In the quest to prevent a collapse in the global bee population, few approaches look more promising than simply banning the use of neonicotinoids in agriculture. To the EU’s credit, that’s exactly what was done last May when the EU passed a two-year ban on nicotinoid usage. For life on earth it was the bee’s knees, although the Life Sciences industry wasn’t entirely pleased:
World On a Plate
Hosted By The Guardian
London bee summit: pesticides or no pesticides?
The decision to frame the argument over neonicotinoids as pro- or anti-pesticide ignores the myriad optionsPosted by Emma Bryce
Tuesday 28 January 2014 05.38 ESTIn London last Friday, research scientists, chemical industry representatives, and journalists gathered for an open discussion session that concluded a three-day summit about the impact of neonicotinoid pesticides on honeybees. The result was a rich debate about the future use of these chemicals in agriculture, and implications for food production. But the efforts by some industry representatives to oversimplify the issue gave an otherwise intricate discussion the aura of a highly polarised one.
Neonicotinoids, which are widely used in Europe and America, are applied as a coating on seeds of crops like oilseed rape, maize, and sunflowers before they are planted, in this way protecting the plant from the start. But since this class of chemicals was linked with a decline in honey- and bumblebee health in 2012, followed by The European Commission’s imposed restrictions on specific uses of neonicontinoids soon after, they have been recognised more for the controversy they are associated with than anything else.
The science cannot definitively link neonicotinoid impact on individual pollinators to the widespread, overall decline of honeybee populations going on in Europe and America—the phenomenon labelled Colony Collapse Disorder. But a growing body of research on the subject is helping to cement the concerns of conservationists and scientists alike. Friday’s open discussion helped air those concerns, and yet, these were foregrounded against a controversial industry suggestion that if we stop using neonicotinoids, we essentially commit to a future of environmental ruin.
Speaking during his presentation on behalf of Bayer CropScience—the company that makes imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid-based pesticide—environmental safety manager Richard Schmuck concluded his talk by stating that not only will food production dip dramatically if we stop using neonicotinoids, but that in an effort to make up for lowered production, countries will have to convert untouched wild land into crops and ‘import’ land from developing world countries. That will result in decreased biodiversity in Europe, America, and abroad, he said.
This rather extreme argument gives us just two options: a world with pesticides, or one without. But it misrepresents the approach of scientists and several conservation groups, and also contradicts what the chemical industries themselves say.
“I think it’s just an oversimplification by the industry to suit their message,” says Sandra Bell, nature campaigner at Friends of the Earth UK who was present at Friday’s meeting. “We’re not necessarily talking about banning every pesticide. We’re talking about minimising the use.” A speaker at the conference, University of Sussex Professor David Goulson, leader of one of the research groups that found neonicotinoid impacts on pollinators in 2012, agreed, adding that in order to grow enough food to feed an increasing world population, he recognised that chemicals would inevitably be part of the mix.
But the binary pesticide/no pesticide scenario overwrites a third option: using pesticides together with other controls. This is one aspect of integrated pest management (IPM), touted as a ‘common sense’ approach to farming. “IPM is not a system that doesn’t use pesticides at all,” says Goulson, “but you try and minimise the pesticides and only ever use them responsibly, and as a last resort.” This ideal contrasts starkly with the current reality of crops that receive up to 22 pesticides at a time.
Rotation-cropping, organic farming, production of pest-resistant crops, and the use of state-funded agronomists to evaluate land and apply tailored pest control, were all raised as alternative management options during the open debate. Matthias Schott, a PhD student at the University of Giessen in Germany, who was there to present a poster about whether bees can sense neonicotinoids, suggested that in an ideal future, farmers would be given financial incentives for avoiding unnecessary pesticide use. Currently, he says, “there is no possibility for farmers to get pesticide-undressed seeds from the big companies. Therefore most agricultural land is exposed to insecticides.”
Bayer CropScience notes that alternatives are part of its portfolio, too. “We are very open to finding the right synthesis between integrated pest management and pesticides,” said Bayer’s global pollinator safety manager, Dr. Christian Maus, adding that it is necessary to establish a pesticide’s compatibility with IPM before it goes on the market. (He spoke on behalf of Richard Schmuck who was traveling and not available for an interview.)
The reality, of course, is that the pesticide/no pesticide split exists because there is no financial incentive right now to mould things differently. Alternative methods of pest control get little funding, and less research. “There’s no profit to be made for anyone who develops anything like that,” says Goulson. “So really, most research into how to farm is focused on high-tech solutions that can be sold by the people that manufacture them.”
The UK government’s seemingly tight-knit relationship with major chemical company Syngenta has only intensified the frustrations felt by those seeking alternatives. Industry-funded studies that find no neonicotinoid impact are a target for critics, and researchers highlight the general scarcity of peer-reviewed science on the subject.
Indeed, the confident conclusion in Schmuck’s presentation that a future without pesticides will amount to a loss of virgin land and biodiversity comes from an industry document that he cited in his talk. “It was a report by the agrochemical industry,” says Goulson. “I would strongly imagine it has no credibility whatsoever.” Yet, says Maus, everything Bayer CropScience publishes is independently regulated, whether it appears in a journal or not. “Our data are scrutinised,” he states.
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The binary argument over neonicotinoids, no matter how superficial, denies the role that creativity has to play in finding other solutions. It perpetuates a threatening rhetoric in which the obvious pressure exists to stick with the status quo. “It’s about a lack of investment in the right kind of research,” says Bell. “If several years ago more money had been directed towards [alternatives] we might not be in this situation now.”
The two-year EU ban on neonicotinoids is going to be a critical story to watch but it’s also a difficult story. As the attendees to the London Bee Summit often pointed out, bee colony collapse is an incredibly complicated phenomena and nicotinoids are just one piece of the puzzle.
Another piece of the puzzle that adds uncertainty to the future of the neonicotinoid ban is the fact that Ettore Capri, the director of the Italy based OPERA Research Center — a pesticide industry-friendly think tank with a history of lobbying the EU for laxer neonicotinoid regulations — is also sitting on the EU’s pesticide panel. But it’s a big panel so we’ll see soon how the EU’s two year moratorium works out. Major nicotinoid manufacturers like Bayer and Syngenta may not like bans on neonicotinoids but the bees do. And in two years we’ll see who wins, Big Pesticide or the bees. Hint: It’s looking like it’s going to be a cliff-hanger/catastrophe sort of experience.
It Isn’t Easy Being a Bee
Neonicotinoids and lobbyists arent’t the only threats complicating the fate of the bees. If your a bee, mites might make for a really bad day. Or a new farm where your delicious prairie flowers used to be. Or both. It isn’t being a bee, and its getting harder:
International Business Times
How Can We Save Bees? 3 Possible Solutions To Combat Honeybee DeclineBy Roxanne Palmer
on January 22 2014 11:38 PMThe pleasant buzz of the honeybee is going silent across the nation, and the globe. But not everyone is planning on letting bees bumble gently into that good night.
Since 2006, U.S. beekeepers have been seeing colony losses of an average of 33 percent a year, with a third of that attributed to colony collapse disorder, or CCD, the abrupt disappearance of worker bees from the hive.
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Since no one can quite pin down a singular cause for the drop in bee populations across the globe, a nest of different approaches to saving the honeybee is springing up. Here are just a few of the measures that are being taken to try and save the bees:
Europe’s pesticide ban
Last April, the European Union voted to ban a certain class of pesticides called neonicotinoids....
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Nevertheless, the EU ban went into effect this past December and will last for two years. Some scientists fear that European farmers may turn to more toxic pesticides in the wake of the ban, while others fear that crop pests may seize their advantage in the coming years. Only time will tell what the ban has wrought.
Combating the varroa mite
One of the other prime suspects in CCD is the varroa mite, a tiny arachnid that can hitch a ride back to beehives on the backs of foraging worker bees. Once it invades the hive, the mite lays its eggs in honeycombs alongside young bees. The mite brings its own hitchhikers into the colony as well: bacteria, viruses and other pathogens that can sweep through the bees.
Bayer scientists and bee researchers from Frankfurt University have come up with a way to nip the varroa mite right at the entrance of the hive, using a specially designed entryway for commercial hives. When bees pass through this varroa gate through small entry holes, they brush up against a coating of poison that targets the mite (it’s based on the same principle as a flea collar for dogs or cats).
In Australia, where the mite has yet to gain a foothold, scientist Denis Anderson has been searching for a chemical switch that would allow him to turn off the mite’s breeding cycle. But, Anderson says his work has been hampered by a lack of funds, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
Filling empty bee bellies
Any hungry creature is vulnerable to illness and calamity, and bees are no exception. And the spread of modern agriculture, coupled with skyrocketing demand for biofuels, may be chewing up the bees’ sources of food.
American grasslands are rich in wildflowers, which provide food for a host of pollinating insects, including honeybees. But these grasslands are being destroyed as a study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found. The study found that 1.3 million acres of grassland and wetland were converted to cropland in the Dakotas, Nebraska and parts of Minnesota and Iowa between 2006 and 2011, at a rate not seen since before the Dust Bowl.
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So even when neonicotinoids are banned, the farmers might just use something even worse, mites might infest your colony with bacteria and viruses, and, in the US, native bee habitat loss from 2006–2011 was at a rate not seen since the Dust Bowl! It’s sure not easy being bee, neonicotinoids or not.
Climate Change Is A Pest For The Bees Too. Technology Change Is More Of An Open Question.
And then there’s climate change. Climate change directly impacts bees by causing flowers to blossom when bees aren’t ready but it’s also the perfect storm for exacerbating virtually all of the other other bee-life stresses. For exaple, the loss of native bee habitats from the changing climate is going to be compounded by the increased demand for new farm land as climate change destroys arable land. And then there are the pests. As the climate changes, pests change too. Not only the types of pests but also the sheer volume of them. And when new pests arrive, and the old ones increase in number, the pest control strategies have to increase too.
Since there’s quite possibly going to be a lot more pests to control in the warming climates of the future, we should probably hope that the new pest control strategies required for that warmer future are easier on the bees that what we’re currently doing. Especially the pesticides use for major crops that attract bees. Crops like corn. High Fructose Corn Syrup isn’t the only corn-relate threat to the bees. +90% of corn grown in the US is covered with Bayer’s neonicotinoid products, along with a growing number of other crops. Quite simply, as the demand for pest control strategies grows with the changing climate, it’s going to be very hard to see how an outright ban on the use of neonicotinoids going to be possible without either a very big shift in how humanity feeds itself or the development of some new, effective pest-control technologies that can be used for staple foods.
All of these growing threats are a reminder that the challenges bees faced in the 20th century (the emergence of industrial agriculture) might be multiply in the 21st century. And since it’s looking increasingly like bee colonies are collapsing from the ‘death of a thousand cuts’ of many different environmental insults simultaneously it’s important to keep in mind that even a complete banning of nicotinoids still might not save the bees. A ban will be helpful, sure. But if we simply replace nicotinoids with other forms of bee-harming pest control strategies the bees and the rest of us might still be screwed.
And, sure, if humanity gets a lot better at sharing and not wasting food we could potentially shift to a organic farming strategies and minimize pesticide use around the world and still feed ourselves, but is that realistic? If not, that means a key challenge for the future of bee-friendly pest-control is going to ever-increasing specificity: you want tools that eliminate only the pest on the crop of interest and nothing else. Or at least nothing beneficial like bees.
So, for example, let’s say Monsanto was to develop a new form of GMO technology designed to ward off major pests that have developed immunity to Monsanto’s widely-used GMO-based corn with the BT Toxin and Monsanto’s Roundup weed-killer. That might be helpful, at least for a while. But new technology that kill newly resistant pests aren’t going to help humanity feed itself if those new technologies keep killing our six-legged friends:
Mother Jones
Is Monsanto Giving Up on GMOs?—By Tom Philpott
| Wed Jan. 29, 2014 3:00 AM GMTIs genetically modified seed giant Monsanto doing the unthinkable and moving away from genetically modified seeds?
It sounds crazy, but hear me out. Let’s start with Monsanto’s vegetable division, Seminis, which boasts it is the “largest developer and grower of vegetable seeds in the world.” Monsanto acknowledges Seminis has no new GM vegetables in development. According to a recent Wired piece, Seminis has has reverted instead to “good old-fashioned crossbreeding, the same technology that farmers have been using to optimize crops for millennia.”
Why? The article points to people’s growing avoidance of genetically modified foods. So far, consumers have shown no appetite to gobble up GM vegetables. (But that doesn’t mean people aren’t eating GMOs: Nearly all GMOs currently on the market are big commodity crops like corn and soy, which, besides being used as livestock feed, are regularly used as ingredients in processed food—think high-fructose corn syrup and soy oil.)
But the Wired piece also suggests a factor that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: GM technology doesn’t seem to be very good at generating complex traits like better flavor or more nutrients, the very attributes Monsanto was hoping to engineer into veggies. Here’s Wired:
Furthermore, genetically modifying consumer crops proved to be inefficient and expensive. [Monsanto exec David] Stark estimates that adding a new gene takes roughly 10 years and $100 million to go from a product concept to regulatory approval. And inserting genes one at a time doesn’t necessarily produce the kinds of traits that rely on the interactions of several genes. Well before their veggie business went kaput, Monsanto knew it couldn’t just genetically modify its way to better produce; it had to breed great vegetables to begin with. As Stark phrases a company mantra: “The best gene in the world doesn’t fix dogshit germplasm.” [Emphasis added.]
Okay, that’s vegetables. What about Monsanto’s core business, selling seeds for big industrial commodity crops like corn, soybeans, cotton, and alfalfa? Monsanto has come to dominate these markets with its Roundup Ready products, which are designed to withstand Monsanto’s flagship herbicide, and, for corn and cotton, its “Bt” products, which are engineered to produce a toxin found in Bacillus thuringiensis, an insect-killing bacteria. Does the company have lots of novel GM products in mind for this vast, lucrative sector?
Monsanto’s latest Annual R&D Pipeline Review, a document released earlier this month that showcases the company’s research into new product lines, foretells all kinds of impressive-sounding stuff. But a surprising amount of the company’s new research, even for its most lucrative crops like corn and soy, promise either new iterations of herbicide tolerance and Bt, or rely on classical breeding—not biotechnology.
The one major exception is a corn seed relying on a new kind of GMO: RNA interference (RNAi) technology, a recently discovered way to turn off certain genes, which Monsanto plans to engineer into crops to kill certain insects. According to Monsanto’s pipeline review, RNAi corn remains in the early “proof of concept” phase. In a recent piece, the New York Times’ Andrew Pollack reports that the technology is showing promise—Monsanto hopes to have it on the market “late this decade.” But it’s also generating controversy even in normally Monsanto-friendly regulatory circles because researchers have suggested it may kill beneficial insects like ladybugs along with targeted pests. Pollack points to this 2013 paper by Environmental Protection Agency scientists, which warned that the unfamiliar technology presented “unique challenges for ecological risk assessment that have not yet been encountered in assessments for traditional chemical pesticides.”
So RNAi corn may be coming—and could bring public relations and regulatory complications for Monsanto, not to mention unpredictable ecological consequences for the rest of us. But how much other GMO-based stuff does Monsanto have up its sleeve? According to the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the agency that oversees the rollout of new GM crops, not much. Of the 13 new GMOs APHIS is tracking, only 2 are from Monsanto: an alfalfa engineered to be more easily digestible as animal feed, and a soybean designed to withstand a harsh old herbicide called dicamba (a variation on the familiar Roundup Ready herbicide-tolerance theme).
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Are you excited for Extra-Super-Corn with RNAi technology that kills ladybugs but not necessarily bees? Yes? No? Regardless, the super-pests like BT-Toxin-resistant corn rootworms and Roundup-resistant superweeds are already here munching away on super-corn’s roots so we probably shouldn’t be surprised if extra-super-corn featuring RNAi technology makes its way onto the farm sooner rather than later (and then proceed to wander around the ecosystem from there). The ladybugs probably aren’t very excited. They might prefer the smart-breeding strategy.
The bees, interestingly, might actually have reason to be excited by the development of this extra-super-corn, although not for the reason you might suspect: Nearly all corn grown in the US and Canada (and much of the world) is Monsanto’s BT toxin GMO corn (our present day super-corn). But that BT toxin only protects against key pests like the corn rootworm. Or at least it used to against them. So, barring a neonicotinoid ban in the US and Canada, even if this new RNAi technology temporarily thwarts the emergence of BT Toxin-resistant corn rootworms neonicotinoid products are still going to be used on corn and a growing number of other crops. No, the reason the bees might be breathing a bit of a sigh of relief is because RNAi technology might make mites a little less of pest for bees:
The New York Times
Genetic Weapon Against Insects Raises Hope and Fear in FarmingBy ANDREW POLLACKJAN. 27, 2014
Scientists and biotechnology companies are developing what could become the next powerful weapon in the war on pests — one that harnesses a Nobel Prize-winning discovery to kill insects and pathogens by disabling their genes.
By zeroing in on a genetic sequence unique to one species, the technique has the potential to kill a pest without harming beneficial insects. That would be a big advance over chemical pesticides.
“If you use a neuro-poison, it kills everything,” said Subba Reddy Palli, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky who is researching the technology, which is called RNA interference. “But this one is very target-specific.”
But some specialists fear that releasing gene-silencing agents into fields could harm beneficial insects, especially among organisms that have a common genetic makeup, and possibly even human health. The controversy echoes the larger debate over genetic modification of crops that has been raging for years. The Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates pesticides, will hold a meeting of scientific advisers on Tuesday to discuss the potential risks of RNA interference.
“To attempt to use this technology at this current stage of understanding would be more naïve than our use of DDT in the 1950s,” the National Honey Bee Advisory Board said in comments submitted to the E.P.A. before the meeting, at the agency’s conference center in Arlington, Va.
RNA interference is of interest to beekeepers because one possible use, under development by Monsanto, is to kill a mite that is believed to be at least partly responsible for the mass die-offs of honeybees in recent years.
Monsanto has applied for regulatory approval of corn that is genetically engineered to use RNAi, as the approach is called for short, to kill the western corn rootworm, one of the costliest of agricultural pests. In another project it is trying to develop a spray that would restore the ability of its Roundup herbicide to kill weeds that have grown impervious to it.
Some bee specialists submitted comments saying they would welcome attempts to use RNAi to save honeybees. Groups representing corn, soybean and cotton farmers also support the technology.
“Commercial RNAi technology brings U.S. agriculture into an entirely new generation of tools holding great promise,” the National Corn Growers Association said.
Corn growers need a new tool. For a decade they have been combating the rootworm by planting so-called BT crops, which are genetically engineered to produce a toxin that kills the insects when they eat the crop.
Or at least the toxin is supposed to kill them. But rootworms are now evolving resistance to at least one BT toxin.
RNA interference is a natural phenomenon that is set off by double-stranded RNA.
DNA, which is what genes are made of, is usually double stranded, the famous double helix. But RNA, which is a messenger in cells, usually consists of a single strand of chemical units representing the letters of the genetic code.
So when a cell senses a double-stranded RNA, it acts as if it has encountered a virus. It activates a mechanism that silences any gene with a sequence corresponding to that in the double-stranded RNA.
Scientists quickly learned that they could deactivate virtually any gene by synthesizing a snippet of double-stranded RNA with a matching sequence.
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Using RNAi in insects, at least for beetles, should be easier than in people. Beetles, including the corn rootworm, can simply eat the double-stranded RNA to set off the effect.
One way to get insects to do that is to genetically engineer crops to produce double-stranded RNA corresponding to an essential gene of the pest.
Various genetically engineered crops already harness RNAi to silence genes in the crop itself. These include soybeans with more healthful oil and a nonbrowning apple that appears close to federal approval. The technique has also been used to genetically engineer virus resistance into crops like papaya.
But generally those crops had been developed using methods to modify DNA that were known to work but were not understood at the time to involve RNAi. Monsanto’s new rootworm-killing corn is one of the first in which the crop has been engineered specifically to produce a double-stranded RNA, in this case to inactivate a gene called Snf7 that is essential for moving proteins around in the rootworm. Monsanto, which is based in St. Louis, hopes to have the corn, which it calls SmartStax Pro, on the market late this decade.
The double-stranded RNA could also be incorporated in sprays.
Monsanto is developing a spray that would shore up one of its biggest product lines — crops resistant to its Roundup herbicide. Farmers have grown them widely because they can spray Roundup to kill weeds without hurting the crop.
Roundup, known generically as glyphosate, works by inhibiting the action of a protein plants need to survive. But many weeds have evolved resistance to Roundup. Some of these weeds make so much of the protein that Roundup cannot inhibit it all.
Monsanto’s spray would use RNAi to silence the gene for that protein, reducing production of the protein and restoring the ability of Roundup to kill the weed.
Monsanto is also looking at putting RNA into sugar water fed to honeybees to protect them from the varroa mite. The way to fight the mite now is to spray pesticides that can also harm bees.
“We were trying to kill a little bug on a big bug,” said Jerry Hayes, the head of bee health at Monsanto.
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Take a moment and note that this new double-stranded RNA technology can potentially be used in sprays or added to water. And that’s in addition to the ability to actually incorporate it into the genomes of living systems. It’s a reminder that there’s going to be a lot more potential uses for this new RNAi technology than just pest control.
Continuing...
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If the RNAi is directed at a genetic sequence unique to the mite, the bees would not be harmed by ingesting it, while the mites would be killed once they attacked the bees. One field trial showed that this technique could help protect bees from a virus. Monsanto acquired Beeologics, a company developing the RNAi technology for bees. It bought at least two other companies pursuing agricultural applications of the technology. And it has paid tens of millions of dollars for patent rights and technology from medical RNAi companies like Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and Tekmira Pharmaceuticals.But Monsanto is not alone. In 2012, Syngenta signed an agreement to work on RNAi sprays with Devgen, a Belgian biotech company, and later said that it had acquired all of Devgen for around $500 million.
Some scientists are calling for caution, however, In a paper published last year, two entomologists at the Department of Agriculture warned that because genes are common to various organisms, RNAi pesticides might hurt unintended insects.
One laboratory study by scientists at the University of Kentucky and the University of Nebraska, for instance, found that a double-stranded RNA intended to silence a rootworm gene also affected a gene in the ladybug, killing that beneficial insect.
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Well that’s certainly an exciting maelstrom of technological possibilites. To summarize, almost all corn grown in the US and Canada is Monsanto’s “Bt corn” with the Bt toxin gene artificially added to kill the corn rootworms munching on the plants’ roots. But Bt corn might becoming somewhat irrelevant because the corn rootworm is already developing resistance to the Bt toxin. And the weeds that were under control using Roundup herbicide are now growing resistant to that too. But now Monsanto has a new trick that might save the Bt corn from both the corn rootworm and the super-weeds: The newly resistant corn rootworms and super-weeds are resistant because they have a new genes so if Monsanto can prevent the expression of those new genes both the Bt toxin and the Roundup can begin to work again. And this can be accomplished adding a new double-stranded RNA gene to the Bt corn that will silence the new gene in the corn rootworm beetle and then spraying the weeds with new double-stranded RNA targetting the new gene in the super-weeds. And this new RNAi technology can also be added to sprays or even water! So many possibilities...
