As I understand it, DDT was banned because it was discovered that it tended to concentrate in the food chain. Leaded fuels were banned because concentration of airborne lead were steadily rising.
In both cases, it must have been difficult to do a simple double-blind study, because these were widespread effects affecting the whole planet. Yet eventually the evidence was deemed sufficient and governments acted.
But today I see many environmental problems that nobody seems willing to tackle. Clmate change has become one more left-vs-right issue, bee colony collapse will remain “under investigation” for years to come, etc.
My questions: If the negative effects of DDT were discovered today, would it get banned? Similarly, if the negative effects of leaded fuels were discovered today, would they get banned? What forces would prevent the bans, if any?
It’s unclear to me if the corporate lobbying effect has remained stable or gotten worse. And if the left-vs-right polarisation is worse than it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
Leaded fuel is still in use in aviation. And I seem to recall that DDT is also still used under certain circumstances, but I’d have to find a cite to prove that one. Maybe later.
You don’t have to have a double blind study to evaluate the danger or effectiveness of everything, only those things in which the reaction of the tested or testers is a significant factor in corrupting the results. You don’t need a double blind test to be able to detect increasing levels of atmospheric lead, and to know that it’s bad.
There’s never been a double blind, placebo controlled study on the effectiveness of parachutes, and yet we’re pretty sure they work.
As far as the left/right issue, that’s an interesting question. I see some similarities between global warming and smoking in the 50s and 60s - the actual science was warning people of the danger, but the establishment powers had considerable influence on public opinion and regulation. In fact, some of the very same PR firms that tried to push the “smoking isn’t dangerous” idea are also pushing the “global warming is a hoax” campaign.
Not only would Lead get banned, it would never have been permitted in the first place! Firstly, it’s a catalytic converter poison, so that alone would be a non-starter. Secondly, if we were somehow living in a world without catalytic converters, the science behind Lead and children’s brain development is well-established - in your hypothetical world, is Lead allowed in paint? Because if it isn’t I can’t see it being permitted in fuel.
Of course it would get banned. Do you somehow think that entrenched corporate interests against the banning of leaded gas and DDT were somehow weaker back in the past?
Of course they were weaker in the past, politically speaking. Today we wouldn’t have Medicare, Social Security, and the EPA if that hadn’t been the case.
If they were invented today, automobiles would be banned, never mind the fuel.
Let’s see…
Convenient
Fast
No more arranging your life around train schedules
Lure of the open road
Roughly a 1% chance of being killed in an accident at some point…forget it. They would be immediately banned, and even if they weren’t, no investor would ever back their manufacture.
A ton of people have claimed that aspirin is so powerful that if discovered today it would never be allowed for sale over the counter, but only by prescription.
And, I’ve heard it said (sorry, no cite; just urban legend?) that honey contains so many natural preservatives and poisons that the bees put there, that any artificial concoction containing the same would be forbidden by the FDA.
It may be a hijack from your thesis, or maybe not, but there wasn’t some gradual buildup of awareness that tetraethyl lead additives in gasoline were harmful – the guy who invented and popularized leaded gas deliberately concealed the harm it inflicted on him and others from the start.
The short version of the Wikipedia article is detailed enough to be damning. Apparently there was deception involved from the get-go, because they knew people don’t like being poisoned:
As an industrial process, it was pretty hazardous. Within three years of his discovery, there had been fifteen deaths involved in the manufacturing process, and that’s not counting mere poisonings and insanity:
Possibly germane to your main point, Midgley participated in a press conference, apparently for the express purpose of belaying suspicions:
Not that corporations didn’t lobby. They did but it hadn’t become such an industry. More to the point, fund raising had not become congresspersons’ full time job (with actual legislation a very part-time activity). Also they felt that the voters were their real constituency, rather than their donors. Straight party-line votes (except on actual organization) were exceedingly rare since the parties spanned a broad spectrum. I remember when the very liberal NY senator Jacob Javits was asked why he was a Republican, he very reasonably answered that he didn’t want to be in the party of the likes of Herman Talmadge. Of course, eventually all those southern bigots became Republicans and Javits could not have remained in that party.
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If the negative effects of DDT were discovered today, would it get banned?
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There has been a controversy about the banning of DDT all along, there are credible scientists that argue that A) DDT was never that bad. B) it’s potential to improve life by cutting down malaria is so immense that it was worth continuing to use.
It’s not a matter of it being “too powerful”, but rather that it has some rather nasty side-effects, including the breakdown of the stomach lining. They’d probably be enough to prevent its approval nowadays.
Note the development of resistant mosquitoes has been documented, and is a real concern.
We’ve seen the assertion that “the DDT ban has killed people in Africa, since it could/should have been used for malarial control” come up on this board every time DDT is mentioned (pardon my lack of cites – can’t search on DDT or any other three-letter term, unfortunately) and most times Rachel Carson is mentioned. Whether it’s some kind of political talking point people use to bash environmentalism, or what, I don’t know, but it’s been debunked multiple times. Sorry for being testy about it.
Oh my gosh, I just read that article. That’s some political screed right there, that is. It starts out with an outright lie. DDT has never been banned for use in malaria control.
Industry is notoriously lazy about this if there isn’t any federal legislation banning something. For example, CFCs were banned for most - but not all - uses, including asthma inhalers, thus manufacturers never bothered to do anything. Until it was banned for that purpose as well (a couple decades after the main ban), leaving them with nothing to fall back on, when they should have developed alternative propellants.
The CATO institute is a heavy pusher of this line, I came across it onJunk Science, Steven Milloy’s (a CATO “science” fellow/expert) site more than a decade ago and he was also pushing the secondhand smoke not being harmful lie too (at the time, but can’t find it now on his awful site). I’m actually surprised that the douchebags Penn and Teller haven’t made a Bullshit! about it, what with them both being CATO funded shills, fans of Milloy and all (great magicians, they just have scummy politics).
