A major challenge in developing appropriate responses to legitimate problems is that alarmism catches people’s attention and draws them in. Alarmism is given more weight than it deserves, as policy makers attempt to appease their constituency and the media. It polarizes the debaters into groups of “believers” and “skeptics,” so that reasoned, fact-based compromise is difficult to achieve. Neither of these aspects of alarmism is healthy for the development of appropriate policy.
--Amy Kaleita and Gregory R. Forbes, Hysteria’s History

SAN FRANCISCO – Environmental hysteria leads to poor and self-contradictory policy-making according to Hysteria’s History: Environmental Alarmism in Context, a new report released today by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI). In Hysteria’s History, author Amy Kaleita, policy fellow in Environmental Studies at PRI, charts the progression of hysteria starting with Rachel Carson’s influential book Silent Spring up to the current global warming controversy.

“A major challenge in developing appropriate responses to legitimate problems is that alarmism catches people’s attention and draws them in,” said Dr. Kaleita. “Alarmism is given more weight than it deserves, as policy makers attempt to appease their constituency and the media.”

Examples of poor and self-contradictory policy choices in California include:

Taxpayer money spent on a lawsuit against nearly the entire automobile industry in North America to seek damages that have not yet occurred.

The Low Carbon Fuel Standard recently promulgated by the governor of California to promote the use of ethanol in the state’s fuel supply. Ethanol reduces fuel efficiency, which means drivers will need to burn more fuel to go the same distance.

San Francisco’s ban on the use of plastic bags in city businesses. In reality, the manufacture of paper bags releases more greenhouse gases than the manufacture of plastic bags.

“Environmental alarmism should be taken for what it is—a natural tendency of some portion of the public to latch onto the worst, and most unlikely, potential outcome,” said Dr. Kaleita. “Alarmism should not be used as the basis for policy. Where a real problem exists, solutions should be based on reality, not hysteria.”

To download a copy of Hysteria’s History click here. http://liberty.pacificresearch.org/publications/id.3301/pub_detail.asp

HYSTERIA’S HISTORY: ENVIRONMENTAL ALARMISM IN CONTEXT

By Amy Kaleita, Ph.D with Gregory R. Forbes

[...]

Lessons from the Apocalypse

Apocalyptic stories about the irreparable, catastrophic damage that humans are doing to the natural environment have been around for a long time.
These hysterics often have some basis in reality, but are blown up to illogical and ridiculous proportions. Part of the reason they’re so appealing is that they have the ring of plausibility along with the intrigue of a horror flick. In many cases, the alarmists identify a legitimate issue, take the possible consequences to an extreme, and advocate action on the basis of these extreme projections. In 1972, the editor of the journal Nature pointed out the problem with the typical alarmist approach: “[Alarmists’] most common error is to suppose that the worst will always happen.”82 But of course, if the worst always happened, the human race would have died out long ago.

When alarmism has a basis in reality, the challenge becomes to take appropriate action based on that reality, not on the hysteria. The aftermath of Silent Spring offers examples of both sorts of policy reactions: a reasoned response to a legitimate problem and a knee-jerk response to the hysteria. On the positive side, Silent Spring brought an end to the general belief that all synthetic chemicals in use for purposes ranging from insect control to household cleaning were uniformly wonderful, and it ushered in an age of increased caution on the appropriate use of chemicals. In the second chapter of her famous book, Carson wrote, “It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that… we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife, and man himself.”

In this passage, Carson seemed to advocate reasoned response to rigorous scientific investigation, and in fact this did become the modern approach
to environmental chemical licensure and monitoring. An hour-long CBS documentary on pesticides was aired during the height of the furor over
Silent Spring. In the documentary, Dr. Page Nicholson, a water-pollution expert with the Public Health Service, wasn’t able to answer how long pesticides persist in water once they enter it, or the extent to which pesticides contaminate groundwater supplies. Today, this sort of information is gathered through routine testing of chemicals for use in the environment.

However, there was, as we have seen, a more sinister and tragic response to the hysteria generated by Silent Spring. Certain developing countries, under significant pressure from the United States, abandoned the use of DDT. This decision resulted in millions of deaths from malaria and other insect-borne diseases. In the absence of pressure to abandon the use of DDT, these lives would have been spared. It would certainly have been possible to design policies requiring caution and safe practices in the use of supplemental chemicals in the environment, without pronouncing a death sentence on millions of people.

A major challenge in developing appropriate responses to legitimate problems is that alarmism catches people’s attention and draws them in. Alarmism is given more weight than it deserves, as policy makers attempt to appease their constituency and the media. It polarizes the debaters into groups of “believers” and “skeptics,” so that reasoned, fact-based compromise is difficult to achieve. Neither of these aspects of alarmism is healthy for the development of appropriate policy.

Further, alarmist responses to valid problems risk foreclosing potentially useful responses based on ingenuity and progress. There are many examples from the energy sector where, in the presence of demands for economy, efficiency, or less pollution, the marketplace has responded by developing better alternatives. That is not to say that we should blissfully squander our energy resources; on the contrary, we should be careful to utilize them wisely. But energy-resource hysteria should not lead us to circumvent scientific advancement by cherry-picking and favoring one particular replacement technology at the expense of other promising technologies.

Environmental alarmism should be taken for what it is—a natural tendency of some portion of the public to latch onto the worst, and most unlikely, potential outcome. Alarmism should not be used as the basis for policy. Where a real problem exists, solutions should be based on reality, not hysteria.