Bipartisan deceit

The hypocrisy of Green politicians has reached three megametzenbaums on the open-ended Kennedy scale. Politicians have now fully discovered the vote-gathering power of feigning environmental concern. Like peace and justice, it is a cause void of opponents, and one that allows sanctimonious politicians and their gullible followers to strut about under a halo of superior morality. They use it to impresse others, and never fail to impress themselves.

But such self-deception often despoils the environment, and is costly not just in dollars, but in human lives. I have most often pointed to the case of nuclear power, prevented by artificial obstacles from lowering the toll of deaths and diseases caused by fossil fuels. But there are other cases, such as the health costs inflicted by the animal-righters and crusaders against food irradiation; or the unparalleled cynicism of Ralph Nader's "health" groups, which demanded the reduction of permissible radon levels for uranium miners while covering up the vastly higher radon exposure in homes to infants on the breast. (This was in 1980, at least six years before the media machine discovered radon.)

I am not using "infant on the breast" as a rhetorical artifice; radiation affects the rapidly multiplying cells of growing tissue more than the normal cells of adults. And of course, in all societies the beginning lives of children are valued higher than the remaining lives of the aged; and in all societies a hazard directed particularly at children is considered particularly threatening.

Except, perhaps, in Washington, D.C. At a grossly under-estimated cost of $3.1 billion, asbestos is to be removed from some 45,000 US schools, where it is now harmless, but is likely to disease school children in their later life by making them breathe the fibers during and after removal. The concentration before removal is usually about 0.0009 fibers per cc; after removal the number rises to 20 - 40 (a 40,000 fold increase), and often stays at elevated levels for years. As much as 1,000 fibers/cc have been measured after removal. The EPA sets no numerical standard: the pre-remedial level is to be restored, as is done by a doctor heating a broken leg, except that it was not the doctor who broke it.

Sometimes, as in Tucson, Ariz., the removal is done with the children present: the workers, who come under OSHA rules, wear masks; the children, under EPA rules, breathe the fibers freely.

But school children are not Brodeur's only victims. There are two basic types of asbestos: amphibole, which is a serious hazard (asbestosis, mesothelioma) and serpentine, which is very much less dangerous, since its larger, twisting fibers are more easily ex-pelled by the lung. The former has long since been abandoned in America; the latter is imported by Third World countries from the US and Canada, mainly for their cement/asbestos sewage pipes. When the US ban goes into effect, they will largely go back to the locally available deadly amphibole type. So what? The Schroeders and Lugars did not care when 100,000 blacks were massacred in Burundi; why should they care when they are killed off by lung disease? Only South African blacks have political value.

Am I mistaking bad advice, poor judgment and lack of infor-mation for a conscious policy?

Consider this: When the ban was announced by top EPAcrat William Reilly, a former "environmental" activist, in a carefully staged PR event before 21 TV Cameras and almost 100 reporters, he left out the paragraph admitting the danger to the Third World when he read his press release. The media were invited two hours before industrial representatives so that the awkward questions were asked only after the reporters and cameras had gone; scien-tists were not invited at all. The asbestos removal program was pushed by the EPA with a figure of 40,000 asbestos-caused cancer deaths (asbestos-caused cancer occurs virtually only in smokers); when Congress asked for substantiation, they could not give any, for the figure was rudely concocted. They then cut their concoction by a factor of 5, again without substantiation. That they do not dif-ferentiate between the two types of asbestos, one deadly, the other not very dangerous, is by itself enough to show that Mr Reilly is interested solely in politics, not the environment.

The idea of playing politics under the pretense of environmen-tat concern was introduced as a presidential policy by Jimmy Carter. Reilly and Bush have raised this strategy to new levels of hypocrisy, in fact, it has become a bipartisan policy of both Republiwimps and Demobrats.