I love this piece in the Guardian about GMOs, I really do. It’s so exquisitely disingenuous that you have to admire the writer’s chutzpah. Let’s start with this line (my emphasis): Why is it that some politicians and prominent scientists and “communications” agencies are so exclusively preoccupied with GM [genetic modification]? I can’t imagine that…Continue Reading…
Via Twitter, I learn that Nassim Taleb, author of the The Black Swan, a mega-selling 2007 book, has some interesting thoughts on biotechnology.
The news is coming fast and furious (literally) this week. Let’s start with the big Supreme Court rulings dominating headlines. Yesterday, the Supremes invalidated a key part of the U.S. Voting Rights Act, which President Obama characterized as as “setback” in the fight against discrimination. Today, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court overturned a…Continue Reading…
In March, several green groups, notably the Environmental Defense Fund, formed a partnership with Chevron and other energy companies to, as the LA Times reported, provide more stringent standards for fracking of natural gas in parts of the eastern United States. The collaboration, which also includes several philanthropies, has been formalized with a non-profit organization called…Continue Reading…
I’m guessing that nobody at Monsanto has ever invoked the adage, “There is is no such thing as bad publicity.” The biotech giant, already a bogeyman to the anti-globalization/anti-corporate/anti-GMO crowd, has endured a particularly rough PR stretch of late. Last month, protesters from around the globe marched against the company. Then came news of Monsanto’s “rogue” GMO wheat,…Continue Reading…
There is much to recommend this article in the New Republic by Nate Cohn, starting with the sub-headline: Grappling with climate change nuance in a toxic political environment It is an ungrateful task to interrogate the complexities of climate change (which extend to the policy side of the equation) so props to Cohn for taking…Continue Reading…
In this space, I’ve frequently shown how GMO fear mongering plays out in the media. The latest frightful example aired Monday on CNN. It was a piece about the mysterious genetically modified (GM) wheat recently found in an Oregon farm field. First, some quick background: In the early to mid-2000s, Monsanto field tested GM wheat in…Continue Reading…
There are two kinds of people who write about genetically modified foods: Those who believe that GMOs are bad and those who don’t. In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m in the latter group. Unfortunately, the simplistic debate between these two camps has devolved into a Three Stooges slapfest: More specifically, one group shrieks…Continue Reading…
Oh, for the days: Remember when everyone used to be really, really worried about power lines? youtube.com/watch?feature=… — Ketan Joshi (@ArghJoshi) June 13, 2013 Those were worried Australians in the mid-2000s, so it wasn’t all that long ago. In the United States, people were really, really worried in the 1980s and 1990s about getting cancer from…Continue Reading…
Today is a good time to be alive when compared to any in human history, such as 100 years ago, when the average life span in industrial countries was about 50. As one recent science article noted, the key in driving up our collective age lies with the advent of medical technologies, improved nutrition, higher education, better housing…Continue Reading…