A tale of two gases

In physics or chemistry, there is little that radon and ozone have in common; but an iron bond unites them in politics. When environmentalism is used to mask an anti-industrial agenda, it works by a well-tried recipe: scare the pants off people with the dangers from industrial processes, but when these same processes occur in nature, cover them up, and if that fails, pooh-pooh them.

Radioactivity, we have been told, is Hiroshima, Chernobyl, pestilence and catastrophe beyond belief. But in 1979 Prof. B.L. Cohen derived a figure of 10,000 fatal lung cancers/year via radon in homes, and Dr Henry Hurwitz showed that the increased ex-posure to radon by energy conservation exacts a higher death toll than an uncontained meltdown of a nuclear reactor. The stories were duly censored by a press that (as this example shows) is quite incorrectly accused of being "sensationalist."

Several reputable scientists regard these figures as mislead-ingly overstated, and quite correctly so, for they take no account of hormesis, which lowers the cancer rate at very low radiation levels. But the point I want to make here is that the media, who never failed to bring scare stories about radioactivity (such as the shrieks about uranium tailings by Prof Pohl of Cornell U.) now all of a sudden pooh-pooh the EPA figures, quoting the very scientists whom they had previously censored on any radiation issue. And that goes not only for the National Enquirer/New York Times press, but also for the comment by "nonpolitical" journals like Science.

But the ozone hoax is also worse because it appears to be the first case where the anti-technology rampage has gone inter-national by a treaty among governments. The great heroes of this anti-industrial campaign, aiming for the phase-out of CFCs and halons, appear to be Reagan's State Department and EPA, especially top EPAcrat Lee Thomas, a spineless bureaucrat and media pleaser typical of the higher officials who have escaped Nancy's purges.

The campaign to turn ignorance into an international treaty, signed as the "Montreal Protocol" last year, is described with surprising frankness (and unsurprising ignorance in its scientific statements) in the Spring 1988 Issues in Science and Technology by an official of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a pro-fessional organization of anti-industrial legalistic sabotage, well known to AtE readers from their interminable antinuclear ob-structions and bottomless funds to finance them.

Prodded by such renowned geophysicists as Weicker, Ken-nedy and Metzenbaum, the US Senate unanimously ratified the treaty in March of this year.

Du Pont beat itself loudly in the breast that it has developed ozone-friendly substitutes and will phase out the production of CFCs (for under a CFC ban it stands to make a bundle from these materials). Though spineless and servile like most large corporations (including much of the nuclear industry), Du Pont's unwont sense of self-interest is almost refreshing.

"Humanity is conducting an ... uncontrolled experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a nuclear war."