The End of Doom (14 page)

New Attacks on New Technologies

The promoters of fear never rest—the modern world abounds in new threatening technologies. Consider, for example, the promising new suite of technologies that comprise synthetic biology. In 2012, a coalition of 111 environmental and social activist groups called for a moratorium on the development of synthetic biology. The activists are worried about researchers into synthetic biology who aim to create a toolbox of standardized intracellular parts that can be used to create novel organisms that do things like clean up toxic wastes, make fuels, or produce medicines. The moratorium declaration specifically cites the Wingspread Consensus Statement as its authoritative version of the precautionary principle. The declarants state, “Applying the Precautionary Principle to the field of synthetic biology first necessitates a moratorium on the release and commercial use of synthetic organisms, cells, or genomes.”

Once the moratorium is in place, the groups want governments to conduct “full and inclusive assessments of the implications of this technology, including but not limited to devising a comprehensive means of assessing the human health, environmental, and socio-economic impacts of synthetic biology.” It's not just risks to health and environment that are to be weighed, but also social and economic risks that are to be assessed. The Friends of the Earth letter accompanying the call for a moratorium noted that it is “rooted in the precautionary principle and the belief that the health of people and our environment must take precedence over corporate profits.” For what it's worth, President Obama's Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues issued a comprehensive report in 2010, noting that “synthetic biology does not necessarily raise radically new concerns or risks.” The commission explicitly rejected applying the precautionary principle to synthetic biology and instead recommended “an ongoing system of
prudent vigilance
that carefully monitors, identifies, and mitigates potential and realized harms over time.” The commission concluded that with respect to the benefits and harms of synthetic biology, the current regulatory system is robust enough to protect people and the environment.

Nanotechnology is also being targeted by proponents of the precautionary principle. Nanotechnology basically encompasses a suite of new technologies involving the use of materials at scales measuring in billionths of an inch, including tools like 3-D printing and carbon nanotubes. When it comes to regulating nanotechnology, Georgia Miller from Friends of the Earth asks, “Who is afraid of the precautionary principle?” She argues for “a more comprehensive application of the precautionary principle [that] would see nanotechnology's broader socio-economic and political implications considered and assessed alongside its toxicity risks.” The proponents of the precautionary principle ultimately hope that blocking the development of new technologies will force the rest of us to submit to the more radically communitarian and egalitarian forms of society and economics that they prefer.

The Seen and the Unseen

Promoters of the precautionary principle argue that its great advantage is that implementing it will help avoid deleterious unintended consequences of new technologies. Unfortunately, supporters are most often focusing on the
seen
while ignoring the
unseen
. In his brilliant essay “What Is Seen and What Is Unseen,” nineteenth-century French economist Fr
é
d
é
ric Bastiat pointed out that the favorable “seen” effects of any policy often produce many disastrous “unseen” later consequences. Bastiat urges us “not to judge things solely by
what is seen,
but rather by
what is not seen.”
Banning nuclear power plants reduces the allegedly seen risk of exposure to radiation while boosting the unseen risks associated with man-made global warming. Prohibiting a pesticide aims to diminish the seen risk of cancer, but elevates the unseen risk of malaria. Demanding more drug trials seeks to prevent the seen risks of toxic side effects, but increases the unseen risks of disability and death stemming from delays in getting effective drugs to patients. Mandating the production of biofuels attempts to address the seen risks of dependence on foreign oil, but heightens the unseen risks of starvation.

Jonathan Adler sensibly asks, “Why is it safer or more ‘precautionary' to focus on the potential harms of new activities or technologies without reference to the activities or technologies they might displace?” He adds, “There is no a priori reason to assume that newer technologies or less-known risks are more dangerous than older technologies or familiar threats. In many cases, the exact opposite will be true. A new, targeted pesticide may pose fewer health and environmental risks than a pesticide developed ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. Shifting the burden of proof, as the Wingspread Statement calls for, is not a ‘precautionary' policy so much as a reactionary one.”

As we've seen, the precautionary principle privileges the status quo by shifting the burden of proof to the proponents of new activities and technologies. But that's not all. The rhetoric of the precautionary principle enables its promoters to drape themselves in the mantle of the public interest. The precautionary principle “places the speaker on the side of the citizen—I am acting for your health—and portrays the opponents of the contemplated ban or regulation as indifferent or hostile to the public's health,” explained Aaron Wildavsky. “The rhetoric works in part because it assumes what actually should be proved, namely that the health effects of the regulation will be superior to the alternative. This comparison is made possible in the only possible way—by assuming that there are no health detriments from the proposed regulation.” In other words, proponents of the precautionary principle are trying to get away with claiming that there are no trade-offs; they assert that their policy of suppressing new technologies guarantees benefits without incurring any risks. But as the pesticide, nuclear power, drug approval, and biofuels examples clearly show, that is simply not true. It is impossible to abate just one risk—there are risks on all sides of any technological process, including the risks of banning it.

Precautionists also ignore another vital fact about progress: All technologies serve as bridges to other technologies, to ever better and safer alternatives. For example, without the production of fossil fuels, humanity would not be in the position to make the costly, knowledge-intensive transition to the solar/hydrogen future that many environmentalists wish to subsidize into existence. One technology leads to another. As dirty as burning fossil fuels may be, they aren't a tenth as dirty as burning wood. And if the world had not switched to fossil fuels, it might well have been the case that all the world's forests would have been cut down by now.

