The Multidisciplinarian

Toxicity is binary in California. Or so says its governor and most of its residents.

Governor Newsom, who believes in science, recently signed legislation making California the first state to ban 24 toxic chemicals in cosmetics.

The governor’s office states “AB 2762 bans 24 toxic chemicals in cosmetics, which are linked to negative long-term health impacts especially for women and children.”

The “which” in that statement is a nonrestrictive pronoun, and the comma preceding it makes the meaning clear. The sentence says that all toxic chemicals are linked to health impacts and that AB 2762 bans 24 of them – as opposed to saying 24 chemicals that are linked to health effects are banned. One need not be a grammarian or George Orwell to get the drift.

California continues down the chemophobic path, established in the 1970s, of viewing all toxicity through the beloved linear no-threshold lens. That lens has served gullible Californians well since the 1974, when the Sierra Club, which had until then supported nuclear power as “one of the chief long-term hopes for conservation,” teamed up with the likes of Gov. Jerry Brown (1975-83, 2011-19) and William Newsom – Gavin’s dad, investment manager for Getty Oil – to scare the crap out of science-illiterate Californians about nuclear power.

That fear-mongering enlisted Ralph Nadar, Paul Ehrlich and other leading Malthusians, rock stars, oil millionaires and overnight-converted environmentalists. It taught that nuclear plants could explode like atom bombs, and that anything connected to nuclear power was toxic – in any dose. At the same time Governor Brown, whose father had deep oil ties, found that new fossil fuel plants could be built “without causing environmental damage.” The Sierra Club agreed, and secretly took barrels of cash from fossil fuel companies for the next four decades – $25M in 2007 from subsidiaries of, and people connected to, Chesapeake Energy.

What worked for nuclear also works for chemicals. “Toxic chemicals have no place in products that are marketed for our faces and our bodies,” said First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom in response to the recent cosmetics ruling. Jennifer may be unaware that the total amount of phthalates in the banned zipper tabs would yield very low exposure indeed.

Chemicals cause cancer, especially in California, where you cannot enter a parking garage, nursery, or Starbucks without reading a notice that the place can “expose you to chemicals known to the State of California to cause birth defects.” California’s litigator-lobbied legislators authored Proposition 65 in a way that encourages citizens to rat on violators, the “citizen enforcers” receiving 25% of any penalties assessed by the court. The proposition lead chemophobes to understand that anything “linked to cancer” causes cancer. It exaggerates theoretical cancer risks stymying the ability of the science-ignorant educated class to make reasonable choices about actual risks like measles and fungus.

California’s linear no-threshold conception of chemical carcinogens actually started in 1962 with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the book that stopped DDT use, saving all the birds, with the minor side effect of letting millions of Africans die of malaria who would have survived (1, 2, 3) had DDT use continued.

But ending DDT didn’t save the birds, because DDT wasn’t the cause of US bird death as Carson reported, because the bird death at the center of her impassioned plea never happened. This has been shown by many subsequent studies; and Carson, in her work at Fish and Wildlife Service and through her participation in Audubon bird counts, certainly had access to data showing that the eagle population doubled, and robin, catbird, and dove counts had increased by 500% between the time DDT was introduced and her eloquence, passionate telling of the demise of the days that once “throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, and doves.”

Carson also said that increasing numbers of children were suffering from leukemia, birth defects and cancer, and of “unexplained deaths,” and that “women were increasingly unfertile.” Carson was wrong about increasing rates of these human maladies, and she lied about the bird populations. Light on science, Carson was heavy on influence: “Many real communities have already suffered.”

In 1969 the Environmental Defense Fund demanded a hearing on DDT. Lasting eight months, the examiner’s verdict concluded DDT was not mutagenic or teratogenic. No cancer, no birth defects. In found no “deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.”

William Ruckleshaus, first director of the EPA didn’t attend the hearings or read the transcript. Pandering to the mob, he chose to ban DDT in the US anyway. It was replaced by more harmful pesticides in the US and the rest of the world. In praising Ruckleshaus, who died last year, NPR, the NY Times and the Puget Sound Institute described his having a “preponderance of evidence” of DDT’s damage, never mentioning the verdict of that hearing.

When Al Gore took up the cause of climate, he heaped praise on Carson, calling her book “thoroughly researched.” Al’s research on Carson seems of equal depth to Carson’s research on birds and cancer. But his passion and unintended harm have certainly exceeded hers. A civilization relying on the low-energy-density renewables Gore advocates will consume somewhere between 100 and 1000 times more space for food and energy than we consume at present.

California’s fallacious appeal to naturalism regarding chemicals also echoes Carson’s, and that of her mentor, Wilhelm Hueper, who dedicated himself to the idea that cancer stemmed from synthetic chemicals. This is still overwhelmingly the sentiment of Californians, despite the fact that the smoking-tar-cancer link now seems a bit of a fluke. That is, we expected the link between other “carcinogens” and cancer to be as clear as the link between smoking and cancer. It is not remotely. As George Johnson, author of The Cancer Chronicles, wrote, “as epidemiology marches on, the link between cancer and carcinogen seems ever fuzzier” (re Tomasetti on somatic mutations). Carson’s mentor Hueper, incidentally, always denied that smoking caused cancer, insisting toxic chemicals released by industry caused lung cancer.

 This brings us back to the linear no-threshold concept. If a thing kills mice in high doses, then any dose to humans is harmful – in California. And that’s accepting that what happens in mice happens in humans, but mice lie and monkeys exaggerate. Outside California, most people are at least aware of certain hormetic effects (U-shaped dose-response curve). Small amounts of Vitamin C prevent scurvy; large amounts cause nephrolithiasis. Small amounts of penicillin promote bacteria growth; large amount kill them. There is even evidence of biopositive effects from low-dose radiation, suggesting that 6000 millirems a year might be best for your health. The current lower-than-baseline levels of cancers in 10,000 residents of Taiwan accidentally exposed to radiation-contaminated steel, in doses ranging from 13 to 160 mSv/yr for ten years starting in 1982 is a fascinating case.   

Radiation aside, perpetuating a linear no-threshold conception of toxicity in the science-illiterate electorate for political reasons is deplorable, as is the educational system that produces degreed adults who are utterly science-illiterate – but “believe in science” and expect their government to dispense it responsibly. The Renaissance physician Paracelsus knew better half a millennium ago when he suggested that that substances poisonous in large doses may be curative in small ones, writing that “the dose makes the poison.”

To demonstrate chemophobia in 2003, Penn Jillette and assistant effortlessly convinced people in a beach community, one after another, to sign a petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide (H2O). Water is of course toxic in high doses, causing hyponatremia, seizures and brain damage. But I don’t think Paracelsus would have signed the petition.