Zombie DDT ban myth reanimated

Drive a wooden stake through Heartland.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie.”

Yeah, the GMO lobby is doing some creative stuff on the internets.

I’m curious, what does a “research associate” do when inventing falsehoods? Do you have to invent sources? Fake footnotes?

http://www.revisionism.nl/Potato/The-Mad-Revisionist.htm

James Lovelock keeps repeating this myth, for one. What a curate’s egg that guy is.

Derren Brown has vectored this one in print. I wonder if it’s got a toehold outside the right-Libertarian compound in that me-so-rational area where people call themselves Bright. Brian Dunning ran it in 2010 on his Skeptoid podcast (and got royally taken down by Rebecca Watson at Skepchick, I’m happy to say). I guess that if you are a rationalist debunker in the US you’re going to end up talking to a lot of right-Libertarians (if you aren’t one yourself, e.g. Penn Jillette).

Heartland are re-branding themselves as “climate optimists”, but replace the word “climate” with “tobacco” and you get the flavour.

“The evidence says tobacco can destroy your quality of life and give you an early death, but, hey, be an optimist and light up.”

Sasha, one of Monty Python’s better moments. :-)

“Only a few are so arrogant that they go around constantly saying what they like and dislike is a reflection of an objective reality”

They also tend to be very personally unpleasant. I took part in a couple meetings of a local skeptic group a few years back and man did they make it hard to like them.

11, 14: George Monbiot is a bit more charitable to Lovelock but takes him to task for the DDT nonsense. The article contains responses by Lovelock, showing him to be completely ignorant.

http://www.monbiot.com/2014/04/25/brilliance-and-bunkum/

He used to be an organic farmer… But he just couldn’t go on this way, because 9/11 changed everything.

@14, 21: James Lovelock is similar to Freeman Dyson: his early, strictly scientific work was absolutely brilliant (the electron capture detector revolutionized analytical and atmospheric chemistry), his mid-career work was insightful and influential if somewhat erratic in detail, and his late stuff is awful. I think they both fell victim to facile contrarianism for its own sake.

“If bed bugs developed resistance, where did they go for 50 years?”
They were apparently all at the Sheraton at 57th and 7th in NYC…that’s where I always find them.

Seriously – every have to pay to have a house heat treated to remove those B***ards? $4,000….for a bunch of cooked drug resistant bugs.

26. Cleaning habits aren’t as good as they used to be, which also explains the rise of hospital infections. A hundred years ago hospitals had to be incredibly clean to prevent rampant infections in the pre antibiotic era. Even in the 1950s when my grandmother was a nurse’s aide, and former cleaner, hospitals were immaculate. By the time
My mother was in medical school, she was a much older student, in the 1970s and early 1980s only the heads of nursing and senior cleaners remembered the danger that the tiniest speck of dirt would cause. Hospital infections were rising but they were all instantly killed by antibiotics. By the time my mother completed her residency there was almost no awareness of the need for absolute cleanliness, antiseptic washes and the advances of hand sanitizers further eroded cleaning tradition, yet now resistant staph was a problem. Of course now budget cuts had eliminated many cleaners and their training was non existent, and we are still relying on antibiotics to clean up our mess.

The same is true with hotels, the use of ever more advanced insecticides meant that the sort of furniture that bedbugs can hide in has multiplied, cleaning practices have declined due to cost savings and the fact that catastrophic errors can quickly fixed with bug spray. But at the same time the bugs, which evolve very quickly, developed resistance at the same time we ran out of insecticides that didn’t kill humans too.

How many are dead because of Greens endorsement of biofuels?

Well, don’t just leave us hanging in suspense.

All of them! Every human death sincee 1987 can be traced directly to Green’s endorsement of biofuels.

And I think we all remember just how important Green endorsement was. Agribusiness can occasionally nudge along the details of some legislation, but to make large-scale changes in the U.S., you need the Greens.

Remember how vital the 77-member Green Coalition was in the U.S. Congress at the time? And while Greens only held 20 seats in the Senate, they were important to promoting biofuels, not to mention the 3 Green Party cabinet ministers in Reagan’s cabinet.

I forgot the link: http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/wp/12-02WiseGlobalBiofuels.pdf

Just curious. I tend to reflexively think “corn lobby” whenever I see “corn.” Any influence here?

31: indeed! I feel myself inclined to self-destruction at the mere thought of the Greens’ biofuels endorsement, which would make me their latest casualty. Farewell, Green world!

