Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (65 page)

[32]
. “Mass Extinctions: What Causes Animal Die-Offs?”
National Geographic
, http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/prehistoric-world/mass-extinction.html

[33]
. K. J. Willis, and S. A. Bhagwat, “Biodiversity and Climate Change,”
Science
326, no. 5954 (November 6, 2009), 806-807, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/326/5954/806

[34]
. Hannah Devlin, “Experts Say That Fears Surrounding Climate Change Are Overblown,”
Sunday Times
, November 6, 2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6905082.ece

[35]
. Barry Sinervo et al., “Erosion of Lizard Diversity by Climate Change and Altered Thermal Niches,”
Science
328, no. 5980 (May 14, 2010): 894-899. , http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/328/5980/894

[36]
. Doyle Rice, “Lizards in Danger of Extinction, Study Finds,”
USA Today
, May 14, 2010, http://www.usatoday.com/NEWS/usaedition/2010-05-14-lizards14_ST_U.htm?csp=34

Chapter 18 -
Chemicals Are Us

Among the most misunderstood and abused words in the English language is
chemical
. We are encouraged to avoid chemicals even though our food is made entirely of chemicals. Water is a chemical. Our medicines are all chemicals. Without chemicals there could be no life, never mind civilization. Obviously when the word chemical is used as if it is a bad thing we must be talking about something else.

Perhaps we mean
synthetic chemicals
, the ones made with chemistry by people in the chemical industry. But most of our medicines are synthetic and so is most of the vitamin C added to our fruit drinks. And the nitrogen fertilizer that keeps four billion of us alive is synthetic too; it is made from air and natural gas. Plastics are synthetic. Now I’m getting into controversial territory, as if plastics were wrong. Greenpeace’s Pyramid of Plastics is essentially a priority hit-list to rid the earth of these very useful substances.
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Nevertheless, only a real back-to-the caves type would not admit there are some very good and useful synthetic chemicals. As previously mentioned, organic farmers use a large number of them.

Then maybe we mean
toxic chemicals
. Okay, there are certainly lots of toxic chemicals, but most of them occur naturally. Snake venom is a good example. Many medicines are derived from natural chemicals that are toxic to bacteria. The smoke from natural forest fires is a pretty vile mix of chemicals, including dioxins. Many plants produce toxic chemicals to discourage animals from eating them. Most of us drive around with a tank full of gasoline or diesel, transformed by nature from ancient plants into chemicals you wouldn’t want in your stomach or your eyes. So even if the word chemicals is used as code for poison, chemicals are certainly not all made by large chemical companies.

Many toxic chemicals that are produced by these companies are rather useful when properly employed. Ammonia, the building block for the nitrogen fertilizers so vital to our survival, is a very poisonous gas. Yet it is the second largest chemical by volume produced today. You wouldn’t want sulfuric acid on your corn flakes, yet it is the chemical produced in the largest volume worldwide (165 million tonnes [182 million tons] annually). Like ammonia it is used to produce fertilizers along with hundreds of other useful products, including the acid in our car batteries. The chlorine added to our drinking water and used to disinfect our homes, hospitals, and workplaces is essential to control the spread of infection and disease. Yet chlorine is one of the most toxic substances if used improperly. And again there are our medicines, purposely designed to be toxic to the billions of bacteria aiming to kill us. If we were foolish enough to stop producing these important toxic chemicals, we would have a heavy price to pay in human lives.

Chemicals, otherwise known as molecules or compounds, are composed of elements, which form the basic building blocks of our universe.
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Elements are the simplest substances in chemistry; chemistry is about how elements fit together to make molecules. The elements hydrogen and oxygen combine to make the molecule/chemical/compound water. Every substance in our world is either an element or a molecule (chemical or compound). So if chemical is just another word for molecule and compound, the stuff everything in the universe is made of, surely we should not use the word as if it were automatically negative.

Every element on earth can be found dissolved in water. Uranium, arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, chlorine; you name it and it can be detected, even if in minute quantities, in the water in rivers, lakes, and especially in oceans, where they tend to accumulate in seawater. You wouldn’t want to drink a lot of seawater, as it is dehydrating due to the salts (chemicals) it contains, but if applied externally it has a healing quality as a mild antiseptic, because it contains chemicals that have antibacterial properties. One of the most important of those chemicals is sodium chloride, common table salt, and the most abundant molecule in the sea other than water. Sodium chloride is essential for life but is toxic at high concentrations.

If chemicals are so good, then why are the environmental movement, industry, and world governments so concerned about them? By far the most important reason is the issue of toxic waste. Many industrial processes produce by-products that are toxic but have no useful purpose. In the past it was the practice to emit many toxic wastes into the nearest ravine, creek, river, lake, or seashore, and, in the case of toxic waste in exhaust gases, into the air. This resulted in tremendous damage to aquatic life, to forests and wildlife, and to people who breathed the toxic air.

The development of regulations to prevent the release of toxic wastes into the environment, which began in the 1970s, was one of the environmental movement’s first major achievements. Today most industrialized countries have largely eliminated the disposal of toxic wastes into water bodies. This has resulted in much improved health of freshwater ecosystems. Many developing countries, including China, Indonesia, and India, have not succeeded in reducing water pollution to acceptable levels. In numerous ways it is the wealthiest countries that are the cleanest. They can afford to clean the water after they make it dirty. As developing countries become wealthier, they too will choose to employ the technology that is needed to keep toxic waste out of their waterways.

