I have been an on-again, off-again Green Party supporter for years. At times “on” enough that I was active in my local federal EDA, and have supported local Green candidates. Anyone who reads this blog will know I am prone to seeking the “green” solution to problems, which to me means the solution closest to Aristotle’s “Golden Mean”: between the three legs of sustainability: economic, social, and environmental concerns. Look it up, if that means nothing to you.
I am also convinced that the only way to find that Golden Mean is through rational discussion of scientifically valid data. Any decision made based on bad data is likely to be a bad decision. This is why I have railed on about the Conservative Party’s war on science: they don’t want information that does not support their ideology, and therefore, they make a lot of bad decisions.
Of course, all political parties are prone to bad decisions, and most have an underlying ideology that prevents them from creating policy based solely on accurate analysis of good information. That’s the party system, and that is the reality of Canadian politics. However, I have found on most issues, the Green Party has policy based closest to the rational advice that would be give by scientific experts in the field. Some would argue they alone have that luxury, as they will never actually have to worry about finding enough votes to actually get elected, but they used to say that about the NDP.
This week, however, the Green Party jumped the shark in my mind. Both federal leader Elizabeth May and Provincial leader Jane Sterk this week came out against electricity. They have aligned themselves with one of Canada’s most notorious pseudo-scientists, Magda Havas, by regurgitating the long-debunked link between electromagnetic waves and cancer and other ailments. This is so far from the scientific truth of the matter, that they may as well have come out against leprechauns.
Provincially, we saw Jane Stark standing beside Magda Havas and calling for an end to the Smart Meter program because of “health and environmental concerns”. Here is the Green Party throwing a science-based approach out the window and aligning themselves with the scare-mongering denizens of wingnuttia. Havas has linked EMF to everything from cancer to MS to diabetes over the years, all the time helping her friend sell “electronic filters” that remove “dirty electricity”. Havas’ claims about smart meters are so far from a science-based approach that I simply cannot square it with rational policy at any level. Havas is a snake-oil sales person, a shameless self-promoter, and, wost of all, a terrible scientist.
Now, before writing this post, I sent an e-mail to Jane Sterk’s website. I was actually shocked that she e-mailed me back personally within a couple of hours. In her response, she raised some interesting discussion points about the accountability around the contract to deliver the meters, about the business case for the potential savings, about BC Hydro not having a real plan to take advantage of the meters. These are excellent points, but not what my complaint was about. For the record, I am decidedly agnostic about Smart Meters. Seems like it is a useful technology to encourage electricity conservation through flexible billing, and it seems they could help with leakage control, but whether the business case can be made, I’m not sure. But none of this addresses the central complaint that he opposition argument is based on the irrational ravings of a pseudo-scientific whack-a-loon. This is not a foundation upon which to base policy.
Worse, the rational discussion we should be having about the business case for Smart Meters and the need for household electricity conservation will be drowned out by the silly sideshow of Smart Meters allegedly causing cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and MS (all claims made by Havas). Enter “Green Party Smart Meters” into Google, and scan though the first 100 hits. You can see that there has been no pick-up on the potentially valid economic or energy policy concerns you mention above. Instead, rational debate is lost in a fog of pseudo-science, playing directly into Magda Havas’ hands (and potentially building a great market for EMF filters specifically designed for Smart Meters… patent pending, suckers!).
Ms. Stark also suggested in her e-mail to me that Hydro should provide the option for hard-wired meters for those concerned about EMF, which, of course, does nothing to support her arguments that the business case is not right, and again reinforces the idea that Smart Meters will kill you.
I should also note that Ms. Stark’s e-mail to me was followed by a ubiquitous tag, so common as to be not be noticeable, but relevant to this discussion:
“Sent from my iPhone”
Presumably, that iPhone was plugged into a wall and not emitting microwaves…
Check out Dr. Havas’ website. For a full-time, tenured prof at Trent U (Ontario), she runs website like no other prof’s I’ve ever seen. She has her own Youtube channel! All dedicated to the hazards of EMF (ie. electricity).
Her PhD, BTW, is in biology (botany) – not in medicine, physiology, epidemiology or physics (as would be more usual for health research related to electromagnetic fields). Her initial publications are all in the field of the effects of pollution (acidification, mainly) on plants. Since 2000 she’s been rabbiting on about the dangers of various electromagnetic fields. She claims they cause “type 3” diabetes. Whatever that is.
She gives tenure a bad name, and like you, I’m horrified that the Green Party has apparently bought into this woo-research. Time for a stern letter!