And one of those possibilities includes feeding bees RNAi-laced sugar water so then the RNAi gets passed from the bee to the mite, allowing for less anti-mite pesticide use. This is actually a pretty big deal if this technology works! Although, as the above article pointed out, one of those big deals might be the disappearance of the ladybug due to the non-specific interactions between the RNA that was chosen to target a gene in the corn rootworm but also impacted one of the ladybug’s genes (a rather important gene for the ladybug, apparently).
So while it appears that this new RNAi technology has the possibility to provide new levels of specificity when targeting pests it’s still doesn’t appear to be specific enough to avoid collateral damage to the broader ecosystem. Which raises the question: what new unintended biological surprises are in store for the bees as RNAi technology flourishes and the number of different dsRNA strands getting added to plants, sprayed on the fields, or thrown into the water supply grows? The answer appears to be the standard answer to these types of questions: we don’t wnok what hos unintended surprises are going to be, but we’re going to find out! Yes, humanity is going to find out what surprises are in store for a species that casually dabbles in GMO technology because:
1. We can’t help ourselves.
2. It’s going to be increasingly difficult to feed the world without advanced farming methods and pest control strategies unless we significantly change how food resources are used (see reason 1).
3. We aren’t the neo-Luddites we need to be. And no, not the studid smashy-burny kind of Luddite. The anti-thoughtless-implementation-of-technology Luddite:
Smithsonian Magazine
What the Luddites Really Fought Against
The label now has many meanings, but when the group protested 200 years ago, technology wasn’t really the enemyBy Richard Conniff
March 2011
n an essay in 1984—at the dawn of the personal computer era—the novelist Thomas Pynchon wondered if it was “O.K. to be a Luddite,” meaning someone who opposes technological progress. A better question today is whether it’s even possible. Technology is everywhere, and a recent headline at an Internet hu-mor site perfectly captured how difficult it is to resist: “Luddite invents machine to destroy technology quicker.”
Like all good satire, the mock headline comes perilously close to the truth. Modern Luddites do indeed invent “machines”—in the form of computer viruses, cyberworms and other malware—to disrupt the technologies that trouble them. (Recent targets of suspected sabotage include the London Stock Exchange and a nuclear power plant in Iran.) Even off-the-grid extremists find technology irresistible. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, attacked what he called the “industrial-technological system” with increasingly sophisticated mail bombs. Likewise, the cave-dwelling terrorist sometimes derided as “Osama bin Luddite” hijacked aviation technology to bring down skyscrapers.
For the rest of us, our uneasy protests against technology almost inevitably take technological form. We worry about whether violent computer games are warping our children, then decry them by tweet, text or Facebook post. We try to simplify our lives by shopping at the local farmers market—then haul our organic arugula home in a Prius. College students take out their earbuds to discuss how technology dominates their lives. But when a class ends, Loyola University of Chicago professor Steven E. Jones notes, their cellphones all come to life, screens glowing in front of their faces, “and they migrate across the lawns like giant schools of cyborg jellyfish.”
That’s when he turns on his phone, too.
The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago this month, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and what being a modern one actually means.
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The word “Luddite” is simultaneously a declaration of ineptitude and a badge of honor. So you can hurl Luddite curses at your cellphone or your spouse, but you can also sip a wine named Luddite (which has its own Web site: www.luddite.co.za). You can buy a guitar named the Super Luddite, which is electric and costs $7,400. Meanwhile, back at Twitter, SupermanHotMale Tim is understandably puzzled; he grunts to ninatypewriter, “What is Luddite?”
Almost certainly not what you think, Tim.
Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it. You could say they were good at branding.
The Luddite disturbances started in circumstances at least superficially similar to our own. British working families at the start of the 19th century were enduring economic upheaval and widespread unemployment. A seemingly endless war against Napoleon’s France had brought “the hard pinch of poverty,” wrote Yorkshire historian Frank Peel, to homes “where it had hitherto been a stranger.” Food was scarce and rapidly becoming more costly. Then, on March 11, 1811, in Nottingham, a textile manufacturing center, British troops broke up a crowd of protesters demanding more work and better wages.
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As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
So if the Luddites weren’t attacking the technological foundations of industry, what made them so frightening to manufacturers? And what makes them so memorable even now? Credit on both counts goes largely to a phantom.
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People of the time recognized all the astonishing new benefits the Industrial Revolution conferred, but they also worried, as Carlyle put it in 1829, that technology was causing a “mighty change” in their “modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.” Over time, worry about that kind of change led people to transform the original Luddites into the heroic defenders of a pretechnological way of life. “The indignation of nineteenth-century producers,” the historian Edward Tenner has written, “has yielded to “the irritation of late-twentieth-century consumers.”
The original Luddites lived in an era of “reassuringly clear-cut targets—machines one could still destroy with a sledgehammer,” Loyola’s Jones writes in his 2006 book Against Technology, making them easy to romanticize. By contrast, our technology is as nebulous as “the cloud,” that Web-based limbo where our digital thoughts increasingly go to spend eternity. It’s as liquid as the chemical contaminants our infants suck down with their mothers’ milk and as ubiquitous as the genetically modified crops in our gas tanks and on our dinner plates. Technology is everywhere, knows all our thoughts and, in the words of the technology utopian Kevin Kelly, is even “a divine phenomenon that is a reflection of God.” Who are we to resist?
The original Luddites would answer that we are human. Getting past the myth and seeing their protest more clearly is a reminder that it’s possible to live well with technology—but only if we continually question the ways it shapes our lives. It’s about small things, like now and then cutting the cord, shutting down the smartphone and going out for a walk. But it needs to be about big things, too, like standing up against technologies that put money or convenience above other human values. If we don’t want to become, as Carlyle warned, “mechanical in head and in heart,” it may help, every now and then, to ask which of our modern machines General and Eliza Ludd would choose to break. And which they would use to break them.
As the above article points out, contrary to their anti-technology reputation, the Luddites “just wanted machines that made high-quality goods... they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns”. Technological progress is fine. But make it ethical. When you put aside the “smashing and burning” part of their history there’s a lot we can learn from the Luddites.
And as the above article also points out, technology during the time of the Luddite protests (1811–1817) was largely limited to the new machines of the Industrial Revolution. Today, we’re sort of like the Borg with just with one planet to assimilate. Our future is going to include a robust implementation of technology. And demand is going to be growing for any technology that can increase food and energy supplies in a world with shrinking resources, a changing climate, and an ever growing human demand. So when we’re looking for answers to the twin questions of “how do we protect the key species needed to feed ourselves protected from the practices of modern agriculture?” and “how do we feed ourselves?” the answer is most likely going to involve coming up with less damaging yet more powerful modern agricultural solutions. And that means better biotech. Maybe that will involve things like Bt corn and RNAi sprays, and Roundup. Hopefully not because it’s very unclear why we would want to introduce more stresses into the environment at this point if we can get by without it.
In The Future, Food Will Come Pre-Cooked. And Diseased.
But it’s hard to rule out biotech tools when we’re talking about future threats to the global food supply. And who knows, maybe the most environmentally efficacious solutions in the future really will involve utilizing a Rube Goldberg Machine of GMO tech combined with a concoction of other carefully selected pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Hopefully all of that won’t be necessary and organics farming methods really will be adequate of the rest of the century, but we can’t really rule out the Rube Goldberg approach indefinitely. For starters, GMO technoloy is still pretty new and there’s no reason future generations of GMO technology have to carry with the same risks and dangers seen today.
For example, as the following article points out, future GMO technology may not involve introducing new genes into an organism at all but instead tweak existing genes. Also, depending on how climate change plays out, doing everything we possibly can to increase crop yields using traditional farming methods may not be an option in our warmer, more populated future with with extreme temperature spikes. Many plants can handle higher average temperatures but not when those higher averages are arrived at through a series of extreme temperature spikes. And that’s the future climate we’re looking at in many parts of the globe: one with a lot more extremely hot days that physiologically shock plants. Bees aren’t the only species humanity needs to survive that can die a death of a thousand environmental cuts. Our food in the future just might need all the help it can get:
MIT Technology Review
Why We Will Need Genetically Modified Foods
Biotech crops will have an essential role in ensuring that there’s enough to eat.By David Rotman on December 17, 2013
Signs of late blight appear suddenly but predictably in Ireland as soon as the summer weather turns humid, spores of the funguslike plant pathogen wafting across the open green fields and landing on the wet leaves of the potato plants. This year it began to rain in early August. Within several weeks, late blight had attacked a small plot of potatoes in the corner of the neat grid of test plantings at the headquarters of Teagasc, Ireland’s agricultural agency, in Carlow.
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It’s the second year of what are scheduled to be three-year field trials. But even if the results from next year are similarly encouraging, Teagasc has no intention of giving farmers access to the plant, which was developed by researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Such genetically engineered crops remain controversial in Europe, and only two are approved for planting in the EU. Though Mullins and his colleagues are eager to learn how blight affects the GM potatoes and whether the plants will affect soil microbes, distributing the modified plant in Ireland is, at least for now, a nonstarter.
Nevertheless, the fields of Carlow present a tantalizing picture of how genetically modified crops could help protect the world’s food supply. Blight-resistant potatoes would be one of the first major foods genetically engineered to incorporate defenses against plant diseases, which annually destroy some 15 percent of the world’s agricultural harvest. Despite the heavy use of fungicides, late blight and other plant diseases ruin an estimated fifth of the world’s potatoes, a food increasingly grown in China and India. Stem rust, a fungal disease of wheat, has spread through much of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and is now threatening the vast growing regions of central and south Asia, which produce some 20 percent of the world’s wheat. Bananas, which are a primary source of food in countries such as Uganda, are often destroyed by wilt disease. In all these cases, genetic engineering has the potential to create varieties that are far better able to withstand the onslaught.
GM potatoes could also lead to a new generation of biotech foods sold directly to consumers. Though transgenic corn, soybeans, and cotton—mostly engineered to resist insects and herbicides—have been widely planted since the late 1990s in the United States and in a smattering of other large agricultural countries, including Brazil and Canada, the corn and soybean crops go mainly into animal feed, biofuels, and cooking oils. No genetically modified varieties of rice, wheat, or potatoes are widely grown, because opposition to such foods has discouraged investment in developing them and because seed companies haven’t found ways to make the kind of money on those crops that they do from genetically modified corn and soybeans.
With the global population expected to reach more than nine billion by 2050, however, the world might soon be hungry for such varieties. Although agricultural productivity has improved dramatically over the past 50 years, economists fear that these improvements have begun to wane at a time when food demand, driven by the larger number of people and the growing appetites of wealthier populations, is expected to rise between 70 and 100 percent by midcentury. In particular, the rapid increases in rice and wheat yields that helped feed the world for decades are showing signs of slowing down, and production of cereals will need to more than double by 2050 to keep up. If the trend continues, production might be insufficient to meet demand unless we start using significantly more land, fertilizer, and water.
Climate change is likely to make the problem far worse, bringing higher temperatures and, in many regions, wetter conditions that spread infestations of disease and insects into new areas. Drought, damaging storms, and very hot days are already taking a toll on crop yields, and the frequency of these events is expected to increase sharply as the climate warms. For farmers, the effects of climate change can be simply put: the weather has become far more unpredictable, and extreme weather has become far more common.
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One advantage of using genetic engineering to help crops adapt to these sudden changes is that new varieties can be created quickly. Creating a potato variety through conventional breeding, for example, takes at least 15 years; producing a genetically modified one takes less than six months. Genetic modification also allows plant breeders to make more precise changes and draw from a far greater variety of genes, gleaned from the plants’ wild relatives or from different types of organisms. Plant scientists are careful to note that no magical gene can be inserted into a crop to make it drought tolerant or to increase its yield—even resistance to a disease typically requires multiple genetic changes. But many of them say genetic engineering is a versatile and essential technique.
“It’s an overwhelmingly logical thing to do,” says Jonathan Jones, a scientist at the Sainsbury Laboratory in the U.K. and one of the world’s leading experts on plant diseases. The upcoming pressures on agricultural production, he says, “[are] real and will affect millions of people in poor countries.” He adds that it would be “perverse to spurn using genetic modification as a tool.”
It’s a view that is widely shared by those responsible for developing tomorrow’s crop varieties. At the current level of agricultural production, there’s enough food to feed the world, says Eduardo Blumwald, a plant scientist at the University of California, Davis. But “when the population reaches nine billion?” he says. “No way, José.”
Failed promises
The promise that genetically modified crops could help feed the world is at least as old as the commercialization of the first transgenic seeds in the mid-1990s. The corporations that helped turn genetically engineered crops into a multibillion-dollar business, including the large chemical companies Monsanto, Bayer, and DuPont, promoted the technology as part of a life science revolution that would greatly increase food production. So far it’s turned out, for a number of reasons, to have been a somewhat empty promise.
To be sure, bioengineered crops are a huge commercial success in some countries. The idea is simple but compelling: by inserting a foreign gene derived from, say, bacteria into corn, you can give the plant a trait it wouldn’t otherwise possess. Surveys estimate that more than 170 million hectares of such transgenic crops are grown worldwide. In the United States, the majority of corn, soybeans, and cotton planted have been engineered with a gene from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringensis—Bt—to ward off insects or with another bacterial gene to withstand herbicides. Worldwide, 81 percent of the soybeans and 35 percent of the corn grown are biotech varieties. In India, Bt cotton was approved more than a decade ago and now represents 96 percent of the cotton grown in the country.
Yet it’s not clear whether that boom in transgenic crops has led to increased food production or lower prices for consumers. Take corn, for example. In the United States, 76 percent of the crop is genetically modified to resist insects, and 85 percent can tolerate being sprayed with a weed killer. Such corn has, arguably, been a boon to farmers, reducing pesticide use and boosting yields. But little of U.S. corn production is used directly for human food; about 4 percent goes into high–fructose corn syrup and 1.8 percent to cereal and other foods. Genetically modified corn and soybeans are so profitable that U.S. farmers have begun substituting them for wheat: around 56 million acres of wheat were planted in 2012, down from 62 million in 2000. As supply fell, the price of a bushel of wheat rose to nearly $8 in 2012, from $2.50 in 2000.
So far, the short list of transgenic crops used directly for food includes virus-resistant papaya grown in Hawaii, Bt sweet corn recently commercialized in the United States by Monsanto, and a few varieties of squash that resist plant viruses. That list could be about to grow, however. The Indonesian agricultural agency expects to approve a blight-resistant potato soon, and J.?R. Simplot, an agricultural supplier based in Boise, Idaho, is hoping to commercialize its own version by 2017. Monsanto, which abandoned an attempt to develop GM wheat in 2004, bought a wheat-seed company in 2009 and is now trying again. And Cornell researchers are working with collaborators in India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines, countries where eggplant is a staple, to make an insect-resistant form of the vegetable available to farmers.
These bioengineered versions of some of the world’s most important food crops could help fulfill initial hopes for genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. But they will also almost certainly heat up the debate over the technology. Opponents worry that inserting foreign genes into crops could make food dangerous or allergenic, though more than 15 years of experience with transgenic crops have revealed no health dangers, and neither have a series of scientific studies. More credibly, detractors suggest that the technology is a ploy by giant corporations, particularly Monsanto, to peddle more herbicides, dominate the agricultural supply chain, and leave farmers dependent on high-priced transgenic seeds. The most persuasive criticism, however, may simply be that existing transgenic crops have done little to guarantee the future of the world’s food supply in the face of climate change and a growing population.
The first generation of insect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant crops offer few new traits, such as drought tolerance and disease resistance, that could help the plants adapt to changes in weather and disease patterns, acknowledges Margaret Smith, a professor of plant breeding and genetics at Cornell University. Nonetheless, she says there is no valid reason to dismiss the technology as plant scientists race to increase crop productivity. Scientists are “facing a daunting breeding challenge,” Smith says. “We will need a second generation of transgenic crops. It would be a mistake to rule out this tool because the first products didn’t address the big issues.”
Developing crops that are better able to withstand climate change won’t be easy. It will require plant scientists to engineer complex traits involving multiple genes. Durable disease resistance typically requires a series of genetic changes and detailed knowledge of how pathogens attack the plant. Traits such as tolerance to drought and heat are even harder, since they can require basic changes to the plant’s physiology.
Is genetic engineering up to the task? No one knows. But recent genomic breakthroughs are encouraging. Scientists have sequenced the genomes of crops such as rice, potatoes, bananas, and wheat. At the same time, advances in molecular biology mean that genes can be deleted, modified, and inserted with far greater precision. In particular, new genome engineering tools known as Talens and Crispr allow geneticists to “edit” plant DNA, changing chromosomes exactly where they want.
Exact Edits
The workshop adjacent to the rows of greenhouses at the edge of Cornell’s campus in Ithaca, New York, smells musty and damp from the crates of potatoes. It is less than a mile from the university’s molecular biology labs, but what you see are wooden conveyer belts, wire screens, and water hoses. Walter De Jong is sorting and sizing harvested potatoes as part of a multiyear effort to come up with yet a better variety for the region’s growers. Boxes are filled with potatoes—some small and round, others large and misshapen. Asked what traits are important to consumers, he smiles slyly and says, “Looks, looks, looks.”
The question of how he feels about efforts to develop transgenic potatoes is not as easily answered. It’s not that De Jong is opposed to genetic engineering. As a potato breeder, he’s well versed in conventional methods of introducing new traits, but he also has a PhD in plant pathology and has done considerable research in molecular biology; he knows the opportunities that advanced genetics opens up. In the northeastern United States, a variety of potato is optimized for about a 500-mile radius, taking into account the length of the growing season and the type of weather in the area. Climate change means these growing zones are shifting, making crop breeding like solving a puzzle in which the pieces are moving around. The speed offered by genetic modification would help. But, De Jong says dismissively, “I don’t expect to use [transgenic] technology. I can’t afford it.”
“It’s a curious situation,” he says. Scientists at public and academic research institutions have done much of the work to identify genes and understand how they can affect traits in plants. But the lengthy testing and regulatory processes for genetically modified crops, and the danger that consumers will reject them, mean that only “a handful of large companies” can afford the expense and risk of developing them, he says.
But De Jong suddenly becomes animated when he’s asked about the newest genome engineering tools. “This is what I have been waiting my whole career for,” he says, throwing his hands up. “As long as I have been a potato scientist, I’ve wanted two things: a sequenced potato genome and the ability to modify the genome at will.” Across campus, De Jong also runs a molecular biology lab, where he has identified the DNA sequence responsible for red pigment in potato tubers. Soon, it could be possible to precisely alter that sequence in a potato cell that can then be grown into a plant: “If I had a white potato I wanted to turn red, I could just edit one or two nucleotides and get the color I want.” Plant breeding “is not the art of shuffling genes around,” De Jong explains. “Basically, all potatoes have the same genes; what they have is different versions of the genes—alleles. And alleles differ from one another in a few nucleotides. If I can edit the few nucleotides, why breed for [a trait]? It’s been the holy grail in plant genetics for a long time.”
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One implication of the new tools is that plants can be genetically modified without the addition of foreign genes. Though it’s too early to tell whether that will change the public debate over GMOs, regulatory agencies—at least in the United States—indicate that crops modified without foreign genes won’t have to be scrutinized as thoroughly as transgenic crops. That could greatly reduce the time and expense it takes to commercialize new varieties of genetically engineered foods. And it’s possible that critics of biotechnology could draw a similar distinction, tolerating genetically modified crops so long as they are not transgenic.
Dan Voytas, director of the genome engineering center at the University of Minnesota and one of Talens’s inventors, says one of his main motivations is the need to feed another two billion people by the middle of the century. In one of his most ambitious efforts, centered at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, the Philippines, he is collaborating with a worldwide network of researchers to rewrite the physiology of rice. Rice and wheat, like other grains, have what botanists call C3 photosynthesis, rather than the more complex C4 version that corn and sugarcane have. The C4 version of photosynthesis uses water and carbon dioxide far more efficiently. If the project is successful, both rice and wheat yields could be increased in regions that are becoming hotter and drier as a result of climate change.
Rewriting the core workings of a plant is not a trivial task. But Voytas says Talens could be a valuable tool—both to identify the genetic pathways that might be tweaked and to make the many necessary genetic changes.
The pressure to help feed the growing population at a time when climate change is making more land marginal for agriculture is “the burden that plant biologists bear,” Voytas says. But he’s optimistic. Over much of the last 50 years, he points out, crop productivity has made repeated gains, attributable first to the use of hybrid seeds, then to the new plant varieties introduced during the so-called Green Revolution, and “even to the first GM plants.” The introduction of the new genome engineering tools, he says, “will be another inflection point.”
If he’s right, it might be just in time.
Heat Wave
For agronomists, plant breeders, and farmers, it’s all about yield—the amount a crop produces in a hectare. The remarkable increases in crop yields beginning in the middle of the 20th century are the main reason that we have enough food to go from feeding three billion people in 1960 to feeding seven billion in 2011 with only a slight increase in the amount of land under cultivation. Perhaps most famously, the Green Revolution spearheaded by the Iowa-born plant pathologist and geneticist Norman Borlaug substantially increased yields of wheat, corn, and rice in many parts of the world. It did so, in part, by introducing more productive crop varieties, starting in Mexico and then in Pakistan, India, and other countries. But for at least the past decade, increases in the yields of wheat and rice seem to have slowed. Yields of wheat, for example, are growing at roughly 1 percent annually; they need to increase nearly 2 percent annually to keep up with food demand over the long term. Agricultural experts warn that yields will have to improve for other crops as well if we are to feed a rapidly growing population—and yet rising temperatures and other effects of global climate change will make this tougher to achieve.
David Lobell, a professor of environmental earth system science at Stanford University, has a calm demeanor that belies his bleak message about how global warming is already affecting crops. The effects of climate change on agriculture have been widely debated, but recently Lobell and his collaborators have clarified the projections by combing through historical records of weather and agricultural production. They found that from 1980 to 2008, climate change depressed yields of wheat and corn; yields still rose during that time, but overall production was 2 to 3 percent less than it would have been if not for global warming. This has held true across most of the regions where corn and wheat are grown.
The finding is startling because it suggests that global warming has already had a significant impact on food production and will make an even bigger difference as climate change intensifies. “Anything that causes yield [growth] to flatten out is a concern,” says Lobell. And while overall yields of wheat and corn are still increasing, he says, “climate change becomes a concern long before you have negative yield trends.”
