Clouding The Issue
Common sense says we should consider all the evidence regarding social problems and seek simple, proven solutions. Our moral superiors believe otherwise. By Nick Cater.
Every modern cause needs its polar bear, a totemic victim adrift on a chunk of ice, rendered incapable of swimming by the monstrous injustice of capitalism, or something along those lines.
Last week the crusaders against e-cigarettes thought they had found their bear, a 17-year-old vaping addict whose lungs had become so damaged they had to replaced. News of the operation in Detroit followed an apparent epidemic of vaping-related illness in the US. Two thousand Americans are said to have suffered vaping-related respiratory illness this year and 39 have died. In keeping with the inflated rhetoric of our time, we are obliged to refer to this as a “vaping crisis”.
The case against e-cigarettes, however, is not as simple as most news reports imply. Public health activists and most of the journalists who covered the issue picked their cherries carefully.
It turns out that the totem teenager had not been vaping a conventional aerosol infused with nicotine and flavouring, a legally available product. He was sucking on the vaping equivalent of wacky baccy, an oil infused with tetrahydrocannabinol, the main psychoactive component in cannabis.
Water vapour is harmless to the lungs. Vaporised oil sticks to them like a sludge, inflaming the air sacs and producing the symptoms of pneumonia. To make matters worse, the TCB oil was cut with a suspected carcinogen, Tocopheryl acetate, a synthetic form of vitamin E that is used as a thickening agent in black-market vape juice.
A prohibition on e-cigarettes on these grounds would be as sensible as banning eating on the grounds that it causes salmonella.
Yet state administrations in the US have succumbed to the urge to prohibit vaping products, just as a century ago they progressively banned alcohol, the supposed root of all evil.
Australia’s federal, state and territory chief medical officers responded to the vaping crisis with a statement warning of “growing evidence implicating e-cigarettes in a range of harms”.
Healthdirect.gov.au, which boasts of delivering “free advice you can count on”, was emphatic. “Some things in life are indisputable,” it reported. “Puppies are cute, Bill Gates is rich, the Earth is round. And smoking cigarettes is bad for you. Evidence is emerging of a link between e-cigarettes (electronic cigarettes) and lung disease requiring intensive care.”
Promoting the evidence that supports a favoured argument and dismissing the evidence that does not has become a habit for the cognoscenti who presume to possess superior moral judgment. Simplifying the cause and overcomplicating the solution has become their hallmark, as we saw last week in the debate about bushfires.
Most Australians, for example, still hold that bushfires should be fought the traditional way, by enlisting courageous citizens to apply water to the flames by hose, aircraft or bucket.
Last week’s bushfires across stretches of the east coast revealed a dissenting view. Bushfires should be fought not by tackling flames but their “root cause”. The root cause, the experts tell us, is not the accumulated organic matter around the roots of trees. It is climate change or, as it is now known, the climate emergency.
The experts put their heads together in Vienna in July last year at a meeting convened by the World Bank’s Program on Forests to establish what this new method would entail. “The experts eschewed the sort of simple solutions that have become the norm in most countries threatened by fire such as increasing investment in fire suppression,” the Australian Financial Review reported.
Fighting fires is apparently old hat. Our thanks to Rob Jesudason, the former chief financial officer of the Commonwealth Bank, for explaining what we should be doing instead. “To solve this issue,” Jesudason told the AFR, “we need to bring together both societal and corporate behavioural change, with proactive government policy, innovation in climate finance and by harnessing transformational technologies flowing from the digital revolution.” Jesudason, we must point out in the interests of transparency, is chairman of Pollination, a company, the AFR informs us, providing advice “on how to capitalise on the move to net zero carbon emissions”.
Like the hypothesis that vaping causes cancer, the theoretical link between rising global temperatures and bushfires has the ring of truthiness. Replicable data to support or refute the claim, however, is elusive.
Even if we assume that temperature over time can be measured reliably, it is not clear how we are supposed to measure variations in the intensity of bushfires.
They occur episodically — bad one year, then less bad. If two fires break out 300m apart, for example, are they part of the same fire or do we mark them down as separate blazes? Do we measure fires by the number of hectares destroyed? The 1851 Black Thursday bushfires in Victoria, for example, consumed five million acres, 11 times the area lost in the 2009 Black Saturday fires.
That may be a reflection of the state of the technology, sophistication of techniques, manpower and money available to fight fires, rather than the ferocity of the inferno. Do we measure natural disasters by the number of lives lost? The number of deaths from landscape fires was measured in single digits for all but three of 30 years until 2016, leading the Productivity Commission to add a cautionary note that “the small number of deaths means it is difficult to establish patterns”.
The head of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Collaborative Research Centre, scientist Richard Thornton, wrote recently that while temperatures appear to be rising, “we cannot be sure what this means for extreme hazards like bushfire”.
Uncertainty, however, is merely nitpicking to campaigners such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who responded to bushfires in California last month by tweeting: “This is what climate change looks like.”
Ocasio-Cortez believes facts are overrated. What matters is how you feel. As she once wrote, “there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually and semantically correct than being morally right”.