Precaution and Perfect Foresight

Embedded in the precautionary principle is the notion that humans can somehow anticipate all of the ramifications of a technology in advance and can tell whether on balance it will be a net benefit or a net cost to humanity and the environment. That's complete nonsense. Human beings are terrible at foresight. To cite a single example, when the optical laser was invented in 1960, it was dismissed as “an invention looking for a job.” No one could imagine what possible use this interesting phenomenon might be. Of course, now the optical laser is integral to the operation of hundreds of everyday products. It runs our printers, transmits our data on optical telephone networks, performs laser surgery to correct myopia, checks us out at the store, plays our CDs, opens clogged arteries, helps level our crop fields, and so forth. It's ubiquitous. Yet no one anticipated—no one could have anticipated—how incredibly useful lasers would turn out to be, not even the wisest tribunal of environmentalist seers. Permissionless innovation produces progress.

Consider another case of overwrought precaution. In the 1970s, there were extensive efforts to ban genetic engineering research on precautionary grounds (see the next chapter). As late as 1989, in response to Green Party pressure, German regulators forbade the chemical manufacturer Hoechst to open its then-state-of-the-art biotechnology facility outside Frankfurt to produce pure human insulin using gene-spliced bacteria. The process poses no significant threats and biotech insulin is safer for diabetics to use than was the standard pig and cow insulin sourced from slaughterhouses. The anti-biotech precautionary prohibition doubtlessly harmed German diabetics who would have benefited from nonanimal insulin.

Electricity, automobiles, antibiotics, oil production, computers, plastics, vaccinations, chlorination, mining, pesticides, paper manufacture, and nearly everything that constitutes the vast enterprise of modern technology all have risks. On the other hand, it should be perfectly obvious that allowing inventors and entrepreneurs to take those risks has enormously lessened others. How do we know? People in modern societies are enjoying much longer and healthier lives than did our ancestors, with greatly reduced risks of disease, disability, and early death.

“A generic focus on new products is problematic because they often present lower risks than the older products they are intended to replace and failing to adopt new products can increase risks,” observes a 2013 report from the nonprofit Council for Agricultural Science and Technology. “Regardless of whether the subject is automobiles, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, factories, or a myriad of other products, new technologies are generally safer than the older versions. By imposing a barrier to the introduction of newer technologies, the Precautionary Principle favors the status quo, which could often mean higher risks.”

The precautionary principle is profoundly conservative, privileging the old over the new, the past over the future. It amounts to an argument from ignorance, claiming that the truth of a premise is based on the fact that it has not been proven false, or that a premise is false because it has not been proven true. In this case, the wielders of the precautionary principle can simply assert that any new technology they dislike could be dangerous merely because their claim has not been proven false. Conversely, precautionists can contend that claims for the safety of a new technology are false on the grounds that it has not been proven (sufficiently) true.

Prior to the modern era, most societies were dominated by elites that sought to restrict the range of activities and technologies available to their subjects. For example, on precautionary grounds the samurai during the Tokugawa period in Japan forbade their subjects firearms; the Turkish caliph outlawed printing presses throughout the Middle East and North Africa until 1729; and the Chinese emperor burned all oceangoing vessels in 1525 and restricted ships to having just two masts for sails. Now modern environmentalist elites would similarly restrict access to technologies that they find too dangerous and socially disruptive.

The precautionary principle empowers a self-selected elite of the timorous to obstruct progress for the majority. In a sense, the precautionary principle is a return to the era when clerics and nobles (environmentalist ideologues and bureaucrats today) had the power to halt innovations on the grounds that they were bad for the common folk. The precautionary principle is the opposite of the scientific process of trial and error that is the modern engine of knowledge and prosperity. The precautionary principle impossibly demands trials without errors, successes without failures.

Trial Without Error

“The direct implication of trial without error is obvious: If you can do nothing without knowing first how it will turn out, you cannot do anything at all,” explained Aaron Wildavsky in his 1988 book
Searching for Safety
. “An indirect implication of trial without error is that if trying new things is made more costly, there will be fewer departures from past practice; this very lack of change may itself be dangerous in forgoing chances to reduce existing hazards.”

Wildavsky added, “Existing hazards will continue to cause harm if we fail to reduce them by taking advantage of the opportunity to benefit from repeated trials.” On the other hand, he suggested, “Allowing, indeed, encouraging, trial and error should lead to many more winners, because of (a) increased wealth, (b) increased knowledge, and (c) increased coping mechanisms, i.e., increased resilience in general.” Wildavsky contends that pursuing a strategy of resilience is a far superior way to mitigate any deleterious side effects of new technologies. Greater knowledge, experience, and wealth gained from technological progress supplies societies and individuals with more options for handling whatever problems might arise, either natural or man-made.

Progress and Safety Happen Only Through Trial and Error

Fortunately, two centuries ago, some societies managed to escape the dead hand of elite rule and embark upon the trial-and-error process embodied in science, the market, and democratic politics. The result of the risks taken by social, economic, political, and scientific innovators is modern prosperity. “The true key to the timing of the Industrial Revolution has to be sought in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century. The key to the Industrial Revolution was technology, technology is knowledge,” explains Northwestern University economic historian Joel Mokyr in his 2002 book
The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy
. Technology is the productive engine that has enabled some happy portion of humanity to escape from our natural state of abject poverty.

Correspondingly, Timothy Ferris, author of
The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature,
points out: “Liberalism and science are methods, not ideologies.” Both embody the freedom to explore and experiment, enabling people to more systematically use trial and error to seek truths about the physical and social worlds. Both science and liberalism advance in their goal of better understanding their subject matter by falsifying asserted claims. As Nobel Prize economics laureate Friedrich Hayek argued, “Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.” It is through a continual process of trial and error and success and failure that science and liberalism ultimately yield better ways of doing things.