Even more disturbing, Lobell and his collaborator Wolfram Schlenker, an economist at Columbia University, have found evidence that in the case of several important crops, the negative effect of global warming is more strongly tied to the number of extremely hot days than to the rise in average temperatures over a season. If that’s true, earlier research might have severely underestimated the impact of climate change by looking only at average temperatures.
Schlenker’s calculations show steady increases in corn and soybean yields as the temperature rises from 10 °C into the 20s—but at around 29 °C for corn and 30 °C for soybeans, the crops are “hit hard” and yields drop dramatically. In subsequent work, Lobell showed that hot days were doing far more damage to wheat in northern India than previously thought.
A surprising and troubling detail of the research, says Schlenker, is that crops and farmers don’t seem to have adapted to the increased frequency of hot days. “What surprised me most and should inform us going forward,” he says, “is that there has been tremendous progress in agricultural breeding—average yields have gone up more than threefold since the 1950s—but if you look at sensitivity to extreme heat, it seems to be just as bad as it was in the 1950s. We need to have crops that are better at dealing with hot climates.” During the heat wave that hit much of the United States in 2012, he says, yields of corn were down 20 percent, and “2012 is not that unusual a year compared to what the climate models predict will be a new normal pretty soon.”
It’s possible that plants are simply hardwired to shut down at temperatures above 30 °C. Indeed, Schlenker says he’s not convinced that crops can be engineered to adapt to the increased frequency of hot days, though he hopes he’s wrong. Likewise, Lobell wants his work to better define which aspects of climate change are damaging crops and thus help target the needed genetic changes. But, like Schlenker, he is unsure whether genetics can provide much of an answer.
In California’s Central Valley, one of the world’s most productive agricultural areas, UC Davis’s Blumwald acknowledges that scientists have “never bred for stresses” like drought and heat. But he aims to change that. Inserting a combination of genes for tolerance to heat, drought, and high soil salinity into rice and other plants, Blumwald is creating crops that have at least some advantages during extreme weather conditions, particularly during key times in their growth cycle.
The challenge is to avoid reducing yields under good growing conditions. So Blumwald has identified a protein that activates the inserted genes only under adverse conditions. “There’s no cure for drought. If there’s no water, the plant dies. I’m not a magician,” he says. “We just want to delay the stress response as long as possible in order to maintain yields until the water comes.”
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Note that the California farm belt is experiencing its driest season on record.
Continuing...
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Daily Bread...
Wheat is also emblematic of the struggles facing agriculture as it attempts to keep up with a growing population and a changing climate. Not only have the gains in yield begun to slow, but wheat is particularly sensitive to rising temperatures and is grown in many regions, such as Australia, that are prone to severe droughts. What’s more, wheat is vulnerable to one of the world’s most dreaded plant diseases: stem rust, which is threatening the fertile swath of Pakistan and northern India known as the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Conventional breeding techniques have made remarkable progress against these problems, producing varieties that are increasingly drought tolerant and disease resistant. But biotechnology offers advantages that shouldn’t be ignored.
“Climate change doesn’t change [the challenge for plant breeders], but it makes it much more urgent,” says Walter Falcon, deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford. Falcon was one of the foot soldiers of the Green Revolution, working in the wheat-growing regions of Pakistan and in Mexico’s Yaqui Valley. But he says the remarkable increases in productivity achieved between 1970 and 1995 have largely “played out,” and he worries about whether the technology–intensive farming in those regions can be sustained. He says the Yaqui Valley remains highly productive—recent yields of seven tons of wheat per hectare “blow your mind”—but the heavy use of fertilizers and water is “pushing the limits” of current practices. Likewise, Falcon says he is worried about how climate change will affect agriculture in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the home of nearly a billion people.
Asked whether transgenic technology will solve any of these problems, he answers, “I’m not holding my breath,” citing both scientific reasons and opposition to GM crops. But he does expect advances in genetic technologies over the next decade to create wheat varieties that are better equipped to withstand pests, higher temperatures, and drought.
It is quite possible that the first and most dramatic of the advances will come in adapting crops to the shifting patterns of disease. And as Teagasc’s Ewen Mullins puts it, “if you want to study plant diseases, you come to Ireland.”
A hundred kilometers from the idyllic fields in Carlow, Fiona Doohan, a plant pathologist at University College Dublin, is developing wheat varieties that stand up to local diseases and trying to understand how plant pathogens might evolve with climate change. At the school’s agricultural experiment station, she uses growing chambers in which the concentration of carbon dioxide can be adjusted to mimic the higher levels expected in 2050. The experiments have yielded a nasty surprise. When wheat and the pathogens that commonly afflict it are put in the chamber with the increased levels of carbon dioxide, the plant remains resistant to the fungus. But when both are separately grown through several generations under 2050 conditions and then placed together, Doohan says, the plants “crash.” This suggests, ominously, that plant pathogens might be far better and faster than wheat at adapting to increased carbon dioxide.
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What a wonderful surprise: So are researchers finding that heat shocks are going to be particularly damaging to staple crops like wheat. But on top of that, when they studied the impact of a 2050 climate on wheat they found that the wheat could adapt to the higher CO2 levels but wheat’s pathogens adapted faster and better to the new conditions. And when the two were allowed to adapt separately and then combined, the plants were overwhelmed by their more-rapidly-adapting pest. It’s a nasty surprise that highlights the grim reality that today’s pests can effectively become tomorrow’s super-pests simply by adapting more rapidly to the oncoming stresses climate change. And since pests almost always adapt more rapidly than the their more complex target organisms to changing conditions and since pests are bound to move into new regions as the climate warms, it sounds like we could be in for a global tidal wave of super-pests preying on some very stressed out plants.
That’s not a very fun sounding scenario but it is what it is. It’s also our future. Or might be. And as the above author points out, if the impact of climate change on crop yields really is worse then we’ve been led to believe, committing to a GMO-free future may be a hard sell decades from if when crops are dying at greater-than-expected rates. And if the situation is looking so dire that global hunger could be looming over the horizon, why, as one of the researchers in the article pointed out, do we have this situation?
“It’s a curious situation,” he says. Scientists at public and academic research institutions have done much of the work to identify genes and understand how they can affect traits in plants. But the lengthy testing and regulatory processes for genetically modified crops, and the danger that consumers will reject them, mean that only “a handful of large companies” can afford the expense and risk of developing them, he says.
Leaving the development of GMO tools that could be needed to avoid a mass calamity over the next century in the hands of a handful of large corporations like Monsanto and Bayer with long track-record of prioritizing profit-maximization is, well, strange. And it’s especially strange when the future biotech tools that we all might need in the future could, if misused, also lead to mass calamity. As the above article pointed out, existing GMO crops have been quite profitable, but they haven’t really done much to increase the food supply. It raises the question of whether or not the profit-motive is going to be at all adequate to incentivize the development of tools we’re going to need when that development is conducted by a handful of profit-maxizing giants. And if not, are there other options?:
Slate
Let’s Make Genetically Modified Food Open-Source
It will help fight climate change and stick one in Monsanto’s eye.
By Frederick KaufmanNot too long ago, popular wisdom ran that molecular biologists were going to save billions of people from starvation by genetically engineering crops resistant to flood, freeze, and drought; crops that could blossom from desiccated soil and bloom in salty sand; crops that could flourish despite an atmosphere saturated with carbon dioxide and rays of sunshine riddled with radiation. A waterless seed was the next killer app.
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But despite the hopes of Borlaug and the hype of Enright, genetically modified crops as we know them have as a general rule increased agriculture’s reliance on a system of expensive “inputs”—agro-speak for the proprietary seeds and herbicides that have brought untold profits to multinationals such as Monsanto and Dow. The reputation of transgenic crops has tanked, as what was once a harbinger of green technology is now commonly perceived as a source of genetic pollution and has thus become anathema for many environmentalists.
The GMO story has become mired in the eco-wrecking narrative of industrial agriculture, and that is too bad for those who understand the real risks of climate change and discern our desperate need for innovation. And while the blue-sky hype of a genetically secured food supply has not become a reality, there have been a few breakthroughs. Even as climate change has increased the prevalence of many plant diseases, the new science can take credit for genetic inoculations that saved Hawaii’s papaya business. It’s also led to flood-resistant rice, created by Pamela Ronald of the University of California–Davis.
Of course, the party-line foodie dare not say anything positive about GMOs, at risk of being labeled a stooge of the foodopolists. And it’s true: Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, and Pioneer are not interested in GMO innovations that might help the bottom billion—molecular ramp-ups of crops like cassava, millet, or teff. They are not interested in low-insecticide eggplants that would help clean urban water supplies in South Asia. There’s not enough money in it for them.
But the truth is that GM products aren’t just necessary to help create an agriculture system that can survive in a post–climate-change world—they may actually help ameliorate global warming. As David Zilbermans, professor of agriculture and resource economics at the University of California–Berkeley has noted, “Adoption of herbicide tolerant varieties enabled transition to minimal tillage techniques, which reduced the greenhouse gas effect of agriculture equivalent to hundreds of thousands of cars annually. GMOs make it possible to produce food on less land, reducing the incentive of converting wild land into agricultural land.”
So the question looms: How can we harness the possible positives of GMOs without lining the pockets of the pharmers?
GMO agriculture relies on the relatively new science of bioinformatics (a mixture of bio- and information science), which means that DNA sequences look a lot more like software code than a vegetable garden. And if Monsanto is the Microsoft of food supply—raking in the rent on bites instead of bytes—perhaps the time has come for the agricultural equivalent of Linux, the open-source operating system that made computer programming a communal effort.
Open-source GMO is a new idea for food justice activists, who have been concentrating their efforts on depleting Monsanto’s market share through consumer advocacy and political reform. Labeling laws for genetically modified organisms in the retail foodstream are about to land in statehouses across the country. But genetic modification does not equal Monsanto and Pioneer. The time has come to separate the dancer from the dance and admit that it is possible to be against big-agriculture and for scientific advancement.
Open-source is the quickest way to undermine proprietary rights to food molecules, those rights that guarantee profit streams for transnationals while condemning the earth to a monocultural future of agriculture with no regard for agroecology. For the surest way to sabotage Monsanto is not to label but to sap its income. Already, a number of biotech pioneers have followed the open-source examples of Apache and Wikipedia. The database of the human genome mapping project has been free since it was published in 2003. The genetic map of rice has been made available at no charge to researchers worldwide. And the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has made its “Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture” a transnational paradigm of free-flowing information. Agricultural researchers in developing countries need not pay a penny to review all the latest life science research published in more than 3,000 academic journals.
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Everyone interested in global food knows that agriculture has had a largely negative impact on global warming, but few have recognized that legal reform of food-related intellectual property laws can help ensure a path to a more ecologically secure future. No doubt, biological “input” is far more complex than computer “input,” but the idea of a swarm of bio-hackers bringing down Monsanto and Dow is too delightful to dismiss. Throw climate change into the picture, and the stakes are simply too high for continuing the status quo of patented food. Neither information nor lunch may want to be free, but eventually we will need to get around to the business of sequencing proteins that have less to do with quarterly profits and more to do with centuries of ecological abuse. And those will be the only inputs that matter when the big heat hits.
Excited for your open source GMO future? Monsanto, Dow, and Bayer probably aren’t very excited by the idea. The bees might be if it leads to faster development of bee-friendly pest control technologies. But at the end of the day, if we want to ensure that resources are invested into developing the kinds of biotech tools that humanity needs — as opposed to the biotech tools that corporations find most profitable — something new is going to have to be tried if humanity wants to avoid having its golden goose cooked in the coming decades.
But when we’re swimming in a sea of confusing biotech-speculation and calamitous prognostications, let’s keep in mind that there are some very simple solutions to ensuring global food supplies in the future and they mostly revolve around needed less of it. For instance, we could go a long way towards saving the bees (and a lot of hungry people) if we could just stop eating the birds and their four-legged friends. Not interested yet? Just wait. Or we could cut down on the total farmland needed by no longer throwing so much food away for no good reason . Or we could maybe just stop throwing substances like neonicotinoids on so many crops and use them only as a last resort. Or all of the above.
And yet, as we’ve seen, seemingly simple solutions like banning neonicotinoids to save something as crucial as bees can be a surprisingly complicated process. Part of this complication is due to the fact that answering questions like “how much are neonicotinoids contributing bee deaths” is a really hard question to answer. But another part of this complication is due to the fact that saving the bees often involve helping the pests and harming crops. And in the case of Bt corn, it’s a particularly profitable crop that’s mostly used for cattle and fuel making it an awful win-lose situation with a lot of money involved. When it comes to saving the bees, Big Ag potentially has to make major shifts in how it does what it does and giants like Bayer and Monsanto stand to lose billions if sustainable farming becomes the norm. From a financial standpoint there are heavy prices to be paid by many powerful private entities if we achieve the bee-friendly future too soon. And yet, from a profit standpoint, the last decade has been when Big Ag can most afford to change its ways. And from a biological/ecological standpoint, there might never be a be a better chance than right now to clean up our food supply and put the planet on a sustainable, bee-friendly food future — yes, even now — because it’s only getting worse from here. For the moment, we can still afford to shift to a sustainable, bee-friendly world and ditch whatever GMO tech or any other industrial agriculture practices that are just not going to be viable going forward (no matter how profitable they may be). We can still do all that feed ourselves because so much of what we grow is used for things other than food and so much food is wasted (which also happens to be much of what gets sprayed with neonicotinoids).
But in the future, as populations grow and the climate changes, the food-supply flexibility of today may no longer exist. Just keeping the world fed when using next-generation high-yield GMO foods could become a problem if climate change is significantly worse than expected (or about as bad as expected). The short-term costs of ditching Franken-corn and its GMO-food-friends may be significantly higher under many feasible future scenarios so when we’re pondering “what do we do about the bees?” we should keep in mind that this is one of this situations where waiting and hoping for technical advances to fix the problem in the future might be a really bad, and expensive approach.
So from a profit standpoint, there’s a corporate profit vs bees dynamic at the moment. In the long-term, however, it’s either the choice of both the bees and humanity living together in harmony of sorts or waaaaaaaaay fewer flowering species and a big loss of biodiversity. Life could go on, and the patented domestic super-bees would probably survive through human intervention, but a big swathe of life would disappear if the native bees go. The longer we put off shifting to a bee-friendly agricultural paradigm, the more costly and dire those short-term costs are going to be when we do finally make the bee-friendly shift.
At present, the current best technological hope for the bees seems to be the ant-mite RNAi sugar-water. That’s kind of scary. While we may not want to ban the use of GMO technology outright (because we may not have that option decades from now), it’s a pretty big sign of civilizational failure if we have to rely on a set of tools that perpetually create super-pests just to feed ourselves. That’s insane. It would be like pointlessly pumping cattle full of antibiotics just to create super-bugs for us to eat. Only a crazy species would do that. So it’s doesn’t bode well or us that RNAi sprays are the new hot thing to fix that problems with the previous new hot things. At least there’s the neonicotinoid ban in the EU now but we’ll see how long it lasts. The ban is certainly one of the best signs we’ve seen in while. And maybe the neonicotinoids really are innocent, or at least not as culpable for the bee colony collapses as presumed. As we’ve seen, there are plenty of other culprits. But regardless of which combination of factors is killing the bees, the disappearance of the bees is something to prepare for if this trend continues because the bee is the super-canary in the coal mine: if it dies, a whole bunch of other things die too. Forever.
While this may sound grim, keep in mind that there do exist more controversial solutions that ensure our demands for food don’t take collapse parts of the biosphere but, while simple and elegant, may not be for everyone: For instance, instead of genetically modifying the rest of the biosphere to suit our needs, how about we make a few small tweaks to ourselves? Specifically, we need to make our hair much more moth and algae-friendly. That’s it. No other changes and...dinner is served! Maybe there’s a nice RNAi shampoo that can do the trick. No? How about a lovely hat that feeds you. Still no? Luddite. Hmmm... there’s a certain advanced technique that could feed the world and help control pests simultaneously and everyone can play a role in implementing this technique. But, really, most of you will probably prefer the hat. Still no?! Well, there always the meat-lover’s option.
@Pterrafractyl–
Note that both Bayer and BASF are evolved from I.G. Farben and are both integral, foundational elements of the Bormann capital network.
https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-411-the-bayer-facts-ig-farben-and-the-politics-of-murder/
Best,
Dave
Housekeeping note: Comments 1–50 available here
@Dave: Here’s another interesting twist to Bayer’s bid for Monsanto: On the same day Monsanto made that bid, the EU was scheduled to vote on whether or not glyphosate, the key ingredient to Monsanto’s wildly used Roundup pesticide that Monsanto’s GMO seeds are designed to be withstand, should be banned in the EU or be relicensed for another nine years. And as the article below points out, while Germany’s agriculture minister was in favor or relicensing the pesticide, the SPD reversed course and called for a ban due to both environmental and possible health concerns. So at the same time Bayer and BASF are poised to gobble up Monsanto and its spun off pieces, one of the crown jewels of Monsanto could get banned in the EU:
“If the German government cannot agree, it will have to abstain from Thursday’s vote, making a majority vote in favor of the extension unlikely. That could leave the decision in the hands of the European Commission.”
Yes, Germany’s government found itself unable to arrive at a conclusion and abstained from the vote. So what happened with the vote? It didn’t happen:
“If no decision is reached to extend the license, a spokesman said the company could not rule out seeking legal remedy.”
So on the same day the EU was scheduled to vote on whether or not to ban glyphosate, the vote gets called off in large part due to conflicting German government opinion and Bayer makes a surprise, unsolicited bid for Monsanto. And the current license expires June 30. And all that means there’s going to be quite a flurry of lobbying and negotiating over the next month, along with threats of lawsuits like Monsanto made. On top of all that, France’s powerful agriculture industry appears to want to see glyphosate banned.
So it’s going to be pretty interesting to see how this plays out. With over two thirds of Europeans and 70 percent of Germans wanting to see glyphosate banned, companies like Bayer are going to have quite a public relations problem on their hands. And a lobbying problem it would seem. And while it doesn’t seem like announcing a desire to buy Monsanto is going to help Bayer’s public image, it sure could help with the government lobbying! Or maybe not. We’ll see. It’s not like Bayer and BASF are new to the PR game.
Bayer-Monsanto may be good Rx for agribusiness
http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=101934&topicId=152270019&docId=l:2585857374&Em=7&start=7
With the US celebrating Independence Day by blowing up a large volume time explosives, it’s probably as good a day as any to note that the very first US patent (Patent X000001), was a patent for refining potash, the potassium-containing compound that serves as a key natural resource for making everything from fertilizer to gunpowder. Neat.
It’s also worth noting that the potash is only found a relative handful of locations around the globe, which means it’s basically a global oligopoly, like oil, but with a smaller number of suppliers. So small that when Russia’s Uralkali broke away from a partnership with Belaruskali in 2103, it was seen as a global potash game changer that was going to bring on a global price war. Which is what happened.
So as Americans celebrate Independence Day with a potash-fueled food and fireworks, it’s worth noting that our ability to blow things up and eat fertilizer-grown food while doing it is tied to a resource that’s controlled by a global oligopoly in them midst of a price war with itself. Could be worse:
“Some suggest they should take a page from Saudi Arabia’s oil strategy, boosting production to drive out higher-cost competitors, with the goal of maximizing profit over time.”
It sure sounds like the potash market’s biggest players are considering an OPEC-style potash price war designed to drive higher-cost competition out of business. The more prices implode, the more Big Potash’s appetite to cannibalize itself grows.
So that should hold down prices for things like fertilizer and fireworks, although don’t be surprised if your fireworks still get pricier. Most of the US’s fireworks are made in China and there’s a firework industry labor shortage and not just in China. There’s a glut of potash due to a small cartel’s global civil-war, but not enough people to take the assemble the fireworks because it’s done by hand to avoid accidents, although robots will eventually take over.
So while you’re lighting that fuse, take a moment to keep in mind that someone working in a factory probably made your explosive toy by hand. Probably for too little pay. If there’s an appropriate way to enhance the spirit of America’s Independence Day, it would be to push for a global campaign to ensure fireworks are made by well-paid people working in safe conditions. You can’t truly celebrate an Independence Day without the spirit of Labor Day.
Yes, it might increase the price of the fireworks, but if we’re going to have a potash cartel price war, isn’t this one of the best times to push for global firework worker protections and rights? It’s always a good time to push for firework worker rights, but a potash price war just makes it a better time. And what’s a better way for the US to celebrate its national sovereignty than a global campaign for pyrotechnical worker rights and protections? Shouldn’t that be part of Independence Day? It isn’t just in the spirit of Independence Day but enhances it because it’s something we’re free to do and it’s the right thing to do. Let’s do that.
Here’s some good news/bad news for the bees. First, the good news: after seven species of Hawaiian bees were added to the endangered species list back in September, the first bee species ever added to the list, the rusty patch bumblebee was placed on the Fish and Wildlife Service’s endangered species list in the few weeks of the Obama administration, making it the first bee in the continental US to make it onto the list.
The bad news, as you probably guessed, is, of course, the Trump administration:
“The NRDC’s Riley noted that as the EPA reassess neonics, it is obligated to consider the insecticides’ impact on endangered species. If the rusty patched bumblebee makes it onto the list, that would place an endangered species that’s clearly harmed by neonics directly into the region where the lucrative chemicals are most widely used—possibly forcing it to restrict neonic use in those areas. It’s worth noting that the man Trump chose to lead the EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, works for the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, which runs a website, SafeChemicalPolicy.org, that exists to downplay the health and ecological impacts of chemicals. More on that here.”
Yep, since the EPA is obligated to consider the impact of insecticides’ on endangered species, the the impact of neonicotinoids on at least one species of bee will have to be considered when the EPA reassesses neonicotinoids. Which is exactly why we should probably expect the Trump administration’s “freeze” of the rusty patched bumblebee’s endangered status to turn into a revocation. Well, maybe not exactly why we should expect it. The Trump administration’s endless desire to kiss corporate asses and general disdain for life on earth might also have something to do with it. Regardless of the reason, it’s hard to see how first bee in the continental US to make it onto the endangered species list is going to stay on that list in an era when the GOP controls all branches of the federal government and four of the states where the rusty patched bumblebee is still found are in the “US Corn Belt”. Especially given the endangered status of the endangered species list:
“The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held hearings on Wednesday to discuss legislation that would weaken the Endangered Species Act, according to The Washington Post. These hearings occurred even as the House Natural Resources Committee is considering an outright repeal the bill, with Committee Chairman Rob Bishop claiming that its main reason for existing is “to control the land.” Senate Republicans argue that the bill violates states’ rights and property rights, as well as limits economic growth in drilling, mining, and agriculture.”
Well, so long rusty patched bumblebee. And everyone else on the list.
Presumably they all had it coming. Or maybe that’s us.
