Topic: WorldNetDaily
Christopher Monckton serves up another epic fail in his Aug. 16 WorldNetDaily column, this time ranting about DDT:
This year, as I pack my bags for Sicily, professor Larry Gould of the University of Hartford has sent me a chilling documentary about the consequences of the ban on DDT. The title of the video says it all: “Three Billion and Counting.” The estimate of the number of people killed by the environmentalist left’s ban on DDT may be somewhat on the high side, but there is a statable case that the left’s ban on DDT has killed more people than any war, any pogrom, any policy ever.
Some lessons must now be drawn from the left’s poisonous, racialistic hatred of black children in Africa.
Lesson 1: The mass-murder-by-banning-DDT policy did not occur by accident. It was, and remains, the worst genocide the world has ever seen. The left’s intention in banning DDT was to destroy Africa’s population.
Lesson 2: The left always goes to elaborate lengths to conceal its true, murderous intent by finding and promulgating some half-baked, pietistic, pseudo-scientific justification. The left’s pretext for banning DDT was that it was harming large birds by making their eggshells thinner, and that it caused cancer in humans. Subsequent studies showed that the “thinner-eggshells” story was fiction and that DDT, which humans can eat by the tablespoonful without coming to any harm, is about as carcinogenic as coffee.
Lesson 3: Even when science belatedly catches up with the left’s lies and exposes the baselessness of its cruel policies, those policies remain in place. Just about everyone now knows perfectly well that the benefits of using DDT overwhelmingly outweigh its few and relentlessly overstated disadvantages, but no one dares to reverse the insane policy on which the left sourly continues to insist. At least half-a-million children a year continue to be killed quite unnecessarily by malaria as a direct result.
Well, no. As we've documented, the main issue with DDT was that its overuse created DDT-resistant mosquitoes.
Further, as one writer notes in pointing out the errors of the “Three Billion and Counting” video Monckton was given, DDT was never banned in Africa, which puts a hole in Monckton's conspiracy theory that "The left’s intention in banning DDT was to destroy Africa’s population." In reality, the people who ended up "destroying African's population" were the people who overused DDT.
Further, as the Worldwatch Institute details, bednets are currently a more effective way to stop the spread of mosquito-borne malaria than DDT is because the main malaria-spreading mosquitoes are DDT-resistant, but the nets are subject to taxes or tarriffs in 28 African countries making them even less affordable for poor Africans. The institute adds:
We now have half a century of evidence that routine use of DDT simply will not prevail against the mosquitoes. Most countries have already absorbed this lesson, and banned the chemical or relegated it to emergency only status. Now the [Roll Back Malaria] campaign and associated efforts are showing that the frequency and intensity of those emergencies can be reduced through systematic attention to the chronic aspects of the disease. There is less and less justification for DDT, and the futility of using it as a matter of routine is becoming increasingly apparent: in order to control a disease, why should we poison our soils, our waters, and ourselves?
The institute also shoots down Monckton's contention that DDT is so safe that "humans can eat by the tablespoonful without coming to any harm":
Like other organochlorine pesticides, DDT bioaccumulates. It's fat soluble, so when an animal ingests it-by browsing contaminated vegetation, for example-the chemical tends to concentrate in its fat, instead of being excreted. When another animal eats that animal, it is likely to absorb the prey's burden of DDT. This process leads to an increasing concentration of DDT in the higher links of the food chain. And since DDT has a high chronic toxicity -- that is, long-term exposure is likely to cause various physiological abnormalities -- this bioaccumulation has profound implications for both ecological and human health.
That's "Lord" Monckton for you -- wrong every time, even as he rants that "the left" is "wrong about everything."