@37 PS Everytime you reference that tu quoque thing I think you are referencing an odd Canadian term for a hat (via Bob and Doug MacKenzie). I’m sure it’s the perfect thing for exactly what you mean, but I get distracted (leaded gasoline: can’t blame the enviros for that one!).

Although I wonder if the salt isn’t necessary. I love Borax.

elm: your link refers to the 2005-2010 period as a 6-year period

1 – 2005
2 – 2006
3 – 2007
4 – 2008
5 – 2009
6 – 2010

Empirical proof that 2005-2010 is a six-year period.

Ummm, might you care to enlighten the rest of us as to what constitutes the thoroughgoing empirical ‘best system’ ?

@47 & 48 Feel free to disagree with me. Maybe my description of environmentalist is a caricature that simply buys into the PR campaigns produced by big business. Or maybe it is something that was true and no longer applies. Maybe everyone but me thinks about health care in ideological terms as Edmund Burke vs Alexander Hamilton.

But putting scare quotes around a non-controversial (if slightly idiosyncratic) description of an empiricist worldview informed by Roman Catholic moral norms is just… I honestly don’t know… confounding? Flummoxing?

And what to make of this: Only a few are so arrogant that they go around constantly saying what they like and dislike is a reflection of an objective reality (even if many people might feel that way on some level).

So I dislike… ??? Environmentalism? Or Environmentalists? And so I’m claiming that objective reality says that sometimes they ignore science? But that’s not reality because in fact they are always scientifically grounded. Obviously, that’s not your claim because the absolute nature of it makes it impossible to defend. Maybe it makes more sense re: a specific claim? Like that science says GM crops are fine and any food that doesn’t have DNA in it is by definition, not food, but nonetheless we should keep an eye on it. That’s not true and is me projecting my tastes onto the world?

I put everyday sort of quotation marks on ‘best system’ because I was quoting you and was pointing out you seemed to be making a category error, ‘Best’ not being an empirically observable and verifiable quantity.

With regard to Roman Catholic morality Pope Francis has made it quite clear that he is concerned for the environment and other non- human creatures, and such thoughts go back a long way in the Catholic tradition indeed.

With regard to GM of food plants – the problem of malnutrition for poor people is not physical because there are not already enough natural plants in the world to provide adequate nutrition – the problem is social because of land mal-use and inequitable distribution. Surely the Catholic perspective favours the social justice solution to malnutrition rather than the manipulating creation solution?

If you can point to an inaccuracy (‘bad fact’) in what I wrote I will investigate and if it was inaccurate try to remedy it.

Meanwhile Caritas produces reports on food security and food sovereignty and accepts donations for program’s enhancing food security in Africa

http://www.caritas.org.au/docs/publications-and-reports/report_foodthefundamentalright

http://www.caritas.org.au/learn/programs/africa—uganda-integrated-food-security-program

Bruce @45

I agree, of course, but the period is potentially vague. Thornton had referred to it as a 5 year period previously, and accounting for that changes the denominator by 16 or 20% (depending on which direction you consider).

@42/43 godoggo Re: bedbugs

Thanks for the tips, which could certainly work if you know the bedbugs are limited to one room of the house. If you can’t be sure of that and particularly if you can’t be sure when the infestation started and how far the suckers might have traveled, you essentially need to apply that 120-140 degree heat treatment to virtually every room in your house – the more rooms the higher the cost (that’s what rang up the $4k). Our issue concerned a vacation property that had been essentially closed up for awhile so we had to do the whole place. If it had just been a single room it would still have been at least $1k from what I understand,. That said, the Borax thing would surely have been worth a shot and probably would have been kinda cool to watch.

Feeding Cars, Not People
The adoption of biofuels would be a humanitarian and environmental disaster
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 22nd November 2004

http://www.monbiot.com/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

Also see http://www.slideshare.net/amenning/quantitative-problems-food-security, p. 4-5.

JQ 37: “It’s probably true that in the early days there was a more favorable view. But far from showing parallel craziness, that demonstrates that the environmental movement has been willing to adjust its initial views in the light of evidence.”

Exactly.

@60
So your evidence that their work on GMOs will feed 10 billion people is two articles that don’t make that claim at all? Eh…thanks for letting me know that I shouldn’t waste my time looking into your claims in the future?

To JQ in the OP, I would suggest that you get out into the right-wing blogosphere a little more, where you will find that “lack of DDT killed millions, DDT was banned, etc.” are still oft-repeated articles of faith and have never stopped being so. People (Glenn Reynolds comes to mind) toss them off as one of those things that “everybody knows.” It’s tribal.

