From chlorine to biofuels, beware of political trendies with a cause

WHEN Eric the Red landed in Greenland in the late 900s he established a farming settlement, with sheep and cattle feeding on grass.

By 1100 there were 3,000 people living there, but after 1300 the farming community died out following the arrival of what became known as the Little Ice Age, which lasted until 1850.

Before that the earth had gone through cycles of global warming and cooling, even within recorded history. The era from 200 BC to 600 AD was known as the Roman Warming period; 600 to 900 was the cold period of the Dark Ages, and 900 to 1300 was the Medieval Warming period.

What caused those earlier eras of global warming? We can be sure it was not jet planes. We can be just as sure that man has had nothing to do with the apparent warming in Mars where the polar ice cap is currently receding.

Last week the chief economist of the US Department of Agriculture, Joseph Glauber, blamed biofuels for increasing the price of corn and soybeans.

Food prices went up 4% last year in the US, the biggest rise since 1990, and they are expected to go up even more in the next year as a record 24% of US corn will be devoted to ethanol production, but it will replace less than 3% of petroleum consumption.

Rather than helping to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it is now estimated the conversion to ethanol will actually double the emissions over 30 years. As a result the US Congress is rethinking the initiatives it took only last year.

Trendy political activism is not new, but some people have recognised the kind of damage it has being doing. Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace in 1971, resigned as one of its five international directors in 1986 because he was disillusioned with the organisation’s tendency to abandon scientific objectivity in favour of political activism.

None of his fellow-directors had any formal science education — they were just political activists or environmental entrepreneurs.

The issue that prompted his resignation was the decision by Greenpeace to call for a worldwide ban on chlorine, which played a critical part in the eradication of water-born diseases such as cholera. In 1991, Peru reduced chlorine levels in its water due to unfounded fears that it posed a cancer risk.

A cholera epidemic broke out there and spread throughout Latin American, infecting more than half-a-million people and killing 4,700. That has been mild in comparison with the controversy raging over Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT), the insecticidal properties of which were first discovered by a Nobel Prize-winning Swiss scientist in 1939.

In 1955 the WHO backed the global malaria eradication programme. Around 800,000 people were dying every year of malaria in India when they began using DDT. By the late 1960s, malaria deaths in India were approaching zero.

In Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), there were 2.8 million cases of malaria and 7,000 deaths from the disease in 1949. They began spraying the inner walls of dwelling houses with DDT and by 1963 there were only 17 recorded cases of the disease and no deaths.

Rachel Carson (1907-1964) is widely credited with having initiated the modern environmental movement with her 1962 book, Silent Spring. But controversy now rages around her involvement in the banning of the insecticide DDT, which was outlawed in the US in 1972.

Although she suggested it might be a carcinogen, she did not urge a total ban on DDT or other chemical insecticides.

However she deplored their reckless use. “We have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife and man himself,” she noted.

DDT was being sprayed on fields from crop-dusting planes without regard to the damage it was doing to the ecology. That was patently wrong. But where it was sprayed in small quantities on the inside walls of houses, DDT did little or no harm to people or the environment, and would not enter the food chain. Any possible harm was certainly far outweighed by the good it was doing.

Each year between 300 and 500 million people suffer from malaria worldwide, and health experts estimate it kills two million people a year — 90% of those are children under the age of five in Africa.

In March 2000, in the town of Ndumo in South Africa, near the border with Mozambique, some 2,300 were treated at the local clinic for malaria. Then they began spraying the inside walls of homes with DDT and by March 2003 the clinic treated only nine cases.

With such dramatic evidence of its effectiveness it should be used within homes in vulnerable areas, but irresponsible political activists have had DDT banned throughout most of Africa. So much for the 1,800,000 children under five who are dying of malaria each year.

People in this country or elsewhere in northern Europe, or in North America, do not worry about malaria because it has been eradicated in these areas. Some people think it is a tropical disease, but it did affect all of those places. Shakespeare alluded to it as “ague” in eight of his plays, and Oliver Cromwell died of malaria.

On this island the greatest disaster resulted from distorted economic thinking which called for non-intervention by government. Thus while Ireland exported food, the poor were ravaged by Great Famine in the mid-19th century.

Are the poor in the Third World now going to go hungry, or even starve, for the sake of biofuels, or for the trendy political activists promoting crazy schemes to prevent global warming. Some of the schemes are about as practical as some of the daft efforts here to promote the Irish language.

AS SOME of the Greens elsewhere are going bananas, John Gormley, the Green party leader here, moved to resolve the Dingle row last week. He announced that the town will after all be able keep its name and even use its traditional Gaelic name, Daingean Uí Chúis. He also plans to introduce legislation that will allow local referenda on place names to be conducted on the basis of a proper secret ballot.

The Government had been trampling on the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Dingle people. Mr Gormley should therefore be congratulated for this sudden outbreak of rationality and democracy.

Maybe the people of Dingle were lucky that nobody decided to call it Daingean Uí Cuív. Of course, you’ll say there is no

‘v’ in the Irish language, but that has never stopped Éamon Ó Cuív and his brand of insufferable Irish.

We have the absurd farce of translating documents that nobody wants. Cork County Council spent €90,000 on translating a local development plan into Irish, while they spent €26,000 translating a county development plan in Waterford, but not one request was received for a copy of either of them.

TG4 has produced some interesting programmes that have appeal. Spending the money on such programmes would have been wiser and more practical than wasting it on documents nobody reads. Those who think this is the way to help the language need to have their heads examined.