Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
London High-Rise Fire Tragedy Result of Environmentalist Regulation
The highrise in London which recently burned, killing many was so devastating because it was recently clad with exterior insulation material to make it more energy-efficient.
The fire started in a lower-floor kitchen and rapidly spread up the entire building due to a “chimney effect” caused by the cladding.
Insulation keeps heat in. Basically, they converted the building into a giant kiln.
Jeremy Corbyn blames cuts to local council funding for the tragedy, but this cladding was part of a multimillion-dollar renovation.
About 30,000 other buildings around Britain have also been covered with this insulating cladding.
Published in Environment
I don’t mean to be argumentative, and I respect your opinion, but it is my understanding that none of her research was disputed in that her descriptions of how cells work were accurate, her descriptions of how the pesticides and herbicides worked were accurate, and the research she cited actually existed. The citations were accurate and well done. Most of the studies she cited were twenty to thirty years old and just collecting dust in the government archives. Why, she asked, weren’t they made public?
She was not a hysteric. Not in the least. I read her book on its thirtieth anniversary because I was involved in a fight with the EPA. I was extremely impressed by the work she put into this book. We are not talking about Al Gore here. She did an excellent job with a difficult subject.
Her main point, by the way, had nothing to do with DDT. It was simply this:
If scientists do the work of carefully explaining their opinions and research, the general public can understand it. Her book was about democracy. Until then, every time anyone dared to question a scientist, which she was not and which she made very clear, the scientists wouldn’t explain things, saying “You wouldn’t understand.”
So the government was making decisions on its own, without putting scientific matters to the public.
That’s what she wanted to change. And it needs to change.
If you’ve ever been in an argument with a government agency official such as someone from the EPA, you’d appreciate Rachel Carson’s book. :)
I probably haven’t read her Silent Spring book since I first read it during my college days, and at this time of night don’t want to wake everyone up so I can search all the bookcases in the bedrooms of the house for my copy. So I just now bought a kindle version.
I haven’t got very far yet, but so far I am reminded of my twitter feed on #AHCA. People on twitter are saying that if we cut this or that, people will die. They look only at one thing – whether we give them money to get medical care. They don’t consider economic sustainability at all. They don’t consider the downstream effects on our culture and society of giving such vast powers to the government.
It’s the same with the Rachel Carson opponents. They say people will die if we don’t use DDT to kill insects. They don’t consider ecological sustainability. They don’t consider the development of genetic resistance. They don’t consider 2nd or 3rd order effects. They make no effort to strike a balance.
So there you have it: The Rachel Carson critics are the moral equivalent of those who are moving us to “single payer” health care. Single-minded insecticide use and single-payer health care are bosom buddies.
When I looked at the building’s design, it was pretty clear that it could not accommodate more than one stairwell. There was a central core with elevators and the stairwell, and the units surrounded them on the outside, clearly meant to optimize resident views.
None of that sounds particularly bad, since it’s about the only thing you can do in a compact design.
Out of curiosity I wondered how safety was handled in a modern building where money was essentially no object. The Porsche Design Tower, now going up in Miami, cost an economical $557 million, and certainly is a world away from Grenville Tower. It is a 60 story steel and glass architectural masterpiece, where absolutely no expense was spared. Signature feature: a special car elevator that zooms your high-end sports car up to your unit where you can gaze at it in admiration from the living room. The Penthouse unit sold for $22.5 million. I seriously doubt if all of Grenville Tower was ever worth that much.
And yet … there don’t seem to be access to staircases that is any better. Here are the floor plans:
http://www.designtowermiami.com/floorplans-porsche
Now, it appears to be that each unit gets its own semi-private staircase, shared with the unit to its side and the units below. But it appears that there is access to only one staircase per unit, so in reality this design isn’t any safer than Grenville’s. You have only one stair you can go down. If it is damaged or catches fire you are in just as much trouble as if you were in Grenville with its single staircase.
I’d be curious as to how the Porsche design is safer, or if it is.
As far as Grenville is concerned, their tenant action group seems to expose incompetence and neglect at every level:
https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com
Hearing that the cladding was put on partially to make it look better for surrounding (much wealthier) residents is enough to make me into a socialist.
Well, almost.
Considering that it’s governmental housing that created this perverse process, we’d better stick with capitalism.
It’s a lot safer.
https://fee.org/articles/millions-died-thanks-to-the-mother-of-environmentalism
That article says DDT use was discontinued in India in the late 70s, after which malaria cases increased. But other information on the web talks about a controversy over India agreeing to discontinue DDT use by 2020, saying that it has been used for decades in agriculture and mosquito control.
Somebody is speaking with forked tongue.
This article in The Daily Mail raises questions for me about the energy efficiency narrative.
If was originally planned to use a non-plastic cladding for the tower renovation. Ultimately the plastic one was chosen which also saved some costs.
Did the non-plastic, nonflammable cladding meet the same energy efficiency standards?
If so, what were the reasons for the substitution? Was it solely cost?
I read the article. The current vendor website does not list the exact names Reynobond PE or Reynobond FR. Universally, PE stands for “polyethylene” and FR for “fire rated” or “fire retardant/resistant”.
