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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Tourists beware – green zealots in the Hawaii legislature have just passed a bill which bans safe, effective sunscreen products. From January 2021, sunscreen products which contain potent ultraviolet blockers oxybenzone and octinoxate will be illegal, if Governor David Ige signs this bill into law.
Most sunscreens may soon be banned in Hawaii, because coral reefs are dying
USA TODAY NETWORK
Ashley May, USA TODAY Published 3:37 p.m. ET May 2, 2018
…
The bill, introduced by Democratic Sen. Mike Gabbard, would prohibit the sale and distribution of sunscreen with those chemicals on the island “without prescription from a licensed healthcare provider.”
“Amazingly, this is a first-in-the-world law,” Gabbard, who introduced the bill, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “When you think about it, our island paradise, surrounded by coral reefs, is the perfect place to set the gold standard for the world to follow. This will make a huge difference in protecting our coral reefs, marine life, and human health.”
The bill would go into effect January 1, 2021 if signed by Democratic Gov. David Ige.
Critics of the bill question studies linking the chemicals to coral reef decay and say banning sunscreen could discourage people from wearing skin protection altogether, increasing skin cancer cases. Alexandra Kowcz, chief scientist with the Personal Care Products Council, said the bill rests on a “limited body of scientific research.” Henry Lim, immediate past-president of the American Academy of Dermatology Association, told USA TODAY a sunscreen ban could “create significant confusion” about why wearing sunscreen is important. Plus, there aren’t many effective sunscreen options on the market without these chemicals, he said.
…
The full text of the bill is available here.
According to the Wikipedia entry on octinoxate, both chemicals are commonly mixed with Titanium Oxide to produce an effective sunscreen.
… Often used as an active ingredient in sunscreens combined with oxybenzone and titanium oxide for its use in protection against UV-B rays. …
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octyl_methoxycinnamate
This bill in my opinion reeks of Silent Spring style activism. Thanks to questionable research presented in the book “Silent Spring”, and an over enthusiastic response from lawmakers, poor people across the world have been deprived of a safe, effective defence against mosquito borne diseases.
Since DDT was restricted worldwide, millions of people have died of Malaria who would otherwise have had an opportunity to live a healthy life.
The new Hawaiian Sunscreen law in my opinion was passed by green zealots exhibiting a comparable disregard for human health. Thanks to the sunscreen bill, tourists visiting Hawaii who conscientiously heed health warnings about skin cancer may now be at greater risk.
There may be acceptable substitutes for the restricted chemicals – but if the substitutes are better at protecting skin than the chemicals named in this new law, why haven’t they already supplanted the now restricted chemicals? How many people will now risk their health by choosing not to apply sunscreen, or be forced to choose an inferior product? How long will it be until those same green legislators attack the use of substitutes for the banned chemicals?
In 2012, 55,000 people died of skin cancer. While many skin cancers are successfully treated, some skin cancers are insidious and aggressive. Sometimes people don’t realise they are ill until it is too late.
Any rise in this cancer death toll due to misguided Hawaiian efforts to prioritise coral health ahead of human health would be an utter tragedy.
Let us hope Governor Ige has the courage and good sense not to sign this bill into law.
Correction (EW): The 55,000 death toll in 2012 is worldwide, not USA only.
The crazy thing is that the Greens went after products like DDT but for years did nothing about asbestos in buildings or arsenic in ‘treated’ timber. If they’d got those products banned a long time ago the health hazards to anyone working in older buildings would have been greatly reduced.
Hold hard here.. Isn’t this an admission that such products are a major source of damage to corals? So this supercedes the warm water meme as the major source of damage?
Many people in this very blog have in the past cited studies showing sunscreens causes coral damage, rather than warm water.
I guess the acid test is whether there are good alternatives to the chemicals being banned.
tonyb
This is true, Tony, but damage is very localised … dilution of the toxins.
http://www.cairnspost.com.au/news/cairns/sunscreen-a-coral-killer-on-fnqs-great-barrier-reef/news-story/b3b218acfe417eb6e89dde2b4f8c437e
Lots of important questions that do not seem to be being asked here. How good are the stats or is this another irreproducible result? Do the lab results apply to the real world? (I thought CO2-mediated global warmining was murdering the reefs.) Who funded this sunscreen study? (Was it competitors using different formulations? Or just another green misinformation campaign?) But really, shouldn’t the first question here be Cui bono?
