{"id":44104,"date":"2018-07-11T03:00:43","date_gmt":"2018-07-11T07:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44104"},"modified":"2020-03-26T16:08:19","modified_gmt":"2020-03-26T20:08:19","slug":"environmentalists-against-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/07\/11\/environmentalists-against-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Environmentalists against science"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Catallaxy Files<\/em>, Jeff Stier<\/a> looks at situations when activists who normally fetishize their devotion to science will go out of their way to fight against scientific findings that don’t co-incide with their preferences:<\/p>\n

The debate over regulation often devolves into a debate about \u201ctoo little\u201d versus \u201ctoo much\u201d regulation, split along the ideological divide. Too little regulation, goes the argument, and we are exposed to too much risk. Too little, and we don\u2019t advance.<\/p>\n

This binary approach, however, represents the dark-ages of regulatory policy. It was more frequently relevant when our tools to measure risk were primitive, but today\u2019s technology allows much more precise ways to evaluate real-world risks. With less uncertainty, there\u2019s less of a need to cast a broad regulatory net.<\/p>\n

Regulation not warranted by countervailing risk just doesn\u2019t make sense. That\u2019s why a pseudoscientific approach, dubbed the \u201cprecautionary principle,\u201d behind much of today\u2019s regulation is so pernicious. This dogma dictates that it\u2019s always better to be safe than to ever be sorry. The approach is politically effective not only because it\u2019s something your mother says, but because it\u2019s easier to envision potential dangers, remote as they may be, than potential benefits. Uncertainty, it turns out, is a powerful tool for those who seek to live in a world without risk.<\/p>\n

But what happens when regulators can<\/em> get a reasonably good handle on benefits and risks? Some potential risks have been eliminated simply because the basis for the concern has proven to be unwarranted. For more than two decades, the artificial sweetener, saccharin, came with a cancer warning label in the U.S.But it turned out that the animal experiment which led to the warning was later found to be irrelevant to humans, and the warning was eventually removed.<\/p>\n

Warning about a product when risks are not well-understood is prudent. But it would be absurd to continue to warn after the science tells us there\u2019s nothing to worry about.<\/p>\n

Today, an analogous situation is playing out in the EU, where activists are using outmoded tests not just to place warning labels on silicones, a building block of our technological world, but to ban them outright.<\/p>\n

The playbook is predictable: as the scientific basis for a product\u2019s safety grows, opponents go to increasingly great lengths to manufacture uncertainty, move the goalposts and capitalize on scientific illiteracy to gain the political upper-hand.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen these tactics employed in opposition to everything from growing human tissue in a lab, to harm-reducing alternatives to smoking, such as e-cigarettes. Now, the effort to manufacture uncertainty is playing out in the debate over the environmental impact of silicones, which are used to in a wide range of consumer, medical, and industrial products.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, in the case of silicones, regulators in a number of countries, including Australia, have put politics aside and adhere to appropriate scientific methods to inform their decision-making.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Catallaxy Files, Jeff Stier looks at situations when activists who normally fetishize their devotion to science will go out of their way to fight against scientific findings that don’t co-incide with their preferences: The debate over regulation often devolves into a debate about \u201ctoo little\u201d versus \u201ctoo much\u201d regulation, split along the ideological divide. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,84,16,15],"tags":[486,1134,720,661,1365,359],"class_list":["post-44104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-government","category-science","category-technology","tag-greengestapo","tag-precautionaryprinciple","tag-protest","tag-regulation","tag-risk","tag-uncertainty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-btm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44104"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55866,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44104\/revisions\/55866"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}