Here’s something to keep in mind as climate change increasingly threatens global food supplies while simultaneously increasing the prevalence of diseases that will require health immune systems to fight off: while it’s often thought that one of the benefits of having more CO2 in the atmosphere is that at least plants will have more carbon to grow, there’s a potentially significant downside to that enhanced growth. According to researchers looking into the largely unexamined relationship between atmospheric CO2 levels and plant nutrition, that extra CO2 appears to be screwing up plant metabolism and slowing turning plants into low-nutrient junk food:
“These experiments and others like them have shown scientists that plants change in important ways when they’re grown at elevated CO2 levels. Within the category of plants known as “C3”-which includes approximately 95 percent of plant species on earth, including ones we eat like wheat, rice, barley and potatoes-elevated CO2 has been shown to drive down important minerals like calcium, potassium, zinc and iron. The data we have, which look at how plants would respond to the kind of CO2 concentrations we may see in our lifetimes, show these important minerals drop by 8 percent, on average. The same conditions have been shown to drive down the protein content of C3 crops, in some cases significantly, with wheat and rice dropping 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively.”
Less vitamins, minerals and protein. That’s what we should expect as CO2 levels continue to rise. And amazingly, only a handful of people appear to have actually been looking into this phenomena over the past couple of decades. And what they are finding is that, ““Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising...We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history?[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply”:
“Fortified”, low-carb foods are probably going to be a growth industry. Along with food grown in greenhouses with controlled CO2 levels. Which will of course be a luxury most people won’t be able to afford:
And look who is already getting impacted: the bees. Of course:
“They found that the protein content of goldenrod pollen has declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in CO2.”
So that’s all something to considering when speculating about the various stresses climate change is going to impose on life on Earth: our CO2 habit is sapping the nutrition out of nature.
And in related dire news, check out the latest climate change-related positive feedback loop researchers have uncovered: as land warms, it undergoes a period of increased CO2 emissions as the bacteria in the soil use the warmth to speed of the breakdown of organic compounds still trapped in the soil until the extra organic material is broken down and a new equilibrium is reached, at which point the CO2 emissions slow. In other words, the warming up period of climate changes includes an extra CO2 burst from the soil. Periodic pulses of CO2 as part of the process of reach that new equilibrium. And we have yet to really experience that massive soil CO2 pulse during this period of warming and the amount of CO2 the expect to be released from this phenomena over the next century could be the equivalent of the last 20 years of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels:
“Scientists have long been concerned that once humans kicked off warming of the atmosphere and seas, other parts of nature will take what we’ve begun and run with it. Some things are in our control—land use, pollution from fossil-fuel combustion. A global pulse in microbial carbon-munching, however, they write, “could be very difficult, if not impossible, to halt.””
An unstoppable global pulse in microbial carbon-munching caused by warming soil. Move over cow farts. And this just might be “equivalent to the past two decades of carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning and is comparable in magnitude to the cumulative carbon losses to the atmosphere due to human-driven land use change during the past two centuries”:
That’s a lot of carbon. Extra carbon for extra-junk-foody plants everywhere.
And if humanity ends up clear cutting even more forest to grow more food in order to deal with growing populations and collapsing nutrition, that’s going to mean extra carbon pulses:
“Deforestation is obviously an enemy of forests; what the authors found was that forest degradation—losing healthy patches here or there to human or natural causes—is more damaging to carbon-soaking capacity than previously believed.”
It’s the latest reminder that the solution to trashing the ecosystem and turning it into junk food isn’t going to be to simply clear cut more forests and make more farms. Although that’s probably what we’ll end up doing anyway.
Here’s the latest news about the bees: According to a study out of Germany that’s been tracking the levels of flying insects in nature reserves, the number of flying insects have dropped by 76 percent over the past 27 years on average. And it’s an 82 percent drop during the peak summer season. As the authors of the put it, we’re looking at ecological Armageddon. The bees have company. A lot of flying dying company which can’t mean good news to the rest of the ecosystem either. If you’re an animal that eats flying insects, dinner has almost died off.
And it’s not just in Germany. Because as the following article notes, while it’s a mystery as to what exactly caused the ecological Armageddon observed in German nature reserves over the past 27 years, it’s not a complete mystery. Industrial agricultural practices are obvious a major factor and that means the observed declines in Germany are probably applicable to the rest of world where similar agriculture practices are in place. Which is almost everywhere to some extent nowadays:
“The fact that the samples were taken in protected areas makes the findings even more worrying, said Caspar Hallmann at Radboud University, also part of the research team: “All these areas are protected and most of them are well-managed nature reserves. Yet, this dramatic decline has occurred.””
Yes, we’re not talking about flying insect Armageddon in the cities and next to farms. This was in nature reserves. Might there be some agricultural pollution making its way the crop fields and into these reserves? Perhaps, and it sounds like widespread heavy pesticide use is considered the likeliest factor. But data like pesticide levels in reserves hasn’t been collected yet because the data on insect levels in reserves over the last 27 years was collected by amateurs (who were doing it in strictly standardized ways so it’s reliable data). This amateur data set is basically the first big look at this phenomena. Because governments everywhere appear to have decided to ignore the impact of Big Ag on Big Dying Nature:
“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline...We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”
FYI, those are nightmare words. And at this point we very little data from other parts of the world to see if this really is taking place elsewhere. Because as the following article notes, it’s just been assumed industrial agriculture isn’t poisoning more remote ecosystem. Apparently everywhere. So we might have been collapsing insect populations in the wild for decades and no one has been measuring it. Again, these are nightmare words:
“Any chemical you put into the environment has the potential to be widely distributed,” she said. “We’ve known this for decades, particularly through the early work in the 1960s – the Silent Spring, DDT and so on – and you can find chemicals in places that have not been treated because of the connectivity of ecosystems. There are often quite unexpected effects [and] you often don’t see them until the pesticide is used at more industrial scales.”
We’ve known about the ability of agricultural chemicals to get into the deeper ecosystem since the 1960’s. And yet it’s apparently just been assumed pesticides have no effect on remote ecosystems so no one bothered to test this. Almost everywhere:
“The effects of dosing whole landscapes with chemicals have been largely ignored by regulatory systems.”l
Just let those nightmare words sink in.
So what was Big Ag’s response to this report? Well, the following article that interviews the chief executive of the Crop Protection Association — a branch of the CropLife International lobby that includes Bayer/Monsanto — gives us an idea of what the pesticide industry’s response would be. It’s what which is what we should probably expect: many factors could be contributing, more research is needed, and pesticides can actually help contribute to biodiversity by maximizing yields and requiring less farm land. And while all of those statements are true to some extent, it’s still a rather grim answer to hear from a pesticide lobby when pesticides are the lead suspect in a recently discovered mass insect die off. Because it means Big Pesticide is unfazed and probably getting ready to do everything it can to ensure we continue not knowing about the bug die off that might kill us all:
“Crop Protection Association chief executive Sarah Mukherjee said: “While these findings are clearly concerning and further research is needed to establish whether these declines are more widespread, we should not rush to blame the nearest chemical.”
Yes, let’s not rush to blame the nearest chemical after we spend the last 60 years dumping massive amounts of pesticides in the environment and suddenly discover a mass insect die off. More studies are surely needed. Fast. So we can rush to judgement and stop the insect die off that could collapse the ecosystem.
And you have to love how crop maximization from pesticides promotes biodiversity by requiring less farm land and increasing wild spaces is used as a retort to serious concerns that pesticides might be poisoning remote wild spaces:
Those were the soothing words from the chief executive of the Crop Protection Association.
But we do have to acknowledge that even Big Pesticide can have a valid point, and when they suggest that we view the insect collaspe as as a multi-dimensional factor that probably includes more than just pesticides it’s hard to disagree. And when they say more research is needed, it’s hard to disagree with that too. Much, much more research needs to happen in this area soon.
And regarding the comments from the study author about how it’s possible that it’s not pesticides but instead something like a lack of food for flying insects, note how this same researcher previously found that neonicotinoids might be killing farmland birds. Yes, our food production methods are killing off the birds and the bees. It’s not the best symbolism:
“It could simply be there is no food for them, or it could be exposure to chemical pesticides, or a combination of the two.”
Also keep in mind that one reason there might not be adequate levels of food to feed the flying insects is because the neonicotinoids (and other man-made environmental insults) are killing off the pollinators which means fewer flowering plants to feed pollinators and non-pollinators alike. It’s an extra vicious cycle. While the collapse of the bees is typically seen as a catastrophe for human food supplies, the collapse of wild pollinators is going to starve the food supply for almost everything else too, directly or indirectly. Maybe. Perhaps we should study that. Like, with government money so amateur volunteers don’t have to do it alone.
And Big Pesticide is correct, we can’t just blame the nearest chemical. Not exclusively. Because we’re dump all sorts of chemicals in the environment. On an industrial scale, with almost no oversight, which probably isn’t good for the insects either (or anything else):
“They also concluded that pollution represented one of the “great existential challenges” of the human-dominated era.”
Pollution as an existential challenge for humanity. It seems like a reasonable assessment given the real possibility that we are current polluting ourselves into ecological oblivion. And killing lots of lots of people, and insects presumably, in the process. But we sadly have say we are presumably killing insects with all our pollution because we don’t know because we don’t study it:
And because we don’t study pollution, we have no idea how things like, say, air pollution might be impacting flying insect health, despite the fact that air pollution is the biggest sources of human deaths:
So at this point know a few key points:
1. There appears to be a mass insect die off.
2. We don’t know its extent because we don’t study it.
3. If we did study the impact of pollution we’d probably realize that human civilization urgently needs to radically overhaul itself in order to avoid eco-collapse.
4. The industries that would need to be radically overhauled would rather that not happen. They’d prefer radically overhauling the biosphere instead. By poisoning it.
5. The inability of humanity to even address this issue is part of a larger existential crisis of our inability to address almost any existential crisis.
So we know we need to know a lot more, but already know enough to know we’re probably screwed unless we act on the information we already have, and act soon. The reason all of this isn’t obviously an existential threat to everyone and a global unifying issue that prompts humanity, especially policymakers around the globe, to snap out of its daze and clean up its act remains a mystery. Perhaps we should study that too.
It looks like the recent revelations about George Papadopoulos’s hapless spy games for the Trump campaign already took their first victim: right-wing talk radio host Sam Clovis, one of the Trump campaign members who communicated with Papadopoulos about the attempt to set up meetings with the Russian government, just withdrew from the nomination process for his government position.
And what position did this right-wing talk radio host get nominated for by the Trump administration? Head of the Department of Agriculture. So was Clovis a right-wing talk radio host who also happened to have some sort scientific background in agriculture? Nope. He has basically no scientific background at all. But he is a fervent booster of right-wing junk science which presumably acts as a qualified and requirement for the Trump administration:
“When Iowa conservative talk-radio host and former flight pilot Sam Clovis was tapped by Donald Trump to be the U.S. Department of Agriculture‘s chief scientist, the choice raised more than a few eyebrows—by law, those who serve in the position must reportedly be “among distinguished scientists with specialized training or significant experience in agricultural research, education, and economics.” Clovis, on the other hand, has a doctorate in public administration from the University of Alabama, but zero experience in science. “In my judgment, I don’t see how in the world he meets the requirements of the law,” Senator Debbie Stabenow said when Clovis was nominated. “I think this is certainly something we’re exploring.””
Yep, Sam Clovis was so grossly unqualified for this position that his nomination may have actually violated the law. And yet that wasn’t what derailed his nomination. Because that’s how the US rolls these days.
Still, it’s nice to see someone so unqualified that their nomination would probably be illegal not actually get confirmed. Who knows, maybe the next nominee will be someone with an actual background in the science of agriculture.
Although as the following article about the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules reminds us, even if Clovis’s replacement nominee is an actual scientist, that doesn’t mean they won’t be an industry shill scientist. In fact, that’s basically the EPA’s new rule: industry shill scientists are now the only scientists allowed to sit on the EPA’s advisory boards. Yep. According to the EPA’s new rule, academic researchers who accepted a government grant to study a topic will not be allowed to serve on the agency’s advisory boards due to supposed concerns of “conflicts of interest.” Conflict of interest concerns that don’t appear to apply to industry representatives:
“In an unprecedented move, Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt announced a new, far-reaching directive barring scientists who receive E.P.A. grants from serving on the agency’s advisory boards. Though he pitched the directive as a means to stamp out conflicts of interest—“When we have members of those committees that have received tens of millions of dollars in grants at the same time that they’re advising this agency on rule-making, that is not good and that’s not right,” he said at an E.P.A. event on Tuesday—the move will effectively purge the boards of top academic researchers, including experts on environmental science, clearing the way for industry representatives to take their place.”
If the government gave you a grant to study a topic the EPA doesn’t want to talk to you. That’s the unprecedented move EPA administration Scott Pruitt just made, and it’s merely the latest move in Pruitt’s quest to give the most polluting industries in the country the ability to pollute with impunity.
Oh, and it probably goes without saying at this point, but it’s worth noting that Scott Pruitt doesn’t actually have a background in science. Although he does have an extensive anti-science resume which presumably makes him extra qualified for the job.
All in all, it’s pretty apparent that once this Trumpian nightmare ends there’s going to be a massive need for high quality scientists to go work for the EPA...to assess and hopefully reverse the damage to the world and future the EPA is currently accelerating. It’s one of the grand ironies of our age: the non-stop assault on the environment more or less guarantees that environmental science is going to be one of the most important future fields of study on the planet. So while the current news might make the career prospects of environmental science research seem bleak, keep in mind that we’re going to need A LOT of environmental researchers as the collapse of the biosphere progresses.
Some high quality science in the area of political ponerology would also be quite useful.
Another day, another GOP call for the casual sowing of the seeds of our own destruction. This time it’s the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, sowing the destructive seeds: Scott Pruitt just reached the next level of climate change denialism. He’s now suggesting that there isn’t enough consideration of the possibility that climate change will help humans flourish and therefore we should all stop acting like climate change is going to be a bad thing. Again, this is the head of the EPA:
“Human civilization has, until now, developed in a relatively stable climate. Rising temperatures, of around 1C since the industrial revolution, are pushing humanity into an environment it has never previously experienced. The last time sea surface temperatures were as high as now was around 120,000 years ago, when sea levels were up to 9m higher than today’s average.”
Yep, as the projected climate change plays out, humanity is going to be entering an environment that is unprecedented in human history. A much warmer Earth might be precedented for, say, alligators. But not humans. And that unprecedented climate is the climate EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt thinks has a good chance of leading to human flourishing. And he makes this prediction over the unequivocal views of the EPA’s scientists that climate change will have a net overall negative impact and the Pentagon’s assessment that it’s a national security risk:
Yes, the head of the EPA is in a league of his own when it comes to his reckless optimism. Ok, he’s not alone in that reckless optimism. Lots of people on the payroll of climate denialism lobby share Pruitt’s optimism. And the far-right around the world generally wants to see some sort of global environmental cataclysm. But within the community of public professionals tasked with responsibly dealing with issues like climate change, Scott Pruitt, the head of the EPA, is in a league of his own. A catastrophically irresponsible league of his own:
“It’s fairly arrogant for us to think we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”
It’s the people who take the perils of rapid climate change seriously who are the arrogant ones. He seriously said that.
And in a move that is simultaneously intriguing and ominous, Pruitt has been pushing for some sort of public debate between the climate change deniers like himself and the rest of the climate science community. It’s intriguing because one of the plagues of our times is the compartmentalization of information exacerbated by the internet and modern media, where people can live in ideological bubbles and remain walled off from outside information. So a public debate of this nature presents an opportunity to expose the segments of the American public — specifically the Fox New/Breitbart crowd — to a potentially educating experience. But it’s an ominous idea because it could easily be a miseducational experience for the public and filled with lies and faulty reasoning. And Scott Pruitt probably wouldn’t propose such an idea unless he was confident it could further his agenda. It’s kind of tragic that proposals for public debates have to be recognized as potential traps designed to further Big Lie agendas, but that’s where we are. The age of the Bizarro Enlightenment:
And this debate proposal raises a question: since the climate denialism lobby uses a variety of mutually incompatible argues in its denialism, which one will they take in Scott Pruitt’s debate? Will they argue that there’s no actual warming going on? That it’s actually cooling? That there is warming but it’s all primarily caused by the sun and/or water vapor and carbon emissions don’t matter? All of the above?
We’ll see. Since the general of idea of climate denialists like Pruitt is to sow enough doubt about climate science to get the public to not take it seriously. odds are we’ll see a bit of all of those arguments and a whole bunch of other ones. And one argument we’ll likely here is an extension of the argument Pruitt was just making, which is that some parts of the world will net-benefit from warming. Specifically, cold parts of the world:
So, since Scott Pruitt is signalling that the ‘benefits of climate change’ will be one of the arguments we can expect to hear more of in the future, here’s an article about an example of exactly that. Specifically, the agricultural benefits of climate change to Canada. As the article points out, there’s an estimated 26–40 percent growth in the amount of arable land in the now-frozen plains of Candad thaw and that makes Candada one of the biggest expected beneficiaries of climate change in the world. The article notes how it’s largely expected that countries like Canada are going to have to export even more food as its yields increase because so much of the rest of the world is going to see their food sources shrink. So Canada really might benefit pretty significantly from climate change. It will have more land to grow food, and demand for food will be up globally as arable land and other food sources are lost elsewhere.
So, yes, if you ignore living in a world in chaos, Canada might end up being one of the biggest beneficiaries of a warming planet. Because it’s going to be able to grow more food while the rest of the world goes increasingly hungry. In other words, it’s an example of a country benefiting from climate change that includes the implicit assumption that climate change is a disaster for the rest of the world.
And as the article also points out, climate change could still end up being a disaster for Canada too. Because the warmer it gets, the more likely Canada will experience a repeat of the ‘dust bowl’ conditions that ravaged Canada in the 1930’s along with the US. So if warming is worse that Scott Pruitt is optimistically assuming it’s going to be, even Canada might shrivel under the heat. And then there’s all the other extreme weather events that are only going to get more and more extreme the warming it gets. Like flooding.
And as the article grimly notes at the end, as bad as these risks are for Canada’s agricultural future, they’re not as bad as the risks farther south in the US. So, yes, the is some good news with climate change. For Canada and pretty much only Canada. And presumably the US with Alaska. There might be farming up there. And countries liek Russia and Finland. And that will pretty much be it in terms of the countries that might economically benefit. Because the rest of the world will be aflame as civilization buckles under the heat. So Canada’s climate-change ‘good news’ is only relatively good because it’s so bad for almost everyone else:
“Other countries are going to be affected (by climate change) much worse than we are...It’s not a really happy picture overall.”
It’s not a really happy picture overall. Sage advice from the Canadian agriculture official. And that sage advice includes all the extra food Canada gets to grow as its arable land increases:
Canada. One of the few lucky ones. Everyone celebrate.
But it could be worse. There might not be any lucky countries at all when it comes to climate change and then who would feed the world? Because someone is going to have to thanks to all the damage climate change is going to do to almost all the places in the world that aren’t Canada:
And these estimates that Canada’s agriculture will benefit from a warming planet also include the very real possibility that climate change will deliver Canada a giant dust dowl instead:
“Canada’s prairies, home to about 80 percent of its farmland, were devastated by the same long-term “Dust Bowl” drought that hit the United States in the 1930s, leading to farm failures and huge losses of topsoil.”
Too much warming and it’s giant dust bowl time for Canada’s agricultural heartland. A heartland that’s going to be needed to feed the world. Behold the future flourishing.
And if the dust bowl doesn’t hit the thawed out Canada of the future, rest of the extreme weather will. And maybe the extreme weather will hit with the dust bowl too:
And as ominous as the ‘good news’ is for Canada, it only gets worse the closer you get to the equator:
And that’s all why the ‘good news’ for Canada is actually catastrophically bad news. It’s like finding out you won the lottery, but you might end up losing bigger later and the winnings come at the future cost of global stability. It’s a lottery you really don’t want to win:
And, of course, it gets worse. That’s pretty much how climate science works in our context: the more we learn, the worse it gets. Because rapid climate change is actually really bad, despite Scott Pruitt’s optimism. So what did researchers just learn that makes this bad situation worse? Well, it’s the kind of finding that might not bode well for Canada’s agricultural future. Or Canada’s public health: It turns out the permafrost around the Arctic holds more mercury than the rest of the world’s land and oceans combined. And as that permafrost melts, which is happening in places like Canada and Alaska, all that mercury is going to be released. Into the soil first and eventually into the oceans. And eventually into fish. So it’s the kind of new bad news that’s especially for for Canada and the rest of the cold places but still quite bad for everyone else:
“According to a study published Monday (Feb. 5) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the Arctic permafrost, which, combined with permafrost in the Antarctic covers roughly 20% of the Earth’s surface, holds an estimated 15 million gallons of naturally-occurring mercury. That’s roughly 10 times more mercury there than all the mercury humans have pumped into the atmosphere over the last 30 years, according to National Geographic. It’s also almost twice as much mercury contained by all other soils, the ocean, and the atmosphere combined, according to the paper, which is the first to quantify how much mercury is trapped in the permafrost.”
Roughly 10 times more mercury is trapped in that permafrost we’re melting than all the mercury humans have pumped into the atmosphere over the last 30 years. And it’s also almost twice as much mercury contained by all other soils, the ocean, and the atmosphere combined. That’s a lot of mercury. And we’re all about to start consuming it. Because don’t forget, all that land that’s about to get extra hefty doses of new Mercury are the places that are going to have to feed the world. It’s the same soil. And as this permafrost melts, that’s already known to release large amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. So the release of the mercury is tied to a self-reinforcing dynamic that’s going to release more and more mercury. Along with more and more of all the other bad stuff that’s going to happen:
And, of course, more research is needed. In part because all the feed-back loops that could make things worse make the climate models extra complicated:
And don’t forget that the future research that’s needed to investigate issues like the release of mercury from melting permafrost is exactly the kind of research Scott Pruitt is trying to shut down as head of the EPA.
So we have a growing number of reasons for concern about calamitous consequences of rapid climate change, even for countries like Canada, paired with a climate denialist EPA administrator who feels that people aren’t paying more attention to the possibility that humanity might flourish under a warming climate. It’s one of those situations that raises the question of whether or not the far-right is trying to instigate a global climate catastrophe that kills off a massive number of people.
And that’s why it’s worth recall one of the more disturbing stories about the forces behind climate denialism: In 2010, Jane Mayer wrote a story about the Koch brothers and their role as lead funders of the climate denialism complex. And it included a description of one of the most disturbing-sounding exhibits at the Smithsonian Museums that’s ever been created. The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. It was a “multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change”. The exhibit barely mentioned fossil fuels and other man-made sources of contemporary climate change, and it includes an interactive game that suggests that humans will continue to adapt to climate change in the future. People may build “underground cities,” developing “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines,” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.”