That said, the DDT-koolaid kids here are very disappointing. ‘DDT was banned and millions died’ is not consistent with the facts. Yes, DDT was banned in 1st world countries when and where it was no longer needed, but was always always available in most of the rest of the world (China and India helped with that), although not always easy to use without annoying aid programs. Unfortunately, the real reason malarial deaths increased in the latter half of the 20th Century is most likely that public health services fell apart after the fall of colonialism and the rise of Cold War. DDT is a very useful chemical in malaria control, but it is not a panacea and Anopheles mosquitoes have adapted to it. DDT and malaria is a complicated story, not a simplistic chant.
More evidence is here of the DDT ban:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/02/07/remember-when-global-warming-was-going-to-increase-malaria-never-mind/comment-page-1/#comment-2737825
Malaria and the DDT Story
The Institute of Economic Affairs, London, 2000
I’ve wanted to say this for a while but couldn’t find the right space.
DDT kills all insects, not just mosquitoes. Those other insects include dragonflies, which feed on mosquitoes and are harmless to humans. DDT spraying is broadcast, not selective. I use a hornet spray to keep the wasps away from my house, but I’ve found it more effective in the long run to let carpenter bees have a place to nest and lay a few eggs, because they drive hornets and wasps away from their territory. They are extremely effective that way.
There are pros and cons to DDT. Killing dragonflies, a beneficial insect, is one of the ‘cons’.
Hi Sara,
I understand that DDT was over-used in developed-world agriculture and that specific part of the DDT ban probably made some sense.
However, some of the scary scientific claims against DDT have reportedly never been reproduced.
The ban in sub-Saharan Africa from 1972 to 2002 allowed a doubling of malaria deaths, most of whom were children under five years of age – just babies. I find this unacceptable, to put it mildly.
The banning of DDT from 1972 to 2002 in the battle against malaria was a crime against humanity.
After DDT was re-introduced circa year 2002, malaria deaths declined considerably. The battle against malaria continues.
Regards, Allan
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1566107003466856&set=a.1012901982120697.1073741826.100002027142240&type=3&theater
… So long as you can tolerate the damage the carpenter bees can cause …They did a LOT of damage to a neighbors house and a fair bit to my old garage . I am allergic to wasp venom , but I still prefer wasps over c .bees .
No argument from me on the death rate, Allan, but the destruction of beneficial insects bothers me. It’s bad enough that honeybees are treated like M&Ms in a jar by the people who farm them out to commercial orchards. No wonder colony collapse is going on.
it’s the lack of thinking of the consequences that bothers me. I use hornet/wasp spray and will never hesitate to do so, because they invade bee spaces. The overuse of something is part of the problem, as in the miracle drug penicillin, which has been so overused that diseases it killed are now resistant to it.
In regard to the carpenter bees, I found that insect repellent let them know they weren’t welcome in certain places, but they were welcome in others, where I planted pots of flowers. They are damaging, yes, but there is a way to m manage that without hurting the bees. They are completely stingless, both male and female. The male has a white shield on his head that he employs when he head-butts wasps. And there are some plants they don’t like, too.
Sara, there are very few insecticides that kill only a single species or group, e.g., Bt, Bti, etc. Almost every pesticide can kill all other insects and arthropods. Like with all poison it is all dose related, that is quantity of poison versus size of the organism. Fenthion (Baytex) an organophosphate designed for resistance mosquitoes kills mosquitoes are a very tiny rate, less than parts per trillion. It also can kill pink shrimp in the laboratory at 7 ppt. The problem with DDT, just like the problems with penicillin, was we didn’t understand that insects and bacteria could develop resistance. We didn’t understand why it was taking more and more DDT to have the same effect. We didn’t understand that using it as a larvicide, pupacide and an adulticide drove resistance extremely fast. It is true some pesticides are more effective on one species than another. Again the response is dose related. Having had dinner with those that were high officials in the companies manufacturing DDT at the time it was banned, the reasons DDT was banned had little to do with good science and a whole lot to do with pure modern environmental politics. Basically since it was losing its effectiveness they saw little problem allowing it to be banned. They believed in feeding the crocodiles. Somehow they believed for public relations if they did not fight the ban or even agreed to the ban the environmentalists and bureaucrats would be satisfied and go away. They saw modern pesticides as “miracle chemicals” that were going to help feed the world’s exploding population. They believed no one could be against that for long.
