When I wrote about Propublica's rather dishonest rebranding of sand as "crystalline silica" the other day, I thought what I'd stumbled across was just a particularly egregious example of the green tactic of making everything sound scary in the hope that somebody will be convinced.
Not a bit of it.
Writing at Forbes, Christopher Helman reveals that there is a fullscale environmentalist war front directed at sand mining. And not only that, but it appears to have had some effect.
Towns like Winona, Minn are now facing calls for the monitoring of silica dust and diesel fumes emitted by the sand mines. There’s a real concern that when tiny particles of airborne silica are inhaled and get lodged in the lungs they could lead to silicosis.
Just this week Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, home to more new sand mines than anywhere else in the country, has imposed a year-long moratorium on issuing new mine permits while it studies health impacts.
I'm not at all convinced that the "concerns" are genuine. Like the environmentalist "concerns" over microseismic events, they appear to take form only when associated with fracking. Sand has, after all, been mined without controversy for quite a long time and the type used as a fracking proppant seems about as far removed from a risk of silicosis as it's possible to get. It's therefore hard for any reasonable person to conclude that these "concerns" are built on anything other than a fervent belief in the evils of capitalism.
Expect to hear about this latest "controversy" in the pages of the Guardian and on the news programmes of the BBC in due course.