I’ve always been just a hair skeptical about all those admonitions to consumers to save the world — you know, the “Live simply, that others may simply live”-type instructions. They felt a little too much like guilt-tripping to me, with perhaps not enough corresponding actual environmental good being done. It seems like a way for consumers who are feeling guilty about something — say, those SUVs they drive — to assuage their guilt by doing something that doesn’t really hurt, like turning off the lights when leaving a room. And of course, we’ve seen how this mindset can backfire:

What? You want me to do something more to help the environment? I recycle, ya know!

So environmentally, my frame of mind was: No pain, no gain.

Well, I stand corrected. Finally, some smart people did us all a favor and ran the numbers. And it turns out that, OK, maybe consumers can’t save the Earth from global warming on their own, while the factories and power plants grind on – but consumers can have a measureable impact. Especially if they live in the U-S of A.

Michael Vanderbergh

And in Dateline Earth’s never-ending search for the hundred 1-percent solutions to global warming, this one counts.

 What I’m talking about is a recent paper (PDF) entitled “Household Actions Can Provide a Behavioral Wedge to Rapidly Reduce U.S. Carbon Emissions” that appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  

Co-author Michael Vandenbergh was interviewed by Robert Siegel, co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered. It turns out that U.S. consumers could, by taking a series of 17 actions that the authors of the peer-reviewed paper say would result in “little or no reduction in household well-being,” reduce U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by about 7.5 percent.

Siegel asked my question: Just 7 percent? Vandenbergh’s answer:

Seven percent. That’s equivalent to the total emissions of France. It’s also equivalent to the combined emissions of the petroleum refining, iron and steel and aluminum industries … One of the largest problems that we face is getting over the presumption that people have that individual behavior or household behavior doesn’t matter. But when you aggregate it across 300 million individuals and 100 million households, it has a very large impact on total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, that 7-percent estimate doesn’t even assume that everyone in the United States would start taking these steps. No, the research team assumed a certain “plasticity” for each action (which sounds to this economics minor a lot like the “elasticity” we learned about in ECON 301. It was also here that I learned that all-important economist’s question: “Compared to what?”).

For example, the paper’s authors figured that maybe 90 percent of the population could be cajoled into weatherizing their homes, while maybe 80 percent would install low-flow showerheads and efficient water heaters. But only about 15 percent could be talked into carpooling.

Even at that, we’re still looking at reducing U.S. emissions by 1/13th! That ain’t nothing, no how. 

And it turns out, Vandenbergh says, that my initial assumption about this is probably wrong. That is, there’s no evidence that people who take these steps excuse themselves from larger burdens. There hasn’t been much empirical data on that question, he says, and what does exist suggests just the opposite — that as a person begins to feel good about one set of small actions to help the Earth, he or she is likely to start considering larger and bolder steps. 

OK, that does it. I’m vowing to redouble my efforts. And in the meantime, I’ll feel a lot better every time I walk to InvestigateWest World Headquarters instead of driving my 20-year-old, gas-sipping Honda two-seater. I’ll congratulate myself when I open the door of my efficient refrigerator. Now, if I could just figure out a good way to dry my clothers in the winter in Seattle in my tiny house without using the dryer…  

– Robert McClure

As ProPublica found, with the help of InvestigateWest, many other media organizations and citizen journalists around the country, interest cooled, perhaps after it became known that media attention was focused on this sometime perk of public office. Or perhaps a record snowstorm had something to do with it.

Was it the two feet of snow that blanketed Washington during the days leading up to the Super Bowl? Or was it the unintended consequence of our Super Bowl Blitz [1], a two-week telephone survey that ProPublica conducted with the help of its readers, trying to find out which members of Congress would be attending this year’s big game?

In any case, at least two Super Bowl fundraising events scheduled by members of Congress were scrubbed at the last minute or moved to undisclosed locations. Invitations to those parties, which had been circulated two or more weeks before the game, promised Super Bowl tickets to contributors who gave either of the lawmakers $5,000.

InvestigateWest’s Daniel Lathrop phoned Washington’s congressional delegation, to find out they were not intending to go, most likely even before the ProPublica began to focus the attention on the fundraising events. None of the state’s delegation had gone to the national football championship event in recent years, except for former University of Washington linebacker Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Bremerton, who attended in 2006,  the year the Seattle Seahawks lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers .

But we’re happy to join in ProPublica’s effort to help keep politicians aware that their constituents are aware of who pays for the perks of office.

You can read the full story here.

– Rita Hibbard.

President Barack Obama answered an important philosophical question last week: How will the federal government fully fund a starved Indian health system?

The answer is budget by budget: The administration boosted spending by 13 percent in fiscal year 2010 and is proposing another 9 percent increase for 2011. But this budget does not resolve the contradiction between “historic underfunding” and the larger reality about federal spending. The proposed budget calls for $5.4 billion in spending for Indian health care, ranging from clinical services to facility maintenance and construction. (The bulk of that money, $4.4 billion would be from appropriations, the rest comes from health insurance collections and special grants.)

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said: “Our budget also contains a significant increase in funds for the Indian Health Service as we continue to work to eliminate health disparities. It is the principle that we are trying to establish in our healthcare system – that regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or geography every American deserves high quality and affordable care.”

But while spending on Indian health is increasing – is it growing fast enough to catch up? There remains a significant gap between what is spent on an American Indian/Alaska Native patient than a federal prisoner, $2,130 per person versus $3,985. One measure used by the federal government is a benchmark based on spending for federal employees. The Indian Health Service is currently appropriated about 55 percent of that standard on per person basis.

Indeed, last April a tribal task force recommended a $2.1 billion increase in the budget authority for IHS in fy 2011. The tribal leaders called for a ten-year phase in of $21.2 billion to reach spending parity.

The National Indian Health Board describes the budget this way: “The Budget demonstrates the Administration’s continuing commitment to honoring the Federal government’s trust responsibilities and treaty obligations. Exempting IHS from the same “freeze” that other programs and agencies are under is a significant sign. However, with IHS deeply and chronically underfunded, IHS services remain woefully short of need.”

Perhaps the area that most highlights that shortage of need comes in the area of contract health care, services that must be purchased for IHS patients. There is a $46 million boost, or more than 11 percent, from $398 million in fy 2010 to $444 million in fy 2011. That’s important because it’s increasing faster than medical inflation (about 5.7 percent) and the patient population growth of about 2 percent.

Contract care is often the primary narrative for the Indian Health Service in news accounts. This is the source of “don’t get sick after June.”

A few weeks ago, before the budget was announced, I talked to IHS Director Yvette Roubideaux about contract health. “It’s a program where we know people are not satisfied because in general American Indian and Alaska Native people believe health care is something owed to them. Unfortunately with the contract health service program we’re struggling to meet the need with existing resources,” she said. “That unfortunately results in some denials and deferments of services.  We know that the patients don’t like this; we know the tribes don’t like that, but it’s the reality of providing health care with a limited budget.”

Dr. Roubideaux said the fair way is to stick with medically based decisions. She would also like increasing the alternative sources of funding, such as employee insurance, Medicaid or Medicare.

That’s the other side of the contract health story. When clients of the Indian health system bring their own insurance – employer-based, purchased directly or because of other public programs – adds resources. The fy 2011 revenue budget only shows a slight growth in this area, revenue from private and public health insurance is estimated at $829 million up from $814 million.

The president’s budget is only a proposal, one that will be refined by the Congress. That might even mean more money. But it’s important to put this in perspective. Federal domestic spending is under pressure because it’s an easy symbol of excess. The federal spending that’s growing the fastest is off the table, namely Medicare, Medicaid and interest on the debt.

And that brings us back to the need for general health care reform: There won’t be spending parity in the Indian health system until that’s accomplished.

Mark Trahant is an advisory board member of InvestigateWest and a Kaiser Media Fellow examining the Indian Health Service and its relevance to the national health care reform debate. He is a member of Idaho’s Shoshone-Bannock Tribes.

The true cost is likely to be a whole lot more — probably in the range of the combined gross domestic products of Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom, says the report, which was financed by the Pew Environment Group.

A melting Arctic heats the climate in two basic ways: First, when all the white snow and ice on the land and in the ocean melts, the darker colors underneath absorb more heat instead of reflecting it.

The second thing that happens is that as the permafrost melts, it releases methane — remember methane, that other greenhouse gas, the one we fingered not long ago for its powerful greenhouse punch?

The researchers came up with estimates of how much both of these effects will have and converted those numbers into carbon dioxide equivalents — i.e., how much of that better-known greenhouse you’d have to release to create this much climate warming.

