The Coming Chemageddon
Is our world as contaminated by chemicals as our media portrays?
Our oceans are choking on plastics.
Glyphosate is causing cancers, Parkinson’s, autism, COVID-19, obesity, birth defects, dead earthworms, bees and butterflies and is a climate stressor.
Forever chemicals are seeping into our water systems at never-before-seen levels.
Nano plastics are invading the brain-blood barrier.
Ultra-processed foods are simply chemical soups.
Our soils are exhausted by being repeatedly drenched in pesticides
My daily news scans show more and more stories on how chemicals, plastics and pesticides are destroying the environment, poisoning our food and water and leaving humans with ever more diseases and debilitations. Increasing rates of cancers or Parkinson’s, declining fertility rates, deforestation, bee declines, never before experienced levels of air, water and soil contamination due to industrialization, the irresponsible use of chemicals and inadequate pollution management. It seems like humanity is going to hell in a handbasket and no regulators seem to care.
And it is getting worse by the day as we slip hopelessly into Chemageddon - a state where chemicals, plastics and pesticides are dominating our ecosystems and destroying our capacity for life.
I can understand how people are afraid and outraged. The media are reporting terrifying results from an endless stream of publications showing things like microplastics crossing the brain-blood barrier, miscarriages tied to herbicides and learning disabilities from not just processed food, but now, ultra-processed food. Then there are the “forever chemicals”. Today I read a story on a Pesticide Action Network study that showed the “largest contamination in EU history” of a potentially toxic forever chemical destroying our lakes and rivers (and that destruction is “forever”). And if this relentless destruction of health and the environment by evil corporations weren’t enough, all of this is contributing to catastrophic climate change that will accelerate the sixth mass extinction.
What is really going on here? After decades of product stewardship, corporate social responsibility and ESG, has industry really gotten worse, more unprincipled and less responsible? With all of our public watchdogs and transparency obligations, are our governments really more in the pockets of industry and not capable of protecting public health and the environment? Can we actually believe any of their Chemageddon claims?
When I worked in the chemical industry two decades ago, we would have three to four investigations or academic publications a year that raised alarms about risks from our products. Now it seems like there are three to four reports a day. Two decades ago, the activist demands were to put controls on the use of a product or clean up a site. Today the demands are for deindustrialization, degrowth and green transitions (to renewable energy sources, agroecological food systems, local, small manufacturing sources and green transport).
In other words, the stories the media fill our newsfeeds with are politically motivated rather than scientifically based. The motives have become much greater than merely supporting public health and the environment - today these Chemageddon campaigns are merely fear-fronts promoting the broader objectives of revolution and system change to a post-capitalist, deindustrialized socialist paradise.
The facts are just not there.
The reality of this Chemageddon is just not there.
Media responsibility is just not there.
Claims of continual crises and multiple risks of extinction are just not there.
How have these open lies been allowed to spread so easily and effectively?
The “Five” Horsemen of the Apocalypse
In the last two decades, there have been five key evolutions that have enabled these activists to create a reality to suit their anti-capitalist, post-industrial political ambitions. These political operatives have seamlessly shaped our narratives and left us, seemingly, with no option but to relent to their alternatives.
1. Media transitions
The media and academic publishers had to transform to meet the changing financial models brought about by the Internet. Before online media, news organizations operated on funds from advertising, subscriptions and want-ads. That economic model disappeared and now news groups are seeking either public funds, donations or more frequently now, funding from politically-motivated foundations. Activists now are able to secure the funding and provide the content for investigative news articles (essentially buying ink and editors in news organizations like the Guardian or the Associated Press). Foundations like Bloomberg Philanthropies are even setting up their own investigative news organizations to promote their campaigns.
No wonder our media cannot keep a critical eye on emotional fearmongering disguised as news.
Academic publishing has fared even worse with the shift online. There are hundreds of predatory, pay-to-play journals publishing very poor research that is never read. These journals survive by charging $2000-3000 for bogus peer reviews. So interest groups and NGOs like the Environmental Working Group or US Right to Know design methodologies for studies conducted merely to confirm their campaigns, pay the peer review fee and then amplify articles in their friendly media sources about the “dramatic findings published in these academic “peer review” journals”. With seemingly unlimited foundation funding coming in, they can execute this scam on a regular basis.
