I felt deeply sorry for myself after having listened to the 1½ hour debate intended to inform us on a complex matter. The recent debate, on SAfm, was on whether or not fracking was a major threat to South Africa’s water supply.

The debate succeeded admirably in both confusing and depressing me in equal measures. How on earth, I wondered, are we, the listeners, supposed to make an informed decision when the only common agreement amongst the experts was that the other side was totally wrong? Both sides claimed exclusive right to science; both sides confidently quoted mutually contradictory facts and figures from evidently highly reliable sources; both sides claimed scientific superiority for their own facts and figures.

My first response was to attribute my confusion to my idiocy and withdraw from the entire matter. The realisation that the politicians, who would ultimately have to make a decision, would almost certainly be confronted with more or less the same conflicting information forced me to go beyond agnosticism. On what basis, I then wondered, would they decide? It is a huge leap of faith to presume that their decisions are rational and based on the most compelling scientific evidence. Nonetheless, it forced me to address the dilemma of how to make a decision when confronted by conflicting evidence presented by what one must presume to be the best informed of experts from around the world.

I fell back on what I know from other, not dissimilar contexts. Extrapolating from analogous contexts is not conclusive but sufficiently persuasive to suggest a cautious answer.

These other contexts include the following.

Outside of the few protected areas recognised by binding (though threatened) international agreements, the world’s major oil, gas or construction companies have (to my knowledge) never abandoned any of their major explorations or developments, as a result of strongly voiced and sound social, economic or ecological considerations. Just think of the opposition to the stadia South Africa built for the World Cup of 2010 that, as predicted, are now largely unused.

Without exception (to my knowledge) there have always been economists, scientists and other authoritative people who have backed each and every one of these explorations or developments. The respected and apparently objective defenders of these activities all sought to re-assure the public that the opposition was misconceived if not actually mischievous. More latterly, in a time of global mass unemployment, the claimed creation of large numbers of jobs has been presented as an added bonus to these large-scale developments. The World Cup stadia are again an example from home.

Such is the universal pattern of experts stoutly and protractedly defending what subsequently came to be recognised as indefensible that some worldwide examples are merited. It is important to emphasise at the outset that any possible analogy between these experts, mostly now consigned to infamy, and the defenders of fracking is no more than a hypothesis the merit of which can be established only in retrospect. It is, however, a hypothesis anchored to a secure pattern where vested interests hold sway; therein lies its persuasive strength.

Smoking provides the first example. I use it because tobacco is the single greatest cause of preventable death globally. Tobacco is most commonly linked to diseases affecting the heart, liver and lungs. Heart attacks, strokes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (including emphysema and chronic bronchitis), and cancers (particularly of the lungs, larynx, mouth, and pancreas) are all often tobacco related. So, too, is peripheral vascular disease and hypertension.

The association between smoking and deadly ill-health was first definitively established in the case of lung cancer. This occurred in the very early 1950s. By 1954, the tobacco industry launched a sustained, step-by-step attack. With the assistance of what it called ‘distinguished authorities’, the industry argued (1) there are many possible causes of lung cancer; (2) there is no agreement among the medical authorities regarding the cause of lung cancer; (3) there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes; (4) statistics purporting to link smoking with the disease could apply with equal force to any one of many other aspects of modern life; (5) many scientists question the validity of the statistics themselves.

People continued dying in their hundreds of thousands as step by step the industry and their ‘distinguished authorities’ conceded the validity of the science against them.

By the 1960s the industry and its spokespeople – whether scientists, lawyers or PR specialists – fought another rear-guard action. This time, it was a step by step attack on the evidence linking all the health hazards of smoking to passive or second-hand smoke.

By the 1990s, the tobacco industry was paying billions of dollars in US court-imposed fines for its deliberate attempts to conceal the truth that smoking kills most effectively and in large numbers.

Less well known than the smoking scandal, though in many ways even more revealing, is the story of lead in petrol. Unlike smoking, which is subject to individual control, the only way to stop lead poisoning is to stop breathing. Astonishingly, the fact that lead is a potent neurotoxin has been well known since about 150 B.C. as a result of lead’s use in Roman plumbing. (Plumbing indeed comes from the Latin for lead, plumbum). This was of little consequence to the automobile industry, the oil barons and the giants in the chemical world in the early 20^th century. Adding lead to petrol was enormously profitable for them all. They weren’t going to let the scientist who determined the age of the earth by measuring naturally-occurring lead in the atmosphere to threaten their profits by exposing the extent to which atmospheric pollution by leaded petrol had become a major health hazard for everyone, particularly the young, in all countries with cars in high densities. Despite their considerable efforts to destroy the troublesome scientist, he eventually won a dogged struggle of more than 20 years.

Books such as John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and Deceit and Denial – The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner reveal how corporate pressure on professionals and control over scientific research contributes towards the ready supply of scientists and economists for hire.

The incessantly dire warnings about the collapse of the motor and chemical industries and the huge cost to motorists if leaded petrol was to be banned have quickly been forgotten, if not actively buried by embarrassed scientists and economists.

The final brief example is one that is still playing itself out – climate change. The first serious scientific warning about global warming was made in 1978. With emphatic backing from other scientists and led by the giant energy industry and conservative politicians, the immediate response was to deny global warming, along with calls for much further research because the climate is a subject of huge complexity, followed by the reassurance that there was no need to panic as there was lots of time for the research to be done. Thirty-six years later the same arguments are still being made – despite the huge amount of increasingly confident science from around the world that climate change is all too real and that time is all but exhausted.

Two final considerations suggest there is, similarly, something fishy about fracking and its lobby. First, given all the uncertainty about the fracking process and the actual amount of gas/oil that might be recoverable, along with the certainty of the astronomic exploration and development costs involved and the many years before any energy could be available, why not use the time and, at a fraction of the cost, spend money on a major renewable energy programme (unlike the pathetic pretence of the government’s current renewable energy policy)?

The second consideration is that the enormous cost of fracking is not a problem. Indeed, it is probably one of the main attractions for both government and industry. There is currently R500 billion lying idle in cash accounts of South Africa’s major corporations. The government is most anxious for this money to be spent. It remains idle for want of investment opportunities that guarantee maximised profits. Fracking could make both the government and the Mineral Energy Complex very happy. And the huge costs would attract BEE to the welcome honey.

When experts differ so fundamentally, as they do with fracking, the lesson for the rest of us seems to be: When in doubt, follow the money. Cautiously. DM