The public health consequences of silencing free speech
By Roger Bate
Last year, the Attorney General of New York subpoenaed Exxon to hand over records related to climate change research and advocacy. The aim is to silence opponents of expensive and sometimes counterproductive actions against greenhouse gas emissions. For climate militants, there is no legitimate debate on climate change science or policy, and going after the largest publicly traded oil company in the world could be considered a great tactic in the aim to silence debate.
I was named in the subpoena as was the organization I used to run, Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM). I suspect the reason is that Exxon gave AFM a small amount of funding in the mid-2000s when we were pointing out some inconvenient truths about the spread of malaria. We relied heavily on the work of global expert Dr. Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. AFM explained that the reason malaria had spread in some locations was due to numerous factors and very little if anything to do with changes in temperature.
Most people assume that, because malaria is a tropical disease today, it always has been and that it could only spread to places like northern Europe if temperatures rise. But as we learned from Dr. Reiter, malaria was once endemic to England. Oliver Cromwell died from it, and there were even epidemics in the Arctic circle. It was endemic to US until it was eradicated by the insecticide DDT in 1952.
A vastly warmer planet would probably lead to the spread of numerous diseases including malaria. But the reason malaria has surged and retreated over the past half century has far more to do with efforts (or lack thereof) to combat it, including spraying insecticides to kill the mosquitoes that carry it.
Today the mosquito-borne disease Americans are worrying about is Zika. But as I explained in a blog a few months ago, Zika is spreading because of green militant action against the use of insecticides.
I stopped writing on climate science and policy roughly a decade ago because I saw that the policies enacted, allegedly to combat the dangerous effects of warming, had almost nothing to do with scientific and economic sense and everything to do with grandstanding and political expediency. Nothing has changed since then.
Until renewable energy is far cheaper than it is today, fossil fuels will remain central to the energy use of billions of energy-deprived folks around the world.
