>>>>>>>     SENSE AND NONSENSE ON THE ENVIRONMENT     <<<<<<<<
                     By Warren T. Brookes
     From The Quill, 79(1):14-19 (January/February 1991).
   A publication of the Society of Professional Journalists.

  Warren T.  Brookes is  a Washington-based  editorial writer
  for The Detroit News and a nationally syndicated columnist.


In  1989, ABC's  estimable  newsman and  morning  host Charlie
Gibson was  on location in  Florida.  During the  course of an
interview,  a  state  agricultural  official  told  Gibson the
citrus industry had to move sharply south in the last 50 years
because it was no  longer safe to grow  fruit north of Orlando
because of cold winters.
    Gibson looked perplexed and  then asked, in substance, But
what about global warming?
    The official replied, again in substance, What about it?
    What Gibson didn't  know was that over  the last 50 years,
average  temperatures in  the Southeast  had fallen  about one
degree Fahrenheit.  There had been  24 arctic outbreaks in the
region in  the last  30 years, compared  with only  six in the
prior 50 years.
    Or as Marc Cathey, director of the National Arboretum told
me last  spring, ``The trees  and plants have  been telling us
unambiguously  that the  U.S.  climate has  been  cooling, not
warming.''
    When  the  U.S.  Department  of  Agriculture  published  a
revised ``safe  cropping area''  map last  February, it showed
that virtually all  of the frost-free  growing areas had moved
south, not north, since the last map, published in 1965.
    Gibson's surprise was symptomatic of the way in which many
of us in the news media have been taken in by environmentalist
scare scenarios over the last three years.
    And it helps explain why over the weekend of October 27th,
10 days before the election, congressional Democrats convinced
President Bush that  even though the  Clean Air Act amendments
they had finally passed would  cost $10 billion to $20 billion
more  than  the  president's  original  ``veto-line''  of  $22
billion, Americans  were so eager  for cleaner  air they would
gladly  pay such  costs  -- costs  that  even Paul  Portney of
Resources for the Future  [Washington, D.C.], an environmental
organization [founded in 1952], admitted ``may exceed benefits
by a considerable margin.''
    But  by November  7th,  the day  following  the elections,
President Bush  had presumably discovered  that the assumption
that  Americans  were   firmly  in  the  spend-more-money-to--
protect-the-environment  camp were  apparently wrong.   In one
state after another, voters  decidedly defeated the ``greens''
and their environmental propositions.
    In  California,  the  costly  and  extreme  ``Big  Green''
(Proposition 128)  went down  by a margin  of two  to one.  In
Oregon, the  nation's ``greenest'' electorate  refused to shut
down the Trojan nuclear power plant by a vote of 59 percent to
41 percent.  Similarly, Oregon  voters defeated (57 percent to
43  percent)  a ``dream  law''  on recycling  that  would have
chased plastic packaging from the state.
    And so it went in Missouri,  in New York, in South Dakota.
Even the eco-populist Jim Hightower was defeated (narrowly) in
the race for Texas Agriculture Commissioner by a little known,
hard-right   rancher/legislator   who   lampooned  Hightower's
environmental views.

