also, if Europeans had been allowed to grow GMO crops, then less pesticide would be necessary. Again, green precaution increased risks.
Likewise, widespread opposition to fracking for shale gas is based almost entirely on myths and lies, as reported by Reason magazine’s science correspondent, Ronald Bailey. This opposition has substantially delayed growth of onshore gas production in Europe and parts of the United States. That has meant more reliance on offshore gas, Russian gas, and coal — all of which have greater safety issues and environmental risks. Opposition to fracking has hurt the environment.
In short, the environmental movement has repeatedly denied people access to safer technologies and forced them to rely on dirtier, riskier or more harmful ones. It is adept at exploiting people’s technological naiveite and suspicion of anything new.
None of the exaggerated early claims about the dangers of climate change have proven true. Meanwhile, the financial, humanitarian and environmental price of forced reduction of fossil fuel use is proving much steeper than expected.
Despite falling costs of solar panels, the system cost of solar power — including land, transmission, maintenance and nighttime backup — remains high. The environmental impact of wind power — deforestation, killing of birds of prey, mining of rare earth metals — is worse than expected. We haven’t begun to pay the environmental cost of disposing huge wind turbines approaching their 25-year life span, and we keep building them.
Indoor air pollution, caused mainly by cooking over wood fires indoors, is the world’s biggest cause of environmental death — an estimated four million deaths every year (from the nonprofit science news website, SciDev.Net).
Getting fossil-fueled electricity and gas to them is the cheapest and quickest way to save their lives. Yet this isn’t being done because we worry about the increasingly small risk of dangerous climate change decades hence. To provide only windmill and solar power to these countries instead is shamefully selfish.
Herb Lindberg lives in Grass Valley.
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