Poisoned Water in Green Hell

A new book explains how environmentalists have made our pipes less safe.

By Mark Hemingway
Monday, August 17, 2009

I like where I live, but I didn’t quite realize that it was turning into a green hell. At least not until I read Steven Milloy’s new book, Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.

I live in one of the older neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. For the last decade or so, lead poisoning through the drinking water has been a constant source of concern. Most of the houses are over 100 years old, and the original lead pipes in many places are still being replaced. Obviously, low-income people who don’t have the money to replace their pipes are disproportionately affected by the problem, as are children, who are more likely to feel the effects of lead poisoning and suffer developmental problems as a result.

Of course, the lead pipes have been in these houses for a long time and were always a public-health threat. But the problem of lead poisoning in Washington, D.C. has actually gotten worse in recent years.

Despite the fact that chlorinating drinking water is one of the greatest public-health advances in history (know anyone who’s had typhoid lately?), environmental groups have been agitating against chlorine for over 30 years. They allege that chlorinated drinking water is linked to cancer and other environmental problems, despite the fact that American drinking water has been chlorinated for over a century without producing any significant evidence of cancer causation.

Bowing to pressure from environmentalists who think chlorine causes cancer, the Army Corps of Engineers removed chlorine from D.C.’s drinking water and replaced it with chloramine — a combination of chlorine and ammonia that is said to be less harmful. Choramine is, however, considerably more corrosive to pipes. As a result, the lead levels in city water — already a problem — became much worse.

And yet, according to Milloy, in reporting on the worrying lead levels in the city’s children at the beginning of this year, the Washington Post explained the city’s lead problem with only an oblique mention of “a new chemical” in the city’s water supply. The article did not delve into the fact that the “hundreds of young children in [Washington, D.C.] experienced potentially damaging levels of lead in their blood” in large part due to ill-considered attempts at environmentalism.

But now that misbegotten environmentalism has ruined my tap water, the question is, how would the modern environmental movement go about fixing the nation’s water supply?

In order to paint a picture of what Milloy’s green hell looks like, water is a pretty good starting point. We’ve already established that environmentalists don’t want anyone drinking chlorinated water. So what does constitute good drinking water? Milloy notes that when the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the country’s leading environmental organizations, rated the drinking water of 19 major cities, only Seattle was rated as “excellent.” When Milloy looks at the NRDC’s rating criteria, he finds that the major determining factor between the Seattle and the rest had nothing to do with the content of the actual water. Rather, the NRDC would not rate a city excellent without looking at its economic-growth policies, under the reasoning that more development automatically meant more water contamination, regardless of what tests showed was in the water. About the only way to score well on the NRDC water evaluation was a “near-complete ban on agricultural and industrial operations,” according to Milloy.

So assuming your municipality uses chlorinated water and local politicians aren’t actively trying to destroy all the jobs in the area, what are you supposed to drink? Bottled water? Au contraire. The production of bottled water uses fossil fuels, as does transporting it. That contributes to global warming and that’s a big no-no. In fact, as Milloy notes, several cities are already passing laws at the behest of environmental activists curbing bottled-water sales, forcing citizens to resort to the tap water that often the same environmental groups are decrying as unsafe.

And forget about importing water from somewhere else. Nevada wanted to build a desalination plant in California to bring more water to its rapidly growing desert towns. Environmentalists did not like that one bit. Canada has 20 percent of the world’s freshwater supply and virtually no one living in much of its landmass — and yet environmentalists are actively opposed to importing water from up north. The idea of tapping the Great Lakes as a water source is also verboten. Even the few very restrictive laws allowing freshwater usage from the Great Lakes have caused environmental uproars.

Oh, and since it will be hard enough finding water to drink, forget about using water for other reasons. And we’re not just talking about cutting back on the lawn a few days a week. Milloy reports on how activists in California mounted a serious campaign to require “smart meters” in homes that would allow the government to control and shut off your water usage (as well as electricity usage, natch) remotely whenever they saw fit.

But what about agriculture? Surely, we need water to grow crops, right? And according to environmental groups, isn’t local agriculture (and government regulation favoring it) important? Milloy notes that in 2007 the NRDC produced a lengthy report bemoaning how all that juicy out-of-season fruit has to be shipped in from New Zealand and other places around the world and boy, that produces a lot of greenhouse gases.

But this report was issued by the same NRDC that wants to prevent huge swaths of land in California from being used for farming because agriculture uses “80 percent of California’s developed water supply.” And not only that, it wants all water diverted from the land to ensure that it can’t be used for agriculture in the future. Why not salt the earth while we’re at it?

The only way to farm in an environmentally conscious way, with minimal water usage, is to start your own organic garden. Naturally, you won’t be able to do that, because, as Milloy explains at length, environmentalists want “smart growth,” which means people are packed into dense communities made up primarily of townhouses and condos. You won’t have land to plant a garden. The good news is that in such centrally planned communities you can walk to the store, which is especially fortuitous since environmentalists are hard at work outlawing internal combustion. The bad news is that if they succeed in imposing their draconian water regulations, it will kill off industrial agriculture, leaving no food at the store to buy.

If environmentalists get their way, you’ll be sitting in your cramped condo (Representative Dingell has already proposed eliminating tax deductions for larger homes) out of work, because more jobs means more development, and, it’s assumed, that means more pollutants. You’re alone in the dark and stinking up the joint because the local public utility politburo has “smart blackouts” and has further decided one shower a month is enough. Sure, you’re slowly starving to death, but if you’re lucky you’ll have just enough contraband rainwater — we have to have laws protecting the watershed, don’t you know — to sip on and keep you alive for the time being.

Welcome to green hell.

Okay, so perhaps I took a bit of license — but Milloy makes a compelling case that prosperity and individual autonomy are the chief targets of the environmental movement. He uses a blizzard of eye-popping facts, statistics, anecdotes, and even healthy doses of original reporting to demolish a number of environmental claims. Perhaps Milloy is most effective when he repeatedly shows how environmental organizations possess a total lack of self-awareness about how many of their stated goals are directly at odds with their other stated goals.

Milloy has written an engaging book. Critics might knock it for being more rhetorical than scholarly at times, but it’s well-substantiated and amusingly argued. That the book is written for general audiences is ultimately a strength.

I suspect I’m not the only reader to open Milloy’s book and find myself slipping down a rabbit hole to discover a vision of green hell that is frightfully plausible.