Christ, now WUWT is into complaining about the regulation of harmful chemicals, just because the people that proposed it happen to be political opponents. This place has gone down the drain so fast. There are plenty of alternatives. The only thing being harmed here are corporate profits.
That’s a lot of wrongness to cram into one short paragraph.
– “regulation of harmful chemicals”: a classic of question-begging.
– “because the people … happen to be political opponents”: any evidence for this claim, is there?
– “there are plenty of alternatives”: those all offer the same utility for the same price, do they?
– “the only thing being harmed here are corporate profits”: on the contrary, those being harmed here are consumers, who will either pay more for sun protection or go without – which could (and, in my opinion, should) be construed as a political attack on the fair-skinned.
really fen tiger, you’re framing this as an attack on white people. Sigh.
benben, fair skinned is not the same as white.
Once again you have demonstrated your ignorance and bigotry.
Any chance you could actually show us some solid evidence that these compounds are actually harmful to corals?
there is plenty of research on the topic of course. Harmful chemicals are researched ad nauseam before they’re banned. Google scholar is your friend. Or not, if you happen to be a WUWT regular I guess 😉
Here is a good reference:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00244-015-0227-7
let me just copy/paste the abstract from one of the papers referenced to (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00244-015-0227-7)
Benzophenone-3 (BP-3; oxybenzone) is an ingredient in sunscreen lotions and personal-care products that protects against the damaging effects of ultraviolet light. Oxybenzone is an emerging contaminant of concern in marine environments—produced by swimmers and municipal, residential, and boat/ship wastewater discharges. We examined the effects of oxybenzone on the larval form (planula) of the coral Stylophora pistillata, as well as its toxicity in vitro to coral cells from this and six other coral species. Oxybenzone is a photo-toxicant; adverse effects are exacerbated in the light. Whether in darkness or light, oxybenzone transformed planulae from a motile state to a deformed, sessile condition. Planulae exhibited an increasing rate of coral bleaching in response to increasing concentrations of oxybenzone. Oxybenzone is a genotoxicant to corals, exhibiting a positive relationship between DNA-AP lesions and increasing oxybenzone concentrations. Oxybenzone is a skeletal endocrine disruptor; it induced ossification of the planula, encasing the entire planula in its own skeleton. The LC50 of planulae exposed to oxybenzone in the light for an 8- and 24-h exposure was 3.1 mg/L and 139 µg/L, respectively. The LC50s for oxybenzone in darkness for the same time points were 16.8 mg/L and 779 µg/L. Deformity EC20 levels (24 h) of planulae exposed to oxybenzone were 6.5 µg/L in the light and 10 µg/L in darkness. Coral cell LC50s (4 h, in the light) for 7 different coral species ranges from 8 to 340 µg/L, whereas LC20s (4 h, in the light) for the same species ranges from 0.062 to 8 µg/L. Coral reef contamination of oxybenzone in the U.S. Virgin Islands ranged from 75 µg/L to 1.4 mg/L, whereas Hawaiian sites were contaminated between 0.8 and 19.2 µg/L. Oxybenzone poses a hazard to coral reef conservation
“Whether in darkness or light, oxybenzone transformed planulae from a motile state to a deformed, sessile condition.”
Yes, yes, I know – I feel that way every morning, before coffee. It’s even worse if I go drinking the night before. Breathing oxygen helps. Maybe we should oxygenate the reefs – that’ll make the little buggers happy!
Holy cow. The amount of oxybenzone in Hawaiian sites is in MICROGRAMS/LITER!!! Just forget it.
What else is there?
Just to point out that LC50 means lethal concentration for 50% of the corals.
1) Do you have evidence that they are harmful.
2) Do you have any evidence that the corporations won’t make just as much profit off the new chemicals?
3) Why do you go out of your way to display your ignorance and bigotry?
Hello MarkW, I provided a reference and copy/lasted an abstract above. Enjoy reading it.
And Allan has already refuted your so called study.
Hehe ok MarkW.l, that have a me chuckle. I guess we’ll just have to ignore your comments from now on. Have a good day!
“This place has gone down the drain so fast. There are plenty of alternatives.”
Such as Hot Whopper. Perhaps you meant alternative sunscreen products.