Oh, yeah, there is psychology thesis just in looking at her publication record. A plant botanist who seemed to get interested in metals in groundwater, then around 1995 (tenure? It is about coincidently 6 years after she was hired), she all but stops publishing in the academic press. Almost all of here “publications” since then are not academic, but are newspaper articles, opinion pieces, providing “expert testimony”, and talks to non-scientific audiences. Her publication list for 2009 lists three unpublished “papers”, two abstracts for talks, and five letters she wrote to newspapers! Yikes! It is clear she has dropped out of academia and took up EMF, with no evidence she has actually done any actual research in the area. From there it is down the rabbit hole. The one study she did do (listed as “submitted”) was so remarkably flawed in its design and conclusions, that it would not have been permitted in a high school science fair.
I don’t think you understand the nature of EM Fields. Even though you can’t see it, EMFs interact with the environment at a fundamental level.
You might recall BC Hydro purchasing properties in Delta. They ended up reselling the properties at a loss with disclosures and clauses preventing future action.
There have been several schools in Canada and elsewhere that have de-activated their Wi-Fi networks due to growing concerns with childrens exposure to the pulsing EM Fields.
And Cell phone manufactures are required to shield the phone from emitting EM Fields into the users skull, and specify the maximum power output of the device.
Everyone remembers the old fashioned 4′ tube fluorescent fixtures that everyone hated due to flickering, humming and poor colour rendition back in grade school.
EMF is regulated by government supposedly for our protection, otherwise industry wouldn’t bother with costly shielding.
Do you not believe in second hand smoke as well ?
Or how about Sunscreen !
“I don’t think you understand the nature of EM Fields. Even though you can’t see it, EMFs interact with the environment at a fundamental level.”
I don’t think Magda Havas understands the nature of EMF, and she is the one making fantastical claims about them, not me.
“You might recall BC Hydro purchasing properties in Delta. They ended up reselling the properties at a loss with disclosures and clauses preventing future action.”
Ah, yes, the famous Delta powerline buy-out. Tell me, what negative health effects did the sellers report? What illnesses have a higher incidence in those re-sold houses than elsewhere? Or perhaps it was more a property-value drop caused by fear mongering?
“There have been several schools in Canada and elsewhere that have de-activated their Wi-Fi networks due to growing concerns with childrens exposure to the pulsing EM Fields.”
That is Magda Havas’ bread and butter: paid speaking engagements and “expert testimony” to scare schools into removing WiFi, completely bereft of any evidence that it causes a problem or even a plausible mechanism of how it could cause a problem. People being scared of monsters do not make the monsters real.
“And Cell phone manufactures are required to shield the phone from emitting EM Fields into the users skull, and specify the maximum power output of the device.”
Really? Where is this law? No shields are mentioned in Safety Code 6, and the numbers they limit are an order of magnitude higher than Cell phones actually put out. You know there are government laws limiting the amount of iron in drinking water? Does that mean all iron is bad? And what does that have to do with Smart Meters?
“Everyone remembers the old fashioned 4′ tube fluorescent fixtures that everyone hated due to flickering, humming and poor colour rendition back in grade school.”
And I remember an electric train set I had as a kid, and sticking my tongue on a 9v battery, and my Commodore 64. So what? What is the relevance of this? Smart Meters hurt colour rendition?
“EMF is regulated by government supposedly for our protection, otherwise industry wouldn’t bother with costly shielding.”
What costly shielding? The government does not regulate EMF for health, they do so because electronic devices interfere with each other, and function and transmission can be interfered with. Like Magda Havas’ “heart rate study”, where it is clear the cordless phone was interfering with the cordless heart rate monitor they were using. If she knew anything about EMF, she would not have written such a ridiculous paper.
“bereft of any evidence that it causes a problem or even a plausible mechanism of how it could cause a problem.”
+Pulsing+ EM Fields around developing children ? Are you daft ? We have to expose them until there is a definite causal link ? I pray you are not a parent who experiments with your child’s well being by exposing them to UNNECESSARY emissions.
“Really? Where is this law? No shields are mentioned in Safety Code 6”
I don’t believe the government of Canada legislates the specific design of shielding for cell phones. I don’t believe the government of Canada legislates the shielding for microwave ovens either.
“You know there are government laws limiting the amount of iron in drinking water?”
Why would the government limit something that is not bad ? Maybe you might consider it has something to do with an accumulative effect ?
“What is the relevance of this?” – those were EM Fields that caused people REAL irritation. Now when they design schools they use as much natural light as possible.
“What costly shielding?” – Take your cell phone apart when it dies. A lot of engineering goes into making shielding. Even your computer motherboard is multi-layered with shielding, otherwise we might be still using 8mhz XT’s.
