I'm talking about "the greatest crime of the 20th century." What would you pick? The Holocaust? The Japanese War in China? Stalin's purges? The Great Leap Forward?
Nope. The right would have you believe that the greatest crime in the 20th century (and, one could therefore argue in all of history) was the banning of DDT. Alleged to have "killed" 50 million people, the banning of DDT is said to have led to the "resurgence" of the nearly defeated Malaria. If the 50 million number were to be believed, that could conceivably mean that banning DDT killed more people than the European conquest of the Americas. (This is of course difficult to say, given that we have no solid number for the pre-invasion population of the Americas. Some scholars have suggested an American population as high as 100 million, 90% of whom died.)
Now, you might guess from my judicious use of scare quotes that I'm skeptical of these claims. There's a number of very simple reasons for this. The first and most important reason is that, when heavily used, all pesticides become less effective, not more so. While it seems intuitive that less use of DDT led to higher rates of Malaria deaths, the reverse is in fact true. Countries that had the highest rates of DDT spraying developed DDT-resistant forms of mosquitoes which carry Malaria. The cases of India and Sri Lanka are instructive - Sri Lanka initially had nearly eliminated Malaria within its borders, and therefore stopped spraying DDT - not because of environmental concerns, but because they figured they won the war.
Think again. Malaria came back with a vengeance, because this time the mosquitoes were DDT-proof. It's pretty simple - insects have such high birth rates and such short generational cycles that even if your insecticide kills 99% of a given population (100% is impossible) the survivors can rebound extremely quickly. India had a similar experience, where spraying increased dramatically throughout the 1970s, but Malaria incidence stayed put.
I think I've written about this before, but Tim Lambert provides an excellent recap of the DDT story.
One of the earliest posts on this blog asked a simple question, and attempted an answer:
why do conservatives love nuclear power? This is an industry that only exists because of the heavy hand of government. No private market exists for nuclear power - plants are comissioned by government, insured by government, and, when the inevitable bankruptcies occur, it is government that bails out nuclear plants. Of course, nuclear power would never have been harnessed without the Manhattan Project, a government program that dwarfs every other government spending program in history. Yet not a week goes by where I don't read or hear some conservative claiming we need to build new nuclear plants. Shouldn't they be decrying this intrusion on the free market? My guess is that conservatives have defined themselves in opposition to environmentalists, so if Greenpeace hates nuclear, then it must be good.I think a similar dynamic is at work here, too. Despite the evidence of a) evidence or b) rational thought, right-wingers feel the need to accuse environmentalists of something monstrous. I mean really: Equating Rachel Carson with Hitler or Mao?
Which leads me to my final point: When will we see a mature right develop on the Internet? I mean honest Conservatives. Not the Powerline crew, not RedState, not any of the seemingly-infinite pseudo-libertarian "conservatives" whose "principles" amount to a juvenile desire to escape any obligation to society or consequence to their actions. If we had honest, mature conservatives, this "worst crime" talking point wouldn't be as widespread as it is, and the idiot who thought it up would be ridiculed in to exile or ritual suicide - by other conservatives.
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