And don’t forget that the Koch brothers are major financial backers of Scott Pruitt. So the backers of the current head of the EPA bought themselves a Smithsonian Museum exhibit back in 2010 with a big donation. And this exhibit is dedicated to climate change and human evolution and peddling a meme of humans physically evolving in response to climate change. So if you’re wonder what the billionaires pushing the pro-climate change agenda have in mind the future, it’s apparently the evolution of humanity at some point in the future to deal with the climate change:
“The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is a multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change. At the main entrance, viewers are confronted with a giant graph charting the Earth’s temperature over the past ten million years, which notes that it is far cooler now than it was ten thousand years ago. Overhead, the text reads, “HUMANS EVOLVED IN RESPONSE TO A CHANGING WORLD.” The message, as amplified by the exhibit’s Web site, is that “key human adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability.” Only at the end of the exhibit, under the headline “OUR SURVIVAL CHALLENGE,” is it noted that levels of carbon dioxide are higher now than they have ever been, and that they are projected to increase dramatically in the next century. No cause is given for this development; no mention is made of any possible role played by fossil fuels. The exhibit makes it seem part of a natural continuum. The accompanying text says, “During the period in which humans evolved, Earth’s temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fluctuated together.” An interactive game in the exhibit suggests that humans will continue to adapt to climate change in the future. People may build “underground cities,” developing “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines,” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.””
Perhaps that’s the likely plan for humanity in the minds of people like the Koch brothers and Scott Pruitt: Humanity will just evolve. Ok, well, not all of humanity. Most of us will have to die off in a century or two of climate calamity and war. And the survivors will presumably have to employ transhumanist technology and genetically engineer themselves for human evolution to happen in time to adapt with rapid climate change. But don’t forget that the far-right often views a mass die off of most of humanity as a prerequisite for humanity to ‘flourish’. It’s one of the problems with the far-right. They tend to embrace mass death as a bridge to a flourishing tomorrow.
But what we can say for sure is that if people like the Kochs or Pruitt have a plan for humanity for a much warmer future, it’s presumably a plan involving warming the planet as much as possible as fast as possible because that is the only realistic consequence of their actions. And thus far it’s the Kochs of the world who are largely winning on this front. Far too little is being done to prevent climate change despite the growing bad news on this front. So we really could see very rapid warming that feeds upon itself in ways that starve the world. And maybe give much of the world mercury poisoning too. So if humanity is going to adapt, it had better adapt to live in an environment that’s in the process of collapsing because the environment can’t realistically adapt to all the man-made insults. And adapt to high mercury levels. And drought. And floods. That’s all a lot adaptation.
Or we could evolve our politics and have actual qualified scientists who actually care about a flourishing future running government agencies like the EPA instead of insanely optimistic diabolical fools like Scott Pruitt.
Remember those studies that indicated that just 2 percent of wild bees do 80 percent of the work done by wild bee in pollinating crops and that these wild bees could be particularly important for keeping ecosystems and pollination continuing during climate change? Well, it looks like a lot of the ecosystems in and around federal wildlife refuges might have to make due without those wild bees, because the Trump administration just rescinded an Obama-era ban on the use of GMO crops and neonicotinoids in wildlife refuges that allow for agricultural cultivation. Yep, there’s programs that allow for agriculture in wildlife refuges. According to Fish and Wildlife Service Deputy Director Greg Sheehan, the neonicotinoids might be needed to “to fulfill needed farming practices.” In other words, if you’re a wild be or any other animal vulnerable to neonicotinoids, wildlife refuges aren’t actually going to be refuges:
“The Trump administration has rescinded an Obama-era ban on the use of pesticides linked to declining bee populations and the cultivation of genetically modified crops in dozens of national wildlife refuges where farming is permitted.”
GMO crops and neonicotinoids on wildlife refuges. What could possibly go wrong?
Keep in mind that the primary concerns about GMO crops isn’t that they use GMO technology. It’s that the GMO technology is typically used to make the crop super resistant to particular pesticides that can then be used in extremely high quantities, leading to pesticide pollution and super-bugs. That’s the big problem with GMOs and those problems are amplified in an insane way by bringing them to wildlife refuges. It’s literally a recipe for bringing pesticides to the wildlife refuge if the GMO crops are the kind that allow for heavy pesticides.
And, of course, the environmentalists are pointing out that industrial agricultural practices are a grave threat to the many pollinating insects in this wildlife refuge so this is a bad idea and no one is listening to them. Their dire warnings unheeded. So long little wild bees! You’ve been deprioritized!
And while the general use of pesticides is inevitably going to be destabilizing to the insects in general in these wildlife refuges (and the all the critters feeding on those insects), the use of neonicotinoids is particularly devastating to the ecosystem given its specific attack on bees and other pollinators. Like all those crucial wild bees. The new policy treats each neonicotinoid on a case-by-case basis. Which, for the Trump administration, means probably whatever the industry wants. So some neonicotinoids will be allowed for in the private agricultural use of wildlife refuges, maybe not all neonicotinoids. It will be case by case. Whoopie:
“Sheehan wrote that genetically modified organisms have helped “maximize production, and that neonicotinoids might be needed “to fulfill needed farming practices.””
Yikes. Those are some scary words from Fish and Wildlife Service Deputy Director Greg Sheehan. Maximized production of agriculture on federal wildlife refuges and how neonicotinoids might be needed to “fulfill need farming practices”.
Good luck, wild bees, you aren’t a “wildlife management objective”:
But at least this new policy only applies to 50 of the 560 US wildlife refuges. We’ll see how much it grows. Which, under the Trump adminstration, just means there are 510 refuges to go:
So that’s the Trump administration’s new policy regarding neonicotinoids and GMO crops on US wildlife refuges: the bees have been deprioritized. Their refuges need to be borrowed by some farmers.
It’s all a reminder that the Trump administration really hates refugees. Especially the bee refugees.
There was a remarkable lawsuit recently that’s bound to create big headaches for Bayer following its merger with Monsanto and a big concerted public relations response from Bayer/Monsanto that’s bound to create major confusion for the public: a US jury ordered Monsanto to pay a California man $289 million in damages over the cancer he developed that he charges was linked to glyphosate exposure. Glyphosate is the herbicide in Monsanto’s RoundUp, which is typically paired with glyphosate-resistant GMO crops like corn and soybeans. So if glyphosate is found to actually be carcinogenic that’s a potentially very expensive finding for Bayer. Not only will it potentially reduce the sales of RoundUp, but as this lawsuit demonstrated, the costs of payer for past damages could be enormous. As the article points out, the man awarded that $289 million was just one of 5,000 similar plaintiffs across the US.
So if it turns out glyphosate really is carcinogenic, we should probably be aware that the combined forces of Monsanto and Bayer are going to be trying to make us aware of that unfortunate fact:
“On Friday, Monsanto was ordered to pay $289m (£226m) damages to a man who claimed the products caused his cancer.”
$289 million for not warning people about the dangers. It’s a pretty hefty fine, even for a company as large as Bayer/Monsanto. And if Bayer/Monsanto is guilty in this case it’s potentially guilty in the rest of the 5,000 similar cases in the US alone:
This is the legal nightmare Monsanto was handed after the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the World Health Organisation’s cancer agency, concluded that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015:
Even more perilous for Bayer/Monsanto is that it doesn’t sound like the jury was very torn on this decision. They found that Monsanto acted with “malice” and that glyphosate contributed “substantially” to Mr Johnson’s cancer. So if whatever evidence they provided at this trial is the kind of evidence that can be brought up in those thousands of other cases there could be a lot more large fines on the way:
As we should expect, Bayer/Monsanto characterizes the finding as a mistake and is pledging to continue defending the safety of glyphosate:
So let’s hope Bayer/Monsanto are correct and their product really is safe. Because as the company points out, it’s been in use for 40 years. And pretty heavy use at that. If it turns out this is all a big misunderstanding and there’s no glyphosate cancer risk that’s great news for everyone.
But if it turns out this jury made the right call, and glyphosate really is a “substantial” cancer risk that Monsanto has been hiding with “malice”, that points towards A LOT more avoidable past cancers and a A LOT more avoidable cancer on the way. And the massive clout of the new Bayer/Monsanto multinational giant is going to be promoting the ongoing use of glyphosates no matter what.
And that’s all part of why the issue of the safety of glyphosates is going to be an increasingly important issue for the public: following the Bayer/Monsanto merger and this lawsuit, there’s going to be more resources than ever trying to convince the public there’s no glyphosate risk at all. Let’s hope Bayer/Monsanto is correct because otherwise it’s a terrifying situation.
Of course, it’s a terrifying situation whether or not Bayer/Monsanto happens to be correct in this instance. Because when you’re in a situation where corporate interests are so powerful that you just have to hope the super powerful multinational conglomerate is correct because it’s going to get its way in the end anyway, that’s inherently a terrifying situation.
So let’s hope this terrifying situation has less glyphosate-induced cancer than this lawsuit suggests it might. It’s terrifying enough. *fingers crossed*
Also don’t forget that the heavy use of glyphosates for industrial scale farming when so much of it is wasted on things like meat production and biofuels that humanity doesn’t need is potentially cataclysmic on its own due to the many environmental consequences of industrial farming, whether or not glyphosate is indeed carcinogenic. So let’s hope it’s not carcinogenic. But it might be. Either way, it’s probably for the best if we grew a lot less glyphosate-intensive crops just for the sake of making money. Alternatives and less unnecessary glyphosate-intensive agriculture that’s only going to breed super-bugs is what is required. And don’t just go with any alternative.
Researchers just published a study that must be having Bayer’s seemingly endless legal headaches throbbing more intensely: New research appears to have found a new way that glyphosate, the main herbicide in Monsanto’s Roundup, could be damaging the health of bees. Keep in mind that glyphosate targets an enzyme that’s only found in plants and bacteria so it’s not supposed to damage the health of bees and other insects but that’s what appears to be happening.
The researchers also identified the mechanism by which glyphosate is damaging the health of bees and it’s the kind of mechanism that could lead to glyphosates damaging a lot of other animals too. Including humans. This is why this could be such a huge legal headache. The public may not care very much about the fate of the bees (because we’re an insane species), but people care about their own health so this is the kind of issue that might could attract a lot of attention.
That mechanism is the destruction of bees’ gut bacteria. Yep, it turns out that a chemical that only targets plants and insects might actually harm the health of animals because the health of animals depends on things like healthy gut bacteria and a healthy microbiome in general.
And if glyphosate can impact bees’ gut bacteria that raises the obvious possibility that it’s impacting human gut bacteria too. It’s not like there isn’t plenty of glyphosate in the food supply at this point.
So that’s all one more reason why Bayer is probably wondering if buying Monsanto was really the best idea:
“Previous studies have shown that pesticides such as neonicotinoids cause harm to bees, whose pollination is vital to about three-quarters of all food crops. Glyphosate, manufactured by Monsanto, targets an enzyme only found in plants and bacteria.”
That was part of the promise of glyphosates as a herbicide: it doesn’t targets animals, including insects. Only plants and bacteria. The problem is that animals rely on ‘good’ bacteria to help fight off ‘bad’ bacteria and other pathogens and glyphosate just happens to harm some particularly important strains of bacteria found in the guts of honeybees. And also appears to prevent worker bees from developing healthy gut bacteria in the first place:
Keep in mind that the collapse of honeybee populations doesn’t appear to be caused by one thing but instead appears to be a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ situation, where a number of different stresses overwhelm the bees. And some of the key known stresses are pathogens like the varroa mites. So if the disruption of bee cut bacteria is making them more prone to pathogens this could have a synergistic effect with the mites. A very negative synergistic effect.
One researcher does note that the doses of glyphosate used the study were, as he put it, “rather high”, which means the study only demonstrated that glyphosate is potentially impact bee health. It depends on the actual glyphosate exposure levels:
But it’s also important to note that this isn’t the first study that found a connection between bee health and glyphosates. A 2015 study demonstrated glyphosate exposure at levels found in fields impaired the cognitive ability of bees to find their way back to the hive. So the levels of exposure found in fields is clearly enough to have some sort of negative impact:
And as disastrous as it is to learn about another way we’re killing off the bees, it of course gets worse. Because if glyphosate can harm bee gut bacteria there’s no reason to assume it’s not also harming the gut bacteria of other animals. Like humans. Or rats. And while it hasn’t yet been demonstrated to harm human gut bacteria, it’s well established that human gut bacteria are getting exposed to glyphosate because it’s found in all sorts of foods. And it’s already been shown to harm the gut bacteria in rats. So it’s looking rather ominous for any gut bacteria found in the guts of animals that eat plants provided to them by humans:
Keep in mind that the study that found an impact on the gut bacteria of rats was using levels of glyphosate exposure that were assumed to be “safe levels”. So while we have no research indicating that glyphosate can alter human gut bacteria, it’s increasingly looking like that’s exactly what researchers are going to find once they start looking at that. There’s a pretty compelling constellation of data points emerging pointing in that direction.
And if it turns out to be the case that humans have been systematically altering their microbiomes through years of systematic exposure to glyphosates, that could mean we’ve been inadvertently altering human consciousness given the link between gut bacteria and the brain. And that’s on top of the array of other medical complications that a whacked out microbiome could trigger.
So if you have a ‘gut feeling’ that something isn’t right with the food you’re eating, that might be your good gut bacteria letting you know that you’re killing them with glyphosates. That’s a gut feeling worth listening to and don’t forget about the bees when you and your gut have that talk.
It’s also worth noting that the probiotics industry is probably going to be an interesting investment area as we learn about how we’ve been wreaking havoc on microbiomes across the ecosystem. There’s going to be no shortage of opportunities.
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report on the risks of climate change a few days that has everyone quite freaked out. Ok, not everyone. Just sane people. The report offers a mix of hope — hope that the temperature rise can be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius if the world engages in an unprecedented concerted effort within the next decade — coupled with dire warnings that things are going be worse than previously expected if the world doesn’t do what needs to be done. So humanity needs to accomplish unprecedented levels of intelligence cooperation in order to avoid an unprecedented global catastrophe. That was the ‘good news/catastrophic news’ message from the IPCC.
One of the dire warnings in the report is the conclusion that the previously identified ‘reasonable goal’ that human civilization could handle without disastrous consequences — a 2 degrees Celsius rise — would actually be quite disastrous in make some parts of the world intolerable. As one observer put it, “1.5 degrees is the new 2 degrees”. So the overall messages is that the world can still limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, but there’s only about a decade to actually do all the things that need to be done to accomplish that and if those things aren’t done it’s going to be worse than previously expected.
So what is the IPCC saying the world needs to do over the next decade to avoid complete disaster? Well, it’s pretty much anything that not just cuts carbon emissions but also sucks existing carbon out of the atmosphere. Everything from power plants to vehicles need to be, at worst, carbon neutral, and preferably a net-carbon negative. Within 10 years the world’s percentage of electricity from renewables like solar and wind would have to jump from the current 24 percent levels to closer to 50–60 percent. Coal and gas plants will need to be equipped with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology and by 2050 most coal plants would have to be shut down. Vehicles and other forms of transportation would also obviously have to be run on renewables.
And then there’s the IPCC’s proposals for agriculture. It turns out biofuels actually play a key role in the IPCC’s proposal for sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. Specifically, the IPCC calls for the growing of trees and crops to be used as biofuels in a manner where the carbon released during the generation of energy is captured and buried in the ground. This technology still has to be developed because we’re not simply talking about converting corn to ethanol. And the IPCC makes clear that large swaths of land currently used to produce food will have to be converted to producing these biofuel plants.
So in this dire warning to the world, the IPCC is calling for a massive increase in the growing of crops that won’t be used for food but instead but used as a hopefully net-carbon-negative energy source that can suck the carbon out of the atmosphere. And this is supposed to happen with 2 billion more people expected on the planet by 2050. So if the world adopts the carbon-negative biofuel approach to addressing this climate change disaster there’s either going to be A LOT more agriculture overall or a lot less available food for a growing population. And don’t forget that if nothing is done and surface temperatures shoot past that 1.5 degree Celsius rise, that’s going to translate into more droughts, more deserts, more heat waves and just more overall stresses on crops. So it’s looking like all of the challenges and perils of our industrial agricultural paradigm are poised to get a lot more challenging and a lot more perilous if we don’t meet those challenges:
“With global emissions showing few signs of slowing and the United States — the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide — rolling back a suite of Obama-era climate measures, the prospects for meeting the most ambitious goals of the 2015 Paris agreement look increasingly slim. To avoid racing past warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels would require a “rapid and far-reaching” transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before, the group found.”
An unprecedented transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before is going to be required to avoid global catastrophe. And if that unprecedented action does take place it looks like humanity really can avoid this doom. That was the relatively hopeful message from the IPCC:
Also note that the IPCC is considered to be relatively conservative compared to other climate science organizations. So when it declares that the previously ‘reasonable’ goal of a limiting the temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius is actually unreasonable because it could trigger feedback loops and will be caused parts of the planet to become inhospitable, that’s coming from a relatively conservative organization:
If we limit the rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius we might be able to avoid the thawing of the permafrost and a massive feedback loop. A 2 degree rise, however, will probably trigger that feedback loop. If you didn’t think a 0.5 degree Celsius difference could make the difference between hope and doom now you know better.
And in order to avoid that catastrophic 2 degree Celsius rise, the world’s electricity needs to suddenly get a lot more renewable. And the non-renewable sources, like coal, need to start capturing that carbon and eventually shut down entirely, which means powerful entities like the Koch brothers would have to actually be reigned in. It’s a reminder that the unprecedented nature of this challenge includes the nearly unprecedented challenge of stopping the global oligarchy from stopping meaningful action:
Much of the carbon capture and storage technology still needs to be developed. But one of the areas where the IPCC appears to have placed much of its hope is in biofuels. Specifically, plants that are grown for fuel, energy is extracted from them, and the carbon released in this process is all captured and stored in the ground. That’s the plan. Biofuel crops and lots of new trees on existing farmland. So the global proportion of arable land used to grow food is going to have to fall as those crops get replaced with biofuel crops:
So all of the environmental nightmares unleashed by the mass product of biofuel crops already for fuels like ethanol — including the systematic development of super-pests — is going to get A LOT worse under this plan. And that still might be a best case scenario. It’s either super-pests or runaway temperature increases.
It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the first time the IPCC called for carbon sequestering biofuels as a means of reducing the carbon levels in the atmosphere. In 2014, the IPCC proposed the same thing. Unfortunately, it was a proposal met with quite a bit of skepticism rooted in the fact that the biofuel carbon capture technology doesn’t actually exist yet and current biomass energy generation arguably releases more pollutants and carbon emissions than coal:
“Proponents of the technique – known as bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) – suggest that regrown trees and crops might sequester additional carbon, making the technology “negative emission” because it might reduce the overall amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
Growing trees and crops will suck the carbon out of the air and save the day. Let’s hope that’s a viable option. But critics point to a number of flaws with this scheme. For starters, agricultural and forestry activities themselves cause heavy carbon emissions and regrown tree plantations don’t actually act as carbon sinks:
And one paper released in 2014 found that biomass-burning facilities actually produced more pollutants and carbon emissions than coal. And experts don’t see the widespread commercialization of carbon capture technologies happening soon enough. In other words, if the world shifts to biomass energy as a solution to climate change without first developing adequate carbon capturing technology and we simply assume that the carbon capture technology is just around the corner and will be developed in time, we could be making a bad situation worse while throwing away this closing window of opportunity:
Then, in 2016, researchers arrived at another unfortunate conclusion about the prospects of using biofuels as a carbon sequestration technology: the assumptions of the IPCC depend on soil soaking up large amounts of carbon and these researchers concluded that the IPCC’s models vastly overstate how much carbon will be soaked up and how rapidly this will happen:
“Soil is the largest land-based reservoir of carbon on Earth, absorbing it from trees and vegetation as they die and decay. The IPCC calculated that should the mass deforestation of recent centuries be completely reversed, around 40 parts per million (ppm) of CO2, from the current 400ppm levels, could be removed from the atmosphere. Other studies have shown large amounts of carbon could be soaked up with changes in agricultural practices.”
Massive amounts of carbon can be removed from the atmosphere if we reverse mass deforestation and improve our agricultural practices. That’s the hope of the IPCC. But according to these researchers, the IPCC’s models overestimate the carbon sequestration potential of soil by as much as 40 percent. And if these researchers are correct, the time it would take for the soil to remove from the atmosphere the levels of carbon that the IPCC is assuming can be removed would be on the scale of hundreds or even thousands of years:
“It will take a very long time for soil to soak up the carbon, there is a timescale mismatch in terms of climate change.” That was the grim conclusion of these researchers.
So while the IPCC’s recent report might seem exceptionally dire, keep in mind that it could easily be far more dire. And that all points to one of the most dire possibilities of all: humanity will just give up, like the Trump administration just officially did:
“Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous seven degrees by the end of this century.”
You read that correctly: the Trump administration, which pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accords in a historic ‘F$ck You!’ to the future, quietly issued an environmental impact state that assumes a 4 degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures, double the 2 degree rise that the IPCC sees as catastrophic. And this dire forecast was used to justify the Trump administrations policies of doing nothing under the assumption that nothing can be done to stop this:
And that morally horrendous document, a document that pretty much represents a crime against humanity and life on Earth put on paper, also represents one of the most likely outcomes if people just give up hope. It points towards one of the existential challenges facing humanity at this point: resisting the urge to say “F%ck it! We’re all going to die anyway and there’s nothing we can do so who cares!” An urge that is clearly being embraced by the Trump administration. Well, ok, the Trump administration might have some additional motives for wanting to exacerbate climate change, but it’s hard to ignore the reality that humans have a predilection to collectively say F@ck It! in the face of really difficult challenges that require collective sacrifice and collective effort for the greater good. We’re not too great at the greater good as a species. And in this case it could actually destroy us and take down much of the biosphere in the process.
So given enormous scale of this challenge and the reality that it’s going to often seem like there’s nothing we can realistically do about, it’s probably worth keeping in mind that not even trying to address this problem that will destroy the future would probably be the greatest collective act of evil in history. Sure, if we try we still might fail, but at least we tried. And when the alternative to trying and possibly failing is to not try at all and committing the greatest act of evil in history, trying and possibly failing doesn’t seem quite as bad in comparison.
And in that sense we should probably thank the Trump administration for issuing this ultra-cynical report. Because there’s going to be no shortage of future reports from organizations like the IPCC that paint a dire picture of the future. We’re going to need all the tools we can get to fix this, so it’s kind of nice to have such a morally reprehensible official document to look back to remind ourselves that not even trying to fix this mess is what the Trump administration would have us do. We’re going to need all the help we can get, and if that help comes in the form of really, really bad moral examples that can motivate us, so be it.
Researchers just released another jaw-droppingly terrifying report on the ongoing collapse of planet’s ecosystem and the role climate change is likely playing in that catastrophe. It’s a report described as “hyperalarming” by one expert: Researchers who previously studied the tropical rain forests of Puerto Rico in 1976–77 returned to the island for a follow up study. What they found can be accurately described as an insect-pocalypse, with a 60-fold drop in the number of insects caught compared to their observations nearly 40 years earlier.
