My old partner in crime Ken Green has one of his typically delicious op-eds out today in the Financial Post of Canada, commenting on the viral video “The Story of Stuff” that is all the rage among the green left (but I repeat myself). It’s the usual Malthusianism in fancy dress combined with big corporation conspiracy-paranoia about how corporations are all out to poison us, because somehow it is good for the bottom line to kill off all your customers.
As Ken says, debunking all the nonsense packed in this short video would be an extensive labor, so he just picks on one claim–that we’re in danger from “untested” chemicals, especially chemicals “in combination.” Read the whole thing, but here’s the good part:
Combinations! Now we’re talking. Let’s start by asking how many ways there are to combine 100,000 drugs if we tested them just two at a time. There are lots of calculators online that’ll let you do this.
You’ll find that testing 100,000 chemicals requires about five billion experiments. Five billion experiments, involving only say, 2,000 people each, means you only need about 10 trillion people. We don’t have 10 trillion people.
Of course, if the population bomb is right, 10 trillion people is surely right around the corner!
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