Are civic leaders bowing to pressure from paranoid Luddites, or are they wising up to a multibillion-dollar boondoggle that’s outfitting homes with fry-and-spy devices? Or is the answer huddling somewhere in between the contending claims?
BC Hydro claims that exposure to radio frequency during a 20-year lifespan of a Smart Meter is equivalent to the exposure from a single 30-minute cell phone call. Not so, according to social scientist Daniel Hirsch, a senior lecturer on nuclear policy at the University of Santa Cruz. At a ten foot distance, the whole body exposure to radio frequency from a Smart Meter may be up to eighty times higher than the whole body radio frequency exposure from a cell phone.
“While no one has actually done human health studies in relation to people living in homes with Smart Meters, we have evidence from a whole variety of other sources that demonstrates convincingly and consistently that exposure to radio frequency radiation at elevated levels for long periods of time increases the risk of cancer, increases damage to the nervous system, causes electrosensitivity, has adverse reproductive effects, and a variety of other effects on different organ systems,” says Dr. David Carpenter.
Claims like this about the safety of RF fields should concern us, if it means a massive, long-term, uncontrolled experiment on public health. No wonder some of the lab rats in BC are calling for a referendum on Smart Meters.
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