And as we should expect, the animals that eat those insects also plummeted in numbers, from lizards to frogs to birds. As the article puts it, The food web appears to have been obliterated from the bottom.
The researchers explored a number of different possible causes for this hyperalarming drop in insect levels and the only conclusion they could come to is rising temperatures. Pesticide use in Puerto Rico has dropped substantially since the 60s and when they factor in things like hurricanes into their models it still looks like higher temperatures are to blame. The average high temperature in the Puerto Rico’s rain forests has risen 4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Other researchers note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that climate changes is the primary driving factor for the collapse if insects observed in other parts of the world, like the 75 percent drop in flying insects observed in Germany last year. Pesticides, habitat loss, and other forms of pollution are still playing a role. But in the case of Puerto Rico’s rain forest the rise in temperature appears to be the primary driving factor in part because tropical forest insects are evolved for a much narrower band of temperatures compared to their more temperature counterparts and therefore more vulnerable to climate change.
So that’s one more hyperalarming study of the ongoing slow-motion ecological Armageddon currently taking place. It’s almost as hyperalarming alarming as the observation that humanity doesn’t seem to have the capacity to care about this:
““This study in PNAS is a real wake-up call — a clarion call — that the phenomenon could be much, much bigger, and across many more ecosystems,” said David Wagner, an expert in invertebrate conservation at the University of Connecticut who was not involved with this research. He added: “This is one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read.””
“This is one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read.” Keep in mind that David Wager probably reads a lot of disturbing articles given his area of expertise. So this study is super disturbing even to someone who is presumably rather inured to disturbing studies about insect loss. And you don’t need to be an expert to understand that these researchers documented a chilling snapshot of a global existential threat to not just humans for most of the ecosystem. Or rather, the interplay of global existential threats. We have climate change, one existential threat, driving the collapse of insect populations, another existential threat:
“Between January 1977 and January 2013, the catch rate in the sticky ground traps fell 60-fold.”
If that 75 percent drop in flying insects reported in Germany sounded ominous, how about 60-fold drop in ground-based insects.
But it’s not just insects. It’s all the things that feed off of them that are also disappearing. As the article puts it, the food web appears to have been obliterated from the bottom. It’s a trickle-up catastrophe:
And when the researcher try to explain what caused this crash, the primary thing their models point to is rising temperatures. A 4 degree Fahrenheit increase in average highs over the last 40 years. Insects are vulnerable to this rise in temperatures because insects can’t regulate their internal temperatures. And tropical insects are exceptionally vulnerable to temperature changes due to the relatively narrow band of temperatures in the tropics that they’re evolved to handle:
But as other researchers point out, that doesn’t mean we should blame all of the insect population collapse on rising temperatures. The other suspected causes — like pesticides and habitat loss — might still be the explanation for the massive drop in insects observed elsewhere. In other words, as bad as this study makes the situation out to be it’s actually much, much worse:
And, of course, this report gets released a week after the UN climate report that warned humanity had about a decade left to get its act together. Which humanity obviously won’t do in time since it’s clearly in some sort of perpetual daze and led by lunatics:
So it sounds like it’s ‘so long’ for the wee ones. It also sounds like insects, especially tropical insects, might end up being the climate change ‘canaries in the climate catastrophe coal mine’, at least in a lot of regions. And that ecological disaster at the bottom of the food chain is only going to trickle up from there.
The joke about cockroaches surviving humanity’s self-inflicted apocalypses apparently won’t include tropical cockroaches. Well, ok, the tropical cockroaches still might survive this man-made Armageddon too. We’ll see. But for those tropical insects without the cockroach’s incredible adaptive abilities and sounds like it might be the end of the line for them. The meek definitely aren’t inheriting the earth. They’re among the first to go.
Also keep in mind that insects are often an assumed major source of protein for human consumption in the future, after meat consumption is no longer viable for the masses due to the enormous resources required to generate it. If you don’t want to be a vegetarian in the future you might have to settle for insect ‘meat’. Or there might not be enough vegetables and insect meat will be the only option you have. Either way, it’s worth keeping in mind that humanity might be wiping out its selection of delicious insects to eat in the future thanks to climate change. At least there will still be cockroaches.
And as the study described in following article predicts, there will be plenty of insects for humans to eat in the more temperate regions that warm up because insects in those regions of the world are expected to increase their activity and numbers due to climate change. Activity that includes eating more crops:
““Crop losses will be most acute in areas where warming increases both population growth and metabolic rates of insects,” they wrote. “These conditions are centered primarily in temperate regions, where most grain is produced.””
Yep, at the same time rising temperatures kill off insects in the tropics they also cause an explosion of insect populations and activity in the more temperate areas. Temperate areas that are about to get a lot more tropical:
How bad could it get for crops? Well, a 3.6 degree Fahrenheit rise in average temperature could cause a 46 degree increase in crop loss for wheat, according to their projections. In other words, you better get used to the idea of eating insects because they’re going to be the only thing left to eat after they get done eating your lunch:
And then there’s all the crop diseases that this explosion of insect activity, along with new insects bring new diseases, will inevitably bring too:
How will farmers deal with this infested future? Probably with more pesticides and GMO technology:
It’s all pretty hyperalarming for the world’s breadbaskets. Just a very different kind of hyperalarming situation than the hyperalarming insect situation in the tropics. Kind of the opposite hyperalarming situation. It’s a full-spectrum alarm.
And don’t forget that if we have runaway climate change there’s no reason temperatures can’t keep going up and fry those temperate zones too. Places with the climate of Northern Canada could be the new temperate zone breadbasket. Maybe. We’ll see Probably sooner than we think.
He’s a pair of articles that add a chilling context to the other recent studies finding warming climates leading to precipitous drops in the populations of insects in the warmest parts of the planet due to tropical insects being unable to deal with extreme heat waves. The following two articles look at the other side of that coin: the inability of insects to deal with the extreme cold that comes with the increasingly harsh winters associated with climate change. :
While the impact of neonicotinoids on behavior of honeybees and other pollinators is recognized as being detrimental on bee havior by a growing number of studies, far fewer studies have examined how this class of chemicals affects the behavior of bees within colonies. That was what the researchers behind a new study just published in Science looked into. It appears that neonicotinoids have a number of number impacts on bee colony behavior. Surprise!
First, they found that honeybees were more sluggish and antisocial, spending more time on the periphery of the nest. The chemicals also appeared to interact with their circadian rhythms, with more pronounced effects at night.
But perhaps the most alarming findings involved the bees ability to deal with winter. Healthy colonies are normally capable of regulating the temperatures within the hive to a relatively narrow range. And since stressed bee colonies are known to die off during the winter, it appears these researchers have discovered one of the key mechanisms triggering the winters die off:
““There’s a whole slew of important behaviors happening within the nest that aren’t associated with forging directly, and so how these compounds might be affecting those behaviors, we really haven’t understood so well,” Harvard University biologist James Crall, the study’s lead author, said in an interview with NPR.”
Colony temperature dysregulation. It’s not the only way neonicotinoids harm bees, but it could prove to be a significant one:
And this finding just might explain, at least in part, the mechanism causing the observation that stressed colonies are known to collapse in the winter: the colonies might literally be freezing to death due to neonicotinoids disrupting the temperature regulating behaviors:
In addition, the chemicals appear to be interacting with their circadian rhythms. In addition to all the other things neonicotinoids are doing to bees it’s apparently disrupting their sleep too:
But Bayer would like to assure us that this study doesn’t have any real-world consequences because in the real-world bees aren’t exposed to chemicals at the levels used in the study. So the researchers responded by emphasizing that they were using “field-realistic levels”. In other words, Bayer is trying to refute this study by lying:
So it’s possible that these researchers discovered an important previously unrecognized trigger for colony collapses: colony temperature dysregulation caused by neonicotinoids.
But, of course, when it comes to the dangers posed to bees, or any creature, by a chemical that disrupts their ability to deal with extreme temperatures, we can’t solely blame that chemical for the deaths cause by extreme temperatures. And that’s obviously because extreme temperatures are getting more extreme and more frequent thanks to global warming. And as the following article reminds us, that ironically includes more extreme cold temperatures during winter due to rising temperatures at in the arctic:
“Uncharacteristically cold winters, however, just might be one of the most hard felt effects of climate change, according to a study published in Nature Geoscience by a team of researchers.”
It’s one of those climate change fun facts people in the Northern hemisphere are repeatedly learning whenever there’s freakishly warm Arctic temperatures: when the Arctic gets hot, the Northern hemisphere gets colder and drier.
And the particular methodology they used to relate Arctic temperatures to temperatures across North America have implications regarding the risk of climate change feedback loops: When the warming Arctic creates a cold snap one of the consequences is less carbon being pulled from the atmosphere which, in turn, is only going to feed into climate change:
Yep, the more climate change impacts the ability of plants to grow, the worse the climate change is going to get as less carbon is absorbed. It’s a giant feedback loop of doom. And it’s not just cold snaps that’s going to be impact plant growth. More extreme heat waves are obviously going to become more frequent too. Climate change isn’t just about rising average temperatures. It’s about more extreme extremes. And as we’ve already seen, rising temperatures are associated with higher levels of insect activity (until temperatures get hot enough to kill off the insects), so as average temperatures get warmer it’s expected that farmers will be using even more pesticides in response.
So as we can see, if you had to come up with a horrible side-effect for a pesticide in the context of climate change, harming the ability of pollinators to deal with extreme temperatures has got to be one of the most horrible. And one of the most widely used pesticides on the planet appears to do exactly that. Which is pretty horrible.
There’s a recent study out on the growing collapse of world’s insect populations. It might be the most dire yet because it’s a review and meta-analysis of 73 of the best studies done to date assessing insect decline so its findings have much more statistical power than a single study are are much harder to ignore. It’s described as the first global scientific review of the insect collapse.
So what did the first global review find? Based on their meta-analysis, The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered. If the current 2.5% average annual decline in insect levels over the last 25–30 is maintained, there will basically be no insects left in 100 years.
Another important point the researchers make regarding the causes of the collapse of insect populations around the world is that those causes vary on how warm the climate already is in a region. As we’ve seen from studies of insect populations in Puerto Rico, for insects in tropical climates it’s climate change that’s the primary driver of the insect population collapse as temperatures climb into levels where insects simply cannot function and reproduce. But for most regions of the world, it’s the intensification of industrial agriculture and the growing use of pesticides that the primary driver, with neonicotinoids playing a particularly powerful role because it persists in the environment. So if humanity isn’t cooking the world’s insect populations to death it’s poisoning them instead. Until there are no more left (in about 100 years):
“The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanisation and climate change are also significant factors.”
Intensive agriculture and the heavy of use of pesticides. That’s the primary driver of the global collapse of the insects according to this meta-analysis of 73 of the best studies to date, which found that 40 percent of insect species are in decline and a third are endangered:
And based on their estimates, at the current 2.5 percent annual rate of losses, virtually all of the insect populations will be lost in 100 years, along with the loss of everything that relies on them for food:
As authors describe it, the soil is literally being sterilized by modern agricultural practices. And the chemicals doing that sterilization don’t stay in the fields where the pesticides are sprayed. The chemicals leak into the surrounding areas and kill the insects there too:
But as the authors also point out, in the tropics, where industrial agriculture is often not present, it’s climate change that is collapsing insect populations:
Or course, as Professor Paul Ehrlich notes at the end of the article, we have to keep in mind that the unsustainable rate of human resource consumption — caused by overpopulation and overconsumption — is the underlying driving force causing the collapse the ecosystem, whether it’s overconsumption leading to unsustainable agriculture practices, or overconsumption leading to climate change, or pollution or habitat loss or whatever. It’s humanity’s poisoning an destruction of ecosystems in general that’s leading to the collapse of the biosphere. It’s an obvious point that is easily forgotten as this nightmare situation unfolds:
So, as of now, it’s agriculture, more so than climate change, that is primarily driving the collapse of insect populations according to this meta-analysis. And at current rates we could effectively run out of insects in 100 years.
But let’s keep in mind that climate change just might overtake agriculture as the primary driver of insect losses if climate change gets really, really, really bad. Especially if humanity behaves really, really, really badly and doesn’t cut back on CO2 emissions and allows the levels It’s already projected to get really, really bad but that doesn’t mean it can’t be worse than projected. There are plenty of runaway climate change scenarios that are very plausible. And that brings us to the following article about a new study just published in Nature Geoscience that just might elucidate a mechanism for how it could get really, really, really bad: if CO2 levels triple from the present day levels, stratocumulus cloud might stop forming. Stratocumulus clouds are created by warm air rising and cooling, causing water vapor to condense. They clouds cover large swaths of the tropical ocean, so if they disappear this will presumably impact the tropics especially hard.
These types of clouds are particularly important to trapping or deflecting sunlight and based on the study we could see an additional 8 degrees Celsius temperature rise solely from the loss of the cloud coverage. That’s 8 degrees on top of all the 4 degrees or so that’s already assumed in most climate models.
Chillingly, this mechanism might explain a period of extreme heating of the climate that took place about 55 million years called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) when the temperature rose so much there were crocodiles in the Arctic. Scientists haven’t been able to explain this kind of heating based on the known CO2 levels from that period. One possibility for the extreme heating that must have taken place for the PETM to happen was another greenhouse gas: massive methane releases from the ocean floor. But this discovery of the theoretical destruction of stratocumulus clouds at high CO2 levels provides another possible explanation for crocodiles in the Arctic.
Adding to the chilling nature of the report is that their models suggested that once that CO2 level is reached where the stratocumulus clouds break up, those levels will have to drop far below that threshold before the clouds form again. So that 1300 ppm CO2 level is a quasi-irreversible tipping point for the stratocumulus clouds.
So what are the odds of a tripling of atmospheric CO2 levels and an ultra-catastrophic surge in temperatures? Well, at present trends, humanity will hit that level in about 100 years, around the same time we’re scheduled to have collapse the global insect populations. So assuming humanity does nothing meaningful about CO2 emissions for the next century, the odds are pretty good of that CO2 tripling (and the collapse of the insects after the loss of the clouds bakes the planet). But the study’s lead researcher, Tapio Schneider, doesn’t think CO2 levels will hit that point. Why? He has faith that human civilization will find a way to avoid that kind of disaster. So a faith in humanity’s foresight and ability to collectively act for the sake of future generations is what’s going to prevent this doomsday scenario, according to the lead researcher. Which is perhaps the most chilling part of the study:
“Climate scientists have long been confounded by clouds. A cloud can amplify global warming, or it can limit it, depending on what kind of cloud it is, and its size, location, thickness, duration, etc. But clouds are hard to pin down in a computer model. They are remarkably insubstantial elements of the natural world. If you could bring all the clouds and water vapor in the atmosphere to the surface, it would form a liquid layer less than an inch deep, Schneider said, and clouds alone would create a layer no deeper than a coat of paint.”
Clouds are tricky. Important but confounding. That’s how climate researchers have long viewed them. But according to this two year modeling study, it’s possible the stratocumulus clouds simply break up at 1300 ppm CO2 leading to an 8 degree Celsius spike in temperature on top of all the other warming. It would be a mega-catastrophe for life on Earth:
And while Perdue climate scientist Matt Huber reminds us that it’s very possible the model is simply wrong, he also points out that this 1300 ppm CO2 threshold on the formation of stratocumulus clouds might be the missing explanation for the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) period 55 million years ago when there were crocodiles in the Arctic:
But at least the lead author is confident that the doomsday 1300 ppm CO2 levels won’t be reached. Because he’s confident we’ll find a technological solution. Or at least hopeful:
Keep in mind that, at current rates, the globe is projected to hit around 800 ppm CO2 by 2100, so if present trends continue or get worse the 1300 ppm level would presumably be hit some time in mid 2100s. Yep, Humanity might have around 150 to avoid breaking the clouds. And based on out current behavior and the scale of the problem, it’s very unclear why we should share Scheider’s hope that humanity will find that technological ‘silver bullet’. So hopefully we do find that technological silver bullet that prevents the crossing of the 1300 ppm threshold. But if not, climate change will clearly overtake agriculture as the leading driver of the death of the insects. A rapid 8 degrees Celsius rise from the sudden disappearance of stratocumulus clouds is going to kill a lot of insects. And much of the rest of the rest of the ecosystem.
But at least the insects that survive the 8 degree Celsius spike in temperatures will have a comfy new home with the crocodiles in the Arctic. That’s the good news.
There was an interesting announcement from Bayer this week: in response to the growing criticism (and lawsuits) over the health risks posed by glyphosate — the key ingredient in RoundUp which Bayer now produces after buying Monsanto — Bayer has declared that it’s going to invest $5.6 billion in finding safer alternatives to RoundUp and cut its environmental impact by 30 percent. The company points out that it’s still planning on selling glyphosate for years to come. It’s the kind of move we should have expected given the public relations headache Bayer bought for itself with its Monsanto acquisition. With one new study after another showing a glyphosate cancer risk and one lawsuit after another showing the potential legal costs, some sort of public relations campaign was clearly in Bayer’s interest.
And if Bayer’s new research and development pledge actually pans out and develops new safer alternatives to glyphosate this new initiative will clearly be in public’s interest too. Safer herbicides that don’t collapse the ecosystem are kind of vital technology at this point. Vital technology that doesn’t exist yet so let’s wish Bayer’s researchers luck. We all need it.
Unfortunately, as the senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity points out in the following article, this is probably just a public relations campaign. Even worse, the article notes one big reason to suspect it might not just be a public relations campaign and will actually be a real research initiative is that weeds resistant to glyphosate are already rampant across the US south and already in Iowa. The weeds are getting resistant to the golden goose. And Bayer’s announcement sounds like they’re really going to be investing in technology to work alongside glyphosate. Because of the resistance.
But also note the implicit absurdity of Bayer’s announcement: it implies Bayer/Monsanto wasn’t already investing heavily in safer alternatives to glyphosate or additional technology to work alongside glyphosate. Isn’t research in next-generation crop protection technology a basic part of Monsanto’s business model that Bayer just bought? Especially given the record profits that Monsanto made with RoundUp over the last two decades have generated plenty of financial resources needed for making the sensible investments like the next-generation safer herbicides? Wouldn’t ‘the market’ demand that such research investments happen? Nope. As Ed Anderson, the Iowa Soybean Association’s senior research director, put’s it in the article below, investment in crop protection stalled after the development of glyphosate because Monsanto’s glyphosate-based commercial empire based on combining glyphosate with glyphostate-resistant GMO seeds was such a dominant technology that Monsanto’s competitors simply conceded the market and stopped researching for the last couple of decades. It was just assumed Monsanto would win. It probably explains why Bayer was willing to buy a legal headache like Monsanto at a hefty price: Monsanto is probably one of the only games in town for cutting edge next-generation crop protection technology because it scared away the competition with its glyphosate empire.
But even Monsanto’s next-generation cutting edge technology that Bayer bought may not be enough. It was apparently assumed by Monsanto and its competitors initially that resistance to glyphosate couldn’t easily be developed in nature so Monsanto’s glyphosate-based empire of glyphosate-resistant GMO crops was going to leave Monsanto in an insurmountable market position for years to come. But that assumption was wrong because the weeds got resistant to glyphosate and now the superweeds have reached the US breadbasket of Iowa. A solution is necessary and the one Monsanto, now Bayer, arrived at is adding more herbicides on top of glyphosate. Like dicamba, which is generally considered the next least toxic herbicide after glyhphosate. More research is clearly needed. Preferably public research not influenced by Bayer’s bottom line.
So humanity left the future of food supply technology up to ‘the market’ and ‘the market’ decided to leave it up to Monsanto. Then Bayer bought Monsanto and was compelled to announce a $5.6 billion commitment to finding glyphosate alternatives in response to glyphosate cancer concerns. It doesn’t inspire optimism. That’s why Bayer announcing this research initiative in response to the bad press it bought with the Monsanto merger should be viewed that larger context of ‘the market’ failing to invest in humanity’s food supply technology because Monsanto was so dominant in the market. And now Monsanto’s crop science research is merged with Bayer, one of its few peers in the crop science space. So one reason not to be super enthused about Bayer’s new commitment is that it’s in the context of a concentration of market power in the crop science space that already resulted in a lack of investment in next-generation technologies before Monsanto merged with Bayer so it’s presumably only getting worse after merger:
“Bayer, which purchased St. Louis-based Monsanto last year, faces mounting legal challenges after three California juries ruled in favor of people with lymphoma and cancer who blame the herbicide for their disease. Bayer said it would appeal the court decisions.”
Bayer didn’t just buy a crop science giant. It also bought the possibility of a class action lawsuit of over glyphosate. Thousands of cases are already pending. So there’s a need for some press about Bayer coming up with glyphosate replacements. The problem is it might just be all talk and no tech and no real plans for research. $5.6 billion can buy a lot of ads instead of research:
But Bayer’s head of crop sciences gives us hints of what’s to come, like the use of satellites, sensors, and robotics to more accurately deliver pesticides which is probably a reference to the ‘Big Data’ vision Monsanto had that was creeping farmers out. Will armies of senors and robots lead to a revolution in lower pesticide use? That’s the promise, so let’s hope it’s not just an excuse to sell a bunch of robots and sensors and collect valuable data:
And as Ed Anderson, the Iowa Soybean Association’s senior research director, ominously describes, investment mostly stalled following the development of glyphosate and GMO resistant crops. Two decades of research time was conceded to Monsanto by the rest of the crop protection industry. And now everyone is playing catch up including Bayer which is reflected by the fact that the current solution to glyphosate resistant weeds is dicamba which is generally considered more toxic than glyphosate:
So it’s not exactly great news. But it’s actually much worst news because that report of weeds are becoming resistant to glyphosate is from 2014. And as we’ll in the 2014 article below, farmers had been dealing with glyphosate resistant superweeds for almost a decade so it’s been clear glyphosate isn’t the magic bullet it was initially promised for quite a while. That’s also part of the context of the recent Bayer pledge: glyphosate-resistant superweeds have been rampant for years and there isn’t really an answer yet other than adding more pesticides. And as Robert Hartzler, an ISU professor of agronomy, describes, this was all 100 percent predictable because glyphosate was so widely used. In other words, maximizing Monsanto’s profits by overselling glyphosate guaranteed terrifying superweeds that might starve us all. There’s presumably a good capitalism metaphor somewhere in there:
“Access to high-quality, low-cost readily available food is “all a function of an effective agricultural system that a weed like the Palmer amaranth could significantly impact,” Owen said.”
