Are you in favor of solar power? Good luck getting any large scale installations to go up. While energy activists want to get rid of fossil fuels and support solar power, environmental activists block solar plants with lawsuits. And then there is the union left, who block solar projects for environmental reasons too - unless the company agrees to use union labor even in a right-to-work state, then their concern about the environment disappears.
But solar power is not the only example. Mother Jones can hardly be called a darling of big business, or the right, or corporations, and yet when they noted the science behind genetically modified food, they were attacked by the anti-science left, who claimed they were 'blinded' by, you know, reason. They made sure to use scare quotes as often as possible, like around "scientific" because it is just a world view, not evidence-based, to fringe progressives - scare quotes are the wink-wink way for the audience to know it isn't scientific unless it agrees with their particular world view.
The writer, Charles Margulis, has to rationalize how Bt is evil in GMOs but organic farmers get to spray it on liberally: "The natural insecticide is so benign that organic farmers are permitted to use them, though only as a last resort and under strict guidelines."
Last resort? Can they or can't they? Who determines 'last resort'? It's entirely subjective and therefore meaningless, as are these "strict guidelines" - they can spray toxic pesticides on the day they are being shipped. Anyone who knows anything at all about the organic food conglomerates knows they have no interest in a law to require surprise spot testing of organic food, for a simple reason; more organic farmers would fail than traditional farms do.
Margulis dutifully trots out suspect claims from China about how they never used pesticides or GMOs and still had huge yield increases, proving organic farming is sustainable. Odd we are to blindly believe China about one study when they denied being the world's leading CO2 emitter until scientists stopped asking them for their data and simply monitored the giant pollution clouds wafting out to sea. And 25% of the organic food from China was found to be just regular old food with an organic label stuck on it. Even Chinese people don't trust Chinese organic food.
He also quote-mines 1995 World Food Prize winner Hans Herren saying, "there is evidence from the field for now over three decades that sustainable agriculture can not only nourish the world, but can do so for the long haul," which is such a jarring misrepresentation it's like claiming the Spanish Inquisition promoted religious tolerance - you have to wonder if they are on the same planet. At a time when activists were predicting we would be eating each other because agriculture could not support people, American farmers led the world in embracing science and successfully 'dematerialized' and now we produce far more food on far less land. Activists now claim they could somply change it all to organic farming and it would be the same. Herren advocates a much older idea; blindly introducing new pests to contain old ones, which is like randomly having high-energy cosmic rays creating mutations instead of precisely controlling what happens, like in GMOs.
In reality, to produce the food we would need without using science-based farming would require adding new farmland equivalent to the size of the Amazon rainforest. If you want to ghetto-ize poor people and create class warfare between food "haves" and "have nots" by all means switch the world to the organic process. I prefer to leave organic food for the rich 1% who can smugly declare the extra cost is worth it. Because they have the money.
But solar power is not the only example. Mother Jones can hardly be called a darling of big business, or the right, or corporations, and yet when they noted the science behind genetically modified food, they were attacked by the anti-science left, who claimed they were 'blinded' by, you know, reason. They made sure to use scare quotes as often as possible, like around "scientific" because it is just a world view, not evidence-based, to fringe progressives - scare quotes are the wink-wink way for the audience to know it isn't scientific unless it agrees with their particular world view.
The writer, Charles Margulis, has to rationalize how Bt is evil in GMOs but organic farmers get to spray it on liberally: "The natural insecticide is so benign that organic farmers are permitted to use them, though only as a last resort and under strict guidelines."
Last resort? Can they or can't they? Who determines 'last resort'? It's entirely subjective and therefore meaningless, as are these "strict guidelines" - they can spray toxic pesticides on the day they are being shipped. Anyone who knows anything at all about the organic food conglomerates knows they have no interest in a law to require surprise spot testing of organic food, for a simple reason; more organic farmers would fail than traditional farms do.
Margulis dutifully trots out suspect claims from China about how they never used pesticides or GMOs and still had huge yield increases, proving organic farming is sustainable. Odd we are to blindly believe China about one study when they denied being the world's leading CO2 emitter until scientists stopped asking them for their data and simply monitored the giant pollution clouds wafting out to sea. And 25% of the organic food from China was found to be just regular old food with an organic label stuck on it. Even Chinese people don't trust Chinese organic food.
He also quote-mines 1995 World Food Prize winner Hans Herren saying, "there is evidence from the field for now over three decades that sustainable agriculture can not only nourish the world, but can do so for the long haul," which is such a jarring misrepresentation it's like claiming the Spanish Inquisition promoted religious tolerance - you have to wonder if they are on the same planet. At a time when activists were predicting we would be eating each other because agriculture could not support people, American farmers led the world in embracing science and successfully 'dematerialized' and now we produce far more food on far less land. Activists now claim they could somply change it all to organic farming and it would be the same. Herren advocates a much older idea; blindly introducing new pests to contain old ones, which is like randomly having high-energy cosmic rays creating mutations instead of precisely controlling what happens, like in GMOs.
In reality, to produce the food we would need without using science-based farming would require adding new farmland equivalent to the size of the Amazon rainforest. If you want to ghetto-ize poor people and create class warfare between food "haves" and "have nots" by all means switch the world to the organic process. I prefer to leave organic food for the rich 1% who can smugly declare the extra cost is worth it. Because they have the money.