Thank you for posting detail of the function of these chemicals on coral.
“The only thing being harmed here are corporate profits.”
It is unlikely that WUWT is harming corporate profits. Perhaps you meant that Hawaii’s ban on these chemicals will harm the corporate profits of whoever makes those chemicals. While that would be indisputably true, it is offset by the increase in market share of titanium oxide, which you can use as white paint when not using it as sunscreen.
No sunscreen great more vit D. Btw when first discovered by Europeans local people were using coconut oil.
NW sage started the thread off on the right note when he asked if there is any evidence.
So far no takers.
Plan A:
1) Demonstrate and measure the ingredients in suntan lotion in the water column *at the reefs*.
2) Demonstrate toxicity on coral *at the concentrations measured*.
Take into account the 24 hour cycle and annual high season/low season cycles.
That is to say if you find a peak value just after a boatload of tourists shows up then project that value 24/7/365 to show possible harm, you are guilty of professional misconduct.
Plan B)
Do a detailed survey of reefs with heavy tourist traffic.
1) Barbados and the local “Swim With The Sea Turtles” daily tourist excursions. A very small, localized area gets perhaps a dozen boats daily.
2) Grand Cayman Is. and The Coral Gardens. A broad shallow area with limited water exchange with the open ocean. Also heavily trafficked.
If you spot reef degradation, show that it is due to suntan lotion and not to something else, like perhaps engine exhaust from all those tourist boats.
The situation is nothing new. These reefs have been on the tourist circuit for decades. If suntan lotion is anything like as bad as the ban proponents claim, these popular reefs should all be dead by now.
gymnosperm writes:
So the coral reefs are getting hammered by silting and nutrient runoff. Both are well known to be very harmful to reefs. So what do they do?
Ignore the real problem and ban suntan lotion!
Sounds just about right.
Yes, and one of the other major factors in reef decline is overfishing. Pollution and overfishing are the two major world-wide causes of reef decline, with overfishing probably the greatest threat. See for example here:
https://www.icriforum.org/caribbeanreport “The report also shows that loss of parrotfishes and other grazers has been far more important than climate change for Caribbean reef destruction so far.” Most marine biologists, I think, would agree that overfishing is a great and imminent threat to reefs, although they usually add something about climate change in accordance with groupthink programming.
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/mora/Publications/Mora%20053.pdf
Healthy fish populations make for healthy reefs (“bright spots”):
“A key finding from our global analysis is that our metric of potential interactions with urban centres, called market gravity … more so than local or national population pressure, management, environmental conditions, or national socioeconomic context, had the strongest relationship with reef fish biomass. Specifically, we found that reef fish biomass decreased as the size and accessibility of markets increased.”
And what have here if not yet another Panic Response to a (possibly) trivial, ill considered, poorly researched and in all probability, imagined problem.
An ill conceived, barely even actually thought about or researched knee jerk reaction.
Precautionary Principle on speed.
Not like that’s ever happened before..
Not like:
Global Cooling
Ozone and CFCs
Mad Cows
Diesel
Millennium bugs
Ebola
Avian influenza
and now the Hell Child of those illustrious parents: Global Warming.
So what gives?
Why all the panic responses?
What *is* panic?
Do we say its the/a/any situation where someone/anyone is confronted by ‘a new situation’
Classically of course, the sighting of a Sabre Tooth Tiger (STT) eyeing you up from behind a nearby shrub.
If a rapid and safe exit cannot quickly be evaluated then all the hormones fire, insulin, adrenaline, cortisol etc. Chances are there will be screaming and shouting and rushing/racing off in a wrong direction – perfectly alerting the STT that you are any easy target and ripe for the picking.
Great for the tiger, not so much you.
IOW: Panic endangers our own existence – classically we say that ‘The turkeys are voting for Christmas’
Now.
We obviously evolved to evade the excess attentions of STTs so we must, somewhere between our ears, have an organ that can respond quickly & appropriately to new & rapidly changing situations.
We do have within us the ability to quickly formulate measured words, deeds and actions and hence not descend into inappropriate panic responses.
Question: Where is that ability now?
If anybody has ever read a word I’ve said on here they’ll know where I think its gone.
Eroded by carbohydrate food, refined sugar and alcohol and then flushed away down the pan.
