"Cash for clunkers", President Obama's 2009 Car Allowance Rebates System (CARS), was hailed as a huge success by the administration and environmentalists - but it was really just another government boondoggle. Not as expensive as $72 billion wasted in pet energy projects but still a high-profile case of an administration engaged in the Scientization of Politics - prettying up a world view by pretending it is reality-based.

In the New York Times, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman 

When people talk about sustainable food in 2013, they really mean something with an 'organic' label that they can attribute all kinds of other ethical and environmental traits to - sustainable food the way those people mean it is not sustainable at all, there is no way organic food can feed anyone except the rich 1% (the economically rich and the food gentry lucky enough to be born into agriculturally rich lands) but if food enthusiasts mired in such first world guilt really want to try sustainable food there is a new solution published in PLoS One.

The anti-biology community that has created the Big Organic $29 billion corporate juggernaut is not as creepy as the anti-vaccine community who distrust medical science - anti-vaccine people want your kids to be experimented on so theirs can stay safe from the evil 'toxins' in vaccines, after all - but they can still be pretty heavy-handed.

British environmentalist Mark Lynas was an early advocate against GMOs and, as he tells it, that meant he was an early advocate for demonizing scientists.

While most actual scientists did not give much credence to an offhand claim by researcher Árpád Pusztai in the mid-1990s that a genetically-modified potato damaged the immune system of an animal, because the results were unpublished and unverified, UK media of the scare journalism kind and British activists took off with it and the "Frankenfood" movement was born.

Here is what Lynas writes about his early efforts (bold mine):