Nancy Bryant, acting executive director of the Carolinas Clean Air Coalition, penned a perfect rejoinder to Locke Foundation adjunct scholar Joel Schwartz’s piece on clean air. Perfectly wrong.
Everything that Bryant could possibly get wrong, she did, starting with the wild notion that because Charlotte is not now drop-dead certain to meet the EPA’s arbitrary 2010 ozone limits the city should run around in circles with its hair on fire and mull crazy ideas like closing drive-thru windows on hot, muggy days. Or build a fantastically expensive nine-mile light rail segment. Neither moves the air quality needle one bit.
As Schwartz noted, as the local vehicle fleet sheds older, dirtier models the air gets cleaner. After that it is down to the fluctuations in weather — big masses of humid air which can “cap” the city for days on end in certain summers — to determine what the EPA-enshrined sensor system reads. That’s it folks.
From do-something mania, Bryant just turns to the kind of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that enviros often throw to up when the facts turn against them. Oh look, someone has an asthma attack, therefore Charlotte air is bad and getting worse. Sad to say it is that kind of thinking which gave us the tragic “link” between autism and vaccinations, a pernicious myth that cannot, it seems, be killed by reasoned argument.
Of course none of this is new, seeing as Edith Efron pointed out the dangerous abandonment of science by regulators and their civilian fellow-travelers in her 1984 masterwork The Apocalyptics. Across almost 600-pages Efron documents the willful neglect of science undertaken to achieve the desired regulatory results, from animal testing that in no way, shape, or form predicts effects in humans to the completely manufactured decision to treat a single molecule of a hazardous substance as hazardous; all of this bias has been built upon and amplified over the years to give us an environmental regulatory state that now stands detached from reality on planet Earth.
Just like Nancy Bryant.