Pretend Environmentalism

Journalists and politicians badly over-estimated the political
power of the environmental movement.  But that is equally true
of many business leaders who have become putty in the hands of
the  intellectual charlatans  who  are leading  a Luddite-like
attack against sound science.
    Case  in  point:  On  the  Thursday  before  the election,
McDonald's   Corporation  succumbed   to  pressure   from  the
Environmental  Defense  Fund  by   agreeing  to  deep-six  its
embryonic program of  recycling polystyrene clamshell cartons.
McDonald's, the announcement said, would switch back to coated
paperboard,  packaging  it had  substantially  abandoned years
ago.
    The four major networks immediately echoed the EDF's claim
that this  was an  ``environmental touchdown'';  NBC called it
``good news  for the  planet.''  Yet  it was,  on balance, bad
news, because it  will at least double  the net adverse impact
on the nation's environment.
    In  1975,  while  considering  switching  form paper-based
packaging  to  polystyrene,   McDonald's  asked  the  Stanford
Research Institute  to look  into the  environmental impact of
the move.  The institute said:
    ``There appears to  be no supportable  basis for any claim
that paper related products are superior from an environmental
standpoint to  plastic related  ones.  The  weight of existing
evidence  indicates  that  the  favorable  true  environmental
balance,  if any,  would be  in the  direction of  the plastic
related product.''
    Although that  was 15  years ago,  the science  behind the
institute's conclusions remains sound:
    o  Polystyrene  is recyclable, while  coated paperboard is
not.
    o  Compared  with polystyrene, it  takes 40  to 50 percent
more energy to produce comparable paperboard packaging.
    o  The atmospheric emissions  involved in producing coated
paperboard are at least two to three times those for producing
polystyrene, and  the waterborne  wastes and  effluents are at
least 70 percent higher.
    Or  ... as  scientist Jan  Beyea  of the  National Audubon
Society told the New York Times  (in a comment buried near the
end of the November 2, 1990, McDonald's story).  ``Using a lot
more paper means a lot more pollution.''
    One suspects that  the switch from  polystyrene had little
to do with environmentalism and a  lot to do with image.  Foam
clamshell packaging  had become  a public  relations liability
for a multibillion-dollar  corporation that desperately wanted
to preserve a neighborly, good-guys image.

A billion here, a billion there

Do  you  remember  all  those  vivid  scenes  of  ``ecological
disaster'' from Prince William Sound in Alaska after the Exxon
Valdez oil  spill in March  1989?  And the  warnings that this
disaster could  injure the ecology  of an entire  region for a
century or more?
    Well, about the  same time as  the McDonald's sellout, the
October 19 issue  of Science magazine, which  is rumored to go
to  newsrooms  here  and  there,  reported  that Congressional
Research Services had concluded that oil spill cleanups of the
kind carried out by Exxon were a waste of money.
    Contrary to the  hysteria generated by  the news media and
environmentalists, says  the report written  by CRS researcher
James Mielke [Oil Spills in the  Ocean, CRS 90-356 SPR, 24 Jul
1990], the ecological effects of  even massive spills like the
Amoco Cadiz,  which went  aground off  the coast  of France in
1978, and the Santa Barbara Channel Blowout in the '60s ``were
relatively  modest,  and  as  far  as  can  be  determined, of
relatively short duration.''
    Mielke told Science,  ``It's devastating to  have a spill,
but there's been  a lot of over-reaction.''   As an example of
how little ecological damage had been done in Alaska, he noted
that 40 million  pink salmon -- an  all-time record harvest --
had been taken in 1990 from Prince William Sound.  Most of the
fingerlings  had  been  released  into  Prince  William  Sound
hatcheries after the Valdez spill.
    He added that given that  kind of recovery, the $2 billion
Exxon Valdez cleanup  was ``money that  could have been better
spent.''
    Science  reported  that other  researchers  they contacted
``tended to agree with Mielke's assessment.''
    But,  as reporters  who traipsed  to  Alaska to  cover the
spill  (and  their   editors  back  home,   for  that  matter)
apparently didn't know, there  was nothing particularly new in
Mielke's report.  In  1976, CRS, which  conducts research on a
non-partisan  basis  for  members  of  Congress,  produced  an
exhaustive 400-page report for  a Select Committee of Congress
on the Outer Continental Self, which said:
    ``[While] local impacts from a  large spill might be quite
severe, most indications are that  the major effects are short
term  .... The  marine environment  is  resilient and  has the
ability   to  absorb   oil   spill  impacts   through  natural
processes.''
    In any event, Mielke concluded his recent study by saying:
    ``Petroleum production  has been among  the least damaging
to the  environment of any  of the  extractive earth resources
industries.   Despite the  short term  media attention  to the
catastrophic  nature  of  major  spill  events,  the chemicals
contained  in  petroleum have  long  been part  of  the marine
environment and physical impacts are likely to be temporary in
the dynamic natural flux of the coastal environment.''
    Plainly, just  as the politicians  have allowed themselves
to be  bamboozled into  costly environmental  overkill (as the
1990 Clean Air Act amendments surely are), so have many in the
news media become press agents for this overkill.
    While it is essential that we journalists remain skeptical
of claims made by  profit-making corporations, for some reason
we have  not been similarly  skeptical of  the green industry,
which uses the news media to  help raise a total annual budget
(for the  top 10 advocacy  groups) of more  than $400 million,
according  to figures  put  together by  the  Capital Research
Foundation.

