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Three anti-science lobbies dragging our world back into the dark ages: 1) anti-vaxxers 2) anti-nuclear 3) anti-GMO Let’s have a better public education befor

by option 7y ago

Three anti-science lobbies dragging our world back into the dark ages: 1) anti-vaxxers 2) anti-nuclear 3) anti-GMO Let’s have a better public education before it is to late. I grew up near Chernobyl and my parents still work there. While no one denies it was a huge disaster in which people died; they way nuclear is portrayed in (most) of the Western world is disgusting. As of today (accounting for all past death) nuclear is the safest form of power generation (statistically even safer than solar, measured in deaths/mwt). Do we want to stop climate change? If yes - nuclear is an essential part of the solution.

beat 7y ago
Please, never say "safer than solar". Even if technically correct from a certain perspective, it sounds like an "argue to win" point, and just alienates the very people you want to win to your side - environmentally-minded folks who might be convinced of the benefits of nuclear power. From a less narrow perspective, it shows a total ignorance of how risk analysis works. It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed. This is intuitively obvious to the people you're trying to impress with this line. So don't use it.
- petschge 7y ago
  Also there is a huge difference between workers installing solar panels dying on the job from falling of roofs and citizens getting killed by exploding nuclear plants. The former is a risk they were very aware of, had some control over and were payed to accept. The latter is a risk imposed on them outside of their control and without compensation (and if they vote to get rid of that risk HN viciously attacts them).
  - option 7y ago
    My point is that nuclear is very safe, not that we should get rid of solar. People, think! I now live in Bay Area (very sunny place) and have solar on my house. Problem is that it covers at best 40% of my family’s (4 people) energy needs
    - CyanBird 7y ago
      Reduce, reuse, recycle That has always been the mantra and always will. I'm certainly opposed to God forbids opening new nuclear plants, but I'm also opposed to closing existing ones, those are different arguments and should be treated as such. Nuclear fission is a relic of early 50's, but we already paid the co2 cost of building said plants, therefore should continue operating to reduce further damage to the biosphere by releasing more co2/methane. But we don't need to build new nuclear plants, as they are overly expensive and the safer you try to make them the more expensive they get, not to mention that they take a huge amount of time to actually get built and in the meantime release ungodly amounts of co2 with the colossal amounts of steel and concrete needed for the construction, a co2 budget that will take a long time to be recovered
      - mooseburger 7y ago
        They only take that long due to red tape, not due to any intrinsic reason. France did not have this problem. The U.S. could do like them, create the one standardized design for a nuclear plant, build them all the same way, which of course will help with construction, safety and maintenance.
    - Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
      Needs or wants? Could you conserve another 40% if you tried?
      - gwbas1c 7y ago
        A lot of that depends on what the energy medium is. Is the other 40% gas for cars and natural gas for heating? It's very easy to do 100% of electricity from solar in the Bay Area in a home that still drives gas cars, has gas heat and no AC. I coughed up the money to go as solar as I can, (heat pumps, electric vehicles, ect,) but my state's financing had its limits; and then Mother Nature sent me an unusually cloudy April. I'm probably going to be somewhere between 70-85% solar after I have a few years of data. Anyway, when it comes to reducing CO2, celebrate the partial victories. Rooftop solar can take a huge dent in emissions, but it's not a complete solution. There is no silver bullet for this problem.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    And the latter (killed by exploding nuclear power plants) is historically zero. All nuclear related fatalities are due to radiation exposure, and the immediate deaths are rather small numbers, with the lingering effects of the fallout (i.e. cancer) only pushing the numbers into the 10's of thousands.
    - petschge 7y ago
      Claiming that the fallout is in no part due to exploding nuclear plants is disingenuous.
      - falcolas 7y ago
        The power plants aren't exploding - that's my point. Calling a meltdown an explosion is factually incorrect, and furthers misconceptions about what happens when a nuclear power plant goes critical. These misconceptions help nobody.
        colordrops 7y ago
        Chernobyl exploded.
        petschge 7y ago
        Factually there was a hydrogen explosion in Fukushima due to things doing wrong in the nuclear part. And it produced fall out. That is was not a prompt critical nuclear explosion is semantics. You just want to push nuclear instead of being honest.
        darkpuma 7y ago
        > "That is was not a prompt critical nuclear explosion is semantics." In a world where nuclear weapons are a thing and the public is generally aware of their horrific effects, the distinction between a meltdown and a 'nuclear explosion' is not semantics.
- option 7y ago