Meanwhile, the “tribal” thinking in Hawaii is not on the part of the locals:
http://io9.com/if-you-want-a-glimpse-of-future-food-wars-look-to-haw-1605648958/+laceydonohue

“”The thing with the Kauai bill is that it exposes the link between GMOs and pesticides,” says Bill Freese of the Center for Food Safety. The Kauai measure is important, Freese says, because it skips the question of whether GMOs are safe for human consumption and instead focuses on the issue of public health in farming communities. “It’s indisputable that the GMOs that are being grown commercially have sharply increased pesticide use, despite industry claims.”

MOST MAINLANDERS PROBABLY don’t think of Hawaii as a centre of industrial agriculture. But in just the last decade the state has become a crucial testing ground for the global seed industry. The five big biotech companies that dominate seed production — Monsanto, Dow, Pioneer-DuPont, BASF, and Syngenta — each have massive operations in the state that together occupy tens of thousands of acres of former sugar and pineapple plantations. The companies have found that the islands’ subtropical climate is the perfect environment to grow and test transgenic seeds, largely corn, but also some soy, canola, and rice varieties. Hawaii has the largest number of experimental GM crops in the United States, with more field tests than any other state. Biotech seed farms comprise the state’s largest agricultural sector, valued at about $240 million and employing some 1,400 people. The seed industry proudly claims that almost every ear of GM corn in the global market today has spent some part of its life cycle in the Aloha State.

In Kauai, four of the Big Five biotech companies manage about 15,000 acres of land. (Monsanto used to have a small operation there, but it packed up in 2010.) Much of this activity is on the island’s west side, where the weather is sunnier and drier than the more rain-prone north and east sides.

The people of Waimea hadn’t gone looking for a fight with Big Biotech. Quite the opposite. The closures of the pineapple and sugarcane plantations through the 1990s left behind hundreds of jobless agricultural workers in Kauai. So when the seed companies arrived in the late 1990s, most people were happy. There were jobs to be had again. The companies were hiring just about anybody, sometimes entire families, including grandparents who could sit in the fields with umbrellas — human scarecrows to chase away birds and feral chickens. Most of the west-siders had either worked or grown up in the shadow of the plantations. The seed companies offered the comfort of the familiar.
Until the dust kicked up.

When the fields around Waimea were growing sugarcane, they were harvested once a year. But Hawaii’s warm climate allows for three to four corn or soy harvests in a year — which is what drew the big biotech companies to the islands in the first place. The multiple harvests meant that the fields were now tilled much more frequently, and treated with fertilizers and a cocktail of pesticides more often as well. Repeated tilling created a lot of loose, chemical-laden soil that swept into Waimea. The red dust landed on the streets and on the cars, snuck into houses and coated everything — windows, floors, and appliances, even dishes in the cupboards.”

“For many Hawaiians, the GM seed industry’s growing presence and political clout represent the beginnings of a new form of colonialism — one where corporations have replaced the sugar barons who ran the state for more than a century. For them, the fight against GMOs isn’t just about agricultural practices and what kind of food we put on the table, it’s also part of a larger struggle to reclaim the islands’ political sovereignty. “To me the real underlying story in all of this is Hawaii is a occupied nation and it’s been used as an experimental station all along,” says Rosenstiel of ‘Ohana O Kaua’i. “They test sonar, they test missiles, they sprayed Agent Orange here before using it in Vietnam, and now they are growing seeds for the largest human experiment ever.”
The struggle is also linked to other knotty issues such as consolidated land ownership and deeply entrenched power structures, and two centuries of alienation from a traditional, diversified agricultural system that had once sustained a robust Indigenous population in the islands. (Exhibit A, Carvalho’s comment: “It’s always been large ag here.”)
The five large seed companies, activists say, are all too reminiscent of the “Big Five” sugarcane companies — Alexander & Baldwin, Theo H Davies, Castle & Cooke, Amfac, and C Brewer — that once ran the islands like fiefdoms and lobbied for the US annexation of Hawaii. “It’s déjà vu, that’s the scary part,” says Walter Ritte, a veteran Hawaiian political and environmental activist from Molokai. “We haven’t learned any lessons.”
The new “Big Five” quickly established themselves in the political scene still dominated by old haole (white) and Hawaiian family lines that have a stake in maintaining the status quo. The companies have wooed the influential, hired lobbyists, and put cash in politicians’ campaign coffers. From 2007 to January 2014, the biotech industry has spent at least $515,775 on campaign contributions in Hawaiian legislative, gubernatorial, and county council elections, according to an analysis by the Honolulu-based watchdog group, Babes Against Biotech.”

