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My concern is best summed up by this comment from above: Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget
by dbasedweeb 8y ago
My concern is best summed up by this comment from above:
Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be.
See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction.
The answer in all those cases is the harmful effects eventually became known, but the jury was out long enough for the vested interests to make a ton of profit and cause a ton of damage which they'll never pay for repairing. All made possible with a series of comparatively small investments to buy scientific research to keep the jury out.
Even in non-borderline cases like tobacco, lots of money and power can really confuse the issue. This is definitely not as clear cut as tobacco, and I’d like the option to opt out of the lengthy, massive “trial period” in which the public gets to play guinea pig. The problem with this is that it’s very difficult to do that when the compound in question is unexpectedly ubiquitous.
- tptacek 8y agoThis isn't so much an argument as it is innuendo. If you get glyphosate carcinogenicity wrong, you increase carcinogenic agriculture, because that's what the market alternatives to it are: clearly known human carcinogens.
- dbasedweeb 8y agoThat isn’t so much an argument as a false dichotomy, predicated on a system of agriculture which allows a near 50% rate of wasteage in the West. The alternatives include less productive, yet still sufficiently productive methods which do not include carcinogenic compounds. Edit: Your state of being persuaded is immaterial, because what I said isn’t really controversial. One known alternative to herbacides is tilling, hardly a radical new invention and notably not carcinogenic. As I said up front, it would take more effort to produce crops, but simply by reducing waste you can more than make up for that. The use of ground cover, litter, and other established techniques all allow for large scale farming without herbacides. There are other alternatives, and adjunct techniques as well, for example: http://plen.ku.dk/english/news/2015/crops/ http://plen.ku.dk/english/news/2015/crops/ Stop wasting so much food because it isn’t pretty enough, and you can stop truffing carcinogens. That seems fair.
- tptacek 8y agoIt would be a false dichotomy if glyphosate hadn't literally displaced herbicides that were known to be human carcinogens and allowed anyways, but it did, so your logic isn't persuasive.
- sooheon 8y agoAnd what you're proposing is letting perfect be the enemy of the good. No matter how sustainable and green your alternative is, "less productive" anything won't fly in today's world economy. Until we change 8 billion humans' economic motives, maybe we can start with getting the facts straight on one substance.
- tropo 8y agoI like tilling, but it requires lots of diesel fuel and it increases evaporation. The future is probably robotic weed picking. That still requires fuel, but perhaps not as much.
- GW150914 8y agoIs there some reason that EV’s can’t till? If you’re farming there’s lots of sunlight for solar, and nuclear is a good option too.
- the-pigeon 8y agoThis is actually somewhat common too. Like chlorine being replaced by other disinfectants in drinking water. https://www.npr.org/2011/01/07/132743638/disinfectant-to-clean-water-has-problems-of-its-own https://www.npr.org/2011/01/07/132743638/disinfectant-to-cle... Basically you have some popular chemical so it gets studied extensively and we learn about the bad things it does. It then starts being replaced by things that have been less studied, so there's less evidence of the bad things they do but could be equally bad, better or worse.
- buvanshak 8y agoA very good recent example being Vaping replacing smoking as a "healthier alternative"....
- airstrike 8y agoThe other market alternative is eating organic.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago"Organic" usually means even worse chemicals were used so no, that's not better.
- matte_black 8y agoLike what?
- airstrike 8y agoNot all organic food fits that description.
- r00fus 8y agoFalse equivalence. There are non carcinogenic methods of farming.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]