“The government does not regulate EMF for health” – What about folks with Pace-Makers ?
“electronic devices interfere with each other” – how do signals get to your brain ? How does your brain signal your muscles ? What does an EKG use to detect signals ? Does that make me an electronic device ?
“function and transmission can be interfered with.” – I will agree with you !
“it is clear the cordless phone was interfering with the cordless heart rate monitor they were using” – Interesting the author of the rebutle to the study did not disclose the FREQUENCY channels those 2 separate devices were working on, and prove through documentation or demonstration that this is the cause. Obviously that information is READILY available, and if this was case he could have proven his conjecture.
What is the relevance of all this to smart meters ? After they are installed our GVRD will be lit up (invisibly) with this new frequency, adding to the EMF pollution we are all UNNECESSARILY and UNWITTINGLY exposed to by greedy corporations eager to exploit new technology !
Perhaps we need to clarify where we disagree.
You think that WiFi, Smart Meters and Cell Phones are something new, some sort of magic thing in a box that humans have never been exposed to, and therefore, to be precautionary, we had better make sure they are 100% safe before we bring this technology into the world.
However, I don’t see WiFi, Cell Phones, Smart Meters as anything new. Sure the application is new, but microwaves are as old as the Universe (well, probably came into existence about a nanosecond after the Planck time). The planet has been bathed in electromagnetic radiation every day since the Sun went nuclear. In the non-ionizing range, sources include the cosmic background radiation (microwaves, you know) to technology we have surrounded ourselves with for the last 100+ years. Microwaves are so plentiful that they are the primary wavelength used for radio astronomy. Hertz and Bose were both pissing around with microwaves in the 1890s. Every cop with a radar gun has blasted you with K band microwaves. Those rabbit ears on top of your old TV were collecting microwaves (and longer-wavelength radio waves). The physiological effects of microwaves are well studied and well known. Natural microwaves have flooded our bodies since our first ancestors crawled out of the sea (microwaves do not travel very far through sea water), and unnatural sources have bathed us for 100 years, and no negative health effects have ever been attributed to them (except, of course, for thermal heating of tissues at high intensity, but Smart Meters are several billion times too weak to have this effect).
So there is no experiment being performed on my imaginary child. If you like, there was an imaginary experiment performed on my grandparents, and their amphibian forbearers, and the experiment has demonstrated the safety of low-intensity microwaves for communications.
By the way, microwave ovens are regulated by Federal Law, and iron in drinking water is regulated based on aesthetic concerns, not health concerns, and poor colour rendition and flickering of old-technology fluorescent lights are two separate, unrelated phenomena (the first caused by limited phosphors, the second caused by old magnetic ballasts), and have absolutely nothing to do with this discussion. They did not emit microwaves, and they actually produced much more of their energy in visible light than did regular light bulbs.
But on this topic, I guess we need to disagree.
“You think that WiFi, Smart Meters and Cell Phones are something new” – YES ! To Microwaves the earths atmosphere is opaque like stained glass ! That’s why they need so many cell towers !
Take a few minutes and learn some more about the EM spectrum on Wiki, your comment is so full of errors it’s pointless to debate someone with such limited comprehension of basic science. Sound, light, microwaves, X-rays, cosmic rays are all related. So that means that the light caused by “limited phosphors” and “magnetic ballast” have everything to do with this discussion.
Btw -the sun went nuclear half a billion years before the earth was formed.
http://www.goodhealthinfo.net/radiation/health_efx_western.htm
“Firstenberg points out (p. 41) that “calcium ion efflux from brain tissue is extremely sensitive to irradiation with radiofrequency waves.” He cites four studies and a literature review. In particular, a 1986 study by Dutta et al. at 915 MHz and various exposure levels showed that “The effect at 0.0007 mW/g SAR [specific absorption rate] was quadruple the effect at 2.0 mW/g, in other words 3000 times the intensity had 4 times less of an effect under these particular conditions.” Looking at it the other way, an intensity three thousand times lower had an effect four times greater.”
Funny how the plate in the microwave stays cool but the food gets hot isn’t it ?
Can we agree to disagree? I guess you cannot, so I have to address your specific points.
Point 1: Look, I am fully aware of the electromagnetic spectrum. You, apparently, are not. If you took your reading beyond “wiki”, like maybe to a grade 10 science text book, you would recognize that sound is not part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Sound waves are a completely different phenomena, and the buzzing of old fluorescent lights is not a EM emission, it is a pressure wave.
