This article appeared in the "Editor's File"
in The Textbook Letter, September-October 1995.

Promoting the Far Right's Fictions

William J. Bennetta

I hope that readers of Education Week weren't taken in by West and Harp's effort. The poster (titled The Earth Is Fine! Save Yourself!) is really a melange of far-right political fictions, including ignorant incantations, lies, and an attempt to brand environmental organizations as Marxist conspiracies. Caruba's material has no respectability whatsoever, and it can serve only as a sample of the anti-scientific, anti-environmental trash that agents of the extreme right try to inject into schools. Look at some of Caruba's tricks:

• Although there is no doubt that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are destroying stratospheric ozone, Caruba flatly denies it. He ignores all the scientific work that has shown how CFCs deplete the ozone layer (including the work that was commemorated by this year's Nobel Prizes in chemistry), and he declares that "Ozone is not being destroyed by 'man-made' chemicals." He says that holes in the stratospheric ozone layer are "a natural phenomenon," and then he sinks into pseudoscientific raving: "The evaporation cycles of the world's oceans annually generate 300 times more chlorine than the entire world production of CFCs."

That is nonsense -- and even if huge quantities of chlorine were being liberated from the oceans, this would be irrelevant. Such chlorine couldn't reach the stratosphere: It would react, here in the troposphere, to form chlorides. CFCs, on the other hand, are extremely stable and do not react in the troposphere at all. They ascend unchanged to the stratosphere, and only when they reach the stratosphere do they decompose (under the effect of ultraviolet radiation) to release chlorine. The chlorine reacts with ozone, and the ozone is destroyed.

• "Global warming," Caruba says, "is a completely discredited theory." This is a vicious political slogan promoted by coal companies, oil companies and some other commercial interests. If there has been any doubt about global warming, the doubt was abolished when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported (in September) that Earth's atmosphere is definitely growing warmer, that the warming is at least partly due to human activity, and that the resulting changes in the average global temperature will be more rapid than any changes that occurred in the last 10,000 years.

• Caruba dismisses water pollution in two sentences: "Clean water is what comes out of the tap from one end of the nation to the other. Enjoy it." So Caruba wants students to believe that all our drinking water is clean and that we have no reason to be concerned about the pollution of water supplies. The fact is this: From one end of the nation to the other, various local populations must use water sources that are badly contaminated by heavy metals, organic solvents, and other industrial or agricultural pollutants.

• Here's what Caruba wants young people to believe about air pollution: "Clean air is precisely what we breathe full-time in America. Yes, in some cities, . . . . the air isn't that great, but no one is dying from it. Today's automobiles contribute very little to so-called air pollution. Environmentalists want you to stop driving. You won't. You don't have to."

When I recited that stuff to my friend Milton Feldstein, who is a chemist and a senior officer of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (in San Francisco), Feldstein remarked: "Obviously, the person who wrote that doesn't know anything about science or anything else." In every urbanized region in the Western world, Feldstein told me, automobiles contribute more than 50% of the air pollutants, including carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and substances that create smog by driving the formation of tropospheric ozone. The effects of such pollution on health include the inhibition of respiratory function -- and (contrary to Caruba's claim) people are dying from it. Particulate matter is known to cause excess deaths, and carbon monoxide kills persons whose cardiovascular systems have been weakened by age or disease.

• "Pesticides," Caruba says, "are one of the reasons more people are living longer, healthier lives . . . ." He ignores all of the environmental issues involving pesticides, and (of course) he promotes the view that feeding humans is the only thing that matters. Then he tries to divert attention from the dangers posed by pesticide residues on foods: "Fully 99% of the pesticides ingested by humans are produced naturally by fruits and vegetables . . . ." That is an absurdity and an attempt to sow confusion and misinformation by muddling the meaning of the word pesticide.

• "Forests," Caruba says, "are not disappearing. In the U.S., fully two-thirds of the forests that existed when the Pilgrims arrived still exist." That is another absurdity -- one that shows up often in propaganda dispensed by timber companies and religious cranks.

In the end, Caruba turns to overt political cant. He attacks the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and he says that "environmental organizations" -- all of them -- demand "that centralized government control property, natural resources, agriculture, and all means of production." (Do you know of any environmental groups that demand government control of "all means of production"? Neither do I. Caruba has obviously dredged up that trite phrase to imply that all environmentalists are Commies. Shades of J. Edgar Hoover!)

I know all that I need to know about Alan Caruba and the faction that he represents, but I don't know what motivated West and Harp to plug Caruba's sleazy stuff in Education Week.

William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes frequently about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false "history" in schoolbooks.

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