A morbid, but interesting cocktail topic is to ask: “Who was the most evil person in history.” Hitler, who killed perhaps 60 million? Stalin, 20 million? Mao, 40 million? Pol Pot, 2 million? Once an atrocity exceeds a graspable number of victims, it is hard to judge evil intent versus evil results. This blog wishes to nominate Rachel Carson to the master evil doer club for her sublime orchestration of the deaths of nearly 100 million people.

Carson, to those in the know, is the matriarch of the environmentalist movement. Her seminal work, Silent Spring, is the prototypical environmentalist scare bomb. Al Gore’s book on global warming is a direct descendent of Silent Spring. The idea of halting entire categories of industry – in this case DDT – based on anecdotal evidence is Carson’s legacy.

Far from being a harmful substance, DDT is one of the great miracle inventions, on a par with aspirin. DDT became widely used during WWII, and was found essential for controlling mosquito populations that would otherwise debilitate troops with malaria and typhus. DDT’s inventor was given the Nobel Prize in medicine. Contrary to Carson’s unfounded claims, DDT has been proven to not cause cancer or harm bird populations when used according to its manufacturer’s directions. DDT is cheap to manufacture, and nothing works as well at controlling mosquito populations in the developing world.

Because of the alarmist Carson, however, none of these facts mattered. The EPA, acting contrary to the findings of fact by an Administrative Law Judge, banned DDT within the US, and by proxy banned DDT for the world. This set off the worst human tragedy ever. Since 1972, nearly 100 million people, 90 % of them pregnant women or young children, nave needlessly died for lack of mosquito control. Carson’s legacy of death will only continue, as nearly 2 million people die each year.

Of course Carson did not intend to kill millions of innocent people. She was simply a misguided environmentalist who frenzied ill informed politicians into a rash and disastrous decision. Unfortunately, the anti-capitalist left has used the Carson model ever since to damage the welfare of people in the name of environmental purity.

The list of phony celebrity causes that threaten our welfare is epic. Jackson Brown sang to kill the nuclear power industry – which is the only viable energy source that emits no pollution. Jenny McCarthy stripped to discourage parents from giving their children vaccines – the miracles that prevent smallpox, polio, and a host of horrors. Meryl Streep used her celebrity to ban Alar, another completely safe insecticide. Of course today’s king of fear mongering is Al Gore, who’s highly improbable claims of the harm from global warming may shut down the capitalist engine that has given the modern world all its wealth.

None of these new rogues will likely cause the harm on the scale of Silent Spring, but the Carson model of alarmism, weak science, and unfounded preemptive regulation, is a MO serious voters should learn to recognize. The next time an environmental advocate with questionable credentials says “we can’t afford to wait to find out what harm ‘X’ may cause to the environment,” be skeptical. That is the Carson model of deception.