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OVER THE PAST couple of weeks, I've been reading The Uninhabitable Earth. The author, David Wallace-Wells, had me from his first sentence ("It is worse, much worse, than you think"). Wallace-Wells has done us all the great favor of clearly laying out incontestable evidence for what global warming will mean to the way we live. The book's chapters focus on humanity's ability to work and survive in increasingly hot environments, climate-change-driven effects on agriculture, the striking pace of sea-level rise, increasingly "normal" natural disasters, choking pollution, and much more. It's not an easy read emotionally. But it forces the reader to look squarely in the face of the science.

Susan Crawford (@scrawford) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED, a professor at Harvard Law School, and author of Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It.

Wallace-Wells points out that even though thousands of scientists, perhaps hundreds of thousands, are daily trying to impress on lay readers the urgency of collective action, the religion (his word) of technology creates a belief that, to the extent there is some distant and disputed problem, everything will be mysteriously solved by some combination of machine learning and post-Earth survival. We'll live in spaceships and eat lab-printed meat, and Elon Musk will fix things.

I see a parallel in another big news story: the hype and enthusiasm about 5G wireless as the “thing that will make the existing [communications] model obsolete.” 5G is touted as the solution to all our problems—which sounds pretty unrealistic, as I’ve written in the past. (We’ll still need fiber wires everywhere, including deep in rural areas, to make 5G serve everyone, and there’s a real risk that we’ll end up with local 5G monopolies absent wise government intervention.) And there’s a new (to me) angle to 5G that I’ve resisted in the past: Do transmissions to and from 5G cells, which will need to be everywhere, and much closer to us than traditional cell towers, pulsing out very-high-frequency radio waves at high power levels, pose real risks to human health?

I’ve been impatient for years with people complaining about the health effects of wireless communications. The phrase tinfoil hat leaps to mind, I readily concede. But I am learning that some scientists believe that the intensity of 5G represents a change and that 5G’s effects on humankind should be studied closely before this technology is widely adopted.

As with climate change, where denial rhetoric has been driven by companies interested in maintaining the status quo, the wireless industry is vitally interested in assuring us that 5G poses no issues—or that there's an unresolved debate, so we should trust the existing radio-frequency exposure standards. That’s where we are now.

So far, the European Commission, focused on ensuring its market players lead the way in advanced wireless services, has rejected pausing to consider the human health effects of 5G, stating that most “5G networks are expected to use smaller cells than previous generations with lower electromagnetic fields exposure levels” and “[t]he introduction of 3G and 4G has not increased exposure from environmental fields.” The Federal Communications Commission has acted similarly.

But what if the FCC is measuring public health effects against a decades-old standard that measures the wrong thing? I think that we need better, more neutral standards based on widely accepted science.

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to 5G

The FCC standard for measuring the health effects of electromagnetic radiation is based on whether the exposure, on average, will heat human tissue over short periods (six minutes for occupational work and 30 minutes for public exposure). That standard was adopted in 1996 and was based in part on standards adopted 30 years ago by a private group based in Germany called the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection that some say is loyal to both the telecom and energy industries. In 2012, the General Accountability Office found that the FCC had not ensured that its standards “reflect the latest research on RF energy exposure,” and recommended that the commission reassess and potentially change its exposure limit. The next year, the FCC launched a process to reexamine this standard, but its review doesn’t seem to be progressing.