They are all chemical depressants. They switch off large parts of the human brain, possibly the brain trying to protect itself. They bring on paranoia after long term use (abuse)
It’s not easy to tell though is it?
Not when *everyone* is as equally paranoid as you yourself might be
Check out a guy called (Dr) Mark Hyman – he has words for what inappropriate diet does to people – he calls it the ‘Broken Brain’
Consider that the continued piss-take of Ehrlich (50 years and counting) might just represent the fact that you and many people are, in fact, genuinely and deeply worried about something.
Take it as given that, the human animal can not pass off untruths without giving itself away somehow, even ‘L1es by omission’ or AKA secrets.
The worst person for keeping a secret is the person whose secret it is..
(Some wise old sage said that, I ani’t that brihgt)
Applying sunscreen to coral is a bad idea. Wait . . . what . . . you are going to put it on people?
Never been to Hawaii, nor wanted to go there. Even less desire now.
However, I have many friends in the Navy who have been stationed there, or will be. I will post a link to this elsewhere, and see how much they howl about it.
It seems as though hastily created, poorly though out legislation like this is rammed right through a law body as quickly as possible, sometimes in “secret” (no published notice) for the sole purpose of the creators having their way. The best example of that is the ACA Act, written and passed behind locked doors, because ‘we have to pass it so that we know what’s in it’. And what a disaster that has been.
I spent 12 years there and while I don’t particularly like government controls I am sympathetic to this one. Hawaii has many examples of unwanted side effects of invasive species, this is an invasive chemical. I seldom used sunscreen; got severely sunburned just once. After that I simply regulated how much time I spent in sunshine. I’m a SCUBA diver (PADI certified) and appreciate Hawaii’s glorious reefs. There was sometimes a bit of an oily sheen on the water at Hanauma bay, a popular tourist spot with limited ability to flush out the bay over the reef. Also limited ability to flush out the tourists into the rapid ocean current called the “Diamond Head Express” — very bad to find yourself in it trying to swim to some place you can haul out.
I agree with this IMPORTANT NEW report from the GWPF.
The Greens are the great killers of our age, rivaling Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot, the great killers of the 20th Century.
One example of this criminal Green malfeasance is the banning of DDT from 1972 to 2002, which greatly increased deaths from malaria in the tropics, especially among children under 5 – a global-scale holocaust based on false environmental alarmism.
A more recent example is global warming hysteria and the war against cheap, reliable, abundant energy, which is the lifeblood of society.
I wrote the following in 2015:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/29/remember-the-poor-a-visual-epistle-to-the-pope/#comment-1924594
[excerpt]
Nevertheless, Lomborg is correct in his conclusion – that we need to fight poverty and energy starvation in Africa through the use of sensible energy solutions including fossil fuels – this is a much higher priority than green energy schemes, which are not green and provide little useful energy.
Regards, Allan
_________________________________________________
The GWPF
Press Release 04/05/18
New Report:
GREEN POLICIES THREATEN POOR NATIONS
Efforts to decarbonise will kill millions in poor countries
London 4 May 2018. A new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation finds that climate and green energy policies promoted by development organisations will cause millions of preventable deaths in the developing world.
The report, by eminent epidemiologist Mikko Paunio, says that international bodies and NGOs are trying to prevent poor countries from expanding their use of conventional fuels and have abandoned the so-called “energy ladder” — the gradual shift to cleaner types of fuel that underpinned the clean up of air quality in industrialised nations.
As Dr Paunio explains, this will have devastating consequences:
“Indoor air pollution from domestic fires kills millions every year. But instead of helping poor people to climb the energy ladder and clean the air in their communities, the poorest people are being given gimmicks like cookstoves, which make little difference to air quality, and solar panels, which are little more than a joke.”
What is worse, the greens inside and outside the development community are blaming air pollution on power stations, industry and cars, as a way to prevent any shift to industrial power production. As Dr Paunio makes clear, most air pollution in poor countries is in fact caused by burning low-quality biofuels and coal in domestic stoves:
“Trying to blame power stations for indoor air pollution might make greens feel they are saving the planet, but the reality is that they are allowing millions of deaths from air pollution to continue. The body count is going to rival that of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.”
200 Million At Risk
Domestic combustion of solid (bio)fuels is by far the number one global pollution problem. 4.3 million deaths annually are directly attributable to indoor air pollution (IAP) according to the World Health Organization.