  Regarding risk analysis - past track record is very important, especially when we have decades of it. Nuclear is very heavy regulated (and it should be) to prevent possible risks and new designs are very safe
  - beat 7y ago
    The RBMK design was very safe, too. And it exploded due to a combination of design flaw and dangerous operation. Sure, the rest of them were fixed after that, but. Fukushima was a very safe design, too, and well regulated. Three Mile Island was a very safe design. And let's not even get into the history of lesser-known accidents with less-safe designs, in the hands of paranoid military operators and secretive, embarrassment-shy governments. Of the well-known accidents, all of them were unexpected. And all of them could have gone far worse, were it not for heroic actions and some luck on the part of the operators. And all of them involved a degree of government coverup and the public distrust that causes. So it's not only expected that the public would distrust nuclear power more than is maybe absolutely needed, it's very reasonable for them to do so. The safety of nuclear power worldwide is the safety of the worst design with the worst crew, built by the lowest bidder. Don't just react as if the public is stupid, or there's no risk involved. Those things are the reason the public doesn't take pro-nuclear activists seriously.
    - shawnz 7y ago
      > Of the well-known accidents, all of them were unexpected. What accidents are "expected" in any industry, energy or otherwise?
      - beat 7y ago
        All sorts of accidents are expected. We take them into account. For example, if you operate a large data center, you simply assume that a certain number of drives and motherboards will fail, and build it into the plan. No one planned for Fukushima to be flooded. No on planned for one of Chernobyl's reactor cores to explode. (The phrase "impossible" was tossed around a lot; it took a good deal of thinking to finally recognize the design flaw.)
- falcolas 7y ago
  Decades after the Chernobyl disaster, a worst case scenario, and the total number of people's health negatively impacted is well under 100k. I think it's safe to say that, regardless of the choice between "could" or "have", the number of lives impacted is relatively small (in the scale of power-generation related injuries and deaths).
  - CyanBird 7y ago
    What happened at chernobyl WAS Not a "worse case scenario", had the entire with the other 3 reactors plant exploded in a thermal explosion. Now that would had been a worse case scenario, and today there are still RBMK reactors in operation You wont ever hear of such a risk from a solar plant exploding... If you want to discuss the safety of nuclear energy, then own up the risk and face the criticism, to do otherwise is misleading and cowardly
  - DubiousPusher 7y ago
    But Chernobyl was not a worst case scenario. It was bad but the Soviet government did respond to it seriously. It could've been much worse had they not. In fact, that's what this article gets entirely wrong about the film. The most disturbing thing the film highlights is not the gruesome deaths of a handful of individuals. It's how the disaster could've been much worse.
    - falcolas 7y ago
      > the Soviet government did respond to it seriously If by seriously you mean covering up the problem so the appropriate experts could be brought in to contain the problem before the fallout covered half of Europe, or in not providing proper shielding for the first responders, or by not providing proper funding and training for the staff at Chernobyl... sure, they took it very seriously. /s
      - DubiousPusher 7y ago
        I have read many books about the Soviet Union. The government was full of perverse incentives which encouraged fraud, deception, denial and corruption. The dogma was so perverse it lead to a total corruption of logic and reason. To the point it essentially warped reality. In the Soviet Union, to ask for a better tool was to imply that your managers were incompetent. Or the tool designers were. Or the manufacturers were. All of whom were appointed by the government. A government which saw itself as the manifest will of the people. To imply something wasn't good enough was to imply the Russian people themselves weren't good enough. That horrendous logic may have been self inflicted but it none the less set the ground rules for any action taken by the government. The inadequacies you point out say nothing about how seriously the Soviet government took Chernobyl. You will find the exact same problems pervade almost every single Soviet government initiative.
- shawnz 7y ago
  > It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed. I don't understand. Why should there be any difference between these, unless you're saying that the safety of solar/wind is improving faster than the safety of nuclear is improving?
  - beat 7y ago
    Then you don't understand risk. There is no case in which the failure of a wind farm could cause death or injury to millions of people at once. The whole "safety" argument of solar is buried in flat-out bullshit analysis about how people fall off of roofs while installing panels. There's no safety concern to speak of with solar/wind.
    - shawnz 7y ago
      I didn't claim to be any kind of expert. But I don't understand how the scenario you are describing is necessary for solar/wind to have a higher risk per MWh. What does the presence of catastrophic failure modes have to do with past versus future results?
