If you are in an environmental group, you need to replenish your targets in order to keep that $3 billion in revenue per year. People need to be mobilized and afraid and believe your legal group will 'hold corporations accountable' - by agreeing to a settlement where environmental lawyers get paid.

That is why you see a constant stream of scaremongering about science. This year it is "PFAS in water" despite PFAS being 12,000 compounds and most of them being so natural some PFAS or another is detectable in 98% of all people. Preventing couches from catching on fire was a war on science a few years ago, BPA had its time in the chemophobia spotlight, and various pesticides are always an easy thing to scare people about.

Periodically, we are treated to claims that 'fertility is in decline' and they correlate that to an increase prevalence of modern weedkillers, though logically anyone can correlate anything to anything if the curves match or are opposite. So maybe DDT boosted fertility and once it was gone in some countries the fertility rate plummeted, right?

That is an obvious joke, as are all claims that weedkillers impact fertility. It is a blunt use of demographics. Actual fertility is not declining but developed countries are having fewer children.

The large decline is in...teenagers.


Link: Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham

Are teenagers more impacted by pesticides and suddenly not getting pregnant? Do environmental lawyers and the puppet organizations they fund really want to bring that fertility back?

That isn't the dumbest 'endocrine disruptor' claim that will come out this week but it is ridiculous. Birth control and better education are the reasons teen births have declined.

The other difference is that women are having fewer children, but by choice - environmentalists want women to have the choice, right? - and at later ages.


DOI: 10.1257/jep.36.1.151

Women having children later, or perhaps fewer or none at all by choice, 'stretches out' average numbers and that gives activists opposed to the modern world a story to tell about how Science Is Evil, but it is just a chemical fairy tale.