Domestic combustion of solid biofuels kills almost six million people per year when its effects on ambient air quality are also taken into consideration.
The so called ‘energy ladder’ was introduced as a way of understanding how deaths from IAP might be prevented. The energy ladder seeks to reproduce the experience of rich countries, where households moved away from biofuels and were increasingly connected to electric grids or district heating systems, solving the IAP problem for good.
However, ever-growing resistance from the environmental movement has removed this beneficial approach from the development agenda. Environmentalists fear that by taking steps upwards on the energy ladder, from dirty solid fuels such as cow dung or crop residues, and towards use of electricity, poor countries would become wealthier and so increase their energy use and their carbon intensity. They have managed to persuade all important multilateral development bodies and the WHO to drop the energy ladder entirely. Instead, they are now coercing the poorest countries to adopt utopian energy policies based on renewables. The result is that combatting IAP in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, is becoming impossible.
Aggressive decarbonization is now high on the political agenda. Contrary to the widely disseminated claims of important global actors, this will not solve the problem of IAP. Moreover, it will hamper the expansion of electric grids, which is a critical prerequisite for delivering adequate water supplies, without which it will be impossible to reproduce the public health miracle experienced in the rich countries.
These ‘ambitious’ global climate mitigation policies leave environmental health problems amongst the poor unaddressed and will result in the loss of over 200 million lives by 2050. They are also unlikely – even in theory – to prevent the 250,000 annual deaths that the WHO speculates will be attributable to climate change between 2030 and 2050: high-quality IPCC-linked research has recently shown that solid biomass combustion actually increases CO2 emissions, at least over the next 100 years, compared to fossil fuels.
Full paper (pdf): Kicking Away The Energy Ladder: How environmentalism destroys hope for the poorest
https://thegwpf.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=7456290eeb&e=da89067c4f
Yes, an excellent evaluation and analysis.
Just a little problem. He graduated from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Try to find any faculty member there to support this view. Nobody will.
More BS from rd50 = WD40 – the slippery one.
So rd50, you claim to know the opinions of every faculty member at Johns Hopkins? Really? Some of them MUST BE intelligent.
And what about all Mikko’s other schools? Have you polled all the faculty there too?
Don’t be so ridiculous. You are just a cheap-shot artist.
from the Facebook page of Mikko Paunio
Studied Lääketieteellinen tiedekunta at University of Helsinki
Studied Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University
Studied Biometria at Université Libre de Bruxelles
Went to Normal Lyceum of Helsinki
Lives in Helsinki
Here are some studies on how sunscreen ingredients affect coral:
Sunscreens Cause Coral Bleaching by Promoting Viral Infections
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2291018/
Toxicological effects of the sunscreen UV filter, benzophenone-2, on planulae and in vitro cells of the coral, Stylophora pistillata
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10646-013-1161-y
Toxicopathological Effects of the Sunscreen UV Filter, Oxybenzone (Benzophenone-3), on Coral Planulae and Cultured Primary Cells and Its Environmental Contamination in Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00244-015-0227-7
Ecotoxicological Evaluation of the UV Filters Ethylhexyl Dimethyl p-Aminobenzoic Acid and Octocrylene Using Marine Organisms Isochrysis galbana, Mytilus galloprovincialis and Paracentrotus lividus
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00244-017-0399-4
Coral Bleaching [blames it primarily on warm ocean temps due to El Nino] – growing new coral and experimenting with different types
http://gili-lankanfushi.com/mb-blog/coral-bleaching/
Sunscreens – Biohazard: Treat as Hazardous Waste [anti-sunscreen rant that provides alternatives]
http://www.blogtok.com/index.php?tipo=blog&accao=ler&id=26365
Here’s one on the effects of sunscreen on jellyfish:
http://coralreefpalau.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/CRRF-UNESCO-Sunscreen-in-Jellyfish-Lake-no.2732.pdf
Although, frankly I wouldn’t find if they all were exterminated.
Toxicity is in the dose. No evidence is presented that there is a dangerous concentration of these chemicals at Hawaiian reefs.
Banning tourism would do much more to save Hawaii from environmental degradation and set the “gold standard”. Your move, Hawaii.
Follow the money. If sunscreen has to be provided by pharmaceutical agencies under prescription, there is a lot of money to be made here.
