It always astounds me when Harvard High Flyers put up something that makes no sense.
Thanks to the Chief Toxicologist for Texas, Dr. Mike Honeycutt, for tipping me off.
Here Poulot and Jacob, engineer goofs from Harvard propose that American Food production for export is bad–produces too much small particulate pollution and too much ammonia yadayadddyaaaayaa.
These jackasses deserve to live in a world without food, then they will say–well gee, producing food is good, and sometimes it produces things like dust.
Sure American food production causes a net increase in some air borne things. That’s called human activity. The 3rd world would like to say–thanks.
These guys want the world to be like a big museum with no living people in it. No, actually they want a bubble, where they don’t have to deal with real life and the fact that the air has stuff in it.
Underlying this junk science is the idea that if you can identify particles in the air–bad. The air should be spic and span.
The Clean Air Act was, as I have said so many times–misnamed–it is really intended to be the Safe Air Act, because, even in Cambridge Mass there is no way to produce “clean” air. The air always has pollutants in it, and it is not sterile and it is not free of allergens or the many chemicals and molecules that have been on this earth for the eons. We live in a soup.
The only people that seem to be unable to get their arms around the reality is the enviros–looking for a utopia where the air is “clean” as in no pollutants.
A couple of years ago a Charlatan hack EPA big shot named Jon Samet MD, announced that there is no safe level of pollutants.
Consider that for being a moron.
So here’s the Harvard blather about food production creating net bad effects:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es4034793
And here’s the link to Jon Samet’s declaration that there is no safe level of air pollution.
Such a twit.
Samet J.The Clean Air Act and health—a clearer view from 2011.
New Engl J Med 2011;365:198-201.
Available at http://epahumantesting.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/samet-commentary.pdf.AccessedOct 22, 2012.
Back when the sierra club et al were making much ado about spotted owls my mother observed that a conservationist is someone who already has his cabin in the woods and doesn’t want you moving in next door. That basic tenet has held true of every publicly active environmentalist I’ve heard of.
These “Haaavard” “scientists” are just like the retired government worker in our city. When the Sierra Club was trying to shut down our sawmill, the newspaper asked his opinion as he was considered a “sage”. His reply: “Well when I am sight seeing in the mountains, I hate meeting a log truck. And quite frankly I’ve got mine and I don’t give a damn whether anyone else has a job or a place to live!”
If someone shouts out that he wants to kill a black or a Muslim or someone from such other group, he will immediately be arrested and prosecuted – whether or not he actually tried to harm anyone or had the ability to cause any harm.
But give him a Harvard professorship and he can advocate the mass murder of hundreds of millions of blacks and Asians by starvation, without being arrested or prosecuted – and he may even get an award from some environment group or an invite from the White House.
The progressive mindset is way out of balance.
Actually, there have been several articles that address this. I did so on my “Examining Science” blog. There are a lot of parallels. Tadchem is probably right about the money–baby penquins are so much cuter and interesting than OCD.
“Maybe someone should do a study examining whether environmentalism is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder. ”
Sorry, but they are all busy doing things that require government grants, such as watching baby penguins freeze.
Dust is nature’s way of telling you it is time to wash your car.
I’d say “Not as much, but then I remembered all human caused dust at any level is unacceptable, so I guess we have to send them to whatever hunter/gather societies there are left. But hunting and gathering can be dusty too. I have it! Let’s send them into the vacuum of space! No, dust there too. Probably some on it due to humans. Dang, I’m out of ideas…….
You know that even plowing and tilling by hand will put dust in the air, so we have to send them someplace where people only gather food — and not pull it out by the roots, either.
Call me closed-minded, but I dismiss every environmental argument that hold’s human activity to a threshold below that of situation normal (particulate matter in a volcanic eruption does not count as normal) for nature. Crazy and irresponsible, I know. Apparently, everyone else knows that everyone else can live forever if they aren’t exposed to natural conditions. And I certainly wouldn’t want to be cast as being opposed to living forever or being unwilling to do “whatever it takes” to achieve that objective.
Maybe someone should do a study examining whether environmentalism is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder. It wouldn’t be scientific, but that never stops them from drawing may or may not be conclusions.
We need another catagory for “deaths caused by science”: Imposition of historically failed methods of farming, medicine and life in general based on an irrational fear of progress. I can count millions in that category, denied DDT, denied Golden Rice (okay, that was blindness….), denied vaccinations, etc. I’m thinking that will be a fairly large number……
One of the miracles of the last 200 years is our ability to massively increase food production and transport. We seem to have a whole class of folks who don’t recognize this. Can we improve some of the negative environmental side effects such as nutrient run off, sedimentation and soils loss? Sure. We’ve been doing that since the dust bowl era. Some of the much maligned GMO foods can reduce the environmental impact.
Did these bright researchers now can separate deaths from PM2.5 from agriculture and coal plants. Has that made the CDC morbidity and mortality tables yet?
I also don’t believe these researchers factored in the cost and impact of not producing food in great abundance.
Do we tell them that pipeline from the Gulf Coast is a major method of transporting ammonia?
Solution: Send these people to a third world country where there are not all the evil farmers and manufacturers. Make it a one-way ticket with no chance of return. Don’t want them living in a country that puts dust in the air while growing food–that would be “wrong”. 🙂
don’t know where I read it, but read an interview with a bigshot enviroweenie who was rooting for outlawing all antibiotics because they kill bacteria and those have a right to live that’s at least as important as that of human beings.
that’s the attitude we’re dealing with.
Maybe we can convince all the environMENTALists to climb into a large bunker with super clean air and water as well as perfectly natural food and materials.
(With a really strong door and a time lock set for 100 years.)