Acid rain: a mostly imaginary problem

I was on a  flight going south.  My  seatmate was a bright and
well  educated   woman,  an   executive.   As   we  landed  in
Raleigh-Durham, she  said she was  thrilled to  see how richly
forested  North Carolina  was, and  she expressed  regret that
such resources were disappearing.
    What made her think so, I asked.
    ``Well,'' she  replied, ``we're  always hearing  about all
the dying  forests caused by  acid rain, and  the depletion of
our forests because we are using up so much paper.''
    I  asked  her   if  she  knew   about  the  National  Acid
Precipitation  Assessment  Program (NAPAP),  which  looked for
dying forests but couldn't find any.
    She professed  astonishment, and  then she  added that she
was a member of  the Sierra Club, having  been attracted to it
by news media warnings about dying forests.
    Well, as  the saw goes,  you can't  believe everything you
read in the papers.  Or see on the nightly news.
    Rather than dying, forests  are expanding and growing.  In
1952,  there  were  664  million  acres  of  U.S.  forest land
containing some 610  billion cubic feet  of growing stock.  By
1987, there  were 728  million acres  of forest  land with 756
billion  cubic feet  of growing  stock.   That's a  24 percent
increase.
    It  is intriguing  that virtually  all  of that  growth in
forest volume  has come not  in the  primarily federally owned
and  ``preserved''   West,  where  the   volume  has  actually
decreased by 10 percent, but in the North (79 percent) and the
South (66 percent), where  private forest ownership now ranges
from 80 to 90 percent.
    But  even more  intriguing  is the  way  in which  so many
journalists seemed  to have  eagerly embraced  the notion that
our forests are, in fact, dying.
    Scientific data suggest that  forests are doing just fine,
thank you.  Acid  rain affects only  a relatively small number
of  red  spruce  growing at  high  altitudes  in  the northern
Appalachians, and even that evidence is ambiguous.
    Further,  Eastern lakes  are not  turning acidic  in great
numbers, although a handful of  lakes are more acidic now than
they were decades ago.  But again, ambiguity intrudes.   These
lakes may be  more acidic because of  reasons having little or
nothing to do with acid rain.
    The acid rain  program mandated by  last fall's amendments
to the Clean Air  Act may improve the  pH balance of 75 acidic
lakes  at an  estimated cost  of $200  billion over  50 years.
That's $2.7  billion per lake,  when every acidic  lake in the
United States and  Canada could be  de-acidified for less than
$50 million in lifetime liming costs.
    Further,  the  10 million  tons  of sulfur  dioxide  to be
removed by  the year  2000 through  installing limestone smoke
scrubbers in old power plants at a  cost of $5 to $7 billion a
year, could have been  taken out of the  air by 2010 through a
mandated clean-coal technology phase-in -- at no cost to power
consumers,  and  all  before  the first  acid  lake  is  to be
restored!
    How do we know this?   Because Congress spent $540 million
of the  taxpayers' money  on the  aforementioned 10-year NAPAP
study,   which   involved   700   of   the   nation's  leading
environmental scientists.  NAPAP found that acid rain is not a
problem  that qualifies  as a  crisis.  Therefore,  it doesn't
require a  crash program to  ``solve it''  -- only inexpensive
liming  of  selected  lake  watersheds  during  the clean-coal
technology phase-in.
    Worse, the crash acid rain program may do more harm to the
environment  (not to  mention the  economy) than  good.  Smoke
scrubbing  not  only  cuts  fuel  efficiency  by  five  to ten
percent, but  it creates  three tons  of limestone  sludge for
every  ton  of  sulfur dioxide  removed.   By  1999,  we'll be
looking  for  landfill space  for  30 million  tons  of sludge
produced every year.
    Further, the  scrubbing technology  actually increases the
emission of carbon  dioxide (a ``greenhouse''  gas) from power
plants by one ton for every ton of sulfur dioxide removed.
    The  entire acid  rain program  is an  ecological disaster
that could have been avoided  if anyone -- including the press
-- had bothered to hear what the NAPAP report had to say.
    Instead,  the NAPAP  report,  issued in  stages  last year
[1990], was buried almost without  a trace.  That's a scandal,
and we journalists are partly culpable.

