Selected Articles from the LAND Newsletter
GUEST EDITORIAL
Manipulating data for political gain
Excerpted from WorldNetDaily.com October 18, 2003
The Precautionary Principle was adopted by more than 170 nations at the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. It says, simply, that: Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.
For a decade, this principle has been used to justify environmental policy that could not be justified by scientific evidence. The entire global warming debate, and subsequent policy proposals, have been advanced on the strength of this principle, even in the face of growing scientific evidence that there is no threat of "serious or irreversible" global warming resulting from human activity.
Many of the same people who invoke this principle to advance environmental policies reject the principle when it comes to "serious or irreversible damage" that could result from terrorists' activities. Iraq is a perfect example.
It must also be noted that some of the critics who claim that the president "manipulated" the data have no problem at all accepting the grossly manipulated and misrepresented data regarding climate change or the so-called "endangered" spotted owl or salmon or DDT or asbestos or MTBE or any of the hundreds of other "sky-is-falling" environmental threats to society.
Now that it is known that neither the spotted owl nor salmon is, or was, endangered and that both DDT and asbestos produce far more benefits than harm to society, and that MTBE should never have been required in fuels – why are the critics of "manipulated" data not screaming?
The answer, of course, is political advantage. To some politicians, nothing is more important than political advantage. It doesn't matter that hundreds of thousands of people have been adversely affected by environmental policies based on "manipulated" data with little or no benefit to society. It doesn't even matter that their continued bad-mouthing of our presence in Iraq is emboldening those who exist only to kill Americans. What matters to them is political advantage.
The best precaution is to see that none of these principals gain political advantage.