Air pollution has also been reduced substantially, but here is where the most problems remain, in both industrialized and developing countries. In many developing countries, smoke from indoor cooking and heating has the biggest impact on public health. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates 1.5 million people die each year from breathing indoor smoke from burning wood, dung, and other farm waste. Today this is the world’s most serious health issue that stems from pollution.

By far the largest source of outdoor air pollution is caused by the combustion of fossil fuels. Energy generation and transportation are the two most significant causes of air pollution. Burning coal for electricity and burning petroleum products for transportation cause the most damage to public health and the environment. WHO estimates nearly one million people die from these and other fossil fuel emissions every year.
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Clearly the answer to indoor pollution lies in eliminating the poverty that results in such primitive cooking and heating methods. More efficient stoves with a means of exhausting the smoke outdoors would solve the problem, but this costs money these people don’t have. The estimated 1.5 million people who die from breathing indoor air is of the same magnitude as the number who die every year from malaria. This is one of the many reasons it is obvious to me that the world’s worst environmental problem is poverty.

The air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels for energy and transportation must also be addressed by changes in technology. In this case the industrialized countries can likely afford to make the necessary changes. Replacing coal plants with nuclear and hydroelectric energy and replacing automobiles’ gasoline or diesel motors with batteries is both affordable and feasible.

Toxicology

Toxicology is the study of the adverse effects of chemicals on living organisms. It is concerned with the symptoms, mechanisms, treatments, and detection of poisoning of people and the environment. The most important truism in toxicology is “the poison is in the dose.” This means there is a level of exposure below which there is no poisoning effect and therefore no harm. Therefore it is not sufficient to declare that a certain substance is “toxic” or “poisonous.” Rather one needs to study the relationship between the dose received and the degree of toxicity.

Theoretically all substances are toxic at a sufficiently high dose. Even water will kill you if you take it into your lungs where it prevents the absorption of oxygen. As mentioned earlier, table salt is a required nutrient at low levels, does not cause harm at moderate levels, and is fatal at high levels. There are other chemicals such as ethanol that are not required nutrients but that still cause no harm at low or moderate levels but definitely cause harm or even death at high levels. Other substances, such as snake venom and chlorine gas, are extremely toxic and can kill you at quite low levels, yet even these are not harmful at very low doses. It is clear from this that a black-and-white approach to chemicals and toxicity has no place in a scientific discussion. Yet many activists, including my old friends in Greenpeace, tend to take a zero-tolerance approach to many issues involving chemicals. It is so much simpler to call for a ban on useful substances, thus avoiding the hard work of determining safe levels of a substance that can be toxic at high levels.

As discussed in the section on nuclear energy, the reason there is a level below which otherwise toxic chemicals cause no harm is because our bodies have a cellular repair mechanism. Most poisons harm us either by killing cells or by damaging key components in cells, such as DNA. Our cellular repair mechanisms are able to counteract the damage by continually repairing it as it occurs. As long as the body repairs itself faster than the damage occurs, there is no net damage. As soon as the toxic effects overwhelm the body’s ability to keep up with repairs, we are being poisoned. Many scientists believe this principle also applies to the effects of nuclear radiation. For example, we can be exposed to solar radiation for a short time without harm. At a certain level of exposure the sun’s radiation begins to damage our skin faster than it can repair itself and we develop a sunburn. If one were foolish enough to lie in the hot sun for eight hours without protection the result would be a long recovery in a hospital’s intensive care burn unit.

One of the most impressive advances in modern science is the ability to detect substances at parts per billion and even at parts per trillion. The electron capture detector has made this possible. It is the most sensitive instrument for determining low levels of materials in the environment and in our bodies. It was invented in 1957 by James Lovelock, who also fathered the Gaia Hypothesis as we discussed. With this very simple instrument, we can detect minute traces of many natural and industrial chemicals. It was a great contribution to science but it also led to the idea that any substance measured in the body is a sign of pollution and toxic contamination. Of course the emphasis is always on “synthetic chemicals” rather than natural chemicals, once again inferring humans are the real problem. The class of chemicals known as dioxins, for example, are routinely produced in nature by forest fires and volcanoes. Human activities do produce some dioxins, but they have been drastically reduced, primarily due to more efficient incineration technology. Yet environmentalists routinely place all the emphasis on dioxins produced by industrial activity. And they do so very selectively at that.

Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC)

Earlier I told the story of my departure from Greenpeace and how its decision to adopt a policy to ban chlorine worldwide informed my decision to leave. This was a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Chlorine is the most important element for public health and medicine. It is also extremely toxic in its elemental form as a gas. But there are many chlorine compounds that are very useful and nontoxic. I’ve also mentioned PVC. I’d like to dig a little deeper into the activist campaign against vinyl, to show it up for the textbook case of misinformation-based environmentalism it is.

Vinyl is one of the most important materials in our society. Of the plastics, only polyethylene and polypropylene are produced in larger quantities. Whereas polyethylene and polypropylene are made entirely from petroleum, vinyl is produced by combining natural gas with chlorine derived from salt. This is why most of the vinyl production plants are in Louisiana, where both materials exist in abundance. Vinyl has some important properties not found in other major plastics.