Re:Monsanto gives up fight for genetically modified plants i...
by smsm42 on Sunday June 02, 2013 @04:39PM
(#5810001)
Science is not perfect. It's the best we have. Yes, pests are adapting and we don't have silver bullet. The solution is, however, not to say "well, science didn't work out, let's try to go back to the caves" - the solution is to keep working.
>>> What you support is a matter of what seems trustworthy.
This is exactly the problem - the support becomes political and relies not on what is actually better but on whose lobbyists are better and whose PR campaign is more successful. This venerable tradition started a long time ago, with Edison's shenanigans[1] to give him edge over the competitors. The story of DDT is another example - while the scientific basis for the book that destroyed the DDT - Silent Spring - remain shaky[2] and the ban ended up costing millions of lives of malaria victims, it is still considered an example of how science is going to doom us all. Another example is the continuing PR battle between sugar lobby and corn lobby. Initially, corn lobby was winning - that's why HFCS is called "high fructose" - because once fructose was good and glucose was bad, so the marketing term emphasized the good part, even though some varieties of HFCS have less fructose than table sugar, and commonly used one has only very slightly more [3]. Due to this and as the effect of the insanely high sugar tariffs, US industry switched from sugar to HFCS. Now the tide has turned and HFCS is becoming the bane of our age. And now the corn lobby wants to go back to "corn sugar", but so far they weren't allowed to. Corn guys though did another number in "biofuels", so even if they lose the HFCS thing, they have other victories in their belt.
This is all to say "what seems trustworthy" is a very poor guide, since most information you'd see in popular press is probably worthless. And decisions made by politicians are probably based on random factors having nothing to do with actual merits of proposed solutions.
>>> What you support is a matter of what seems trustworthy.
This is exactly the problem - the support becomes political and relies not on what is actually better but on whose lobbyists are better and whose PR campaign is more successful. This venerable tradition started a long time ago, with Edison's shenanigans[1] to give him edge over the competitors. The story of DDT is another example - while the scientific basis for the book that destroyed the DDT - Silent Spring - remain shaky[2] and the ban ended up costing millions of lives of malaria victims, it is still considered an example of how science is going to doom us all. Another example is the continuing PR battle between sugar lobby and corn lobby. Initially, corn lobby was winning - that's why HFCS is called "high fructose" - because once fructose was good and glucose was bad, so the marketing term emphasized the good part, even though some varieties of HFCS have less fructose than table sugar, and commonly used one has only very slightly more [3]. Due to this and as the effect of the insanely high sugar tariffs, US industry switched from sugar to HFCS. Now the tide has turned and HFCS is becoming the bane of our age. And now the corn lobby wants to go back to "corn sugar", but so far they weren't allowed to. Corn guys though did another number in "biofuels", so even if they lose the HFCS thing, they have other victories in their belt.
This is all to say "what seems trustworthy" is a very poor guide, since most information you'd see in popular press is probably worthless. And decisions made by politicians are probably based on random factors having nothing to do with actual merits of proposed solutions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents [2] http://reason.com/archives/2002/06/12/silent-spring-at-40 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup#Produc...