The movement to bring DDT back after its ban found a curious ally: Big Tobacco. But the endangered industry was after something bigger.
Source: How the Battle Over a Pesticide Led to Scientific Skepticism
” according to Bate. A revision of its history would accomplish what few other stories about science, health, and the environment could.
“You can’t prove DDT is safe, but after 40 years you can’t prove it’s guilty of anything either,” he wrote. Yet DDT had remained “such a totemic baddie for the Greens” that if you could pin a moral dilemma to it, it would pit liberals loyal to the environment against those devoted to public health, he argued.
It was, he said, an issue “on which we can divide our opponents and win.”
There is a science to logic. It is provable that a statement to the effect that without DDT we must have malaria is faulty logic. The entire argument by big tobacco is faulty logic. But it sounds good to sheeple. I have said it again and again that big tobacco will never again try to prove that tobacco does not cause cancer but that so many other things “might” — they will simply muddy the waters. Put advertising budgets in the millions of dollars into paying off researchers desperately looking for funding that suggests that any of 15 other things might be the cause of cancers as well. Generate as much mud as possible. Make anything a reasonable doubt and thus impossible to stop it in a court of law. Oh my.