No, but it seems like they might be neglecting issues that are affecting their constituents health (potentially easy to fix by the sounds of it) and focusing on the current fashionable moral panic.
You say that it's fashionable moral panic but some people may say that an increase in cancer is not worth fashionable network tech investment.
Just as you might think that this 5G thingy is a must have and totally safe, some people might think that 4G works just fine so let's not risk it.
On another note, I would be open to the possibility that Satan is real and is the cause behind cancer if and only if the proper evidence is provided.
How much longer will you bash your head against the wall hoping it will get results?
I have no problem studying the effects of new products and technologies before being released to the general public. After all, I like knowing my drugs aren't likely to harm me. The difference here is radio wave exposure has being a subject studied to death and nothing of note has being found. Simply because you believe something to be true or could be true does not award you the right to make the assertion that it's true. Go get the evidence and bring something new to the table instead of torturing everyone involved with this nonsense.
I think radio communications have been heavily scrutinized, but there is a lack of peer-reviewed well-funded research regarding more controversial hypotheses, like their effect on Voltage Gated Calcium Channels. There's also been research that suggests DNA strand breaks do occur from non-ionizing radiation that has been suppressed, and other hypotheses as well that have not been studied extensively.
Also, I'm not just talking about cancer.
There is research from both the "it's safe" and "it's dangerous" perspectives. However, the "it's dangerous" perspective gets almost no funding despite being scientifically sound and published by scientists who used to be respected before they dared question EMF safety.
I have no doubts that current levels of EMF do not cause major issues in the majority of people. Our bodies have several evolved mechanisms to handle it. But I think it is very plausible that a minority of the population with other toxic burdens could be sensitive to it. There is an entire population of people migrating to rural areas just to avoid EMF so they feel better. I don't think they are making this up. It's a HUGE life change to do that, and no one would do that unless they had no other options.
I find the VGCC work of Martin Pall very compelling, but I do not have links on hand, as EMF is not something a spend a lot of time focusing on. Googling him will bring up plenty of info, but you will probably have to dig a bit to find his published scientific work rather than just interviews on holistic websites.
I am a proponent of representative democracy, of checks and balances, and of democratic institutions that carefully examine problems making good use of all the expertise available.
Representing people is a two way street. It also means for politicians to tell people the truth and to convince them of supporting the right thing having considered all the evidence, trade-offs and shared goals.
Democratic institutions have a lot of resources available to them and a lot of time that the average voter does not have. They should make use of those resources, not lazily ape voters and exploit possibly irrational fears.
I guess if you still want to keep the democracy and have your 5G in Brussels you better convince enough Brusselians that the speed increase in networking is worth risking more cancer or that EM radiation definitely does not increase health risk.
But when I said that I didn't want to rely on average voters' risk percpetion, I didn't actually mean any of that. I merely meant that I don't rely on it to form my own opinion (which is definitely not subject to a popularity contest).
I don't want to convince the people of Brussels of anything. I want to know the truth about the health effects of 5G, and I hope that our democracies are not too dysfunctional to let that truth inform any regulations.
If we don't know anything about the effects of 5G, it could just as well be the cure for cancer.
But it's not a coin toss. We do know some things about how it works, we have decades of empirical data on similar technologies, and ultimately we always have to act in spite of uncertainty as even the effects of doing nothing are uncertain.
What's this a reference to? Last I read there was no established link between cancer and EM Radiation[0].
[0] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r...
As I understand it, Brussels is governed by a parliamentary system, not a direct democracy. The advantage of such a system, in theory, is that these representatives can have cooler heads than the mob of common rabble outside.
Thus a good way to fix trash on the streets is to pay people to clean it up, and after a short while you can get clean streets with a very moderate level of cleaning effort.
Would you be able to share some scientific research that supports the idea that the proposed antennas are completely, without-a-doubt safe? (I assume that's what you're implying by your statment.)
Edit: ok, forget that I used the words 'completely' and 'without-a-doubt' which causes a knee-jerk reaction amongst the armchair epistomologists here. How about just evidence in general that suggests that they're safe?
edit edit: my apology if the phrase 'knee-jerk reaction amongst the armchair epistomologists' rubbed anyone the wrong way. just being snarky but perhaps wasn't helpful to the conversation.
Painting a wall a novel color is a new, unstudied EM radiation exposure.
("Assume safety and viscously attack anyone who suggests otherwise" has some advantages, though.)
Because we were wrong in the past about some things, I'm going to make the claim without evidence that visible light kills. Everyone who has ever died of cancer was exposed to visible light for very long periods of time. Don't expose yourself!
Can you link to a scientific study that proves anything is completely safe? Ironically more money has been spent proving electromagnetic radiation and vaccines are safe than most naturally occurring substances, because the public is paranoid about those things/it is a "sexy" area of research.
They've literally put animals into cages and exposed them to 1000%+ levels of typical EM exposure, and still not witnessed this supposed cancer link. But science cannot say anything is "completely safe" because that isn't how logical reasoning or the scientific method work. All we can say is that a mechanism of unsafety has yet to be discovered.