The Palmer amaranth is a threat to the modern agricultural system that was built on glyphosate. And even moderate infestation can drop yields by two thirds. As a result, farmers are declaring they have no choice but to use the less environmentally friendly technologies glyphosate was supposed to avoid. And that’s exactly what will make the development of the next generation of superweeds inevitable. As ISU professor of agronomy Robert Hartzler puts it, “You couldn’t sit down at a blackboard and come up with a better rotation than we have for weeds to thrive in.” The economics are set up for a market giant to dominate because farmers will be forced to used the technology that gives them the best competitive edge and the need to rotate crops and herbicides is incompatible with those economics:
Again, this was a 2014 article and it’s talking about a crisis of glyphosate resistant weeds that had already been going on for years. That’s part of the context of Bayer’s 2019 pledge of $5.6 billion. An ongoing crisis over the failure of the previous silver bullet technology that the agricultural system was built on. As the follow National Public Radio article from a couple months describes, 20 years ago, when GMO crops were exploding in popularity, farmers were under the impression that glyphosate was a permanent solution to pesticides. Resistance couldn’t develop in the wild. And then it developed in less than a decade. And as the following article describes, there are now strains of pigweed that are basically resistant to al known herbicides. And the only solution the industry has is throwing everything at them. So we’re entering a period where glyphosate-resistant superweeds might start encouraging farmers to use almost every herbicide available in order to deal with the superweeds we created:
“But dicamba and 2,4‑D are among the herbicides he uses on his cotton crop, and he admits it’s a little unsettling to hear about Palmer amaranth plants that these chemicals won’t kill. He’s hoping for new weapons in his arsenal. “The industry, the manufacturers — for them to be in business, they’ve got to have farmers,” he says. “Hopefully they’re utilizing their research and development to continue to provide us with products that will help us control our pests in our crops.””
“Hopefully they’re utilizing their research and development to continue to provide us with products that will help us control our pests in our crops.” That’s what farmers are left to. Hoping that industry is actually investing in new pest control products because the existing products are breaking. Because they definitely don’t have the situation under control now. And 20 years ago they were teaching students that glyphosate had likely permanently addressed pest control. By 2005 the first glyphosate resistant pigweed samples were found in Georgia. It’s now rampant in the US South and spreading in the weekend:
The industry’s answer so far is making GMO-resistant crops for the next-least toxic herbicides, dicamba and 2,4‑D. But the pigweed is getting resistant to even those herbicides resulting in super pigweed that can’t be killed by known herbicides:
What’s are the available options? Deploying lots of herbicides and rotating crops. In other words, roll back the glyphosate revolution, except keep the glyphosate. Two-steps forward, four-steps back:
So that’s all part of the context of the Bayer buyout of Monsanto: Monsanto’s flagship product that was a linchpin of the global food supply is losing it’s effectiveness and no one can find a replacement. But if someone can find a replacement it was probably Monsanto who could do it because everyone else gave up on competing with them. Now Bayer owns that research edge. So Bayer potential holds the fate of the world’s food supply in its hands because the world is relying on Bayer to find the next glyphosate. Bayer, one of the few companies on the planet arguably scarier than Monsanto. That’s who we’re all relying on for securing the food supply to an unprecedented extent. And so far the likeliest answer is throwing more pesticides into a growing pesticide cocktail that’s going to be simmering in the environment and creating ever more unstoppable superweeds. Because profits simply must be maximized even if the consequences are superweeds.
And don’t forget, this is all happening in the context of climate change stresses that are going to be hitting ecosystems. So if the agriculture sector ends up losing battle to feed humanity and we see an explosion of industrial poisoned and ruined soil in the aftermath of that lost battle that’s only going to feed into an already accelerating broader global ecosystem collapse. A global collapse that feeds on itself. Exponential death. That’s what we’re kicking into motion if we screw this up. At the same time we’re driving the evolution of new super-pests we’re also driving a global mass extinction event and the industrial overuse of pesticides is a major driver of that extinction event. Climate change isn’t the only eco-doomsday scenario humanity is creating for itself.
But at least our super-pests will probably be part of the surviving handful of lifeforms that will repopulate the planet after humanity breaks the environment and wipes itself out. So that’s kind of neat.
The future belongs to the super-pests. Our bad.
The world is understandably reacting with a mix of shock and outrage over the ongoing massive fires in the Amazon. Adding to the outrage is the fact that the fires appear to be largely man-made, both in terms of being actively started by Brazilian farmers and ranchers with the quiet approval of the far right Bolsonaro government. So it’s worth keeping in mind at this point that the intentional devastation of the Amazon in recent years under right-wing Brazilian rule isn’t limited to government-endorsed arson. There’s a broad spectrum of assaults on Brazil’s rain forests. For example, as the following article describes, Brazil has been approving thousands of pesticides banned in other countries in recent years. After left-wing president Dilma Rousseff was impeached and removed from office in 2016 (in what appeared to be an effective political right-wing coup), the government under her temporary replacement, right-wing politician Michel Temer, began approving all sorts of new pesticides. Pesticides banned in places like the EU. And it’s only accelerated under Bolsonaro.
This is a particularly dire situation for an ecosystem like a rain forest. As studies continue to demonstrate, the pesticides used in agriculture don’t actually stay in the fields. They disperse across the ecosystem. Recall the profoundly disturbing studies that found a collapse of flying insects deep inside German nature reserves, far from agricultural areas, that appears to be driven, in part, by pesticides flowing in from agriculture areas. So once Brazil’s farmers are done burning down large swathes of the Amazon for the purpose of turning it into farmland and begin treating those areas with pesticides there’s going to be even more pesticides flowing into an ever-shrinking remaining rain forest. Increasingly dangerous pesticides thanks to the flood of right-wing pesticide approvals in recent years:
“Brazil began accelerating pesticide approvals in September 2016 after Michel Temer, a conservative politician with close agribusiness links, assumed the presidency. Bolsonaro also won the presidency with strong support from the agribusiness sector.”
It’s been a pesticide free-for-all in Brazil since 2016. A free-for-all that’s only increased under Bolsonaro. Under Bolsonaro, the agriculture minister, Tereza Cristina Dias, laughably declared that an “ideological process” had been slowing down pesticide approval. Dias had presided over a parliamentary commission last year that approved the lifting even more restrictions on pesticides. Ominously, that bill, dubbed the “poison package”, hasn’t even been voted on yet which means its damage is yet to be done. In other words, it’s going to get a lot worse:
So the bees and much of the other insect-life that manages to escape the wild fires this year are in store for a particularly poisonous next year. But as the following article reminds us, we shouldn’t just be worried about poisoning all the insects. Pesticides aren’t good for people either:
“Around half a billion bees died in four of Brazil’s southern states in the year’s first months. The die-off highlighted questions about the ocean of pesticides used in the country’s agriculture and whether chemicals are washing through the human food supply — even as the government considers permitting more. Most dead bees showed traces of Fipronil, a insecticide proscribed in the European Union and classified as a possible human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.”
Brazil’s agricultural sector isn’t just poisoning the forests. The compounds are flooding the food supply too. Brazil’s own health watchdog Anvisa found 1 in 5 food samples contained pesticides about permitted levels or had unauthorized pesticides. Keep in mind that the unauthorized pesticides are likely to be the more dangerous than the authorized pesticides. And the authorized pesticides are already more dangerous than elsewhere. Greenpeace estimates that 40% of Brazil’s pesticides are “highly or extremely toxic” and 32% aren’t allowed in the EU. It’s why we should expect the stories about large groups of agricultural workers getting sick due to unknown reasons to be increasingly common. The more new chemicals getting approved, or used without authorization, the more mystery illnesses we should expect:
And as we should expect, the response to these health concerns by the Bolsonaro government is to eliminate the need to investigate those health concerns before a new chemical gets approved, making it a lot more likely that pesticides with carcinogenic properties will be approved. Don’t forget that the negative consequences of poisoning a populace with potential carcinogens might not show up for years or decades. It’s not like the farm workers who immediately pass out from the poisons. This could be a recipe for a cancer epidemic decades from now. Which is precisely the kind of policy-making we should expect from a far right government like Bolsonaro’s. Short and long-term poison is an inherent part of the far right agenda:
And note the chilling warning from the pesticide producer industry representative about the need to varying chemicals in order to counter growing pesticide resistance. It’s chilling because it’s probably true. Varying the particular chemicals used in the chemical cocktails that make up these pesticides really is probably going to be a valuable tool in slowing down the inevitable problem of pesticide resistance in the target pests. Because the continuous development of pesticide resistance is the fundamental challenge facing the model of using large amounts of poison to grow the food to feed humanity. It’s an inherently perilous paradigm that will always be at risk of a super-pest emerging and always necessitate the use of a growing arsenal of poisons. Hopefully the poisons are more targeted with less toxicity to humans and the environment but there’s no rule that says the pesticides won’t necessarily get more toxic and harmful as super-pests inevitably pop up. And as the number of different chemicals in that agricultural arsenal grows, so does the difficulty in assessing their safety. It’s one of the many inherent complications built into our food paradigm: It’s going to get harder and harder to know if we’re poisoning ourselves:
And that’s all why this latest Amazonian arson spree is just a prelude to the industrial attack on life in the Amazon that’s getting underway. The charred remains of the forest that get plowed over and turned into fields are going to be the newest outposts of civilization pumping industrial-scale chemical pollution in the parts of the Amazon, the ‘lungs of the world’, that haven’t been burned down yet. First the ‘lungs of the world’ go up in smoke, largely to feed humanity’s demand for meat. And in order to provide the feed for all that meat, the burned-down ‘lungs of the world’ start huffing cocktails of chemicals and coughing them up all over the place. Smoke and huffing. In the Amazon and much of the rest of the world. It’s not a great form of sustenance.
Uh oh, it sounds like the bees have company. Catastrophic company: A new study out of Japan appears to be strong evidence that neonicotinoids don’t just impact the health of insects. It’s also killing off the species that make up the base of aquatic food chains. That’s what researchers found from their research of Lake Shinji, in southwestern Japan. The data set the researchers based their conclusions on included data from a decade before and after the use of neonicotinoid use was started in the region, and other possible causes for the collapse of the lake’s ecosystem have been ruled out.
On the one hand, this finding isn’t particularly surprising because neonicotinoids are specifically selected for heavy use in agriculture because they’re known to selectively impact the nervous systems of arthropods (like insects) without harming mammals so we should expect neonicotinoid use to impact aquatic arthropods too. But it’s still rather surprising to hear how rapidly neonicotinoid use damaged Lake Shinji’s ecosystem. The collapse of the lake’s ecosystem also appeared to have started quite rapidly after the use of neonicotinoids was started in May of 1993, when rice farmers living near the like started heavily using the insecticide imidacloprid. Within a year, the populations of arthropods in the lake, including zooplankton, began crashing and by the end of 1994 even animals higher up in the food change like eel and smelt crashed and have never recovered. The zooplankton biomass declined 83 percent in the 12 years following the introduction of neonicotinoids.
So the damage caused by growing neonicotinoid use isn’t limited to ecosystems on land. Now we know. We probably should have know this already, but it sounds like there hasn’t really been much research into how neonicotinoids might be impacting aquatic ecosystems. It also sounds like neonicotinoid contamination of surface waters, like lakes and streams, is common around the world. So the kind of damage found by these researchers at Lake Shinji is probably taking place all over the world. At least anywhere near an area where neonicotinoids are heavily used:
“These findings, from a paper published in Science in early November, are the first to show that neonicotinoids, a class of toxic insecticides that are the world’s most widely used, can seep into aquatic ecosystems and significantly disrupt fisheries, dramatically reducing their yields. What’s more, scientists think that Japan is not an isolated example, but rather a dramatic illustration of neonicotinoids’ potential to seriously harm aquatic ecosystems worldwide.”
Neonicotinoids aren’t just devastating Lake Shinjo’s ecosystem. They’re likely causing serious harm to aquatic ecosystems around the world, starting with the direct impact neonicotinoids have on aquatic arthropods like the zooplankton that forms the basis of aquatic ecosystems:
Yep, in addition to killing off the bees — which are crucial for land-based food production — in order to grow crops, we’re also killing off the ocean’s food supply. That seems like a pretty good formula for future mass hunger. And not much of a future after that.
Oh, and it turns out the collapse of zooplankton is particularly damaging to Arctic ecosystems, both off and on land. So Santa’s workshop is scheduled to be a graveyard unless Santa delivers some sanity this year.
Here’s a fascinating piece of research news related to the use of RNA interference (RNAi) technology that has the feel of a being the quiet beginning of a vast new area of agricultural technology that could have profound implications on the ecosystem: researchers found a remarkable technique for helping honeybees fight both the parasitic mites and deadly bacteria that are thought to be key drivers of the ongoing global epidemic of colony collapse disorder. It’s the kind of technique that could have clear applications that extend well beyond honeybees. They created modified Snodgrassella bacteria found in honeybee guts to generate substances to fight off the dreaded varroa mites and deformed wing virus and the engineered gut bacteria appeared to work. The mites were about 70 percent more likely to die within 10 days when feeding on bees with the modified bacteria. Similarly, the bees had 37 percent higher survival rate 10 days after exposure to the deformed wing virus.
It’s a remarkable proof of principle experiment that could have all sorts of applications that go beyond honeybees, although it sounds like one of the factors that makes this technique particularly effective for honeybees is how the consistently the gut microbiome of honeybee colonies are maintained that allows the modified gut bacteria to be maintained within the colony for an extended period of time. One of the limitations of existing RNAi technology is how RNA degrades relatively quickly. Engineered gut bacteria will make the desired RNA for as long as the gut bacteria is allowed to live and bee colonies share and perpetuate their gut bacteria. It’s the kind of technology that, on the one hand, potentially allows for the effective targeted introduction of bacteria that could be used to effectively deliver pesticides and all sorts of other chemicals in a real-world setting. On the other hand, it’s also a great platform for spreading out bacteria that could have all sort of unintended ecological effects because it’s not like bacteria stay where you put them. Bacteria spreads and spread their genes too. So this technology is potentially great if you don’t care if the engineered bacteria and the inserted genes end up spreading around the ecosystem and potentially catastrophic if you do care.
So industrial genetically engineered bacterial pollution is poised to be an emerging form of ecological pollution. But it’s the kind of pollution that, ideally, is being used in place of other environmentally damaging pesticides and other chemicals. Engineered bacteria could theoretically deliver an amazing array of agriculturally useful functions in the realm of pest control and really perform a genuinely important role in minimizing humanity’s impact on the biosphere. And also theoretically be some sort of nightmare disaster that gets out of control. It’s a high stakes technology that’s just around the corner. Which means the endless cycle of weighing the costs and benefits of different agricultural pest control technologies is going to include the costs and benefits of utilizing genetically modified gut bacteria:
“Rod-shaped Snodgrassella bacteria, common in bee guts, were engineered to release double-stranded RNA molecules that dial down gene activity in a mite or virus. The pest then sabotages itself by shutting down some of its own vital genes. This strategy hijacks a natural biological process called RNA interference, or RNAi (SN: 10/4/06). The gut bacteria churning out this targeted disinformation work “something like a living vaccine,” says microbiologist Sean Leonard of the University of Texas at Austin.”
It works “something like a living vaccine”. That’s actually a great way to describe this technology although it’s a closer analogy to say it’s like a living version of the kind of mRNA direct delivery technology that Moderna is relying on to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Moderna’s mRNA direct delivery technology can in theory prompt the body’s cells to create a broad spectrum of biochemical products and genetically modified gut bacteria are like permanent versions of that residing in an organism’s gut and churning out the proteins they’re instructed to create. The possibilities are amazing. And if this gets out of control the dangers are amazing. So this is a technology to watch because it’s filled with potential. Incredible positive and negative potential.
And in terms of agricultural applications, note how existing RNAi pesticide technology is seen as expensive in part because it rapidly degrades. So this gut bacteria technology is a massive leap in terms of the duration of an application of RNAi technology. And that means it’s going to be really tempting to use this technology sooner than it should be used, which is another reason it’s going to be important to keep an eye on:
And that’s all part of why Jay Evans, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bee Research Laboratory, calls this research “a very big deal.” This proof of concept research really was a very big deal:
Yes, this “very big deal” research will no doubt be followed by very bigger deal research involving the large-scale application of future versions of this technology. The potential applications of industrial genetically engineering bacteria are kind of endless in agriculture and farming. And the unintended (or intended) consequences are kind of endless too. Hence the calls for health debates about how to regulate this. It’s technology too tantalizing useful to not be used and not to be misused.
And that adds a fascinating dimension to the collapse of the honeybees. The fact that honeybee colonies collectively maintain their gut bacteria makes genetically engineered bacteria particularly cost-effective for use in protecting honeybee colonies against mites and viruses and it actually appears to work, at least in the lab. It really is a very big deal that goes way beyond honeybees because this could be the kind of technology that becomes a ‘hot’ area with tons of speculative investors. The guts of animals are built to house populations of bacteria and bacteria can be built to do an amazing range of functions.
So that’s another reason to pay attention to the plight of the honeybees: in addition to being ‘canaries in the coal mine’ of the collapsing ecosystem, the honeybees are poised to be the ‘canaries in the coal mine’ of industrial applications of genetically engineered gut bacteria. It’s a perilously powerful technology that’s too useful to not use. The bee-stakes got higher.
Here’s an update on the EU’s ostensible landmark total ban on neonicotinoids put in place in 2018 that expanded on the partial ban implemented in 2013. The update is of course an emergency. An emergency about the endless stream of emergency declarations across the EU that are allowing for ’emergency’ continued use of neonicotinoids. There’s a loophole in the 2018 ban that allows for emergency use so of course it’s being abused. That’s what Greenpeace’s Unearthed publication just reported following an investigation into the EU’s ongoing use of these emergency authorizations.
As the following report describes, it’s not like the overuse of emergency authorizations is a newly discovered emergency. There were 62 emergency authorizations from 2013–2016 following the initial 2013 partial neonicotinoid ban and enough of them questionable enough to prompt an EU probe in 2016 that resulted in Lithuania and Romania being blocked from issuing new emergency authorizations. There were 67 emergency authorizations in the two years following the April 2018 total EU ban. The bans for Lithuania and Romania took effect in February after a flurry of new emergency authorizations by the two countries in January.
But the questionable emergency authorizations weren’t limited to Luthania and Romania and it sounds like the use of them has continued across the EU, in particular for sugar beet farmers who weren’t covered under the initial 2013 partial ban and haven’t had to deal with a post-neonicotinoid future since the 2018 ban. And a majority of these emergency authorizations were for large scale areas of major crops including maize and oilseed rape in addition to sugar beets. So the overall message from Greenpeace’s Unearthed update on the emergency authorization emergency is that bees in the EU are still screwed:
“They are rarely justified and often repeated. This means countries are repeatedly and habitually violating EU law, and endangering people, environment and pollinators in the process.”
Rarely justified and often repeated. That’s how Apolline Roger, a chemicals lawyer for environmental law charity ClientEarth, described to Unearthed the ongoing use of “emergency situations” for neonicotinoids. Emergency situations for neonicotinoid use that’s been deployed by at least 16 EU countries since the total ban took effect in 2018:
And note how major manufacturers of these pesticides like Bayer are major users of these emergency authorizations. A bottomless pit of demand for more emergencies:
And that bottomless pit of demand by farmers and pesticide manufacturers for emergency authorizations is what’s going to ensure that these loopholes are going to be exploited for as long as possible. And it’s still very possible. That’s the EU neonicotinoid update.
One of the challenges that has long faced agriculture reformers working to address the under-recognized dangers of pesticides has been the challenge of effectively communicating to the public the full scope of those dangers. For example, while neonicotinoids directly threaten global bee populations and therefore human food supplies, the dangers extend far beyond those immediate concerns and potentially include the global collapse in insect populations far from agricultural areas and all of the peril that poses to the entire ecosystem. Another challenge is that we simply have not adequately studied the indirect ecological impacts of practices like industrial-scale pesticide use and therefore don’t really understand those risk. So with the challenges of both understanding and communicating the full scope of the risks posed by industrial-scale pesticide usage in mind, here’s a recent National Geographic piece that highlights an emerging area of pesticide research: the impact of neonicotinoids on fish, birds, and mammals.
Don’t forget that part of the appeal of neonicotinoids for use as pesticides is because they selectively impact insects far more powerfully than other types of animals because the chemicals targets cell receptors that are expressed at much higher levels in insects. And as we probably should have expected, these initial studies are demonstrating that the direct dangers to the health of wildlife go far beyond what we’ve long been told.
One 2015 study, measured the levels of imidacloprid in the spleens wild deer and found that not only did the deer population have widespread elevated imidacloprid levels but that a higher neonicotinoid level was associated with shorter jawbones, decreased body weight, and undersized organs, including genitals. Beyond that, more than a third of the fawns died prematurely, and those fawns had much higher spleen levels of imidacloprid than the survivors. And both fawns and adults with higher levels had been less active while alive—which in the wild would have made them more vulnerable to predators. So that study found the impact on wild deer was not just negative but potentially severely negative.
And that study was just looking at one species. Another 2019 study set up camera traps in agricultural fields where neonicotinoid treated seeds were deliberately spilled. Motion-triggered cameras recorded more than a dozen bird species (including ring-necked pheasants, geese, and turkeys), plus bears, raccoons, rodents, rabbits, foxes, and skunks, all feeding on the treated seed. And as the article notes, accidental seed spills are disturbingly common.
So news is now coming in that the most widely used class of pesticides on the planet appears to affect mammals in ways that we were told wouldn’t happen. Neonicotinoids weren’t supposed to harm humans because they weren’t supposed to harm mammals, birds, fish, and anything other than insects. That’s what we’ve been repeatedly told. And it’s only now that researchers are finally getting around to asking the question of what impact does this class of chemicals actually have on wildlife and we’re learning that it is potentially substantial. Substantially negative. Neonicotinoids harm mammals, despite all the assurances to the contrary. It’s pretty big news if this pans out. Although perhaps not as big as the news that we’ve only just started asking these questions:
“Over the past several years, scientists have found that only about 5 percent of neonic seed coatings are taken up by crop plants. The rest washes or wears off seeds. The chemicals accumulate in soils and waterways, where a wide range of wildlife is exposed to them. Evidence is growing that compounds tailored to take out invertebrates can also harm mammals, birds, and fish.”
Only 5 percent of the neonicotinoid sprayed on seeds are actually taken up by the plants. The rest wears off and runs into the environment. So around 95% of the neonicotinoids sprayed on crops are ending up in the rest of the ecosystem. We only learned this fun fact in recent years, just as we’re only now seriously investigating what all that neonicotinoid run off is doing to the rest of the ecosystem. Spray first, ask questions later. And now that these questions are finally being asked, we’re learning that this class of chemicals has potentially serious developmental effects on mammals and a wide variety of mammals are consuming them:
And then there’s the obvious question of what impact neonicotinoids are having on the development of humans, the only species that intentionally cakes its food supply in the stuff. And much like the study that found 50 percent of wild deer spleens testing positive for neonicotinoids, a 2019 study similarly found neonicotinoids in around half of human urine samples and a 2015 found unacceptably high levels of neonicotinoids in almost every dish served in Congress:
And that brings us to the final message from the researchers investigating the impact widespread industrial-scale pesticide use: if we can’t selectively poison the environment, can we really afford to rely on poison to secure a food supply? Because selective poison is precisely what neonicotinoids were supposed to be. Only insects would be harmed. That’s what we were told...and then the insect populations collapsed. Are we sure this is a viable strategy?
