Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Whether we know it or not, we all cherish a Whiggish view of history - mankind emerging from dank darkness and ignorance of the past into the sunny destiny of modern civilisation. Such is the stuff of fairy tales, and the child within us will not let us accept any other.
Basing themselves on historical documentation unearthed in litigation to which the US chemical industry has been submitted over the recent decades, the authors - historians both - have portrayed two grim tales of deceit and denial. The first involves lead, whose poisonous character was known since time immemorial, and yet was used indiscriminately in paint, and then in gasoline. The second is the history of vinyl chloride, the mainstay of the petrochemical industry, whose cancer-causing character was long denied.
Lead was defeated by technology. Other minerals made better paint bases, and lead in gasoline was banned when catalytic converters were added to the petrol engine. The current gasoline additives are just as cancerous - but that's a story still to be written.
Caught out in lies and deceit in the `70s about the cancerous effects of vinyl chloride, the petrochemical industry reeled, und knuckled under. It did not even cost them that much. As indicated at pg. 223, the industry paid $ 270 million dollars for doing a job that it had estimated would cost $90 billion - and the government thought it might cost $ 1 billion.
But the industry learned its lesson. It would not submit again to the checks and balances of a democratic society. Politicians were bought, courts intimidated - and heck, science needs research money. A successful campaign against `big government' was launched, and `deregulation' mania swept the land - self-regulation is to solve all problems. Now the governor from the dirtiest state of the Union - and proud of it - is in the White House.
The end of the book is a distressing description of the rearguard battles fought by the citizens of Louisiana to avoid that `cancer lane' - as the region between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is dubbed - become upgraded to `cancer super-highway'.
The list of the participants in this story of denial and deceit are not the `dirty back-yard tinkerers', the scum of the chemical earth. The best of the finest of the sector are involved, individually, and in Associations. Past errors or malfeasance is no object.
We do not learn from past mistakes. Except better to cover up our misdeeds.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public)
No comments:
Post a Comment