Unclear thinking causes trouble.

In the classic 1949 movie thriller, “The Third Man,” the evil Harry Lime justified deadly profiteering by explaining, “… in Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Sometimes it takes such a stark absurdity to see the fallacy. Correlation does not prove causation. Yet people and governments continue to jump on the fallacy bandwagon.

Sometimes no one stops long enough to think through the ramifications of “revolutionary” solutions. Take ethanol, the bright idea it would be better for the planet and a better use of natural resources to burn food for fuel.

Apparently no one calculated that to replace all transportation oil with corn-based ethanol would require planting 700 million acres of corn, covering 37 percent of the continental United States. No one apparently stopped to realize corn ethanol mixed in gasoline increases, rather than decreases, pollutants. And no one thought past Day One of the craze to realize diverting huge amounts of crops to fuel would substantially raise food prices. Biofuels were largely to blame when grain prices rose 140 percent between January 2002 and February 2008.

All of this could have been known by policymakers. But in concert with short-sighted environmentalists, a covey of special interests stood to profit, and did. Growers capitalized on artificial demand, refiners enjoyed government-mandated markets and investors reaped government subsidies.

There’s no better example of correlation being confused with causation than the war against global warming. For about a decade, some indicators showed Earth’s temperature increasing. Some claimed the increase was more rapid than normal. Some posited a theory that mankind’s activities, everything that emitted CO2, was the cause.

The theory held that continual increases in CO2 emissions would dangerously increase global temperatures. Billions of dollars were diverted from productive uses to study and combat the issue. The reality is, for 17 years, while man-made CO2 emissions soared to levels never previously recorded, temperature didn’t budge. Global warming experienced its ethanol moment.

Not only have policies and costs imposed to date not reduced global CO2 emissions, unintended economic harm resulted from vast sums of wealth being diverted from uses that could greatly benefit mankind, such as providing affordable energy to parts of the globe in dire need.

The people who advance these poorly reasoned schemes with their unintended consequences may mean well. Unlike the infamous villain of the film “The Third Man,” backers of ethanol and global warming alarmism probably don’t set out to hurt people. The movie villain sold diluted medicine on the black market. He didn’t care about the welfare of others. In the movie, Harry Lime and a buddy hovered high above the ground in a Ferris wheel when his friend asked, “Have you ever seen any of your victims?”

Harry Lime’s response was, “Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.”

Irrespective of motive, bad policy can have just as evil consequences.

Environmental icon, Rachel Carson, set in motion such a policy based on her claim that the insecticide DDT was dangerous. Her theory has long since been debunked. As early as 1972 the Environmental Protection Agency concluded, “DDT is not carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic to man” and that “uses of DDT [to fight malaria] do not have a deleterious effect on fish, birds, wildlife or estuarine organisms.”

Nevertheless, the claim DDT does more harm than good prevailed, partly thanks to the EPA ignoring what it knew to be true. For decades, DDT was banned based on claims it weakened some birds’ eggs and posed other threats.

The late J. Gordon Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Entomology at San Jose State University, wrote in a 2004, “the chemical compound that has saved more human lives than any other in history, DDT, was banned by order of one man, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Public pressure was generated by one popular book and sustained by faulty or fraudulent research. Widely believed claims of carcinogenicity, toxicity to birds, anti-androgenic properties, and prolonged environmental persistence are false or grossly exaggerated. The worldwide effect of the U.S. ban has been millions of preventable deaths.”

Harry Lime’s intentional evil was fiction. Unintentional evils derived from unclear thinking are real.