“Valenzuela also notes that none of the crops produced by the biotech fields goes to feed Hawaiians. The seeds are shipped off to the mainland US and South America. Meanwhile, the state imports nearly 90 percent of its food.
There’s no disputing that growing food locally is key to food security in Hawaii, which is the most remote island chain in the world. Estimates show that, in case of a disruption in shipping, the state’s inventory of fresh produce would feed people for no more than 10 days. Local food production would also bring economic gains. A Hawaii University study estimates that replacing just 10 percent of imported food with locally grown food would create about 2,300 jobs, more than what the seed industry provides now.
Many local food activists believe Hawaii’s path back to food sovereignty lies in rediscovering its traditional concept of “Aloha ‘Aina” (“love for the land”) and in relearning and building upon Indigenous natural resource management practices such as the ahpua’a system, which shared resources by dividing the islands into self-sustaining land sections that ran from the mountains to the sea. “Over here we have year-round warm weather, we have land, we have waterÂ…. We just need more farms that produce food,” says Chris Kobayashi, an organic taro farmer in Hanalei, on Kauai’s north side.
It’s not clear if Kauai’s Bill 2491 will make it through all the legal and political challenges it faces, or which side of the GMO debate will prevail in years to come. But in Hawaii, as I write this, there’s definitely a sense of optimism that a new, sustainable way of life is within reach. As Kobayashi says: “It’s going to a big fight, a very big fight, but I’m actually very excited about the possibilities of what can be done.””

From : TROUBLE IN PARADISE. By: Mitra, Maureen Nandini, Earth Island Journal, 10410406, Spring2014, Vol. 29, Issue 1

@66, 68, 69 The long quotations suggest you believe that if I disagree it is because I get my news from Gawker. Of course, a Gawker reader would be far better informed than a reader of the Washington Post. But my dad has similar ideas about sources of information, so I know where you are coming from.

But one paragraph into the Hawaii govt report you link to shows the problem: their goal is that food grown in Hawaii should be eaten by Hawaiians. I find that to be a perfectly legitimate goal. Relative inequality is a huge factor in human well-being. If food prices are high then real wages are low, which hurts all the more when rich corporations are shipping all the wonderful cheap food your state produces to rich mainlanders while you are left with expensive canned papaya. It’s a problem. The Irish grew enough food to feed themselves. The problem was they were forced to export them. There was no mass starvation in 1782 because they closed the ports.

The first time the potato blight hit (the organic potato farmers of solve that problem, some people decided to make it economically impossible to grow food in Hawaii for the purpose of export. In the past this would have been done with export duties.

The problem comes when this policy is called “food security” and dressed up as environmentalism. The price of food is a problem, but there is zero threat of Hawaiians starving. Moreover, a lot of jobs depend on profitable food exports. Maybe those jobs can be replaced by farming for strictly domestic purposes, but I have a feeling it will take very few Hawaiian farmers to feed everybody in Hawaii. Forcing this farmers to use lower yielding methods creates a couple extra jobs, but not many.

@69. I get criticized for unsubstantiated claims. But the following is both unsubstantiated and, even if true, a deliberate red herring:

It’s indisputable that the GMOs that are being grown commercially have sharply increased pesticide use, despite industry claims.”

It’s logic like this that makes me want to punch a wall. Growing food at more than a subsistence level requires pesticide. Organic farmers use organic pesticide. You might not need it on your tomatoes in the garden, but you’re not trying to feed anyone. Now, is it true that, on balance, the total contribution of all GM crops globally has played a role in increased pesticide use? Perhaps. But does that mean that GM crops developed to require less pesticide are bad?

No. Whatever the local yahoo at the Center For Food Safety might think, there is simply no logical way around the following fact: if one bushel of corn required less pesticide than another bushel grown in the same environment, the difference between toes to bushels is in the DNA of the plants.

The GM debate really doesn’t belong here and neither do your anecdotes about German communists in El Salvador. But if it pleases you (and the thread is wrecked anyway), have a go:

http://earthopensource.org/files/pdfs/GMO_Myths_and_Truths/GMO_Myths_and_Truths_1.3.pdf

PS I agree the thread is wrecked. I never should have suggested that environmentalist exhibit tribal behavior. In retrospect, that was trolling.

At least you didn’t say the thread was derailed.

