The City Council of Aliso Viejo, CA was scheduled to consider a law banning foam cups and containers this week in part, reports the Los Angeles Times, because they contain a potentially deadly chemical some call "dihydrogen monoxide." It is more commonly called water, notes the Times, and city officials say that a paralegal drafting the proposed legislation was duped by Internet sites repeating the nerdy joke that something ought to be done about the dihydrogen monoxide problem. It can cause breathing problems, wrinkle the skin, and have other terrible effects in large enough quantities, after all. Thousands of people have died in dihydrogen monoxide-related incidents.
The City Council is duly embarrassed, but it's not clear that anyone involved in the incident or even most of the people reading this article right now are as embarrassed as they should be. The scandal is not that something as familiar as water was threatened with a ban but that had it been any other equally harmless but less familiar chemical, it probably would have been banned. Familiarity reduces fear, so water escapes the regulator's grasp while countless chemicals from DDT to PCBs, which are also useful and harmless to humans in the amounts they are normally used, are regarding as creeping horrors to be banished from a pristine natural world.
Interestingly, while the Aliso Viejo City Council quietly removes the dihydrogen monoxide complaints from their proposed legislation, they are still considering banning foam cups and containers from events requiring city permits, on the grounds that they may find their way into rivers and streams. Aren't there supposed to be littering laws against that sort of thing? Is it really necessary to ban any substance that someone might dispose of incorrectly? Beer cans could be left in forests, after all. Concrete might be thrown from tall buildings.
But if the City Council wants to ban something, it is best they do it without recourse to pseudoscience. Not wanting cups in rivers is at least a rational, coherent concern but the fact that a paralegal was on the hunt for any fuel that could be added to the anti-foam fire, science-based or not, is indicative of how many of these legislative battles proceed. First, decide what substance you want to ban, what everyday citizen activity you want to control, or what industry you want to shake down, then go looking for anything superficially resembling a scientific excuse for doing so.
If the City Council of Aliso Viejo stops using the services of that gullible paralegal, perhaps a new employment opportunity could be found working for the EPA's Superfund administrators, who were recently in the news over their efforts to maintain "polluter pays" laws that force companies to pay for expensive chemical-removing clean-ups of sites that may pose no human health hazard at all. Someone willing to grasp at dihydrogen monoxide straws ought to be able to squeeze more than water out of those nasty, obscenely wealthy corporations.
The entire anti-chemical movement is a joke not so different from those dihydrogen monoxide websites. Well, that's not quite accurate: the movement is a hoax, but most of its perpetrators do not have senses of humor as good as those of the anti-dihydrogen monoxide activists.
Note: If you're in a debunking mood, John Stossel and other ABC News correspondents expose unscientific claims and other frauds on Monday, March 22, 10pm Eastern, in another hour of Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity.