The retired scientist’s claims about heating costs and DDT don’t stack up in his new book, A Rough Ride to the Future
Is there anyone as stimulating, infuriating, fascinating and contradictory as James Lovelock? As I found during our radio discussion this week, at 94 he’s as acute and lively as ever. And, as ever, I kept switching between delighting in what he said and groaning with despair. He has greatly enriched our understanding and experience of the living planet. But he doesn’t half talk some rubbish sometimes.
James epitomises that romantic ideal: the independent scientist and inventor. Few succeed in going it alone in any field, least of all these. For every lone genius, there are 1,000 people who believe themselves to be one, but who either unwittingly repeat other people’s work or who, without a sufficient grounding in science, begin with a wildly mistaken premise and go downhill from there. If I had a pound for every email I’ve received claiming to have discovered new forms of energy or propulsion, I could have bought myself a warp drive.
it costs three to 10 times as much to heat a house in Britain as it does to heat a comparable house in America, which overall has a colder climate. This huge discrepancy, which affects everyone and all our industry in Britain, is part of the cost of believing in renewable energy as if it were a religious obligation.
‘Young ideologues’ and ‘urban green lobbies’ … ‘made noisy demands until the US Congress obliged them and other nations soon followed. One consequence of this ban was a sharp rise in the human death rate from malaria and other insect-borne diseases in tropical regions.’
Neither Rachel Carson, nor the green movement nor the US government seemed aware of the dire human consequence of banning the manufacture of DDT and its lookalikes before substitutes were available … In 1963 malaria was about to become effectively controlled. The insecticide ban led to a rise in malaria deaths to 2 million yearly, plus over 100 million disabled by the disease.
DDT was banned outright. Subsequently it became usable again for malarial control in a limited way.