Bread-and-butter statism

Given   what   happened   to   environmental   initiatives  in
California, Oregon, and elsewhere, it's reasonable to conclude
that voters are more skeptical about environmental claims than
are most journalists.
    There  may be  a  very good  reason  for this,  and  it is
essential for the news industry  to understand what it is.  It
has  to do  with journalistic  self-interest  not only  in bad
news,  but self-interest  in preserving  and expanding  what I
call the statist quo  -- the power and  the role of government
-- because government has become our primary turf.
    To illustrate let me take  you back to January 28th, 1980,
when  President  Reagan completed  what  President  Carter had
started.  He  deregulated the price  of oil --  and thus ended
the ``oil shortage.''
    With that single stroke of a pen, he also began the demise
of  the  current  career  activity  of  literally  hundreds of
journalists and writers around the nation (more than a hundred
in  Washington,  alone)  who  were  then  specializing  in the
``energy beat.''
    Within  a  year,  the  nation  and  the  world  were  in a
developing oil glut,  prices were easing  down, and eventually
OPEC  fell into  such disarray  that  by 1986,  Vice President
George Bush was in the Middle  East begging the Saudis to keep
the price of oil from falling below $10 a barrel.
    To put it  bluntly, until last  August when Saddam Hussein
invaded Kuwait, the energy news  beat had all but disappeared.
Even now, with the Gulf crisis  at full throttle, there are no
lines at service  stations, and the  current price of gasoline
is nearly 40  percent less (in constant  1990 dollars) than it
was in 1981.
    All of this suggests that unless the pundits get their way
and  some  Bush  cabinet  bureaucrat  starts  making  ``energy
policy'' again, the energy beat is unlikely to return any time
soon.
    I cite this  example for only  one reason.  It illustrates
something I  have observed  over the  last five  years since I
moved from Detroit to Washington:
    Collectively, the national  press is not  liberal, per se,
so much as it is statist.  That is, (and I speak broadly here)
it is  committed to  the promotion  of an  ever more intrusive
governmental presence in every aspect of our lives -- with the
exception, of course, of the business of journalism.
    Contrary  to popular  right-wing opinion,  journalists are
not  so  much   ideologically  liberal  as   they  are  simply
self-interested.
    The  press  is  the   principal  watchdog  of  government;
meanwhile, impersonal markets are the watchdogs of the private
economy.  Any activity  that moves out  of the marketplace and
into the purview of government  exchanges the watchdogs of the
market for the watchdogs  of the press.  Like  it or not, that
makes journalistic incentives very clear: The more government,
the more power (and jobs) the news media will have.
    If you doubt  this, consider how the  rise of the national
press corps in Washington has paralleled the rise in the power
and interventionism of the federal government:
    In 1936, only 2,335 pages of federal rules and regulations
were  published in  the Federal  Register, and  the Washington
national  press  corps  was  less   than  400  and  the  total
congressional staff on Capitol Hill numbered fewer than 2,100.
    By 1968, the Register was publishing nearly 21,000 pages a
year, the congressional staff was  up to more than 11,000, and
the national press corps stood at nearly 1,600.
    In  1989,  the  Register  published  57,000  pages  of new
regulations,  the  congressional  staff  was  21,000  and  the
national press corps in Washington was pushing 5,000.
    Instead  of  watchdogging   and  containing  this  massive
explosion of government, the press became one of its principal
beneficiaries.
    Statis is our bread and butter.

