Good News Channel - help counter the nattering nabobs of negativity
Article of the week: How Bill McKibben Lost the Plot
Song of the week, by The Flaming Lips: Race for the Prize
“Old” post of the week: Abolishing Suffering & The Buddhist Drug
Actionable post of the week: Doing Good Better Per Marginal Dollar
Action photo of the week:
Preface
Many, if not most, “non-GMO” seeds in use today (including for “organic” foods) were created by inducing random mutations through radioactivity or mutagenic compounds. “Natural”!
Now with techniques like CRISPR, we can intentionally turn on or off genes or insert a sequence of base pairs to provide exactly the change we would like (e.g., producing Vitamin A, which would help many millions avoid death and blindness, an outcome some oppose).
Which do you think has a greater impact on the genome: using a shotgun or a scalpel
Also, if you eat, you’re eating GMOs. Sweet potatoes, tea, bananas, peanuts, yams, cranberries, cherries, and ... beer – all are transgenic plants. That is, they have genes from other species – indeed, from an entirely different kingdom of life!
Eating Organic Can Be Immoral
from Losing My Religions
Don’t tell me that conventional agriculture uses “chemicals.” Everything is “chemicals”! Oxygen? A chemical! Sucrose? A chemical!
And pesticides? “Organic” farmers use pesticides. Also, from New Scientist:
All fruit and vegetables contain large numbers of naturally occurring pesticides. These are the result of an arms race with insect herbivores. If we tested for these, we would find that they are just as nasty as synthetic pesticides, but present in food in higher amounts. However, they don't affect us when we consume them because their concentration is only effective against insects, not anything large. The real problem with organic farming is low yield. You need much more land to obtain similar yields to other forms of farming. I think we should be returning farmland to nature, not increasing its area.
And because of their low yields, advocating organic agriculture means there will be less food grown.
Advocating for organic means more hunger.
Or, as Robert L. Paarlberg says in Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat:
My research experience tells me not to yearn for an organic, local, or slow food system, since that would mean abandoning a century's worth of modern science. It would force farmers to accept more toil and less income, consumers would be given fewer nutritious food choices, and greater destruction would be done to the natural environment… I want a food solution that works for all, including people who live on a budget and those without a lot of spare time. Dinners at Chez Panisse may be wonderful, but start at over a hundred dollars. Assembling healthy meals from fresh, unprocessed ingredients is a joy for many, but the time required for shopping, preparation, and clean up may be too much for a single parent with school-age kids.
PS: While editing this, Vox’s great Kenny Torrella documented how Sri Lanka’s banning of synthetic fertilizer and pesticide imports “proved disastrous.” Now the country is in free-fall. Google “Sri Lanka’s organic farming disaster, explained” for more.
Doom, Plastics, Organics, GMOs, 'Natural,' Voting: Overlap of Losing with Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie
You should definitely read her book. And give a copy to everyone you know. And subscribe to her – she’s way better than I am! She is, quite possibly, today’s most important writer.
Excerpts below from this larger collection of excerpts. And yes, it is a cop-out to outsource nearly this entire post to two other authors, although I will note that Losing came out two years before End of the World ;-)
Every doomsday activist that makes a big, bold claim invariably turns out to be wrong.
The reason pessimists often sound smart is that they can avoid being ‘wrong’ by moving the goalposts. When a doomer predicts that the world will end in five years, and it doesn’t, they just move the date. The American biologist Paul R. Ehrlich – author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb – has been doing this for decades. In 1970 he said that ‘sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come. And by “the end” I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.’ Of course, that was woefully wrong. He had another go: he said that ‘England will not exist in the year 2000’. Wrong again.
I wish I could reach back to my younger self and hug her.
Just 54% [of humans] have a safe toilet, and just 60% have clean fuels. We must ensure access to these resources, but regardless of what metric we’re looking at, the trend is consistently upward. Every day, 300,000 people get access to electricity and a similar number get clean water, for the first time. This has been the case every day for a decade.
Every day I come across motivated and thoughtful people trying to do their best for the environment. They think about the environmental impact of almost every decision they make [but] what they’re doing makes almost no difference, and, as we’ll see later, occasionally makes things worse.
Death rates from disasters have actually fallen since the first half of the 20th century. And not just by a little bit. They have fallen roughly 10-fold.
Anyone that trusted the Netflix documentary Cowspiracy would believe that cutting out meat will stop the climate crisis. The film claims that more than half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock. This is nonsense. The actual number is just under a fifth. [A point someone else has been making for years and years.]
What’s most frustrating about the opposition to genetic engineering is that, once again, it often hurts the poorest the most.
organic farming tends to give us lower crop yields, which (yes, you know where I’m going) means we need to use more land.
organic farming [is] worse for the pollution of rivers and lakes.
Most of the evidence – or maybe the lack of evidence – suggests that the plastic particles themselves are not a big concern for human health.
I’m not an advocate for plastic straws. I don’t really care about them. But I do care about ineffective policies, especially if they take the place of ones that could really make a difference.
In fact, in many ways, a single-use plastic bag is better than some alternatives. You’d need to use a paper bag several times, and a cotton one tens to hundreds of times to ‘break even’ with the plastic carrier.
you should be focusing much more on what you put in the bag than the bag itself. It will have a much bigger environmental impact.
A well-managed landfill, deep in the ground, can be a very effective environmental solution.
I still get the instinctual pull towards ‘natural’ solutions. Working against it takes repeated, and sometimes uncomfortable, effort. Yet it’s something that we need to overcome. The fact that our intuitions are so ‘off’ is a problem. At a time when the world needs to eat less meat, we’ve seen a pushback against meat-substitute products because they’re ‘processed’. When we need to be using less land for agriculture we’ve seen a recent resurgence in organic, but more land-hungry, farming.
Lab-grown meat, dense cities and nuclear energy need a rebrand. These need to be some of the new emblems of a sustainable path forward.
We want to believe in ‘people power’ – that if we all just pull together and act a bit more responsibly then we’ll get there. Unfortunately, to make real and lasting progress we need large-scale systemic and technological change. We need to change political and economic incentives.
get involved in political action and vote for leaders who support sustainable actions.
One positive policy change can almost immediately trump [sic] the individual efforts of millions of people. [and vice versa -ed.]
Completely agreed on GMO. The GMO opponents rarely focus on what the real problems with GMOs might be. The possibility for abusing IP, etc.
Arguably with all the selective breeding the animals and plants we consume today have gone through, they’re all GMOs at this point.
Nuclear energy doesn’t need a rebrand.
Nuclear energy needs to be cheaper. Instead it has a negative learning curve and has constantly gotten more expensive in real terms year by year.
Other renewables are way cheaper at this point.
Further, how is nuclear energy a solution when the nuclear plant in Ukraine is a massive threat due to war in a way that wind and solar can never be.
But most importantly, as the U.S. dropping bombs on Iran and Europeans subsequently imposing sanctions shows, nuclear energy is not a solution to anything because existing nuclear powers will not allow the rest of the world to acquire nuclear energy even if it somehow got magically cheaper.
It’s so weird to see nuclear advocates (I am one) keep repeating tropes from the 2000s while not accepting the real reason nuclear isn’t viable other than limited uses, which is primarily cost and geopolitics.