Those figures are sobering: The amount of warming to be wrought this year alone by Arctic melting will equal about 42 percent of all the emissions from the United States! That’s the equivalent of building 500 new coal-burning power plants. And that CO2-equivalent number will keep going up as time goes along.

This report is being release way up in Baffin Island, in northeastern Canada, at a town called Iqaluit, where the G7 nations are meeting. Just across the Davis Strait and Baffin Bay is Greenland. The report says that if the Greenland ice sheet melts, we’re looking at something like a 20-foot rise in gobal sea level. As a native of low-lying South Florida, I’m chilled by that nugget.

And remember, this report only catalogues some of the costs of an unfrozen Arctic. As the intro says:

This paper provides initial estimates of only one of the ecosystem services provided by the northern cryosphere, global climate regulation. It serves as a scoping exercise pointing to additional work that needs to be carried out. In particular, we recognize the value that the frozen Arctic has for the people who live there and the range of ecosystem services that the Arctic environment provides for them. We do not attempt here to describe or quantify those values and services, in part because a way of life cannot be captured in monetary value and in part simply to emphasize an often-overlooked aspect of the frozen Arctic: the services that it provides to the Earth’s climate system.

– Robert McClure

Molly Jones Gray of Seattle testified this week in Washington, D.C., regarding human exposure to toxic chemicals.  After participating in a study conducted by the Washington Toxics Coalition, a pregnant Gray was horrified to learn that her body contained a variety of dangerous chemicals. Gray said she was testifying not only on her own behalf, but also for her 7-month-old son Paxton. She told the Senate Subcommittee on Superfund, Toxics and Environmental Health:

On behalf of my son Paxton and all other children, I am asking for your help to lower our body burdens of chemicals that come between us and our health.

The Toxics Coalition conducted a study testing nine pregnant women from Washington, Oregon, and California for five groups of chemicals: phthalates, mercury, so-called “Teflon” chemicals known as perfluorinated compounds, bisphenol A, and the flame retardant tetrabromobisphenol A.

The study, entitled Earliest Exposures, examined the blood and urine of the nine women in their second trimester. All nine women’s bodies were contaminated with at least a few of the dangerous chemicals.

Many of the women were shocked and left feeling powerless that they couldn’t protect their children at the earliest stages of their growth.

Before bearing her son, Gray had suffered through multiple miscarriages. Recognizing a connection between fertility and chemical exposure, she made a commitment to eat organic produce, avoid certain cleaning products, and eliminate the use of plastic containers. Once pregnant, Gray took additional dietary measures to maintain her and her baby’s health. She glugged down prenatal vitamins. She avoided mercury-ridden fish. Devout in her commitment to health, she was thoroughly disheartened by the study’s results:

I was shocked that my levels were as high as they were. I learned that this fight to avoid toxins is larger than one person alone!

These chemicals are everywhere. For example, 90 percent of Americans have bisphenol A in their systems. Many people have no idea how often they are exposed to these chemicals or the health effects. But then again, neither do government agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The issue is a basic lack of research.

The EPA is authorized under the Toxics Substances Control Act to monitor and regulate dangerous chemicals that could pose health risks. In order for the EPA to regulate these chemicals, the agency must be able to cite data on the health effects.

Yet agency officials cited numerous problems with the current regulatory system. For example, out of the 80,000 chemicals potentially regulated under the toxic-substances law, only 212 are being studied. And, said Steve Owens, an EPA assistant administrator:

Of the roughly 84,000 chemicals included on the TSCA inventory, the identity of more than 16,000 of these chemicals is currently classified as confidential. That makes no sense.

Without a more detailed look at how people are being exposed to these chemicals, EPA is unable to act to control them.

Committee chairman and New Jersey Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg, recounted his father’s life as a mill worker. He said his father’s exposure to chemicals contributed to his death at 43. Lautenberg urged fellow lawmakers to take steps to reduce the chemical burden carried by Americans and to protect the next generation. Said Lautenberg:

Our children should not be used as guinea pigs. So it’s time to update the law and protect them.

– Jennifer Privette

What with a judge telling the state it’s been failing in its constitutional duty to fund K-12 education, and college students and staff across the state walking out of the classroom to speak out against budget cuts in higher ed, it’s heady stuff.