Alar-mania

Perhaps  this   now-commonplace  journalistic   acceptance  of
statist solutions to problems helps explain why the news media
have so eagerly seized on the environment as the last and most
serious raison d' etre for governmental intervention.
    While governments around the world have clearly mismanaged
economies  (causing   a  global  move   to  privatization  and
deregulation),  governmental  intervention is  needed,  we are
told,  to  prevent   the  destruction  of   our  planet.   The
environment is the one area  in which government regulation is
soaring.
    I think this is why the normally skeptical press corps has
been  so  ready to  accept  the most  outlandish  scenarios of
environmental  doom  --  even when  the  main  purpose  of the
doom-laden scenarios seems  to be to help  raise funds for the
groups generating the scenarios.
    In fact, raising money seems  to have been a major purpose
of the great  Alar scare, which preceded  the Valdez oil spill
by about  three weeks.  Alar,  a growth regulator  used in the
apple industry, was cast in the role of child killer, and that
casting helped  the Natural  Resources Defense  Council (NRDC)
and other environmental groups raise millions.
    The Alar alarm, orchestrated  by a public relations agency
[Fenton  Communications]  employed by  the  NRDC,  also fueled
nationwide hysteria over what virtually all food toxicologists
regard as the non-existent risk of pesticide residues on food.
    Consider the  Fall 1990 issue  of the  National Academy of
Sciences  magazine, Issues  in  Science and  Technology, which
features  an article  by  Joseph Rosen,  a  Rutgers University
professor of food science.  Titled ``Much Ado About Alar,'' it
should make every journalist wince at  the way we were used by
the greens.
    In it, Rosen takes the reader through the way in which the
Environmental Protection  Agency and  then the  NRDC, with the
considerable help  of CBS's  60 Minutes,  managed to  hype the
``cancer risk'' of a product that had otherwise shown no valid
evidence  of  carcinogenicity  in  animal  tests  conducted at
Maximum  Tolerable Dose  (MTD)  levels over  their statistical
lifetime.
    This was  done by  promoting the  results of  two isolated
tests in which rats were force-fed up to 10 times the MTD that
had been  established at 2.9  milligrams per  kilogram of body
weight per  day (which was,  itself, 35,000  times the highest
estimates  of  the  daily  intake  by  preschoolers,  the most
exposed population.)
    The EPA raised the dosage  to 23 mg/kg/day before it could
produce a single  mouse tumor, while the  1977 Bela Toth study
[Cancer Res 37(10):3497-500]  that the NRDC  used as the basis
of the CBS report fed rats 29 mg/kg/day.  That's 350,000 times
normal human exposure.
    In toxicology, the  guiding principle is  the ``dose makes
the  poison,''  an  aphorism  that  expresses  the commonsense
notion that many substances are non-toxic (and, in some cases,
therapeutic)   at   some   dosages   but   toxic   in   higher
concentrations.
    Many researchers investigating carcinogenesis believe that
some chemicals are inherently  carcinogenic because they cause
cell mutations at any  dose level.  Meanwhile, other chemicals
appear to cause  tumors only when  they are fed  or applied to
animals -- usually rodents  -- in near-lethal dosages.  Again,
the dose makes the poison.
    In the Alar case,  the dosage alone used  in the Bela Toth
study  killed 80  to  100 percent  of  the animals  from sheer
toxicity,  making  any  conclusions  regarding carcinogenicity
scientifically bogus.
    In fact,  in 1985  the Science  Advisory Board  of the EPA
formally ruled that the Bela Toth study (cited by the NRDC and
60  Minutes)  was  ``inadequate  to   serve  as  a  basis  for
quantitative risk  assessment and  failed to  provide EPA with
sufficient justification for banning Alar).''
    When Alar was fed  to rats and mice  at 35,000 times human
exposure,  no  excess  tumors were  found  nor  was  there any
evidence of carcinogenicity.  The whole Alar story was a scam.
    Rosen ripped both  the NRDC and  CBS for ``utter disregard
for  objective reporting''  and  for ignoring  hard scientific
data regarding pesticide use.  He said:
    ``Cancer epidemiologists do not consider chemical residues
to be  a significant food  safety problem.  After  40 years of
widespread  pesticide use  there is  no evidence  of increased
cancer linked to pesticide residues on food.''
    No wonder Barbara Reynolds of USA Today was surprised when
she interviewed  former Surgeon  General C.  Everett Koop, who
said:
    ``There's noting to show that organic food is any safer or
more nutritious  than non-organic food.   No one  has yet been
made  sick or  killed by  any pesticide  that's been  found on
food.''
    Incidentally, it  was Koop's  appearances that  blew large
holes in  the Big  Green case  when he  told Californians that
they  were being  fed nonsense  about  pesticides by  -- among
others -- journalists.

