I don’t think it is absurd to test chemicals for safety. But I’m not certain that chemical companies should pay all the costs.
Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by thomaswfuller2
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by Faustino
Let’s hope that my innocuous reply to Harold Doiron also manages to escape the dreaded moderation black hole.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by Faustino
I always start by doing things for the second time; much safer.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by Faustino
Re: your abstract: I couldn’t have said it better myself. Indeed, I couldn’t have said it half as well, thanks.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by Faustino
Gets me through the day, too.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by GaryM
Ray Bolger called. He wants his straw back. The question isn’t whether to test for safety, but how.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by Faustino
He’d know how, if he only had a brain. I wonder who else that might apply to?
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by thisisnotgoodtogo
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by Faustino
Judith, I’ve just read the 2000 paper mentioned by Indur M Goklany: Applying the Precautionary Principle to Global Warming, which can be downloaded at http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=250380 . I wish I’d read this years ago, it argues for similar policies as those I’ve advocated for several years, but from a much stronger and more persuasive base. I think that everyone engaged on the potential CAGW issue should read it.
Many arguments at CE over the years could have been answered by: “See Goklany’s 2000 paper” – an awful lot of ill-informed argument on policies could have been avoided, and even committed warmists would surely have had to accept that the policies supported by the IPCC et al were inappropriate. Perhaps Dr/Prof Goklany could write a follow-up post to this one? I’ve referred the paper to someone with more influence and contacts in Australian policy-making, hopefully it might have some belated effect now that the climate (no pun intended) here is more favourable.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by Faustino
Well, mosomoso, the Abbott government claimed that the adults were now in charge. I’m not so sure.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by Eli Rabett
No, the costs of doing nothing are reasonably well known and scary, even the unduly optimistic ones (Tol for example). See RCP 8.5 and the consequences as described in the AR5.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by Faustino
Joshua, I’ve seen respectable estimates of many million, I can’t confirm 20 million as a best estimate. I’ll let you know if I find a good citation.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by Faustino
http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2012/09/05/rachel-carsons-deadly-fantasies/2/
J Gordon Edwards, 1992: “This implication that DDT is horribly deadly is completely false. Human volunteers have ingested as much as 35 milligrams of it a day for nearly two years and suffered no adverse effects. Millions of people have lived with DDT intimately during the mosquito spray programs and nobody even got sick as a result. The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1965 that ‘in a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million [human] deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.’ The World Health Organization stated that DDT had ‘killed more insects and saved more people than any other substance.’”
500 million deaths prevented by DDT suggests that 20 million from its withdrawal is highly plausible.
“The legacy of Rachel Carson is that tens of millions of human lives – mostly children in poor, tropical countries – have been traded for the possibility of slightly improved fertility in raptors. This remains one of the monumental human tragedies of the last century.”
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/15583-ddt-breeds-death
“Worldwide more than 2,700 people will die today because of a bureaucratic regulation instituted during the Nixon administration in 1972.” That’s almost a million a year. We’ve had 42 years since the ban.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1259
“By means of that ban, environmentalists effectively ensured that, over the course of the ensuing 30+ years, more than 50 million people would die needlessly of a disease that was entirely preventable.”
Joshua, there are many sources indicating deaths in the tens of millions. I won’t cite more, they are easily located.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by Faustino
Eli, read Goklany’s paper, linked to by him and by me below, for a refutation and an indication of a mores sensible approach.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by beththeserf
I downloaded it already.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by A fan of *MORE* discourse
Arno Arrak complains “You [FOMD?] choose to use your talent to totally twist the meaning of what happens around you.”
Arno Arrak, perhaps you should regard more seriously the recent critiques of libertarian ideology:
Phosphorus and Freedom
The Libertarian FantasyBefore you rage against unwarranted government interference in your life, you might want to ask why the government is interfering.
Often — not always, of course, but far more often than the free-market faithful would have you believe — there is, in fact, a good reason for the government to get involved.
Pollution controls are the simplest example, but not unique.
Commonly, self-proclaimed libertarians deal with the problem of market failure both by pretending that it doesn’t happen and by imagining government as much worse than it really is.
That’s why you shouldn’t believe talk of a rising libertarian tide.
Conclusion There are plenty of solid common-sense reasons why libertarians can’t win elections.
And pretty much *EVERYONE* appreciates these common-sense realities … except libertarians!
That’s `cuz high-IQ libertarianism is only tenuously connected to common-sense appreciation of economic realities, real-world politics, moral principles, and the human condition. Eh, Arno Arrak?
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by phatboy
David Appell:
Environmental Research Letters Volume 2 Number 1
David B Lobell and Christopher B Field 2007 Environ. Res. Lett. 2 014002 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/2/1/014002
“Global scale climate–crop yield relationships and the impacts of recent warming”
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/2/1/014002
Smoke and mirrors!
That study really is a prime example of torturing data until they confess, aka how to lie with statistics.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by A fan of *MORE* discourse
Proposition [from medical ethics] “It is wrong to sell pesticides that (in the long run) disastrously harm one infant in five thousand.”Faustino wonders “Is it still wrong if those pesticides save the lives of hundreds who would otherwise die from malnutrition?”
The plain teaching of medical ethics is “it’s still wrong.”
For the common-sense reason, that the explicit consent is required of all who end-up ingesting toxic chemicals.
Pretty much *EVERYONE* appreciates the broad validity of this fundamental principle of human dignity and justice … except strict market-fundamentalists and libertarians, eh Faustino?
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by ordvic
Fan,
You often use simplistic and misleading arguments to make your point. Now while many libertarians and numbskulls like Rush Limbaugh will decry any government action, true libertarian principles make no such arguement.
It has been years since I read Austrian-type economic literature, I do remembered enough to explain to you a part of the philosophy that many people, including many libertarians and presumably you, do not understand. The libertarian philosophy understands that resources are finite and need good stewardship for sustained use for market consumption. Citizens are not entitled to prevent or damage resources and deprive their fellow citizens without lawful intervention.
An example woud be that if you live upsteam of a water resource you cannot cut off your downstream neighbors by damming the water and deprive them without due process. Another example is that you cannot willfully damage a resource such as air or water with pollution without due process. You may be subject to a fine or a tax or even a ban if your fellow citizens or the law determines a misuse of a commonly held resource.
In fact the whole idea of something like a carbon tax comes from libertarian philosophy of taxing the use or damage of a commonly held resource in accordance with how the citizens or the law view that resource. A pollution tax is just a libertarian way of costing out a finite resource.
In the case of something like air or water the finite value is so great as to effect life existence itself, the laws covering that would have to be, by the pure value itself, very stringent.
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Comment on A precautionary tale: more sorry than safe(?) by michael hart
I don’t see much new in Rifkin’s comments. Dirigiste Eurocrats pandering to anti-industrial Cider-with-Rosie types and the eat-yourself-fitter chemophobes. Has he only just noticed?
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