“State funding is not ample, it is not stable, and it is not dependable,” said King County Superior Court John Erlick in his ruling that the state has failed in its duty to provide for the education of school children. He ordered the Legislature to determine the cost of a basic education, then pay for it.

That sounds simple enough, but the devil is in those details, and the formula has been evaded for 30 years, as Erlick also pointed out in his ruling. He also warned lawmakers  the state’s fiscal crisis is not a good enough reason to ignore the state constitution.

The case was brought by a coalition of parents, educators and community leaders. But the state may appeal the ruling, The Seattle Times’ Linda Shaw reported.

That was the one part of the decision that the state’s attorneys found comforting.

“He left the remedy for whatever ails the system in the Legislature’s hands, and we believe that’s where it belongs,” said Assistant Attorney General Bill Clark.

But while parents were ecstatic, the joy was shared by the state’s leading educator, state superintendent of education Randy Dorn, Shaw wrote.

“It’s a great day for kids. It’s a great day for students, and I believe that we’ve had about a decade and a half of moving backward.” For starters, Dorn said, the decision means that the Legislature should refrain from making cuts in its K-12 education budget this year.

But students at the state’s public universities aren’t so confident. They’re staring down the barrel of some serious funding cuts, and they chose Thursday and today to take to the streets in protest.

More than 500 students and faculty walked out of classes and offices at Eastern Washington University on Thursday, and about 150 held a similar demonstration at Washington State University. Students at the University of Washington, Evergreen State College, Western Washington University and Central Washington University are planning protests to budget cuts and tuition hikes today.

We know education is what makes the difference. It will give our state an economic advantage. It will pull us out of a recession long term. It will provide opportunity and change lives. So why not stand up for education wherever it’s needed – for kids, adults, people in prisons, people who need retraining to re-enter the workforce. Education is the game-changer, and it’s time to change the game.

– Rita Hibbard

John, a Vietnam veteran who lived on the streets of Lake City for 15 years, says it’s “scary” to move into his own apartment.  He hopes he will find camaraderie in his new apartment building where 38 of the 75 units are reserved for homeless vets.

“The thing is to have people become a family here and not 75 individuals,” John told Keith Ervin of The Seattle Times. “It’s important that people watch out for each other.”

John’s sentiments remind me of Stan, who I met outside the Seattle Center last weekend after attending a session on homelessness at the Guiding Lights weekend conference. The session, presented by Bill Block, project director of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County, volunteer and author Judy Lightfoot and homeless advocate Joe Ingram, highlighted the number of homeless people in Seattle and King County, and how we as individuals can relate to them person-to-person. What Stan said was this: he’d lived on the streets a long time, and while it could be a cold and hard place, he wasn’t quite sure if he’d move into a home with walls if one could be found.

Joe, who had been on the streets a long time before becoming an outreach worker, introduced me to Stan and explained that coming in from the cold is part of the difficult process for some homeless people. It’s not  all of the problem. Many homeless people would welcome a home. Like John, many long term homeless people are eventually willing to take a chance on finding brotherhood within four walls. Many more are families who desperately need a roof over their heads.

The Lake City model, a $16 million, six-story building named McDermott Place after Rep. Jim McDermott, is operated by the Low Income Housing Institute with funding from the city, county, state and federal sources. Also contributing are Key Bank and other banks, tax credits, Seattle Housing Authority and United Way of King County, Ervin writes.

North Helpline last month moved the Lake City Food Bank and its emergency-services office to the building from cramped quarters in a nearby fire station. In addition, two Sound Mental Health case managers work full-time at McDermott Place and a weekly RotaCare clinic is being set up with volunteer doctors and nurses.

Vets in particular need our help.

“A lot of veterans fought our wars and they come back here and fight a different type of enemy. That could be drugs, alcohol, depression, mental illness,”  Low Income Housing Institute Executive Director Sharon Lee said. “We want to make sure homeless veterans are not sleeping on the streets and are not sleeping under bridges, in their cars.”

To read more about the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness, and how you can help, click on this link. To read more about the workshop presentation, about “coming alongside” homeless people and extending a helping hand, read Judy Lightfoot’s blog on the subject. Judy calls it “freestyle volunteering,”  and offers ways to make it safe, helpful and hopeful to you and those you meet.

