Augusto Zimmerman recently gave us an excellent treatise on the history of the culture and politics of the environmental movement. I didn’t know a lot of that myself actually, but it is entirely consistent with my observations as a scientist, specifically the post-modern abandonment of the values of the Enlightenment – rational, fact-based enquiry and the application of the scientific method. Here is a scientific perspective on the ‘environmental’ movement… Stated simply, show me an ‘environmentalist’ and I’ll show you someone that doesn’t know anything about the environment. That includes government agencies with ‘environment’ in their name. Having worked in the waste management industry for many years, these are the astonishing conclusions I have come to. That is not to, however, decry the need for, or the validity of, environmental science. It’s a necessary discipline in the evolution of technology that stems back to the days of the Enlightenment. Regretfully, a valid scientific discipline has now been hijacked by extremists and bureaucrats at virtually all levels. Let’s wind the clock back a few years and see how we got to where we are today. Science was in its golden age coming out of the second world war. This was largely because it was seen as single-handedly having won the war, as a result of the atomic bomb. Never before in human history, had a conflict been ended so abruptly by a single and notable technological advancement. Science was the future – the panacea for all man’s ills. The second world war also gave us the fly spray. During the desert campaign in Africa, some German soldiers noticed that the flies seemed to be avoiding the pyrethrin daisy, so they ground them up, dissolved them in kero, put it in a can with some butane as a propellant, and the fly spray was born. But it wasn’t just fly sprays that boomed after the second world war; it was cleaning chemicals, industrial coatings, and a host of other products. All these chemicals, mostly, had several things in common. Let’s jump inside the mind of the chemist in the 50s or 60s and think this through. If you were going to produce a synthetic chemical of some sort, you’d want it to have the following properties:

• • Non-flammable
  • Non-explosive
  • Non-toxic
  • Non-corrosive
  • Stable
  • Cheap

And fair enough – who could possibly dispute this as a wish-list for an industrial chemical? Well, have a look through the list and see if you can figure out which one of these properties we don’t want chemicals to have these days. Have you worked it out? It’s the fifth one – ‘stable’. You see, by definition, ‘stable’ means ‘non-biodegradable’. It’s easy to understand why this would be a requirement. If you spray an insecticide somewhere, the longer it hangs around, the more effective it is. And so it is with every industrial chemical. If you had a cleaning chemical, for example, you’d want it to be stable if stored for months (or years). This mindset was based on the simple (and flawed) understanding that the world was a bottomless pit into which you could pour anything. Thus, the most popular type of chemical (regardless of the industry) was the halogenated chemical. Halogens belong to group VII on the Periodic Table, consisting of fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine and astatine. They have the common property of being highly electronegative, and therefore resisting oxidation (the most common process of natural biodegradation). Of these by far the most common was chlorination, and thus you only have to see ‘chloro’ in the name of a chemical somewhere to know it is not biodegradable. Fluoridation was also used, mostly in floor polishes (due to its spectacular wetting properties), but perhaps most notably in chlorofluorocarbon propellants. It’s difficult to point to a single issue that changed the ‘bottomless pit’ mentality, but there were probably several contributors. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring raised awareness of the widespread and gratuitous use of DDT, spectral data revealed a hole in the ozone layer in the 70s, and there were increasing instances (and reporting) of localised health effects caused by the indiscriminate dumping of waste chemicals in the countryside (the ‘Love Canal’ is one example). Thus, Environmental Science was born as a discipline, dating from about the mid-80s in most tertiary institutions. As a result of the increasing awareness of the potential impacts of synthetic chemicals on the environment, a number of changes came about in the chemical industry. Firstly, CFC refrigerants and propellants were phased out, out of concern for their impacts on the ozone layer. Next in line were the swathe of chlorinated pesticides, such as DDT, Dieldrin, and 2,4,5-T. This was followed by non-biodegradable chemicals in most other industries, including the dry-cleaning sector (the highly effective trichloroethane was replaced by a biodegradable alternative). Pretty soon, a product couldn’t be sold unless it had ‘biodegradable’ on the label, and tertiary students studying Environmental Chemistry were taught about the passage of various elements through the biosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere. The first thing you learned about was the carbon cycle, and then the sulphur, nitrogen, and oxygen cycles. Well and good. Regulations were written, the EPA was established, and industries were called to account for their waste products. This kicked off the waste management industry, and technology was developed to allow industrial and domestic waste to be treated to a level at which it could be discharged into natural systems. One caveat needs to be added here though. These processes all applied to Western democracies only. When the Iron Curtain came down in 1989, it became apparent that communists were more concerned with developing technologies to keep pace with the West than they were the environment, as there were some truly egregious accounts of the destruction of pristine countryside by industrial wastes. It’s therefore rather ironic that most ‘environmentalists’ are also Marxists. Not only are they unaware of the egregious human rights records of Mao and Stalin, but they are utterly ignorant about the pillaging of the natural environment by the ‘beat the West’ mentality of communist industries. But back here in the West, environmentalism didn’t have any legs. The word ‘environmentalist’ wasn’t in wide usage, and it was seen as a boutique cause championed by the Jane Fondas of this world. And then, in 1988, the IPCC came along. Suddenly, pollution was no longer carcinogenic chemicals being discharged into aquifers, it was the CO2 coming out of our exhaust pipes, and we were all criminals. And, of course, if we have guilty people, we must also have virtuous people. Being ‘concerned for the environment’ became the new way to advertise your virtue, and the term ‘environmentalist’ was born. And lest there be no doubt about the zeitgeist, it wormed its way into churches, with even clergy (and the Pope) making public pronouncements about the need to ‘protect the environment.’ In short, environmentalism became trendy, and that’s where the problems started. It became a movement populated by the scientifically ignorant. I’ve made many attempts to engage with people on social media who call themselves ‘environmentalists’ and I have yet to find one – not one – with any relevant qualifications. And they seem utterly oblivious to this. A few years back the Barnett government in WA appointed an Environment Minister who drew the ire of a certain individual from the WWF, because he ‘didn’t know anything about the environment’. I chased up the individual involved and put the same question to him. In particular, I asked him what his tertiary qualifications were in Environmental Science. He said he didn’t have any, but he had ‘thirty years of activism…’ But, astonishingly, it’s not just the general public – it’s government departments. I’m sure the EPA began life with Environmental Scientists that actually knew something about the environment, but those days are long gone. I’ve had several dealings with them, both personally and professionally, and I’ve yet to meet anyone with any scientific qualifications. In my experience, it is staffed wholly by lawyers, ex-police officers, and bureaucrats. The consequence of this is that environmental regulations have crept into the system, no doubt thought up by some wet-behind-the-ears kid at a desk, that have no bearing on reality, and place unnecessary and restrictive burdens on industry. I will cite just one example of many. Some years ago I was involved with the project to build the new tugboat harbour at Port Hedland. It seemed simple enough. You dig a dirty great big hole in the ground next to the current harbour (leaving a wall of dirt to separate it from the ocean) and then when it is ready, knock down the wall and let the water in. As you might imagine, as the hole was dug well below sea level, seawater seeped in, and had to be pumped out. Well, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it could just be pumped back into the ocean. After all, that’s where it came from. But you’d be wrong. You see, as it seeped through the soil, it picked up significant levels of nitrate (perhaps 5 or 10ppm), and as there are very strict controls of the nitrate levels that can be pumped into natural waterways (including the ocean) the water had to be treated. Thus, BHP had to install a waste treatment plant whose sole purpose was to remove naturally-occurring nitrates from the water before it could be pumped back into the ocean. It is because of bureaucratic ignorance like this that the term ‘green tape’ was invented – regulations that place an unnecessary fiscal burden on industries. How did this situation come about? The concern with non-biodegradable chemicals that I discussed earlier was legitimate. Aside from being non-biodegradable, they generally have the property of being heavier than water, so they sink to the bottom of a waterway, beyond the reach of any cleanup activities. Contrast this, for example, with oil spills. We all remember the horrific pictures of fish and birds drowning in thick crude oil. Well, horrific though that was, as it floated on water it was accessible to cleanup activities. It was also accessible to oxygen, where natural biodegradation could decompose the residual oil left over from the cleanup efforts. That’s right – crude oil is (ultimately) biodegradable, as it is itself a biodegradation product. Nitrate, however, along with phosphate, when released into the environment, does not poison things, but has the opposite effect – it’s a nutrient. This was never a problem until 1913, when the Haber process was invented – the single most important chemical process in human history. It allowed nitrogen to be harvested from the air, and the synthetic fertiliser process was born, in the way of ammonium nitrate. Now, land could be farmed that previously had been barren. It also, of course, in the shadow of the first world war, allowed nitrate-based explosives to made in massive quantities. It could be argued, therefore, that it was a two-edged sword. It saved many lives by transforming previously barren land into arable farmland, but also claimed many lives in the horror of world war one. But in the early days, nitrate fertlisers used indiscriminately, and this caused problems when there was excessive runoff into natural waterways, upsetting the chemical balance of the system, and resulting in some pristine waterways being turned into swamps (a process called eutrophication). Consequently, discharge limits were put into place. But then the environmental bureaucrats got their hands on the reins of power. To upset the balance of a natural waterway, concentrations over 50 ppm are required, with natural levels around 1 or 2 ppm. I’m not sure what the historical regulations were, but now they are an absurd 0.1 ppm. And I can tell you exactly what happened. A bureaucrat, with no scientific training, got the role of Compliance Officer. He looks at the regulations and says, ‘I’m going to show everyone how concerned I am for the environment! Nitrate levels? It must be a poison or something, which are why there are outfall levels. I’m going to reduce the levels to 0.1 ppm. That’ll show ‘em.’ And so, with a stroke of a pen, hundreds of thousands of dollars come off the bottom line. And I have met people like this. There was one plant I was working on where the water from the plant was being used to irrigate a golf course. And yes, they use nitrate fertilisers on the golf course. So the amount of nitrate in the water shouldn’t matter, should it? Think again. In one of the more bizarre conversations I’ve ever had, I was unable to make this particular Compliance Officer (with no scientific training) see the folly of mandating the removal of nitrates from water that was being used for irrigation. The consequence of all that is that we find ourselves, in 2023, with a whole (legitimate scientific) industry that has been politicised and hijacked by the scientifically illiterate. People that know nothing about the passage of various elements through the natural environment are focused solely on the a chemical, CO2, that causes trees to grow. It could not be more preposterous (for those of you that are wordsmiths, the etymology of that word is that it literally means ‘posterior first’). More than this, they are opposed to the only technology that provides carbon neutral base-load power: nuclear. Any attempt to engage one of these people in a rational discussion is utterly futile, as their ignorance of scientific technology parallels mine of Russian Ballet. The difference is that you won’t find me expressing an opinion on Russian Ballet. From a political standpoint then, the ‘environment’ movement is wide open. If Peter Dutton were to employ advisers with the relevant knowledge, he could demolish the environment citadel, and introduce fact-based policies that would provide reliable and cheap base-load power. At a state level, a conservative government could put a broom through the EPA (they go by various names in different states) and remove the heavy compliance burden on so many industries. Whether at federal, or state level, it’d be like shooting fish in a barrel. The approved ‘science’ is now so out of kilter with reality that reform would be easy. It would, however, require politicians with courage. Peter Dutton has made a good start by opening up talk of nuclear power. More power to him, and let’s hope for a return to Enlightenment values.