The public has increasingly become jaded about the efforts of environmental groups and anti-science activists to raise money by promoting fear and doubt.
Since Rachel Carson first shot to popularity with a book claiming that a pesticide, DDT, was ruining the environment (still cited by people who really want to believe someone sprayed DDT, got cancer and died 6 months later, though Professor I. L. Baldwin, professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin, who led the National Academy of Sciences committee studying pesticides and wildlife and reviewed the book in Science called it a prosecuting attorney s impassioned plea for action) no effort has been spared to get a lot of things banned.
Fast forward to Population Bombs lamented by Dr. Paul Ehrlich and then the forced sterilization advocated in "Ecoscience" by both Ehrlich and Dr. John Holdren, President Obama's "Science Czar", followed in the 1980s by acid rain and then Alar, bacon, you name it, all the way to BPA and GMOs today, a giant chunk of the public has had enough.
But scary stories of the week still pay the bills, which is why Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups with hundreds of millions of dollars in their coffers are always searching for something new to protest.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley notes, "the environmental movement has repeatedly denied people access to safer technologies and forced them to rely on dirtier, riskier or more harmful ones. It is adept at exploiting people s suspicion of anything new."
Oddly, science and corporations are the most progressive when it comes to insuring the future while environmentalists are most afraid of progress.
