About 20 million people in America suffer asthma and about 2 million of those suffer asthma so severe it poises a threat to their life if untreated. About 5,000 people or 0.25% of severe suffers die every year. Over the span of 10 years 2.5% or roughly 1 in 40 of severe asthma sufferers will die of the disease.
Let’s suppose that the difficulty in using the new environmentally friendly inhalers
increase the asthma death rate by just 1%. That come to 50 unnecessary deaths a year or 500 unnecessary deaths over a decade. Roughly 150 of those deaths will be children.
And what do we gain by adopting the new system? Nothing. The amount of CFCs in inhalers has an impact so small that we couldn’t even detect it. CFCs used to be used in a wide range of technologies. Every cooling system of any kind used CFCs as did virtually every spray can. Dozens of other less visible technologies also used and released millions of tons of CFCs a year into the atmosphere. It took these decades long accumulation of great gobs of CFCs to produced an effect on the ozone layer. By contrast the amount of CFCs vented from one small compressor would fill hundreds of inhalers. Even if everyone in the world used CFC inhalers we wouldn’t be talking about enough CFC release to have a measurable impact. One volcano erupting anywhere in the world would destroy more ozone than centuries of CFC inhaler use."
Once again, their moral comfort is more important than your life.
This is just a more stark example but it's wholely in line with their views that energy should be more expensive, that food should be more expensive (with less variety and quanity), that all aspects of industry and commerce should be regulated to their morals.
So, we’ve traded zero environmental gain for the very real deaths of people. Why did this decision get made? Certainly, the economic self-interest of companies making the new inhalers played a role. As with the ban on CFCs in other technologies, the ban forced consumers to stop using old CFC technologies that existed in the public domain and instead use new proprietary replacement technology owned by a few companies. Dupont alone made a killing. Likewise with inhalers, anyone could manufacture a public domain inhaler but only a few companies own the patents to manufacture the non-CFC inhalers.
For their part, many environmentalist clearly supported the inhaler ban merely out of quasi-religious fetishism. Their mystical reasoning divides the world into good substances and bad substances. A substance that is bad for in one instance is bad in all instances. They have no concept of tradeoff. CFCs are bad for the ozone so they have to be rooted out everywhere regardless of the degree of harm or the cost in resources or lives. It’s the symbolism that matters, not the physical reality.
What follows is the most worrying part. The creeping effect of such laws.
Had you told someone twenty years ago in 1989 when the ozone banning Montreal Protocol was signed that it would lead to the banning of medical technology for zero environmental gain, people would have laughed at you. Yet, here we are.
What does this suggest about future tradeoffs such as replacing coal with unreliable weather-dependent power sources? Environmentalist claim they won’t chose to starve us for power to save the environment and they mock anyone who suggest they would yet the example of the asthma inhalers should give everyone pause. If they can rationalize the dramatic dangers of putting asthmatics at risk they can readily rationalize the much more subtle harms of starving the economy of power.
Bit by bit freedom gets erroded and people become less healthy and less wealthy. Why? To make some people feel better, to sate the desires of their faith.
Roger Kimball has more
“It’s a plan that will trigger the creation of millions of new jobs for Americans.” How, pray tell? He doesn’t say because it isn’t true. It doesn’t have to be true. As the philosopher Harvey Mansfield observed some years ago, “environmentalism is school prayer for liberals.” Just say something is “environmentally friendly” (it doesn’t have to be so in fact, it just has to look as though it is) and susceptible souls will roll on the ground, wave their arms and legs in hte air, and empty their pockets. The great thing about environmentalism, from the point of view of a politician and an environmentalist, is that you can never be green enough. The amount of money you can spend is therefore endless — a permanent boon to the politician — while the opportunities for smug self-righteousness are also endless, an munificent gift to the environmentalist, who regards his position on “the environment” the way a properly brought up lady in Victorian times regarded her virginity.
And Kimball gets to the heart of it
The Obama initiatives on the environment and health care bring us to the core of his domestic agenda. He talks about job creation, energy independence, and more humane and affordable health care. He has shown us nothing, absolutely nothing, to support those claims. What he has shown us are plans to turn over huge swathes of the U.S. economy to the government.
Power. That's what Hope and Change is all about. Taking power from the people, from the individual.
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