I had bees move into a window in my basement years ago, eventually that hive died but a beekeeper set up hives near our creek. A beehive has more departures and arrivals than any airport and the complexity of their behavior is staggering. Any poison that made bees just a little bit stupid could have a major impact on the effectiveness of a hive — and if you take responsibility for bees there is a huge list of problems that can endanger a hive.
It's easy in America. As soon as your industry becomes big enough you can afford to petition (lobby) the government to write regulations that favor your busines in your industry.
Fortunately any American can petition their government. Collectively we could hire our own lobbyist to write better laws (and regulations).
Our representatives are supposed to be our lobbyists. Part of the problem is people ignore when their lobbyist is doing a bad job when they wear the right color uniform, and refuse to acknowledge any good they do when they wear the other color uniform.
lobbyists aren't supposed to write laws, but the reality is they probably do.
Politics are pay-to-play. We do have organizations that started as citizens coming together to try to influence government, but unless you have a lot of money to throw around, your public interest research group is almost impossible to hear. Who do you think has outized influence- a group of citizens proposing common-sense reforms, or industry lobbyists paid a lot of money to protect an industry's bottom line?
The Drilled podcast covers in detail the history of how corporations in America engineered their right to use their money and influence for political speech.
US bulk agriculture exports are what keep vast swathes of the developing world from starving. GMOs, herbicides and pesticides are how the US produces immense quantities of cheap food for the rest of the world [1].
I don't really care what the rest of the world whines about, when the US is the country actually keeping millions of the global poor alive.
No. The US (and European) ag subsidies are what fuel overproduction, undermine local production and markets in other countries, creating dependencies and poor diets.
Ah yes. If only the US didn't sell food to subsaharan Africa, they'd learn to pull themselves up by their bootstraps! It's really the handouts that makes them dependent on the US government.
The horseshoe theory of politics truly explains a lot.
Yes. Specific foods. Such as corn, sugar and soybean.
“The US sugar program relies on import quotas and limits on domestic production to ensure domestic prices for raw and refined sugar are, on average, about 100% higher than world prices.
4,000 or so farms that raise sugar beet and sugarcane, many of which also plant most of their cropland to other heavily subsidized commodities such as corn and soybeans.”
They cause overproduction of poor substitutes. Like beets for sugar because of limits on sugar cane. Or monoculture GMO corn for HFCS. This skews diets and prices, usually for the worst.
The production limits effectively cap how much subsidy will be paid. The subsidy is still there. Without it, there would be less sugar grown and the land involved (mostly in the Florida Everglades and specifically developed to suit this sugar program) would go to other uses
It really doesn't. The person is saying it's OK to poison the US environment because we get good boy points for feeding the rest of the world (something the US does help with, but which impact is exaggerated for rhetorical effect). Apparently they're objecting to the fact that his research comes from a European institution and labeling that as 'whining'.
Justification for indifference is on par with justification for ignorance, only is more nihilistic in its apathy for others and their plight. If you seek justification to not care about a thing which others care about, your interaction with them is patently malevolent.
If, indeed, care is not given, then no statement should be made, and shutting up is how to be both honest and accurate.
US bulk agriculture exports are what keep vast swathes of the developing world from sustaining themselves. Wheat, corn and other heavily subsidized crops are how countries are incentivized producing cash crops like coffee, tea and Kat instead of food.
I don't really understand why the rest of the world doesn't whine, when the US is the country actually keeping millions of the global population poor.
>> An average of almost 130 pounds of glyphosate herbicides were sprayed per square mile in U.S. counties.
Is this the weight of pure glyphosate, or it includes the solvents like water?
Wikipedia says that the density of glyphosate is 1.7 but they have no units. Let's assume it's g/cm^3 (the density of water is 1g/cm^3, so it's a good guess.)
Mainly Roundup residues on GMO foods, as well as farm runoff in groundwater. EPA estimates we're all exposed to 0.058–0.230 mg/kg/day and they set the maximum acceptable daily dose at 1.75 mg/kg/day. But the available dosage science is weak.
Why mainly through GMO foods? I am wondering if other non-GMO ones would use mostly non Roundups, which would be a surprise to me given the availability of Roundups for vegetation control purpose around houses.
Almost everything is neurotoxic depending on the dose. Sodium Chloride(Table Salt) will reek havoc on your brain and nervous systems if the concentration gets to high. Why you get muscle cramps and dizzy when dehydrated. Luckily the study addresses this and says that you have heavily dose rats to get a neurotoxic effect but humans will never see this dose under environmental exposure.
