It seems Iain Murray (yes, that Iain Murray) has written a book with the catchy title ‘The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About–Because They Helped Cause Them‘. This handy guide to how liberal environmentalists are destroying the planet explores, among other issues, ‘How Al Gore’s hero Rachel Carson cost the lives of millions of Africans [from malaria] through her efforts to ban DDT’.
Serious, intellectually sceptical econoblogger Arnold Kling is pleased to see such a weighty contribution to the debate and invites us to ponder ‘The total death and illness caused by all of the chemical pollution ever created vs. the death and illness caused by the ban on DDT’. In comments, Tim Lambert and I point out that there was no ‘ban’ on DDT, that DDT is ineffective against malaria in many areas because of resistance (usually caused by indiscriminate use of DDT), and that restrictions of DDT in agricultural use are therefore a good thing (see Tim’s site for details of these). Tim even helpfully includes references to journal articles on mosquito resistance to DDT in his comment.
Arnold’s response:
The term “banned” may not be correct, but countries can be punished in many ways for using DDT–they can lose foreign aid, they can have imports of their crops banned, etc. The restrictions on crop imports apply even when a country uses DDT on homes, not on crops.
Bed nets work fine when people are sleeping in them, but you can’t sleep 24 hours a day.
So I went to the effort of explaining that
- there is no evidence of any country experiencing an import ban for using DDT within the limits set by the Stockholm Convention, which include indoor spraying to combat malaria,
- the anopheles mosquito that spreads malaria is generally only at night or at dawn/dusk, which is why bed nets are so effective,
- recent WHO research in fact shows that when applied at a large enough scale, use of insecticide-treated nets and artemisinin has achieved very large and very fast reductions in malaria mortality in several African countries, eg ~60 (sixty) per cent in Rwanda in a few years ,
- and finally that Iain Murray (see above) might not be the most reliable source of useful information on the subject.
Arnold’s response to this is to ignore everything I said about reducing the millions of deaths from malaria, and to lament my ‘ad hominem attacks on Iain Murray’. Funny, he seemd pretty impressed by Murray’s book accusing environmentalists (especially Al Gore, for some reason) of ‘cost[ing] the lives of millions of Africans’ and producing ’some of the greatest environmental disasters in history’. But that wasn’t ad hominem because Arnold thinks ‘the facts are on Murray’s side’.
I’m no longer of the view that we should smile and nod when people come out with this kind of shite. In fact, I’m really fucking sick of people who use an issue like malaria purely to attack environmentalists or left-wingers (or centrists, or anyone who believes in government intervention to address environmental externalities, come to that) based on myths peddled by people like Iain Murray, then produce crocodile tears about ad hominem attacks when it’s pointed out to them what a stupid idea this is.
So let me be clear: if you are more interested in Iain Murray’s made-up stories about Rachel Carson being a bigger killer than Hitler than you are in what actually works in combating malaria, then yes, you are morally and intellectually suspect. If that makes you feel bad then I’m not in the least bit sorry.