      - beat 7y ago
        Let's put it in concrete terms. I'm going to toss a coin, you call it. If you win, you get $5. If you lose, you pay me $1. You probably do it, right? Next scenario. I'm going to roll a 100-sided die. If it comes up one, I'm going to shoot you in the head. Anything else, you get $100. Now, would you agree to that? Of course not. Even though you're 99% likely to get $100. It's that 1% chance of dying that stops you. That's because "risk" isn't just one number. Even at a very basic level, we distinguish between the likelihood of the risk, and the consequences of the risk. You're only considering the likelihood, not the consequences. That's where you're going wrong.
        shawnz 7y ago
        > You're only considering the likelihood, not the consequences. I'm considering the likelihood of the same consequence: people dying. You are describing a totally different scenario with your coin toss example. You are making it sound like I'm weighing profits against lives and that is not correct. I'm weighing lives against lives.
- jabl 7y ago
  > It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed. Really? So we should take into account scenarios like 1. Solar installer falls from roof, hits car, dies 2. Car didn't have handbrake on, starts to roll down the driveway, rolling over the toddler playing in the yard, killing her too 3. Rolls into the street, causing a school bus full of children to swerve and hit a LNG tanker, causing a massive explosion killing everybody onboard. Of course, in reality, we need to take into account realistic failure pathways and plan accordingly. Per such analysis, both solar and nuclear are both very safe.
CyanBird 7y ago
Nuclear is not an essential part of any solution, it is more expensive than solar and wind per Mwatt, it takes far longer to build new plants, and if you want to make sure those plants are actually safe then you need to invest billions of dollars into them leading again to a higher price for electricity, the risks for said plants are still there, and unlike solar or wind they require big rivers or water bodies nearby. Uranium extraction and processing is still a dirty power hungry affair and that won't change any time soon. Having deaths/mwt is also stupidly misleading because no solar plant ever had the risk of exploding and decimating a chunk of Eastern Europe, not to mention forcing thousands out of their homes and abandoning everything behind never to return If you want to discuss things, then don't do it by misleading statements, that only makes you look like an angsty teen that opposes the status quo simply because it is cool to do so
- nabla9 7y ago
  More expensive than solar and wind per MW comparison misses something essential. If you can't figure it out, you are missing the big picture. Nuclear is not full solution for all energy needs, but it has that something that makes it very effective part in the mix together with wind and solar. Anyone?
  - zwieback 7y ago
    Agreed - don't compare nuclear to solar, compare it to coal and gas.
  - CyanBird 7y ago
    You are not impressing anyone by playing the "I'm smarter than you card", you are only shaming yourself and not addressing the points of the discussion Solar plants with natural gas backup turbines are still cheaper than nuclear plants per mwatt I hope I do t sound too irated, but I'm indeed highly frustrated by the fact that wherever I have this discussion about nuclear power i dont see anyone who is actually ready to have the discussion, only people who believe in an ideal world where nuclear plants are all safe, where 3 mile Island "wasn't a big deal", and where the exclusion area in Fukushima "is a minor externality" Again, if you want to argue, you will have to bring real world arguments
klez 7y ago
About GMO, you don't need to be anti-science to be against them. My problem is that GMO seeds are proprietary, that is you need to buy them from whoever produces them. And you don't get to use the seeds produced from the plants themselves because either they're sterile or you're legally prevented to do so. I mean, there's even a concept of "seed piracy", which to me is crazy. The day we have "free-as-in-freedom" (and, of course, safe) GMOs is the day I won't be against them. I'm a bit perplexed when people here go crazy because John Deere refuses to let people repair their own tractors but as soon as someone is against GMOs it's anti-science.
- shawnz 7y ago
  I don't think this is really being "against GMOs" though, what you're really against is IP law surrounding GMOs. It's like saying you're "anti-film" just because you don't support the MPAA. It's attacking the wrong target and giving people a bad taste regarding GMOs even though they have the potential to do great things for society.
- epistasis 7y ago
  > My problem is that GMO seeds are proprietary, that is you need to buy them from whoever produces them. This is getting a bit off topic, but GMO has absolutely zero to do with this, and is a completely unrelated facet of agribusiness. Plant patents go back long before GMOs were ever a possibility. Hybrids, which don't reproduce true, have also been a huge mainstay of farming since longe before GMOs. It's fine to be concerned with the monetization of plant life, but GMOs are not an aspect related to that. There are plenty of non-profits that are trying to make better products that can be freely distributed and grown by farmers, but such misleading information stymies their efforts.