Yes, that would certainly be a money maker for pharmacies – unless of course they are simply selling OTC sunscreens (rather than prescription grade products that have always required an Rx) that are being kept behind the counter and only given to those with an Rx. If that is the case (selling OTC sunscreens to people with an Rx) then this ban may not be nearly as effective as the powers that be might hope.
Many, if not most doctors, might simply hand out sunscreen scripts like candy, sort of like the way opioid drugs have been prescribed in the last couple of decades. The patient asks – the patient gets. And tourists could just bring a doctor’s permission with them, along with their banned sunscreen of choice. Or if they forget, they could go to a walk-in clinic and get a script. Especially if that clinic is in a drug store…because of course they want to sell you the sunscreen. Because the epidemiology of skin cancer is well known, I doubt that any doc worth his or her salt would refuse a lighter skinned patient a script to buy sunscreen.
So if people will be able to get around this ban that easily, then it may end up being much ado about nothing….
Blonde, blue-eyed people should never vacation in Hawaii again.
I had a look at a couple of the papers making claims about the benzophenone sunscreens. They were like quite a lot of other worthless papers you run across in bio-medical sciences. The authors are clearly looking to demonstrate an effect of compound x so they simply raise the dose of x in a laboratory setting until they achieve some harm. Never mind that it is totally unphysiological concentration and would never happen in the real world unless you were dumping truckloads of it into the local environment, or that there are inadequate experimental controls, or that you could demonstrate something similar with water or vitamin C. A shoddy paper is still “a paper” that Greenfaece can wave in front of the lawmakers.
These chemicals are chosen because they tend to quench photochemical reactions. While it is always possible they suddenly act in the opposite manner in coral reefs, it seems rather unlikely, and awfully convenient for people who just want to ban anything chemical.
Of course, there may also be one particular manufacturer who holds some patents on the next generation of, more expensive, sun-screen products that will be approved, and that manufacturer will then make out like bandits. We’ve seen that kind of thing before, haven’t we?
Grant agree with you more. Plain nonsense.
Another hypothesis a la Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, conceived with an ulterior motive a la CFL, born in isolation, and extrapolated to the real world.
Don’t mind the boiling lava pooring into the ocean or the oil and chemical spils from WWII and the odd eartkuake/Tsunami, just ban sun screen products to punish humanity. I wonder what tar and feathers will do for the corals when people finally wake up and provide their sociopatic establishment the treatment they deserve.
This is a classic 3-fer!! 1. Save the coral (umm, OK), 2. Human population reduction. 3. Racism: Kill da white man, kill him deadt. d.e.a.d.t.
http://www.graysons.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/sunsmart.png
Kill the white people … to a reggae beat
https://youtu.be/6ArtQku7QBI
Everything is about trade-offs and compromises. How much protection for coral vs. how much protection for people? If we’re comparing 100 people who will get a mild sunburn compared to the sure death of the coral reefs, then I’m in favor of the ban. If we talking about 5000 people who may die from skin cancer compared to junk science that will accomplish nothing with a ban, then I’m against it.
The fact that there exists a trade-off tells you nothing about what may be an appropriate position, and this column doesn’t offer much that would help one evaluate the trade-off.
This is what Environmental “Justice” looks like …
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_justice
I’m pretty sure (and have heard) that the more extreme so-called “environmentalists” would not look unkindly on the extermination of about 90% of humans.
“I’m pretty sure (and have heard) that the more extreme so-called “environmentalists” would not look unkindly on the extermination of about 90% of humans.”
As long as they are not included in the 90%
You’re right. Here’s an example, posted as the first comment on an article in the left-leaning UK Independent:
http://sealevel.info/climate_activist_misanthropy_01.png
Well, it sure beats banning farmers and farming …. as we do in Australia.
https://www.queenslandcountrylife.com.au/story/5213874/time-to-resolve-veg-management-issue/
Here is a question, where do these chemicals in the water really originate? Swimmers on the beaches that actually enter the water? How about tourists that shower later and wash them down the drain (even those who never went to the beach)? I wonder where the grey water from the showers and the sunscreen chemicals in it end up? Perhaps in the ocean? Couldn’t the grey water be treated and have a win-win situation?
Guess I could smuggle in a suitcase or two of sunscreen next trip I make to Hawaii. I’ll make enough money to pay for my trip selling tubes on Waikiki Beach.