> Most of studies of rodents analyzed in this review used doses of glyphosate or GBH that did not exceed the current NOAEL and ranged from 5 mg/kg [68] to 800 mg/kg [13]. These doses are not representative of human environmental exposures, which are in the range of μg/kg/day.
The main point of that section you're quoting is that NOAEL has been set way too high and they didn't account for neurotoxicity. We need more studies. We don't really know at what levels neurotoxicity becomes a problem in human.
> the data discussed herein suggest that these values may still be too high. The results analyzed in this review suggest that the ability of glyphosate, alone or in formulation, to produce neurotoxic effects in rodents has been underestimated.
Just to be clear when they talk about NOAEL amount. Its a lot of glyphosate. NOAEL for a human person is drinking two bottles of roundup. The other ingredients(surfactants) would do you in before the glyphosate. Amount humans are exposed to very minimal as mentioned in the study. Don't drink roundup.
There are applications where glyphosate is perfectly appropriate. The issues with it arise when
A) farmers use it as a crop dissicant in large quantities to make their crops cheaper to harvest, outside the spec of the product and
B) when it's used in unsuitable soil, temperature, and humidity conditions.
In the right conditions it has a half life of a few days and will be completely inert in a couple of weeks. This is a relatively small impact for a pretty big benefit. In poorly suited conditions it can persist for months or years.
We should just make it legal for use in situations where it decays quickly and harmlessly and disallow it's use in jurisdictions where the conditions are not appropriate for it's use. It's just a chemical, like any other chemical as long as it's used responsibly it can deliver incredible benefits. In this case cost-effectively feeding the world.
If the price for all that is some impairment to bumblebees for a few weeks maybe we should weigh that against the benefits and make a rational decision.
Rational decisions demand access to all necessary information. Thus one might ask if the impairment described is restricted purely to bumblebees? Do we know? What is it that's so special about bumblebees as against other organisms such that they would be immune to 'just a chemical'?
It is an improvement to better understand the glyphosate effects. Rational decision cannot be taken by only considering the glyphosate effects. Decisions have to be taken with an holistic view on the agricultural systems.
Eg. glyphosate might an option to regain control over weeds versus a systematic plow of the soil that has for consequences to damage its structure and its organisms.
A - Doesn't sound like enough advantage over disadvantage.
B - Sounds like it would need regulation? Who is making sure farmers are using it in this manner?
It isn't just bumblebee impairment. Entire colonies die.
Bumblebees are needed to pollinate a large percentage of our food -> Hence not a "rational decision".
TO say nothing of impact on humans, and the half life in water runoff.
Yes. Both points A and B could benefit from regulation. A lot of things we do kill animals, insects, and plants. The house or office you're sitting in displaced a great deal of natural biosphere. It emitted and emits a great deal of carbon. Should we tear that down too?
No, obviously not, because we enjoy living. You can't ignore those same tradeoffs when they happen to not be taking place in your back yard.
We can make sensible regulation to minimize our impact but sometimes we need to make an impact to extract resources, just how it is.
Also it looks like the red and maybe yellow sections of that list should get banned in favor of the green. If there's that many alternatives, we should really force people to switch.
Anyone have recommendations for what will kill goat heads that isn't glyphosate? I'd love to use something less awful, but so far the goat heads seem unaffected by anything else I've tried.
I don't know why it is taking so long to distribute the facts... In Argentina, one of the top agricultural exporters in the last decades cancer increased a lot in farms using glyphosate. A recent review here [1]
The glyphosate/cancer link is one of the most intensively studied in science, and has yet to pan out. One problem with trying to find such a link from real-world formulations is that you're apt to find links in adjuvants.
Because glyphosate is not that bad compared to other agrichemicals like pesticides, fungicides and weed killers containing Chrlorine (MCPA). When used with a surfactant these chemicals penetrate insects by orders of magnitude.
The paper you linked to is about pesticide is it not?
It's far more likely the bees are getting covered in chemicals when said chemicals are applied to the flowers of the plants which is often the case with fungicides. You're not going to spray glyphosate on your orchard trees because it would kill them. The fungicide powder used to coat seeds are is also a problem as it's dusty and gets airborne easily. Glyphosate might be a bit of a scapegoat when the other chemicals are far worse.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadHoneybee Democracy - How honeybees make collective decisions―and what we can learn from this amazing democratic process
https://www.amazon.com/Honeybee-Democracy-Thomas-D-Seeley/dp...
From what I read, I can only imagine the traffic!
