By Brian Carnell

Tuesday, June 11, 2002

The other day I happened to run across an introduction that Noam Chomsky wrote for the 2001 Project Censored Yearbook which marked Project Censored's 25th anniversary. According to Chomsky, the stories that Project Censored has highlighted over the years were censored by mainstream media because,

They fall in a domain in which corporate-state interests are rather different from those of the public. That such stories would tend to be downplayed, reshaped, and obscured -- "censored," in the terminology of the project -- is only to be expected on the basis of even the most rudimentary inspection of the institutional structure of the media and their place in the broader society.

Well, sure. After all, if the media had just opened its eyes, maybe something could have been done before the Space Shuttle destroyed so much of the ozone layer. If the media had acted, it could have put a halt to those dangerous shuttle launches before skin cancer rates skyrocketed and national warnings limiting time spent outdoors were put in place.

Project Censored, of course, warned the world back in 1990, making the Space Shuttle's ongoing decimation of the ozone layer it's #2 story, leading with a harrowing quote from that world renowned expert on the ozone hole, Dr. Helen Caldicott, who it quoted as saying,

Every time the space shuttle is launched, 250 tons of hydrochloric acid is released into the air. With each launch, .25 percent of the ozone is destroyed. So far, the space shuttle has destroyed 10 percent of the ozone.

And that was just through 1989. There have been 83 subsequent launches of the space shuttle, each doing horrific damage to the ozone layer. Citing Soviet scientists Valery Burdakov and Vyacheslav Fiin, Project Censored noted that just 300 total shuttle flights would be enough to "completely destroy the Earth's protective ozone shield" -- we're more than a third of the way there.

Not that Project Censored didn't have its right wing critics more interested in preserving the interests of capital than pursuing the truth. Some claimed, for example, that Caldicott did not understand the studies she was citing.

These blind conformists pointed out that assuming 9 space shuttle and 6 Titan rocket launches yearly, an additional 725,000 kilograms/year of stratospheric chlorine would be produced. This amounts to an .25 percent increase stratospheric chlorine. Caldicott assumed that a .25 percent increase in stratospheric chlorine meant a .25 percent increase in ozone layer depletion, which is nonsense.

As the nice folks who put together the sci.space Usenet FAQ noted,

The effect [of additional stratospheric chlorine from the space shuttle] on ozone is minimal: global yearly average total ozone would be decreased by 0.0065%. This is much less than total ozone variability associated with volcanic activity and solar flares.

Unfortunately, Project Censored seems to have otherwise ignored the eminent Dr. Burdakov. It is a shame, for example, that it has followed the capitalist party line by refusing to air Burdakov's claims about Soviet research into UFOs (especially about the briefing that Stalin personally received about the alien bodies recovered at Roswell!)

Well, there's always next year.

Sources:

Space FAQ 10/13 - Controversial Questions. Sept. 17, 1996.

The NASA Shuttle Destroys the Ozone Shield. Project Censored, 1990.

Introduction: Project Censored 25th Anniversary. Noam Chomsky, Project Censord, 2001.

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