by option 7y ago

beat 7y ago

Please, never say "safer than solar". Even if technically correct from a certain perspective, it sounds like an "argue to win" point, and just alienates the very people you want to win to your side - environmentally-minded folks who might be convinced of the benefits of nuclear power. From a less narrow perspective, it shows a total ignorance of how risk analysis works. It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed. This is intuitively obvious to the people you're trying to impress with this line. So don't use it.

petschge 7y ago
Also there is a huge difference between workers installing solar panels dying on the job from falling of roofs and citizens getting killed by exploding nuclear plants. The former is a risk they were very aware of, had some control over and were payed to accept. The latter is a risk imposed on them outside of their control and without compensation (and if they vote to get rid of that risk HN viciously attacts them).
- option 7y ago
  My point is that nuclear is very safe, not that we should get rid of solar. People, think! I now live in Bay Area (very sunny place) and have solar on my house. Problem is that it covers at best 40% of my family’s (4 people) energy needs
  - CyanBird 7y ago
    Reduce, reuse, recycle That has always been the mantra and always will. I'm certainly opposed to God forbids opening new nuclear plants, but I'm also opposed to closing existing ones, those are different arguments and should be treated as such. Nuclear fission is a relic of early 50's, but we already paid the co2 cost of building said plants, therefore should continue operating to reduce further damage to the biosphere by releasing more co2/methane. But we don't need to build new nuclear plants, as they are overly expensive and the safer you try to make them the more expensive they get, not to mention that they take a huge amount of time to actually get built and in the meantime release ungodly amounts of co2 with the colossal amounts of steel and concrete needed for the construction, a co2 budget that will take a long time to be recovered
    - mooseburger 7y ago
      They only take that long due to red tape, not due to any intrinsic reason. France did not have this problem. The U.S. could do like them, create the one standardized design for a nuclear plant, build them all the same way, which of course will help with construction, safety and maintenance.
  - Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
    Needs or wants? Could you conserve another 40% if you tried?
    - gwbas1c 7y ago
      A lot of that depends on what the energy medium is. Is the other 40% gas for cars and natural gas for heating? It's very easy to do 100% of electricity from solar in the Bay Area in a home that still drives gas cars, has gas heat and no AC. I coughed up the money to go as solar as I can, (heat pumps, electric vehicles, ect,) but my state's financing had its limits; and then Mother Nature sent me an unusually cloudy April. I'm probably going to be somewhere between 70-85% solar after I have a few years of data. Anyway, when it comes to reducing CO2, celebrate the partial victories. Rooftop solar can take a huge dent in emissions, but it's not a complete solution. There is no silver bullet for this problem.
- falcolas 7y ago
  And the latter (killed by exploding nuclear power plants) is historically zero. All nuclear related fatalities are due to radiation exposure, and the immediate deaths are rather small numbers, with the lingering effects of the fallout (i.e. cancer) only pushing the numbers into the 10's of thousands.
  - petschge 7y ago
    Claiming that the fallout is in no part due to exploding nuclear plants is disingenuous.
    - falcolas 7y ago
      The power plants aren't exploding - that's my point. Calling a meltdown an explosion is factually incorrect, and furthers misconceptions about what happens when a nuclear power plant goes critical. These misconceptions help nobody.
      - colordrops 7y ago
        Chernobyl exploded.
      - petschge 7y ago
        Factually there was a hydrogen explosion in Fukushima due to things doing wrong in the nuclear part. And it produced fall out. That is was not a prompt critical nuclear explosion is semantics. You just want to push nuclear instead of being honest.
        darkpuma 7y ago
        > "That is was not a prompt critical nuclear explosion is semantics." In a world where nuclear weapons are a thing and the public is generally aware of their horrific effects, the distinction between a meltdown and a 'nuclear explosion' is not semantics.
option 7y ago
Regarding risk analysis - past track record is very important, especially when we have decades of it. Nuclear is very heavy regulated (and it should be) to prevent possible risks and new designs are very safe
- beat 7y ago
  The RBMK design was very safe, too. And it exploded due to a combination of design flaw and dangerous operation. Sure, the rest of them were fixed after that, but. Fukushima was a very safe design, too, and well regulated. Three Mile Island was a very safe design. And let's not even get into the history of lesser-known accidents with less-safe designs, in the hands of paranoid military operators and secretive, embarrassment-shy governments. Of the well-known accidents, all of them were unexpected. And all of them could have gone far worse, were it not for heroic actions and some luck on the part of the operators. And all of them involved a degree of government coverup and the public distrust that causes. So it's not only expected that the public would distrust nuclear power more than is maybe absolutely needed, it's very reasonable for them to do so. The safety of nuclear power worldwide is the safety of the worst design with the worst crew, built by the lowest bidder. Don't just react as if the public is stupid, or there's no risk involved. Those things are the reason the public doesn't take pro-nuclear activists seriously.
  - shawnz 7y ago
    > Of the well-known accidents, all of them were unexpected. What accidents are "expected" in any industry, energy or otherwise?
    - beat 7y ago
      All sorts of accidents are expected. We take them into account. For example, if you operate a large data center, you simply assume that a certain number of drives and motherboards will fail, and build it into the plan. No one planned for Fukushima to be flooded. No on planned for one of Chernobyl's reactor cores to explode. (The phrase "impossible" was tossed around a lot; it took a good deal of thinking to finally recognize the design flaw.)
falcolas 7y ago
Decades after the Chernobyl disaster, a worst case scenario, and the total number of people's health negatively impacted is well under 100k. I think it's safe to say that, regardless of the choice between "could" or "have", the number of lives impacted is relatively small (in the scale of power-generation related injuries and deaths).
- CyanBird 7y ago
  What happened at chernobyl WAS Not a "worse case scenario", had the entire with the other 3 reactors plant exploded in a thermal explosion. Now that would had been a worse case scenario, and today there are still RBMK reactors in operation You wont ever hear of such a risk from a solar plant exploding... If you want to discuss the safety of nuclear energy, then own up the risk and face the criticism, to do otherwise is misleading and cowardly
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  But Chernobyl was not a worst case scenario. It was bad but the Soviet government did respond to it seriously. It could've been much worse had they not. In fact, that's what this article gets entirely wrong about the film. The most disturbing thing the film highlights is not the gruesome deaths of a handful of individuals. It's how the disaster could've been much worse.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    > the Soviet government did respond to it seriously If by seriously you mean covering up the problem so the appropriate experts could be brought in to contain the problem before the fallout covered half of Europe, or in not providing proper shielding for the first responders, or by not providing proper funding and training for the staff at Chernobyl... sure, they took it very seriously. /s
    - DubiousPusher 7y ago
      I have read many books about the Soviet Union. The government was full of perverse incentives which encouraged fraud, deception, denial and corruption. The dogma was so perverse it lead to a total corruption of logic and reason. To the point it essentially warped reality. In the Soviet Union, to ask for a better tool was to imply that your managers were incompetent. Or the tool designers were. Or the manufacturers were. All of whom were appointed by the government. A government which saw itself as the manifest will of the people. To imply something wasn't good enough was to imply the Russian people themselves weren't good enough. That horrendous logic may have been self inflicted but it none the less set the ground rules for any action taken by the government. The inadequacies you point out say nothing about how seriously the Soviet government took Chernobyl. You will find the exact same problems pervade almost every single Soviet government initiative.
shawnz 7y ago
> It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed. I don't understand. Why should there be any difference between these, unless you're saying that the safety of solar/wind is improving faster than the safety of nuclear is improving?
- beat 7y ago
  Then you don't understand risk. There is no case in which the failure of a wind farm could cause death or injury to millions of people at once. The whole "safety" argument of solar is buried in flat-out bullshit analysis about how people fall off of roofs while installing panels. There's no safety concern to speak of with solar/wind.
  - shawnz 7y ago
    I didn't claim to be any kind of expert. But I don't understand how the scenario you are describing is necessary for solar/wind to have a higher risk per MWh. What does the presence of catastrophic failure modes have to do with past versus future results?
    - beat 7y ago
      Let's put it in concrete terms. I'm going to toss a coin, you call it. If you win, you get $5. If you lose, you pay me $1. You probably do it, right? Next scenario. I'm going to roll a 100-sided die. If it comes up one, I'm going to shoot you in the head. Anything else, you get $100. Now, would you agree to that? Of course not. Even though you're 99% likely to get $100. It's that 1% chance of dying that stops you. That's because "risk" isn't just one number. Even at a very basic level, we distinguish between the likelihood of the risk, and the consequences of the risk. You're only considering the likelihood, not the consequences. That's where you're going wrong.
      - shawnz 7y ago
        > You're only considering the likelihood, not the consequences. I'm considering the likelihood of the same consequence: people dying. You are describing a totally different scenario with your coin toss example. You are making it sound like I'm weighing profits against lives and that is not correct. I'm weighing lives against lives.
jabl 7y ago
> It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed. Really? So we should take into account scenarios like 1. Solar installer falls from roof, hits car, dies 2. Car didn't have handbrake on, starts to roll down the driveway, rolling over the toddler playing in the yard, killing her too 3. Rolls into the street, causing a school bus full of children to swerve and hit a LNG tanker, causing a massive explosion killing everybody onboard. Of course, in reality, we need to take into account realistic failure pathways and plan accordingly. Per such analysis, both solar and nuclear are both very safe.

CyanBird 7y ago

Nuclear is not an essential part of any solution, it is more expensive than solar and wind per Mwatt, it takes far longer to build new plants, and if you want to make sure those plants are actually safe then you need to invest billions of dollars into them leading again to a higher price for electricity, the risks for said plants are still there, and unlike solar or wind they require big rivers or water bodies nearby. Uranium extraction and processing is still a dirty power hungry affair and that won't change any time soon. Having deaths/mwt is also stupidly misleading because no solar plant ever had the risk of exploding and decimating a chunk of Eastern Europe, not to mention forcing thousands out of their homes and abandoning everything behind never to return If you want to discuss things, then don't do it by misleading statements, that only makes you look like an angsty teen that opposes the status quo simply because it is cool to do so

nabla9 7y ago
More expensive than solar and wind per MW comparison misses something essential. If you can't figure it out, you are missing the big picture. Nuclear is not full solution for all energy needs, but it has that something that makes it very effective part in the mix together with wind and solar. Anyone?
- zwieback 7y ago
  Agreed - don't compare nuclear to solar, compare it to coal and gas.
- CyanBird 7y ago
  You are not impressing anyone by playing the "I'm smarter than you card", you are only shaming yourself and not addressing the points of the discussion Solar plants with natural gas backup turbines are still cheaper than nuclear plants per mwatt I hope I do t sound too irated, but I'm indeed highly frustrated by the fact that wherever I have this discussion about nuclear power i dont see anyone who is actually ready to have the discussion, only people who believe in an ideal world where nuclear plants are all safe, where 3 mile Island "wasn't a big deal", and where the exclusion area in Fukushima "is a minor externality" Again, if you want to argue, you will have to bring real world arguments

klez 7y ago

About GMO, you don't need to be anti-science to be against them. My problem is that GMO seeds are proprietary, that is you need to buy them from whoever produces them. And you don't get to use the seeds produced from the plants themselves because either they're sterile or you're legally prevented to do so. I mean, there's even a concept of "seed piracy", which to me is crazy. The day we have "free-as-in-freedom" (and, of course, safe) GMOs is the day I won't be against them. I'm a bit perplexed when people here go crazy because John Deere refuses to let people repair their own tractors but as soon as someone is against GMOs it's anti-science.

shawnz 7y ago
I don't think this is really being "against GMOs" though, what you're really against is IP law surrounding GMOs. It's like saying you're "anti-film" just because you don't support the MPAA. It's attacking the wrong target and giving people a bad taste regarding GMOs even though they have the potential to do great things for society.
epistasis 7y ago
> My problem is that GMO seeds are proprietary, that is you need to buy them from whoever produces them. This is getting a bit off topic, but GMO has absolutely zero to do with this, and is a completely unrelated facet of agribusiness. Plant patents go back long before GMOs were ever a possibility. Hybrids, which don't reproduce true, have also been a huge mainstay of farming since longe before GMOs. It's fine to be concerned with the monetization of plant life, but GMOs are not an aspect related to that. There are plenty of non-profits that are trying to make better products that can be freely distributed and grown by farmers, but such misleading information stymies their efforts.