The idiom “derail the thread” idiom is a running semi-facetious pet peeve of mine.

You have just made more poorly substantiated claims.

“The price of food is a problem, but there is zero threat of Hawaiians starving”

Not sure why you dispute that the problem should not be called food security. Regardless, Hawaiians import 90% of food, despite there being enough land to feed all the people [unlike maybe Singapore?]. Thus, not starving in Hawaii depends on Hawaiians being able to maintain an economic/financial level above those people in the world you already agreed above it was bad that they were starving.

“The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012. Almost all the hungry people, 852 million, live in developing countries, representing 15 percent of the population of developing counties. There are 16 million people undernourished in developed countries (FAO 2012).
. . .
Children are the most visible victims of undernutrition. Children who are poorly nourished suffer up to 160 days of illness each year. Poor nutrition plays a role in at least half of the 10.9 million child deaths each year–five million deaths. Undernutrition magnifies the effect of every disease, including measles and malaria.
. . .
The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day according to the most recent estimate that we could find (FAO 2002, p.9). The principal problem is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food. ”
http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm

Re: colonialism and unemployment : I cannot believe you seem to be mounting an argument that European colonialism was the best option for the world because indigenous peoples prior to being colonised were “unemployed” ?!?!?!?!
If you actually have sourced that argument from somewhere you really do need to read significantly better sources before making such claims.

Re: pesticides and GM
“Herbicide-resistant crop technology has led to a 239 million kilogram (527 million pound) increase in herbicide use in the United States between 1996 and 2011, while Bt crops have reduced insecticide applications by 56 million kilograms (123 million pounds). Overall, pesticide use increased by an estimated 183 million kgs (404 million pounds), or about 7%.”
http://www.enveurope.com/content/24/1/24

Further, we seem to be currently seeing a DDT like problem all over again with the use of neonicotinoids
“Growing evidence for declines in bee populations has caused great concern because of the valuable ecosystem services they provide. Neonicotinoid insecticides have been implicated in these declines because they occur at trace levels in the nectar and pollen of crop plants.
We exposed colonies of the bumble bee Bombus terrestris in the laboratory to field-realistic levels of the neonicotinoid imidacloprid, then allowed them to develop naturally under field conditions. Treated colonies had a significantly reduced growth rate and suffered an
85% reduction in production of new queens compared with control colonies. Given the scale of use of neonicotinoids, we suggest that they may be having a considerable negative impact on wild bumble bee populations across the developed world.”
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=whitehorn-2012.pdf&site=411

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/15/ban-neonicotinoids-another-silent-spring-pesticide-moratorium

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/04/new-studies-colony-collapse-disorder.html

“Plants that thrive with less pesticide” — this is some bad wording. Pesticides are not nutrients for plants.

Weeds can be controlled mechanically, without herbicides or genetic modifications. I’m not against genetic modifications in general, mind you, but you’re overlooking options. If wages are low relative to crop prices, or if you produce for self-consumption instead of the market, weeds can be controlled with tools as simple as a hoe or hands. Integrated management of tillage, cover crops, and beneficial insects can also raise crop yield without additional pesticides or transgenic modifications. I expect that automated mechanical weeding systems will become mainstream this decade for chemical-free weed control in large scale agriculture. There are already prototypes in field trials.

Chemical control of insects and weeds needs to be used sparingly and/or with rotation to prevent resistance from developing in pests. Over-reliance on glyphosate has led to significant resistance developing in weeds. The same will happen with Bt toxin resistance in pest insects, if it’s not happened already. To prevent resistance yet maintain current practices you would need a stable of herbicides and toxins that fill the same roles as glyphosate and Bt, but work by different biochemical mechanisms so that cross-intervention resistance does not develop in the controlled organisms. Then you’d rotate among varieties to avoid applying consistent selection pressure. Finding chemicals that can do the same job by different mechanisms may be easier said than done — look at the problem of antibiotic resistant bacteria for a cautionary example.

The beauty of mechanical pest control is that resistance doesn’t become a problem. Humans have been uprooting weeds and squishing bugs for thousands of years, and the same practices kill them today. The downside is the labor intensity, at least if you’re talking commercial farming in high-wage nations, but as I said before I think that automated systems will remove that downside in a few years. The systems don’t need to be especially fast or powerful; I would wager that they can be powered by solar PV, and at lower cost than burning diesel for that matter.

“Round-Up is less toxic than caffeine”
you can have my morning coffee when you pry it out of my cold, dead, fingers.