– Rita Hibbard

Not so much, it seems. Today the Lancet medical journal retracted a pivotal scientific paper in support of this concept. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal offered some tantalizing research tidbits that, while not identifying a cause, certainly seem to point toward an environmental factor or factors… or possibly social factors.

The backdrop here is that autism rates are skyrocketing in American children. My InvestigateWest colleague Carol Smith was onto this trend more than a decade ago, when the incidence was running  no higher than 1 out of every 500 children. It’s now up at something more like 1 in 100 children. That’s 1 percent of the population!

In today’s news, first the retraction: It was a paper by a bunch of scientists led by one Dr. Andrew Wakefield that in 1998 set off a bit of a panic among parents, particularly in Britain, about the possibilty that vaccinations could be causing autism.

It was an appealing hypothesis, because it would explain why autism rates are increasing seemingly all over.

But years of studies followed. And the autism rate kept going up even though the mercury-containing preservative, thiomersal, was removed from the vaccines — and even though vaccination rates in the UK and United States took a noticeable downward dip, along with health outcomes for unvaccinated children.

A British journalist whose name I unfortunately cannot find right now later revealed that Wakefield had conflicts of interest that he did not disclose, including the fact that plaintiffs’-bar lawyers helped fund Wakefield’s research. Wakefield also had come up with a measles vaccine that might have become popular in the absence of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, Gardiner Harris reports today in The New York Times.

The Lancet’s action comes a week after Britain’s General Medical Council found that Wakefield had acted with “callous disregard” for his test subjects. He apparently took blood samples from 12 kids gathered for a birthday party.

Now, of course, not everyone is convinced that vaccines are off the hook. The most lucid defense of this point of view that I saw came from author David Kirby over at HuffPo. Still, when almost every scientist on a paper withdraws and the leader-holdout is facing censure by colleagues, it doesn’t look good for that point of view . . .  no matter what the subject.

Now, on to Melinda Beck’s fortuitously timed piece in this morning’s Journal. Her lede:

Why is a child born in northwest Los Angeles four times as likely to be diagnosed with autism as a child born elsewhere in California?

Hard not to keep going, eh?

The really interesting thing here is that an area that includes posh Beverly Hills represents 3 percent of California’s autism cases even though it represents just 1 percent of the state’s population.

Unsurprisingly, the Columbia University study and another California  autism research project by UC-Davis researchers found no links to vaccinations. Both also noted that autism diagnoses are more prevalent in upper-income areas.

And it’s clear that there’s a geographical spottiness to these rates, Beck notes: Autism is diagnosed in greater Phoenix at twice the rate it is in northern Alabama, for instance.

The Davis study pinpointed clusters of high-diagnosis areas in Santa Ana, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Fresno and Stockton. There, kids had at least a 70% greater chance of being diagnosed with autism than in surrounding areas, Beck reports.

The question, though, is whether these higher diagnosis rates are the result of more-educated parents recognizing a problem, versus some kind of actual environmental factor.

Current research doesn’t settle the question. More to come.

– Robert McClure

.

To paper and plastic.

An Oregon lawmaker is backing legislation to ban plastic bags. A big fight is shaping up, with plastic bag makers pointing to the  harmful effects of paper, and asking ‘who can say paper is worse than plastic?’ In Seattle last year, voters bowed to big spending by big plastic and chemical interests and voted down a proposal to  impose fees on all disposable bags.

The Oregon battle, a long shot to begin with, will be a tough one, marked by rhetoric and big spending by corporate interests that have derailed similar efforts around the nation. Expect that to continue. Why? Because nationwide, grocery stores and pharmacies go through about 92 billion plastic bags a year, compared to about 5 billion paper bags.

“The plastic industry … will try to win local battle by local battle,”  Marc Mihaly, director of the environmental law center at Vermont Law School, says of such contests. “They will intimidate where they can. If they can’t intimidate … they will try to influence legislators.”

But all of us could make the decision ourselves, and just bring our own re-usable bags. Yeah, it’s hard to remember.  And really annoying to carry five oranges, a jar of honey and three cans of dog food out of the store with no bag. But, sigh, we could save a lot of money and energy and advertising brochures headed for the landfill if we just said ‘no.’  To non-reusable bags, that is.