The two names they list are Reynobond® with EcoClean™ and Reynobond® Architecture with A2 . These appear to correspond to the two products. “A2” is a particular fire rating. But it could be that the PE and FR were former products. The second link also explains why such material is needed.
What’s interesting is that the former is advertised as having an anti-smog catalytic coating. That brings the environut possibility back into the picture.
There will likely be a booming business for removing the non-FR/A2 version from any high rise buildings having it now.
Interestingly, this link also identifies the FR product as distinct from the A2 product and having only a B rating.
This link has even more info and shows the PE product limited to low-rise buildings:
Even the FR would have been inappropriate.
It seems that Dr. Offit (who wrote the fee.org article) was the one fooling his readers about at least a part of this. He wrote:
and then he goes on to say:
The numbers he cites from India agree with others I’ve found in scientific articles. However, it’s a reach to imply (as his careless placement of words does) that millions of cases of malaria equate to millions of deaths from malaria. It is a dangerous disease, and in one paper I saw figures indicating about one in a hundred persons who got the disease died from it. But most of the more respectable papers distinguish malaria cases from malaria deaths. Dr. Offit made no effort to do that.
The more important problem with his article, though, is that he implied that the dramatic increase in malaria cases following the dramatic decrease in the 50s to the mid 60s was due to the elimination of DDT. But there was no such elimination of DDT. One reason for the increase in malaria was due to the development of resistant strains in some species of the parasite. Other pesticides were used, too (and are still used) but resistance to those developed, too. Another reason was that it was getting expensive for India to get all the DDT India needed from foreign sources. I suppose there is a possibility that the increase in cost was due in part to the less than successful efforts to ban it world-wide, but I’ve not seen anybody try to make that argument, much less provide data for it. And India has developed its own DDT industry, though at the time of some of the articles I read, it wasn’t making enough to do the country-wide application that it wanted. There were also shifts in the population from rural to urban areas, and the urban mosquito problem, a relatively new phenomenon, couldn’t be dealt with in quite the same way as the rural problem.
As for the resistance problem, Rachel Carson warned that the indiscriminate use of pesticides would lead to it. And she was right. The problem is better understood these days, in the case of agricultural pests, and techniques have been developed to help mitigate the problem. It so happens that those techniques don’t help much in the case of the malarial parasite.
Dr. Offit is on firmer ground when he points out that Carson’s fears of human health problems resulting from DDT have been found to be overblown. But the environmental problem she wrote about is a real one.
When I read the book twenty years ago, thirty years after its initial publication, I was fascinated by what she had written about the possible effects on the reproductive system. As I recall without looking at it, there were a couple of times when she mentioned a figure of thirty years to see some of the effects (and I can’t remember why). At one point she said that the reproductive system was the most sensitive system in the human body, for obvious reasons.
At the time I read it twenty years ago, I had been noticing that there seemed to be a cluster of reproductive system health issues–infertility was higher than it should have been, breast and ovarian cancers, early menstruation was becoming an issue, and the number of C-sections was rising. Now I’m wondering about the transgender numbers rising.
It just struck me that maybe something was going on in the environment, and perhaps it was the proliferation of the petroleum-based chemicals.
The other point she made was that DDT was part of a class of petroleum-based chemicals, of which there are hundreds, not just DDT. As I recall, her point was that all life was carbon based, which is the reason she went into such depth about how a cell works. Anything that affects plants and insects could affect human health as well, given that all life shares carbon-based characteristics.
My point of contention with the anti-Carson sentiment is that I believe she had the right to ask the questions she asked. I think the response should have been a similarly well-thought-out book that addressed her concerns point by point. Since the pesticide-producing companies were not able to allay people’s concerns about their widespread use, then surely they are as much to blame for the banning of DDT as Rachel Carson is.
I’m glad you added all of that to the discussion.
In my family I was hearing a lot of similar anti-pesticide rhetoric well before Rachel Carson’s book came out, which affected our food purchasing, handling, and gardening practices. Where all of that attitude and information came from, I’m not sure.
But more later, I’ve got to run now.
What really jumped out at me as I scanned the sources was how old a lot of them were. She makes the point in the book that some of these studies had been kicking around for quite a while.
So it’s no surprise to hear that people were already alarmed and wondering about the safety of these chemicals that seemed to accompany the post-World War II industrial boom.
You’ve made the point that Carson’s book was about democracy, about the ability of the people to get answers from the ruling establishment (as I would call it) about what substances were being used on them. My impression is that those right-wingers who reviewed Rachel Carson’s book favorably back at the time were people who felt pushed aside by the ruling establishment, Democrat or Republican, big government or big business. I hope some environmental historian or other historian looks into this topic some day.
As for the long-term health effects, it seemed to me in the 1970s and 80s that the males of my generation of family and friends were dying off to the point that I was almost having survivor’s guilt. There were some who were young farmers who worked with agricultural pesticides and herbicides, and we’ve always wondered how many of the cancers were due to that. There are stricter safety regulations nowadays, but it’s still nothing to be taken lightly.