George Monbiot is sounding off about the guys at the Breakthrough Institute today - it seems they are insufficiently green for the great man's liking and so they are to receive a tongue lashing.
2/3: One of #ecomodernism's authors has been spreading a great blood libel against the green movement. http://t.co/nwdrg7qO58 @mark_lynas
— GeorgeMonbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) September 30, 2015
The "blood libel" in question is the idea that environmentalist pressure ended the use of indoor DDT spraying and hence led to millions of avoidable deaths from malaria in developing countries. Monbiot's case is set out here. He argues - correctly I think - that there was no worldwide ban on DDT. But he continues thus:
It may be true, in some places and at some times, that DDT has been hard to obtain for the purposes of disease control when it was believed to be the most effective option, though you have yet to show me hard evidence even that this is the case – which is a very different matter from a global ban. If it is true, however, I regret it.
So we see that there is a tacit acceptance that something was awry. Yet Monbiot continues by saying that it was "exaggerated and inaccurate" of Patrick Moore to say that the WHO discontinued its use. Yet if you refer to the announcement made by the WHO in 2006, when it announced that it was reintroducing indoor spraying of DDT, you read this:
Nearly thirty years after phasing out the widespread use of indoor spraying with DDT and other insecticides to control malaria, the World Health Organization (WHO) today announced that this intervention will once again play a major role in its efforts to fight the disease....WHO actively promoted indoor residual spraying for malaria control until the early 1980s when increased health and environmental concerns surrounding DDT caused the organization to stop promoting its use and to focus instead on other means of prevention. Extensive research and testing has since demonstrated that well-managed indoor residual spraying programmes using DDT pose no harm to wildlife or to humans.
In another section of his defence, Monbiot says - again correctly - that indoor spraying of DDT was not always the best option, citing malaria expert Allan Schapira. Yet Schapira is quite clear that availability of DDT was a serious issue, saying that its use has been "held hostage to misguided concerns for the environment" and that the WHO's malaria experts have "fought hard against pressure from various sides to ensure access in malaria-endemic countries to DDT".
So Monbiot appears to be engaging in what logicians refer to as "the fallacy of trivial objections". It seems beyond dispute that environmentalists' concerns led to a reduction in indoor spraying programmes and a consequent death toll. Whether there was or was not a ban is irrelevant. It's the same for the questions of whether the reduction in spraying was total or not is irrelevant too, or whether DDT was not always the best option. These are questions only of degree. We are not debating the distinction between a truth and a blood libel, but the distinction between a bloody truth and a big bloody truth.