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Environmentalists, What Are You Asking From Dedmoroz Lenin For Earth Day This Year?

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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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As I wrote in California Government Is The Big Water Management Problem, we can't make it rain but we could at least stop letting bizarre environmental lobbying get a super vote for how to mitigate the issue. While farmers and the public face mandatory cutbacks, anti-science beliefs about what is most important means that no matter how bad things get, we will have to force water for millions of people to be flushed into the Pacific Ocean.
Pope Francis can claim many firsts; he is the first non-European Pope since 741 AD, the first from the Americas and the first from the Southern Hemisphere. Given his nuanced positions on science issues like climate change and agriculture, some might also consider him the first scientific Pope. That isn't correct, but he may be the most scientific in history.

Francis is not scientific due to credentialism, he does not have any advanced degree in chemistry. Instead, he is scientific by behavior.
Vermont's somewhat odd GMO warning label law, which made sure to exempt anything that would impact Just Label It yogurt millionaire Gary Hirshberg's supply of dairy and import things like alcohol, restaurants and the Whole Foods deli section, is about to cost consumers millions of dollars.
Organic farming has had a pretty good run.
Dr. Oz has done a lot of things right recently.
The Natural Resources Defense Council environmental lobbying group has created a coalition and they have drafted a petition demanding that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ban eight food additives they believe are carcinogens, in the interests of public health.

The problem is that many of these are natural, which is one reason why they have never been banned. The other reason is they haven't been shown to be harmful, regardless of whether or not we have been trained by environmental lobbying groups to be scared of chemical names.