Fortunately any American can petition their government. Collectively we could hire our own lobbyist to write better laws (and regulations).
https://www.politico.eu/article/glyphosate-is-safe-to-use-in...
Politics are pay-to-play. We do have organizations that started as citizens coming together to try to influence government, but unless you have a lot of money to throw around, your public interest research group is almost impossible to hear. Who do you think has outized influence- a group of citizens proposing common-sense reforms, or industry lobbyists paid a lot of money to protect an industry's bottom line?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...
Laws written by corporations.
Also, anybody who doesn’t think corporations buy legislators is being very naive.
I don't really care what the rest of the world whines about, when the US is the country actually keeping millions of the global poor alive.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/international-markets-u-s-tr...
The horseshoe theory of politics truly explains a lot.
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/10/11/bill_clinton_s_trade...
“The US sugar program relies on import quotas and limits on domestic production to ensure domestic prices for raw and refined sugar are, on average, about 100% higher than world prices.
4,000 or so farms that raise sugar beet and sugarcane, many of which also plant most of their cropland to other heavily subsidized commodities such as corn and soybeans.”
https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/recapping-the-e...
How can you possibly be arguing that limits on domestic production are causing overproduction?
thank you for clarifying your point of view so well
I don't really understand why the rest of the world doesn't whine, when the US is the country actually keeping millions of the global population poor.
Is this the weight of pure glyphosate, or it includes the solvents like water?
Wikipedia says that the density of glyphosate is 1.7 but they have no units. Let's assume it's g/cm^3 (the density of water is 1g/cm^3, so it's a good guess.)
From https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=130pounds+%2F+%281.7g%2... this is 0.00001mm ~= 0.0000005 inches .
130kg sounds like a lot, but it's actually that a square mile is very big.
It's further telling with this quote:
> Iowa and Illinois, where the most corn and soy crops are grown, accounted for 15% of national usage
Which means some states heavy skew the results and many, many areas of the country are below 100 or near 0.
> Most of studies of rodents analyzed in this review used doses of glyphosate or GBH that did not exceed the current NOAEL and ranged from 5 mg/kg [68] to 800 mg/kg [13]. These doses are not representative of human environmental exposures, which are in the range of μg/kg/day.
> the data discussed herein suggest that these values may still be too high. The results analyzed in this review suggest that the ability of glyphosate, alone or in formulation, to produce neurotoxic effects in rodents has been underestimated.
A) farmers use it as a crop dissicant in large quantities to make their crops cheaper to harvest, outside the spec of the product and
B) when it's used in unsuitable soil, temperature, and humidity conditions.
In the right conditions it has a half life of a few days and will be completely inert in a couple of weeks. This is a relatively small impact for a pretty big benefit. In poorly suited conditions it can persist for months or years.
We should just make it legal for use in situations where it decays quickly and harmlessly and disallow it's use in jurisdictions where the conditions are not appropriate for it's use. It's just a chemical, like any other chemical as long as it's used responsibly it can deliver incredible benefits. In this case cost-effectively feeding the world.
If the price for all that is some impairment to bumblebees for a few weeks maybe we should weigh that against the benefits and make a rational decision.
Eg. glyphosate might an option to regain control over weeds versus a systematic plow of the soil that has for consequences to damage its structure and its organisms.
B - Sounds like it would need regulation? Who is making sure farmers are using it in this manner?
It isn't just bumblebee impairment. Entire colonies die. Bumblebees are needed to pollinate a large percentage of our food -> Hence not a "rational decision".
TO say nothing of impact on humans, and the half life in water runoff.
No, obviously not, because we enjoy living. You can't ignore those same tradeoffs when they happen to not be taking place in your back yard.
We can make sensible regulation to minimize our impact but sometimes we need to make an impact to extract resources, just how it is.
As far as I can tell this is not accurate- glyphosate breaks down to AMPA which is not inert.
To try to answer my own question it seems that this page at least suggests that it is non-toxic:
https://www.ncagr.gov/pollinators/documents/Bee%20Pesticide%...
Also it looks like the red and maybe yellow sections of that list should get banned in favor of the green. If there's that many alternatives, we should really force people to switch.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221339842...
The paper you linked to is about pesticide is it not?
It's far more likely the bees are getting covered in chemicals when said chemicals are applied to the flowers of the plants which is often the case with fungicides. You're not going to spray glyphosate on your orchard trees because it would kill them. The fungicide powder used to coat seeds are is also a problem as it's dusty and gets airborne easily. Glyphosate might be a bit of a scapegoat when the other chemicals are far worse.