Is pesticide-free farming the future? It is if nothing else works. And the evidence keeps coming in that caking fields with poisons simply can’t be done sustainably. The costs just keep expanding and compounding. Selectively poisoning insects would be problematic even if neonicotinoids really had the selectively the manufacturers claim. But they don’t. It’s quasi-selectively mass poisoning, which is basically just mass poisoning. Insect, fish, bird, mammal, all poisoned. The main difference being that insects die very suddenly and directly from neonicotinoids while it’s more or a slow poison for the rest of us. So perhaps one lesson we can take from this in terms of effectively communicating with the public on the need to seek out as many alternatives to pesticides as possible is the simple idea that slow poison isn’t as sustainable as it might seem at first.
It’s also all another reason not to eat wild deer. Not that we needed more reasons.
There’s a new environmental catastrophe erupting out of Florida at the moment that’s a reminder of one of the many costs of humanity’s over-reliance on unsustainable industrial agricultural practices:
The Florida state government has announced an evacuation order for the resident of Manatee County due to a “significant leak” at the former Piney Point phosphate processing plant. It turns out Florida’s large phosphate deposits make it the source for around three quarters of the phosphoric acid consumed in the US, primarily for fertilizer. And in the course of making that crucial fertilizer ingredient, the slightly radioactive byproduct phosphogypsum is produced. For every ton of phosphoric acid, about 5 tons of phosphogypsum are made and it sounds like the primary means of dealing with this toxic byproduct is to pile it up in stacks hundreds of acres wide and hundreds of feet tall.
In the case of the current emergency, it’s not the phosphogypsum stacks themselves that are posing the environmental risks. It’s large pools of highly toxic waste water stored inside the stacks that are threatening to spill out. The waste water is filled with heavy metals from the refining process that creates the phosphogypsum. If the reservoir of waste water inside these stacks collapses entirely, authorities warn it could immediately send a 20 foot high wave of waste water across the surrounding area.
So how did this emergency situation arise? The usual suspect: decades of regulatory neglect that allowed the mining industry to avoid paying the cost of cleaning up its own mess. And as we’ll see in the third excerpt below, the problems at the Piney Point plant aren’t limited to that plant. Back in 2015, Mosaic Fertilizer, the world’s largest phosphate mining company, agreed to pay nearly $2 billion to settle a federal lawsuit over hazardous waste and to clean up operations at eight sites. Six in Florida and two in Louisiana. It’s the kind of fine that’s notable in part because it gives us a sense of what the “cost of doing business” is for the fertilizer chemical supply industry. A $2 billion fine is probably a lot less than the world’s largest phosphate minder would have had to pay if it was actually running their operations in an environmentally friendly manner. Polluting and paying the fine is part of the business model. That’s why it keeps happening. Accepting the fines is net-profitable, assuming they’re imposed at all.
And if polluting and paying the fines is the business model of the largest phosphate mining company in the world, it’s presumably the business model for the industry. It’s why this possible catastrophic event doubles as a catastrophic preview for future catastrophes to come. Likely in Florida:
““In addition to high concentrations of radioactive materials, phosphogypsum and processed wastewater can also contain carcinogens and heavy toxic metals,” the center said in a statement on Saturday. “For every ton of phosphoric acid produced, the fertilizer industry creates 5 tons of radioactive phosphogypsum waste, which is stored in mountainous stacks hundreds of acres wide and hundreds of feet tall.””
Come for the radiation. Stay for the carcinogens and heavy toxic metals. That’s the inadvertent travel advisory that was just sent out to the world for Manatee County. And as this incident also reminds the worlds, this kind of pollution and lax regulatory oversight has been going on for decades. The cause of the disaster was neglect. Non-benign calculated profitable neglect punctuated by all of the past failures of this nature. Past failures that clearly did nothing to get the oversight that would have avoided this present emergency in the first place:
And instead of actually dealing with those numerous well-document safety failures, there’s the risk that this tidal wave of toxins will find their way into Tampa Bay, where the phosphates will fuel a red tide while the rest of the toxins spread about the aqautic ecosystem. In other words, everything is probably going to be tasting very weird, in a bad way, for the manatees of Tampa Bay for the next few weeks:
“Hope said it’ll still take 10–12 days to deplete the amount that’s there — about 380 million gallons, according to the county. The water eventually flows into Tampa Bay, prompting worries about its potential impact on marine life and even red tide.”
Are the waters of Tampa Bay looking a tinge red-ish? If so, perhaps it’s not a great time for a swim. Although keep in mind it’s not the radiation that would be causing the red tide. It’s all the phosphates fueling an population explosion of the microorganisms that create the red tide and starve the area of oxygen. The radiation is just icing on the catastrophic cake.
Will anything change? The state of Florida is officially giving us the “we’ll think about that later” answer, which gives us our answer. And the 20 years of debate of how to safely drain the phosphogypsum stacks on the Piney Point property will continue. Presumably for another 20 years or so until the next catastrophe:
And while the debate over how to safely drain the phosphogypsum stacks at Piney Point continue, the default long-term plan of unsafe, unplanned, and uncontrolled periodic drainings like this will continue. Same as always. And same as the rest of the phosphate mining and processing industry in the US, apparently:
“First discovered by an Army Corps of Engineers captain in 1881, Florida’s phosphate deposits today are the basis of an $85 billion industry that supplies three-fourths of the phosphate used in the United States. Although phosphate mining provides a major financial boon to the small communities in which the mines are located, it also leaves behind a major environmental mess.”
If there’s phosphate mining pollution going on in the US, it’s probably going in Florida. That’s where we find the phosphate. And also, it’s Florida. The GOP-dominated state can barely accept the reality of climate change. Phoshate mining pollution isn’t the kind of thing we should expect to be very high up on the list of the Florida state government. It clearly hasn’t been so far. After all, the EPA investigation that discovered Mosaic Fertilizer employees were mixing mixing highly corrosive substances from its fertilizer operations with the solid waste and wastewater from mineral processing, that EPA investigation was prompted from a 2003 incident at Piney Point, the location of the current looming catastrophe. And the EPA investigation that found the improper mixing of these substances at Mosaic didn’t just find this practice there. Everyone in the industry did this, according to Mosaic. This is all business as usual:
Mixing wastewater and phosphogypsum with the corrossive substances from the fertilizer operations was business as usual across the industry in 2003. And based on all of the people decrying how nothing has been done to prevent the current disaster, we can only assume that it was business as usual in 2015 AND remains business as usual today. Maybe. We’ll find out when we discover whether or not the torrent of heavy metals and carcinogens being unleash on Manatee County, Florida, also contains the byproducts of those corrosive substances. That’s how awful the situation is: it’s good news if it’s only wastewater and phosphogypsum leaking out of that reservoir and not also the toxic byproducts of all those corrosive substances that were routinely getting mixing in too.
Did that 2003 EPA investigation that resulted in the 2015 $2 billion fine for Mosaic result in any actual changes in industry practices? If not, we have assume the current catastrophe includes all that extra solid-waste pollution. Or rather, the chemical byproducts of adding that solid-waste polution to the wastewater and phosphogypsum slurry. Manatee County is getting inundated with Leaking out into the waters of Tampa Bay.
So as we can see, the list of reasons the manatees weep just grew. Although, relatively speaking it only grew a little. It was already a long list.
Here’s a follow-up on the story of the looming tidal wave of phosphate-enriched radioactive waste water threatening to erupt from a failing reservoir at the old Piney Point phosphate plant in Manatee County, Florida. It’s a good news/bad news kind of follow-up, although it could probably be more accurately described as ‘not entirely catastrophic short-term news/probably catastrophic long-term news’:
The evacuation order for Manatee County was lifted Tuesday after an estimated 165 million gallons of the toxic wastewater was released into Port Manatee on Tampa Bay. So in order to avoid an uncontrolled release of the toxic water they made it a controlled release instead. It’s not exactly a great solution. It’s not really a solution at all. Especially for the rest of the hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic waste water still sitting in a reservoir with clear structural issues.
But as we’ll see, there is a long-term solution Florida officials already have in mind and this incident has finally prompted them to seriously look into implementing it. What’s the long-term solution for all this toxic wastewater? Inject it into Florida’s aquifer. That’s the solution. A ‘solution’ that’s been tried in the past and predictably resulted in toxic algae blooms. But they’re going to do it again. The alternative is doing nothing. Since actually cleaning this mess up for real apparently isn’t an option:
“Wednesday’s appropriation was a fraction of what could be a $200 million project to accomplish the “complete cleanup and closure” of the site. That’s how much Senate President Wilton Simpson, R‑Trilby, said this week he wants to spend, using federal pandemic relief dollars.”
Are federal pandemic relief dollars coming to the rescue of Manatee County? It’s the latest ironic example of Republicans warming to a bill that been slamming as a “Blue State Bailout”. But if a federal bailout for the Red state of Florida is what’s required for the state to finally address this environmental catastrophe waiting to happen, great. Better hypocritically late than never. Especially since 258 million gallons of that toxic water is still sitting there, waiting for the next disaster:
But it’s not like federal dollars can magically make the toxins go away. Something still needs to be done with them. And that ‘something’ appears to be a plan that’s been considered before. Considered and rejected before because of the obvious environmental risks: inject the toxic waste water, filled with phosphates, into Florida’s aquifers, paid for with $200 million in federal dollars. It was a plan first proposed in 2013 and rejected because it might make the situation far worse. That’s the plan under consideration. And as critics warn, if that plan does end up getting implemented at Piney Point, it’s likely just a matter of time before its attempted elsewhere in Florida. So it sounds like the plan is to make a bad situation worse, but worse underground so don’t notice it as much:
“The plan: to treat the plant’s polluted water and inject it 3,500 feet below ground and into a salty part of the Floridan Aquifer. The $200 million to do this would come from President Biden’s covid-recovery package.”
They’ve got a plan. A plan that’s been repeatedly rejected in the past. But desperation and urgency just might propel this plan into action. And just might make this bad situation worse. But because that worsening situation will be taking place underground in Florida’s aquifer slowly over time, part of the concern over this ‘solution’ is that it’s the kind of solution that could only become a demonstrably bad idea slowly over time, long after we’ve already implemented it elsewhere:
So as we can see, Florida hasn’t really avoided a toxic phosphate environmental catastrophe. It’s merely choosing which environmental catastrophe to experience. Instead of facing the immediate danger of a tidal wave of toxic water erupting from those reservoirs, the state is choosing the long-term risks that come with injecting all of those toxins underground. There’s still an ongoing catastrophic release of phosphates into the waters of Florida, but it will hopefully be a slower catastrophic release out of Florida’s aquifers instead of a sudden tidal wave from a reservoir. It’s still a catastrophe, but a better obscured catastrophe. Problem solved. It’s the ‘solution’ Florida is likely going to be using to ‘clean up’ more than just the Piney Point site. Phosphogypsum stacks are scattered across the state.
And as the following article reminds us, it’s not like the clean up ‘solution’ for the situation at Piney Point will only exclusively be used in Florida for addressing other Phosphogypsum stacks. Because those phosphogypsum stacks are just one example of a far more prevalent form of industrial waste storage: open air toxic ponds. Whether we’re talking about phosphate mining or the coal ash generated from burning coal, there’s just a massive amount of toxic waste being stored in open air reservoirs much like these phosphogypsum stacks all over the country. Which is why we should be concerned that Florida’s next export is going to be a bad precedent about how to deal with toxic open air ponds:
“While phosphogypsum tailing stacks like the one at the Piney Point site are concentrated in Florida, thousands of industrial and agricultural open-air wastewater ponds dot the country. They include at least 70 phosphogypsum stacks, 700 coal-ash ponds near coal-burning power plants and thousands of agricultural facilities like the vast lagoons at large, industrial livestock farms.”
Thousands of open-air toxic industrial ponds are just sitting there, waiting for a bad a storm. Especially the unprecedented climate-change-powered storms of tomorrow:
Note that the “we can’t clean this stuff up, it’s impossible” industry sentiment was on full display in July of 2020 when the Trump administration EPA essentially extended the lifetimes of toxic coal ash open air ponds when it ruled that companies could continue using them if they couldn’t find anywhere to put it.
But in general, while we don’t know exactly which toxic industrial ponds will end up overflowing or failing, and we don’t know when it will happen, we do know it’s coming. A major sub-chapter or the story of climate change is going to be the story of all the predictable disasters that could have been clearly avoided and weren’t. This is slated to be part of that sub-chapter. A particularly dark and sad sub-chapter where humanity’s collective inability to care about itself is on full display. A chapter about nothing being done unless it’s too late or, at best, almost too late. And even then, we already know what the almost-too-late ‘solution’ is going to be. We’ve heard that story before.
Here’s another update on the phosphate nightmare of Manatee County and Tampa Bay:
Scientists have been building models of the phosphate spill’s movement into and out of Tampa Bay. They used the existing Tampa Bay Coastal Ocean Model and found that, unfortunately, the pollution is forecast to spend months swirling around inside the bay before actually leaving because powerful sustained winds are rare for this time of year. Just going back and forth, north and south, but not really leaving. Which means Tampa Bay could be in store for a very red tide.
But as we’ll see in the second article below, there is hope. Hope for more sustained winds. Or maybe even a hurricane or two. And that’s because the Atlantic weather patterns are so broken they’re probably going to push the official opening of the hurricane season from June 1 back to May 15. Hurricanes keep happening now before the official June 1 start and so that start date is poised to be moved forward. It’s just a matter of how far forward. Either way, the point is we probably shouldn’t be too surprised if Tampa Bay experiences a hurricane now that we broke the weather. Hurricanes are pretty good at sustained winds, so there’s that.
It’s another aspect of the Piney Point disaster: it happened during the worst time of the year for a spill too:
“Powerful, sustained winds are rare this time of year in Florida, and that means the polluted water that spilled from the Piney Point phosphate plant last month is likely to linger in Tampa Bay for months, a USF ocean physicist said Wednesday.”
Powerful, sustained winds. It’s just what Tampa Bay needs and sometimes gets, but not normally now. Instead, all of those phosphates will be sloshing around for months, suffocating the life out of the bay while we wait for the winds to return:
Is Tampa Bay doomed to suffocate? According to the models, yes, there’s a good chance of that. But then again, this is a weather. And weather is chaotic. Especially after you break the weather:
“During the past nine Atlantic hurricane seasons, seven tropical storms have formed between May 15 and the official June 1 start date. Those have killed at least 20 people, causing about $200 million in damage, according to the WMO. So the organization will discuss an earlier starting season and likely commission a study to figure out how to adopt one.”
When will the strong sustained winds arrive to sweep the toxins away? Probably sooner than we should expect. It’s one of the few bonuses of man-made global warming: the extra hurricanes and high winds should help disburse all the man-made toxins. Chaos to the rescue.
Remember that 2019 study that found neonicotinoids were ravaging the aquatic life of Japan, raising questions about the damage this widely used pesticide might be inflicting on the ecosystems of lakes and rivers. Well, we’re going to get much clearer answers on the kind of damage neonicotinoids might be inflicting on aquatic ecosystems thanks to a new push in Scotland and the EU to use imidacloprid to de-lice caged salmon. Specifically, the CleanTreat system by the company Benchmark, which assures the public that CleanTreat is a closed system that filters any neonicotinoids out before water is returned to the environment. The push is coming despite US government scientists describing imidacloprid as an “environmental hazard” that can be “very toxic to aquatic life with long-lasting effects”. As Dave Goulson, a biology professor at Sussex University who has studied the impact of neonicotinoids puts it, “These chemicals are incredibly poisonous – the novichok for insects...It takes a billionth of a gram to harm aquatic life, so even tiny traces would have major impacts on marine life.” So let’s hope Benchmark’s claims about CleanTreat are true. Because if they aren’t, Scotland and maybe the EU are about to ‘novichok’ Europe’s marine life:
“US government scientists have described the insecticide imidacloprid as an “environmental hazard” that can be “very toxic to aquatic life with long-lasting effects”.”
It’s not like the impact of neonicotinoids on marine life is a mystery. It’s known to be very toxic with long-lasting effects. Enter the Benchmark CleanTreat system, which promises to allow fish farmers to use the toxic compounds at fish farms safely because the CleanTreat system will filter out all the neonicotinoids before the water is allowed to flow back into the environment. Promises that had better be true because otherwise that means CleanTreat is going to be dumping ‘the novichok for insects’ into the ecosystem with all of its very toxic long-lasting effects:
And it’s not just Scotland. The CleanTreat system could end up getting approved at the EU level, with the European Commission currently looking into establishing a maximum residue level for imidacloprid. As long as CleanTreat can convinced regulators that it will keep the spillover below that level, it can presumably get approval. And Scotland may not be the first European country to approve the CleanTreat system. Benchmark is reportedly already working on getting that approval in Norway:
It’s important to note that the major shareholder in Benchmark is the Norwegian holding company Ferd. So a very influential Norwegian family is the force behind getting Benchmark’s CleanTreat approved in Norway.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that the CleanTreat system isn’t designed to exclusively scrub imidacloprid from water systems. It could theoretically be used to filter out a broad array of chemicals, meaning the approval of the CleanTreat system isn’t just an invitation to dump unscrubbed imidacloprid into aquatic environments. It will be used to dump all sorts of chemicals deemed to be useful in fish farming. Pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, and whatever else Benchmark can convince regulators its CleanTreat system is capable of adequately removing from the water before it’s returned to the environment. Whether or not the system is actually capable of meeting Benchmark’s claims
So as we can see, the neonicotinoid industry has a new market in mind and it’s looking like just a matter of time before that market is opened up. Opened up and leaking ‘the novichok of insects’ all over the place.
We have a bee problem. Still. It’s just not quite the same as before. The bee colonies are still collapsing at record or near record rates and native pollinators like wild bees are still in decline. All of the various known stresses contributing to the collapse of pollinators around the world are still there. Pesticides are still being used. The varroa mites are still epidemic. And now there’s a new stress. A rather ironic stress at that: too many honeybees.
Yes, despite the ongoing rampant colony collapses experienced by beekeepers, honeybee colonies have managed to remain stable in recent years and there are now arguably more honeybees alive than at any other point in human history. Quite simply, humans have gotten very adept at replacing lost colonies. Setting up new colonies may be expensive and time consuming, but so far the beekeeping industry has managed to more than keep up with the losses that would have devastated in industry in years past.
And while more honeybees is desirable in the face of persistent colony collapses, there really can be too much of good thing. Especially when the human-managed bee colonies are concentrated in urban areas thanks to a flood of corporate ‘greenwashing’ public relations efforts. As a result, cities like London and NY City now have so many honeybees flying around that the native bees and other pollinators are getting crowded out. It’s become so out of balance that some professional beekeepers who set up and maintain colonies for clients are now turning down new jobs and encouraging existing clients to reduce the numbers of colonies.
So that’s the new, very ironic, stress impacting pollinator populations: pollinators are still in broad decline as the stresses driving that decline remain in place. Thanks to too many urban replacement honeybees.
Ok, first, here’s a report from back in July about the stabilized US honeybee population. Stable despite a near record annual loss of 48% of US colonies in 2022:
“But using costly and Herculean measures to create new colonies, beekeepers are somehow keeping afloat. Thursday’s University of Maryland and Auburn University survey found that even though 48% of colonies were lost in the year that ended April 1, the number of United States honeybee colonies “remained relatively stable.””
Yes, the bee colony crisis is...stable? There’s still a crisis. Bee colonies are still collapsing at record or near record rates. But thanks to aggressive, and expensive, efforts on the part of the beekeeping industry the total number of colonies in the US has remained roughly the same. And yet, with demand for beekeeping increasing as the efforts it takes to maintain a stable number of colonies also increases, it’s not clear how sustainable this ultimately will be. The long run is a pretty long time when you’re talking about annually scrambling to make up for near record losses:
And that report about the remarkable ability of the beekeeping industry to maintain stable colony numbers in the face of steep annual losses brings us to the following NY Times report from back in August about a new problem facing the pollinators of the world: too many honeybee colonies. Yep, it appears that beekeeping has become so trendy there are now more honeybees alive today than at any point in human history, according to some estimates.
Bee-problem solved, right? Nope. The explosion of human-managed honeybee colonies over the last decade is reportedly crowding out wild bees and other pollinators like moths, wasps, and wild bees like bumblebees that play crucial roles in pollination of native plants. Especially in urban areas where beekeeping has increasingly been taken up by corporations as a kind of greenwashing public relations effort. The situation has become so imbalanced that some professional beekeepers who set up and maintain bee colonies for clients are now turning down jobs and advising their clients to reduce the number of colonies they’re already maintaining.
Importantly, as the article notes, nothing about this explosion in human-maintained honeybee colonies has done anything to address the myriad of factors driving the die off of pollinators of all stripes. Factors driving the collapse of flying insect populations in general seen deep inside nature reserves far from agricultural areas and that appear to be driven, in part, by pesticides flowing in into forests and other native habitats from agriculture areas.
So we appear to have achieved a new phase in the global pollinator crisis: Humanity has apparently figured out how to replace honeybees faster than they are dying off...making an excess of honeybees one of the new stress being imposed on the rest of pollinators of the world. A new stress on top of all the old stress that we still haven’t done anything about:
“That, at any rate, was Mr. Trusnovec’s original sales pitch. In recent years, he and other beekeepers, as well as a broad variety of leading conservationists, have come to a very different conclusion: The craze for honey bees now presents a genuine ecological challenge. Not just in Slovenia, but around the world.”
As far as problems go, it could be worse. There could be no honeybees left. Instead, we have more honeybees than at any other point in human history, despite the record die offs. Too many for our own good and the good of the rest of the pollinators of the world:
And while this might seem like a relatively easy problem to fix given that so much of the problem is focused in urban areas like New York City and London filled with corporations looking to engage in some greenwashing. Will corporations be willing to part with their ‘trophy bees’? Let’s hope so:
And as a consequence of all these ‘trophy bees’, the wild bees and alternative pollinators like moths and wasps are even more stressed than ever. Stressed and still declining:
Any bold corporate PR departments interested in setting up some nice moth and wasp nests? Or how about hotels for solitary wild bees? Any takers? It’s probably a lot easier than maintaining a honeybee colony, albeit maybe not with the same kind of positive public profile of a honeybee colony. The kind of positive public profile that is presumably going to become less positive as the ‘too many honeybees’ message percolates. So let’s hope that ‘too many honeybees’ message doesn’t end up becoming a ‘we fixed the bee problem’ message. Especially since we appear to have ‘fixed’ the problem so much it’s arguably worse than ever.