2. Foundation evolutions
Foundations have emerged as key actors in the policy process. The Firebreak Foundation Capitalism series looks at how the last four wealth-creation cycles (the Internet, social media, crypo and AI) have produced a large number of billionaires who are subcontracting their foundations to politically savvy consultants who have created networks of organizations to run and fund campaigns to change the world (ie, block certain industries and deny their products from markets). Before, foundations used to fund research into diseases, support arts, culture and education and set up programs to aid developing countries.
Now foundations are pumping billions into fighting industry, paying law firms to sue fossil fuel companies and donating to news organizations on the condition that they publish stories on their campaigns. They are also working with anonymous interest groups via their donor-advised funds to finance specific NGO campaigns. The foundation world has morphed into an ecosystem of networks, fiscal donors and philanthropic cult movements moving money around in the same way hedge funds invest in projects.
Politically-motivated activist groups now find themselves with unlimited access to funds and little to no scrutiny on how they spend it. With that, they have started to fund their own research.
3. Lab Technology Advances
Laboratory technologies and detection tools have advanced while costs have come down. I used to say: If you have a well-calibrated chromatograph, you can detect any substance in human blood or urine at the parts per trillion range. (A part per trillion is equivalent to one second every 320 centuries.) 20 years ago there was still debate on the word “trillion” with the British still opting to call it a thousand billion.
Now lab technicians can detect substances at the nano level and are being commissioned to try to find nano plastics in human organs from the brain to the testicles. Of course the technology can find it and of course the activists who commissioned the research will amplify the findings, but there is no evidence that the presence at such low levels could lead to any harm. But that is not the point. Their purpose is to show that a synthetic chemical is present in our bodies (even temporarily) and it shouldn’t be. That is enough to create the requisite public fear and outrage.
4. Activist Science
NGOs working with scientists and interest groups (like the organic food industry or tort law firms) have started to design research studies to meet their campaign objectives. There are too many scientists chasing too few positions and research grant opportunities and the more politically active scientists have started finding much better opportunities working with NGOs and foundation-funded campaign groups.
But here the approach differs. Their research methodologies are defined to provide data to support an activist campaign, to create doubt in the present risk assessment approach and to push for policy change. Taking the three earlier subsections into account, we can see how these activist scientists can use the best lab detection equipment to conduct studies, easily funded by foundations and interest groups that they can then easily publish in pay-to-play journals despite their poor methodologies or politicized conclusions. NGOs then amplify their findings in the media and elevate these activist scientists to heroic levels (lone fighters for public health standing up and battling evil corporations and the scientific community that Monsanto has surely paid off).
5. Stakeholder / Citizen Engagement
Political engagement tools have evolved to include more stakeholder dialogue in an attempt to restore public trust in the regulatory process. Time was when policymakers would gather the best expert advice and, upon that, take decisions to ensure rational, sustainable public policies. But after decades of campaigns against industry, scientific innovations and our food and energy systems, public trust in this process had evaporated. The scientific approach, it was felt, provided but one form of expertise and in the last two decades, other “forms of knowledge” have started to enter into the risk assessment process.
The policy process needed to engage and empower other actors like NGOs, faith and indigenous communities, minorities and the under-represented groups. Citizen panels, public assemblies and citizen science started to emerge as the state was losing its authority and ability to govern. Activists did a good job portraying policymakers as being in the pocket of industry lobbyists so they then succeeded, perversely, in excluding industry input from much of the policy process. The idea of opening up governance to stakeholder dialogue quickly became a censorship of actors the activists did not like.
Two Decades of Relentless Alarmism … Unanswered
These evolutions since the advent of the Internet have allowed activist political groups to create a dystopian reality, sell it relentlessly via a struggling media and shape the Western public narrative to fear an “end of days” scenario if we don’t act to overturn capitalism, global trade, all industries and modern agriculture. After two decades of relentless alarmism and outright lies, a certain outspoken part of the public feel that change is necessary, industrial innovations must be stopped and that we must abandon the capitalist system. In the last few years, the word “transition” became a euphemism to impose these political changes as fast as possible.
And during all of this, industry (silenced and defeated) has laid low and performed with stunning impotence. Unless more people stand up and speak out, these political activists will win, our standards of living will decline and our innovative industries will move to friendlier pastures or disappear.