The Oregonian’s Scott Learn writes that State Sen. Mark Hass, D-Beaverton, wants to ban plastic bags at stores, because:

“They contribute to litter, are minimally recycled, regularly gum up recycling sorting machines, harm marine life and are made from fossil fuels. “I don’t think people understand the true cost of these bags,” Hass said.

On the other side, studies have shown that paper bags use a lot of nonrenewable energy and water, and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and acid rain. Paper bags, for example, take about 40 percent more energy to manufacture. But they’re easier to recycle in most locations.

Public bans or fees to limit the use of all disposable bags help spur use of reusable bags. In South Australia, where a ban on plastic bags has been in place for six months, 82 percent of the public believes it has helped keep bags out of the landfill.

In the U.S., cities are beginning to take action.  Twelve, including San Francisco, have banned plastic bags, and Washington, D.C.,  imposed a five-cent fee on single-use bags Jan. 1. The plastics industry has taken the approach of filing suit against governments and government regulations when bans or limits are sought on plastic bags, as they successfully did last week in Manhattan Beach, CA.

Just remember this: your plastic bag will outlive you by many, many years. It has a life-expectancy of about 1,000 years. Your paper bag? One month in a landfill.  Your plastic bags required petroleum or natural gas in its manufacture. They collect in our waterways and choke marine life and birds. In addition to releasing more greenhouse gases and air and water pollution in their manufacture, paper bags require more energy to transport. So don’t choose paper or plastic.

Choose to re-use, and just say no to high-priced, corporate advertising campaigns designed to win your hearts and minds.

– Rita Hibbard

My interest was further piqued when I met malaria sufferers on my trip to Africa, and again when I donated money to a campaign to buy pesticide-treated mosquito netting for African children. Something like 1 million people die annually from malaria — most of them African children under age 5.

So, what’s the real deal? Are the greens so caught up in their rhetoric they would allow kids to die? I’m afraid getting to the bottom of that question slipped pretty far down my priority list.

Fortunately for me and the rest of the world, Simon Fraser University media prof Donald Gutstein did a pretty thorough job poking into the controversy. His conclusion, presented recently in The Tyee, is that there really shouldn’t be any controversy — because environmental groups haven’t opposed use of DDT to fight malaria.

But in Canada, at least — and this matches with my general impression I’ve heard on this side of the border — that is what one would conclude from reading the news media. 

Gutstein relates that the enviros-with-blood-on-their-hands story was one that proved too good for the news media to check out:

The problem with the coverage of the DDT issue and with the eco-imperialism charge is that they are based on falsehoods that the media did not investigate. Former CBC-TV National News anchor Knowlton Nash once said that “…our job in the media… is to… provide a searchlight probing for truth through the confusing, complicated, cascading avalanche of fact and fiction.” In this case, the media let their audiences down; fiction prevailed over fact. 

If you’re still having doubts, check out the United Nations press release outlining the outcome of the latest round of negotiations on persistent organic pollutants.  (Search the PDF for “malaria.”) Bear in mind also that long before DDT use was banned across most of the world, the poison had started to lose its effectiveness on mosquitoes as resistance built up.

Gutstein’s Tyee piece (haven’t heard of The Tyee? You’ve gotta check ‘em out!) is a chapter from his book “Not A Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy.” In it, Gutstein outlines how one of the main groups complaining about greens’ insensitivity to pitiful African children is Africa Fighting Malaria. Which, it turns out, mostly is not from Africa:

Africa Fighting Malaria was formed during the negotiations that led to the Stockholm Convention. The name is misleading. The organization is based in Washington, D.C., not Africa. And the board of directors comprises not Africans, but Americans. Its staff and directors have links, not to African health and social movement organizations, but to Western libertarian and neoconservative think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Institute for Economic Analysis, Tech Central Station, the Liberty Institute and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.

So who’s going to tell Americans about this? When I went looking on this side of the border, I found this question had been asked and answered even before Gutstein’s piece. That happened in a provocative post last year in which my friend Bill Kovarik held forth on how the fake DDT-malaria story is part of a larger unwillingness by some true alternatives to environmentally harmful practices. Says Kovarik:

In each of these cases, alternatives have existed for decades and are well known to experts. Mineral wool works just as well as asbestos. Venezuela has bigger oil fields than all of the Middle East. DDT is not the last word in malaria control. Renewable energy is more affordable than nuclear power. SUVs, for all their bulk, are not as safe as other cars because they roll over.

– Robert McClure