Denial is taking a toll.
Peter Dykstra for Environmental Health News
The
often-ludicrous reasons for today's vaccine avoidance have their ancestors in
other health, science, and climate crises.
Deepwater
denial
The
late Rush Limbaugh was such a reliable gusher of whoppers, quarter-truths, and
loopy conspiracy theories that it shouldn't be this easy to pick any single one
out, but here's mine: A week
after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill,
Limbaugh told his radio audience that "environmentalist wackos" had
doomed the rig and killed 13 of its crew. Never mind that rig operator BP
admitted blame two days earlier.
Non-peer-reviewed
literature
Former
11-term Illinois Congressman John Shimkus has quoted the book of Genesis and
the Gospel according to Matthew as guarantees that overrule the prevailing
science, and that climate change will "not destroy this Earth."
God's
word, the Congressman says, is "infallible, unchanging, perfect."
Shaving
the truth
Paul
LePage was an obscure small-town Maine mayor who became governor in 2010 on an
anti-regulatory platform. But he wasn't your run-of-the-mill science hater.
Even a decade ago, when warming coastal waters posed a threat for Maine's
lobster industry, LePage embraced the science.
But
as the Maine Legislature considered a measure to restrict endocrine-disrupting
bisphenol-A (BPA) in 2011, LePage said he'd reviewed the science on BPA, and
offered this (it's at 1:30 of this video.)
"If
you take a plastic bottle and put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it
gives off a chemical similar to estrogen. And so the worst case is some women
might have little beards."
Ummm
.. come again, Paul?
"Where you now have cows, you will have fish"
In
1990, The Washington Post reported that J.R. Spradley, a U.S. delegate at an
international climate change conference, told the Bangladeshi delegation that
their nation getting swamped by sea level rise won't be such a bad thing. "
The
situation is not a disaster; it is merely a change. The area won't have
disappeared; it will just be underwater. Where you now have cows, you will have
fish."
"Think
of the clearcut as a temporary meadow"
Fifty years ago, Patrick Moore was an eager graduate student who crewed on the first Greenpeace voyages to oppose nuclear weapons tests. Over the next decade, he became a leader in the growing group's triumph and turmoil.
He quit in 1986,
showing up a few years later as a paid spokesman for Greenpeace foes –vinyl
makers, logging multinationals, a nuke plant trade group, and more. Here's
a wet kiss to the timber industry:
"Taken
in the right light, clearcuts can actually look quite pretty. Think, for just a
moment, of the clearcut as a temporary meadow."
Some
climate yucks from Fox News
As
I cited a few weeks ago, Fox's in-house comic, Greg Gutfeld, gifted us
with 10 minutes of climate mirth earlier
this month.
It
turns out that since a recent study cited more global deaths from excessive
cold than from excessive heat, that a little global warming is a great thing.
So
... don't we all feel a little better?
Peter
Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist and can be reached at pdykstra@ehn.org or @pdykstra.