Within the EM spectrum, Cosmic rays and microwaves are related much the same way elephants and mice are related. If you get trampled by one, it is likely to cause more damage than the other. In the elephant category are cosmic rays, x-rays, and some high-frequency (short wavelength) ultraviolet frequencies. They have sufficient energy to disrupt molecules and cause cellular damage. In the mouse category are visible light, infrared, microwaves, and radio waves.
Point 2: Following your link to “good health info dot net”, I am uncompelled. If you can explain to me what “calcium ion efflux” is, how it is regulated across the brain-blood barrier, and what influence that has on cancer, then maybe we can talk. As it is now, it sounds like you are regurgitating a bunch of words you read in a scare-mongering website that you don’t understand, but that are being used to sell you and others “alternative medicine” but mashing up sciency-sonding gobbleygook. But hey, they cited a scientific paper, so it must be true. Follow the that link through and the “scientific paper” is actually this:
Dutta, S. et al. Microwave radiation-induced calcium ion flux from human neuroblastoma cells: dependence on depth of amplitude modulation and exposure time. In Biological Effects of Electropollution, S. Dutta and R. Millis, eds. Information Ventures, Phila., 1986, pp. 63-69.
Yes, a 25-year old self-published book, not peer reviewed, by an author/editor/publisher who has no citations on the subject in PubMed, and which is nonetheless unavailable in the academic press for review. It is also appears to be more about blasting cancer cells with microwaves as a therapy as opposed to raising brain health fears. Sounds interesting, If you have a copy, I’d love to read it. Funny the author himself didn’t follow up on the research at all…
By the way, the plate in the microwave stays cool because it doesn’t have much water in it. I have hand-made clay plates from Mexico that I cannot put in the microwave because they get too hot to touch long before the food is heated up. Still not sure what that has to do with cancer. Heat does not cause cancer.
“the buzzing of old fluorescent lights is not a EM emission, it is a pressure wave.”
How do your stereo speakers work ? A little devil pushing it back and forth ? Are you sure sound waves are not linked to EM emissions ? If you really want to get technical Cosmic rays aren’t part of the EM spectrum either because they are relativistic protons.
“In the mouse category are visible light, infrared, microwaves, and radio waves.”
Put your mouse in a cheap 700watt microwave then tape your mouse to the rotating emitter of a RADAR array on a boat for a few hours, and then we’ll expose your mouse to a 50 watt red or infrared LASER ! Elephants and mice ? No – think of it more like a baseball and a bat, sure, the ball is always traveling at C, the variable is how much energy was transferred into it with the swing.
“you can explain to me what “calcium ion efflux” I’ll try my best ! You see, microwaves tend to resonate with certain elements more then others. Take for example a cup of pure water and a cup of sugar water, the cup of sugar water will heat FASTER then the cup of pure water. Try it ! It’s the same for fat. In microbiology efflux has to do with a cell removing toxins, in his example a calcium ion. Ions are electrically charged and disrupt organic matter because they are radical and like to cause damage ! Thats why Antioxidant foods are so trendy these days.
“the plate in the microwave stays cool because it doesn’t have much water in it.”
Metal doesnt have any water in it, do you put that in your microwave ?
“Heat does not cause cancer.” Can you prove this ?
Btw- grade 10 textbooks teach classical particle-point physics, and not the true nature of nature which is waves. Want a really blow your mind ? Look up PHONON in wiki !
“How do your stereo speakers work ?”
Changes in electrical current strength move a magnet back and forth, which in turn moves a fabric baffle, which in turn creates pressure waves in the air. Electrical force is converted to kinetic energy through induction. Speakers don’t cause cancer.
“Put your mouse in a cheap 700watt microwave…”
Yes, but put your mouse in a pot of boiling water, and the effect will be the same, caused by thermal warming of water in the mouse’s cells. Boiling pots of water don’t cause cancer.
“In microbiology efflux has to do with a cell removing toxins…”
You failed to connect water heating up on a microwave with cellular “efflux”, you just made a few points and assumed there was some sort of connection. Try again. But next time please don’t lead us down the “antioxidant food” trend rabbit hole. Successful marketing does not a health claim make. Calcium is not a toxin, nor does it cause cancer.
“Metal doesn’t have any water in it, do you put that in your microwave”
Your point being?
“Heat does not cause cancer. Can you prove this?”
You are kidding, right? I mean, if it does, we are all hoped: life at absolute zero will suck.
“Want a really blow your mind ? Look up PHONON in wiki “
Phonons failed to “blow my mind” when I was taking transition element and lattice chemistry in university, so I doubt “wiki” will now. But that is in no way relevant to this discussion. Phonons don’t cause cancer.