Green Hysteria 1: Treating the Precautionary Principle with Caution

However hard I prune my LinkedIn feed, I am confronted every day with greenwash and its more innocuous seeming cousin, green hysteria-driven researcher puff-pieces.

Today’s was about microplastics. I’m sure you are aware that researchers have shown that they are found everywhere. What you may be less aware of is that they have not actually shown that they are harmful in any way at the levels which they have been found at.  All of the effort being put into excluding microplastics from the environment is founded in “the precautionary principle”. The same is true of almost all other environmental trace organics resulting from human activity (or civilisation as we used to call it, back before these new dark ages of ignorance and superstition).

The precautionary principle is actually really two principles. Its weaker form is obvious: when faced with uncertainty, you can if you wish err on the side of caution, especially if the penalties for being wrong are high. This makes it rather similar to “Pascal’s Wager” argument for acting as if God exists. If God does not exist, you only incur finite losses in acting as if God does exist. If God does exist and you act as if there were no God, your losses may be infinite.

I have always found this argument weak, especially in view of the range of opinions amongst believers as to which of the many gods it is we should seek to placate. (A South Park episode covers this precise issue, with the overwhelming majority of believers being selected for Hell, on the grounds that “Mormon was the right answer”.)

But I digress. The more problematic version of the precautionary principle is its strong incarnation which states that, unless you are absolutely certain that there is no chance of serious future events as a result of an action, you must not take it. In other words, unless you can prove that there is no problem, there is a problem. As it is impossible to prove a negative, there is no action which can pass this test, so it becomes a recipe for paralysis.

What is missing here is realising that nothing is entirely certain, and there are no consequence-free actions or even consequence-free inactions. Stay in bed and you will eventually die there. Work may not be safe, but not going to work is not safe either, as most accidents happen at home, and you are far more likely to be injured by your leisure activities than your job nowadays.

Ultimately, the strong precautionary principle is self-negating. Applying the strong precautionary principle to the strong precautionary principle shows that it is not safe to apply it.

The other thing which often feeds such hysteria is the lack of understanding of the nature of toxicity. To green activists, all things are either “toxic” or “non-toxic”, but (as Paracelsus noted in the sixteenth century), this is incorrect: the dose is what matters. Because of scientific illiteracy, they also do not understand how very small a level of a chemical we can detect with modern analytical tools. They express concern when any level of something “toxic” is detected, even nanograms per litre (parts per billion). 1 ppb is the equivalent of 300kg of something dissolved in all of the water in Lake Windermere, the UK’s largest freshwater body. Perhaps that still sounds like a lot, so let us imagine that it is 300kg of the most toxic substance known to man, botulism toxin, aka botox.

How much of Lake Windermere would you need to drink to be killed by 300kg of botox dissolved in it? The average UK male weighs 83.6kg, and the LD50 for botox by mouth is 1000ng/kg, so he would need to drink 84 litres to be in with a 50% chance of death. He would however be dead long before he managed to drink this much from the accompanying lethal dose of water (which is around 6 litres, if you can make yourself drink it quickly enough). Don’t even get me started on “natural” and “artificial”, other than to note that botox is “natural”.

I simply cannot be bothered with most of the so-called “debate” on environmental issues, which is essentially a shouting match between brainwashed scientific illiterates and greenwashing PR weasels, amplified by the muppets taken in by one or the other of these camps. I might make a more reasoned argument, but who has time for reasoned argument nowadays? Feelings trump facts every time.

Read Green Hysteria 2 here