The greenhouse conspiracy

Nothing  better demonstrates  the power  of the  press's press
agentry that  the rapid  accession in  public consciousness of
the issue of global warming.
    After  James  Hansen,  a  meteorologist  for  the  Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, told a congressional subcommittee
in June  1988 that  he was  ``99 percent  confident'' that the
summer's drought and  heat wave were the  direct result of the
``greenhouse  effect,'' that  obscure hypothesis  about global
warming was transmogrified by the news media into proven fact.
    Even though Hansen was  publicly rebuked by climatologists
from the  National Oceanic and  Atmospheric Administration (it
was the ``little El Nino''  ocean current that caused the 1988
warming), over the next two  years Americans were treated to a
relentless barrage of global-warming doom and gloom.
    No  wonder  that by  the  spring  of 1990,  a  Gallup poll
suggested that  70 per cent  of Americans  were convinced that
global warming was a  real threat and that  we should act upon
it.
    And  no  wonder a  worldwide  bureaucracy  was established
called the  Intergovernmental Panel on  Climate Change (IPCC),
which set  about writing  draconian policy  prescriptions that
would  drastically alter  our  way of  life  if they  are ever
adopted.
    Nevertheless, the greenhouse  effect remains a hypothesis,
not  a  fact,   and  scientific  data   and  opinion  to  help
journalists evaluate  whether the  hypothesis represents sense
or nonsense is abundantly available to reporters.
    On August 12  [1990], Equinox, the  prestigious British TV
series,  aired  a  powerful  one-hour  documentary  on  global
warming that  caused even  the let's-do-something-about-it-now
Margaret Thatcher  to tone  down her  global-warming rhetoric.
She admitted for  the first time  that the scientific evidence
for global warming was perhaps less than fully established.
    The  program,  called ``The  Greenhouse  Conspiracy,'' was
produced  by  one of  England's  best  science documentarians,
Hilary Lawson.  The Financial Times  of London called it ``the
best bit of television journalism of the week and probably one
of  the best  of  the year  .... Lawson  set  out to  test the
pillars  upon which  the theory  of  global warming  rests and
showed that not one can be relied on.''
    Here   in  the   States,   broadcast  of   that  brilliant
documentary,  built on  interviews with  eight of  the world's
most distinguished climatologists, was recently turned down by
the Public  Broadcasting System, which  said it  was ``too one
sided.''
    Meanwhile, on  the day before  Thanksgiving, PBS assaulted
U.S. viewers  with something  called ``The  Morning After,'' a
documentary far removed  from objective reality,  as that term
is understood in the scientific community.
    Ironically, one reason the British show was successful was
that Hilary Lawson was convinced  that global warming was real
when he set out to do the documentary.
    What  he  found,  instead,  was  a  substantial  number of
climatologists  around   the  country   who  think   that  the
seriousness of  the issue  has been  widely exaggerated.  That
parallels my own experience.
    In  1989, I  began  talking to  climatologists  around the
country about global warming.  While most thought a buildup of
carbon dioxide in  the atmosphere should  produce warming, all
other things being  equal, the lack of  a warming trend during
the  period  of   the  greatest  buildup   of  carbon  dioxide
(1938-1988) suggested that all other things were not equal.
    This led me to  write an article featured  on the cover of
the December  25, 1989,  issue of  Forbes.  Two  days after it
appeared,  The New  York Times  ran  a page  one story  on the
growing  number  of  ``dissidents''  from  the  global-warming
scenario.  Its interviews featured all of my original sources,
many of whom were being cited for the first time by a national
newspaper.
    What the Times  suddenly began to  discover (and to report
ever since) is what Philip Abelson, a deputy editor of Science
magazine,  said  in  a  March  30th  editorial  regarding  the
global-warming story:  ``There has  been more  hype than solid
facts.''
    Abelson's  editorial  accompanied  the  publication  of  a
10-year satellite  temperature study by  NASA's Marshall Space
Flight Center and the University of Alabama, which showed ``no
warming trend'' in  the 1979-1988 decade.   (That was the very
decade  in   which  some   climatologists,  including  Stephen
Schneider,  author   of  the  book   Global  Warming,  stopped
predicting a new ice age and ``discovered'' global warming!)
    The NASA  study should not  have been  surprising.  A year
earlier, the U.S. National Climate Data Center had published a
``de-urbanized'' analysis of the U.S. temperature record since
1895, which not only  showed ``no significant warming trend,''
but confirmed that over the  U.S., at least, temperatures have
been going  down modestly since  1938, during  the period when
two-thirds of the carbon-dioxide buildup in the atmosphere had
taken place.
    Neither temperature story made much  more than a ripple in
the  daily news  stream.   Cable News  Network,  for instance,
cited the 93-year study, with  a rejoinder from Hansen that it
takes a long time to heat up the oceans.
    Last  November,  however,  MIT's  Center  for  Meteorology
published   its   exhaustively   researched   worldwide  ocean
temperature record from 1850  to 1987, which demonstrated that
neither the water  nor the surface  air temperatures had shown
any  warming  trend  in  137  years.   That  story  was mostly
ignored, as  were at least  a dozen more  damaging setbacks to
the global warming catastrophe scenario in recent months.
    Last March, my editor at The Detroit News, Tom Bray, ran a
NEXIS search on all  of the scientists who  had been quoted in
global-warming stories.  More than 80 percent of the citations
were from just two advocates of the global-warming hypothesis,
Hansen and Schneider.  (Schneider is head of Interdisciplinary
Climate  Systems  at  the   National  Center  for  Atmospheric
Research in  Boulder, Colorado.)   Less than  10 per  cent had
come  from the  dozens of  global-warming dissidents,  many of
whom bore scientific  credentials as impressive  as Hansen and
Schneider.
    That's not reporting; that's advocacy.

