Disaster in India

As this is being written, the death toll from the toxic gas release in the Indian pesticide plant is passing the 2,000 mark. Almost as appalling is the report that "half the top personal injury lawyers in America are on planes to New Delhi"¾to file suits aiding all victims who can pay a fat enough retainer.

There is one man who should have no difficulty in saying so: Paul Ehrlich. Though presently engaged in scaring America into defenselessness, he spent years opposing pesticides, opposing the Green Revolution, promoting de-industrialization, and advocating radical population control¾by coercive sterilization if necessary. It was, in fact, in India, "one stinking hot night in Delhi," that this Herrenvolk type learned to hate people. "People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging," he writes in the Population Bomb. "People clinging to buses¾people herding animals¾people, people, people." Well now, what happened at Bhopal¾isn't that a bit of what he always wanted?

Equally absurd is the idea that only government regulation forced uranium companies to cover the tailings after mining and milling the ore. This is a myth particularly dear to those who cover up the radioactivity of the very same source as in uranium tailings¾radon gas and its daughters¾when it is incomparably more dangerous, but is linked to energy conservation.

History tells us otherwise. The danger of radon was not recognized until the mid-fifties, when an increased incidence of lung cancer among uranium miners was noted in several countries (it had never been mined on a large scale before). In the mid-sixties, the adverse impact of tailings on the environment was noted and it was the mining companies, not the Naderite charlatans, who pressed for a standard¾for their own healthy selfish reasons, as they did not wish to waste their profits on liability litigation. In those days the US Public Health Service had no jurisdiction (there was no EPA), so they turned to the states. Colorado was the first to draw up such a standard which was adopted in 1965. The Colorado Dept. of Health was prompted to do so by a particularly insistent company pressing the point.