A not-so-fine madness

As  I  suggested  earlier,  journalists  should  be  endlessly
skeptical of environmental claims made by industry.
    But  journalists  also  should  be  equally  skeptical  of
statements and actions by the Environmental Protection Agency,
a  bureaucracy that  can be  as wrong-headed  at times  as any
other bureaucracy dedicated to its own self-preservation.
    Finally, journalists should be skeptical of claims made by
self-styled public-interest  groups, many  of which  misuse or
abuse scientific data to arouse fear over insignificant health
risks.  They are then able to:
    o   Demand  immediate  and  often  draconian  governmental
action  and  control,  in  which  huge  sums  of  money  chase
ever-more-trivial incremental risks.
    o  Raise large amounts of  money for what are now arguably
the  wealthiest  and  most  demographically  upscale  special-
interest groups in Washington.
    The  net result  of  the journalistic  failure  to examine
environmental data and hypotheses carefully is that while many
environmental  programs  have  worked  well,  most  have  been
colossally wasteful.
    A final  illustration: Last  November 2,  four days before
the election, the EPA quietly filed a ``final rule'' requiring
the U.S. petroleum industry to spend what the EPA estimated to
be up to $407 million in  capital costs and up to $130 million
per  year  in  operating  costs  on  a  program  to  deal with
wastewater sludge in refineries.
    The  EPA admitted  that the  maximum total  health benefit
would be that ``an estimated one  to three cancer cases a year
would be avoided.''  In the same breath, it also said that its
use of the theoretical ``Most Exposed Individual'' (MEI) model
probably overstated the risk.
    In fact, the risk is overstated by a factor of at least 10
times, according to the EPA.
    This  means  that this  little-reported  rule  will commit
American  consumers  to  spending from  $350  million  to $3.5
billion or  more per cancer  risk avoided.  If  you think that
extreme, consider that the average  cost per cancer avoided in
20 EPA rules issued during 1986 was over $440 million.
    In an era  in which this nation  is routinely turning down
organ transplants  costing $300,000 to  $500,000 for budgetary
reasons, to  spend 100 times  that to  avoid theoretical risks
amounts to madness.
    This is not legitimate  ``environmental concern.''  It is,
as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan says, the costly succumbing
to ``middle class enthusiasms.''
    Our industry, print and broadcast, share much of the blame
for that.

    [See also Letters, The Quill, 79(2):3-4 (March 1991).]

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