BIOTECH: SCARE-MONGERING FOR FUN AND PROFIT

The more affluent we become, the less faith we place on scientific, reasoned approaches to our decisions. Those struggling every day to feed their children and stay alive, for example, must, of necessity, make decisions about what to eat based on evaluations balancing the benefits and risks. Only the well-to-do can afford the luxury of fretting over intangible concerns or moralizing about romantic ideals. Hence, Western developed nations are increasingly abandoning science-based assessments of risks. In their place is a growing "absolute safety at all costs" perspective that's been skillfully fueled by scares and misinformation from special interests. As a result, foods and technological developments that can and are bettering our lives and can save lives, are being maligned, feared and resisted far out of proportion to their potential risks.

The result of overly-cautious, inaccurate tenets is regulatory policies rife with blunders and inconsistencies that hurt consumers, most of all the poor and disadvantaged. We not only deny ourselves better choices, as well as perfectly safe foods, we deny them to others who may more desperately need them. Virtually every food and health fear today fits this description: the "obesity crisis," pesticides in fruits and vegetables, mercury in fish, mad cow from beef, hormones in milk, "bad" fats in snacks, refined sugars in treats, arsenic in water, and the countless other unfounded scares bombarding us. But understanding how fears take hold, what's behind them, and what they're doing to us, is the first step towards helping ourselves.

Henry I. Miller and Greg Conko give us some of those insights in a chilling cautionary expos, that bravely counters today's emotionally-charged insanity over what we eat. In The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution (Praeger Publishers 2004), they reveal the story of genetically-engineered foods which have been targeted so vehemently, activists have ominously named them "Frankenfoods." While the authors touch on the misconceptions being spread about biotechnology, that's not their primary focus or this book's greatest value. It's a powerful wake-up call for scientists, policy makers and consumers on how all of today's food myths are invented and used, and the importance of returning to rational, science-based discussions and decisions.

The scientific community views the risks of genetically-modified crops to be no different, and even less, than those from conventional plant breeding. Their calm approach to the safety of biotechnology is due in part from the comfort that comes from understanding the research and scientific nuances of biotechnology; along with an excitement of its current and future possibilities to improve our foods and medicines and alleviate human suffering, enable farmers to grow more foods on less land using fewer chemicals and hence strengthen environmental stewardship, minimize food spoilage losses, and help -- especially subsistence farmers in developing countries -- produce food on inhospitable soils that are salty, acidic or drought-ridden, in harsh climates or in locales ravaged by pests and diseases which claim up to 40 percent of crops each year.

But the reality of food and health risks has nothing to do with how safe the public feels or how risks are regulated. The disparity between risk assessments by scientists and those by regulators and consumers is a source for considerable rancor and accusations of irrationality and ulterior motives. But while it may be easy for the scientific community to conclude that consumers who believe food scares or who view biotech as dangerous are being stupid, I think the public is actually responding in a very predictable way to the information they hear in the media and to their government's special attention in regulating apparent health concerns.

Consumers are being expertly played by those who usually do know exactly where the weight of scientific evidence lies concerning risks, and know exactly how to exploit people and the system for political, economic and social advantage, reveal Miller and Conko. They largely ascribe the unsound regulations surrounding biotechnology to those who are using fear to take advantage of the public -- namely special interest groups, regulators themselves, and the media.

A key part of fear-based marketing is the promotion of the Precautionary Principle -- that's the belief that if something might go wrong, then we must do whatever possible to ensure that it doesn't. Of course, since everything in life entails risks, this makes it possible for fear mongers to object to and impose regulations on anything, especially new advancements in science, health and technology. Supporters of the Precautionary Principle believe that people are too dumb or ill-equipped to manage risky things safely and it's best to control access to them. This concurrently means rejecting the benefits such things might offer. Yet we safely use and benefit from potentially dangerous things every day, from chain saws, cars, hot water to aspirin.

Just like anything being sold to us, what's at the root of scares isn't altruism. While portraying themselves as moral defenders of the little people, say Miller and Conko, the environmental groups and nongovernment organizations behind today's food and health fears are actually a collection of well-financed professionals set out to shape public opinion and deceive people for their own benefit. "No one should mistake the anti-biotech [groups'] misdemeanors for naive exuberance or excessive zeal in a good cause," said Miller and Conko. "Their motives are self-serving and their tactics vicious." They not only don't hesitate to terrify consumers by twisting the truth and exaggerating risks, they intimidate policy makers with the threat of lawsuits, and threaten shakedowns on the food and biotech industries in what Dr. Alan McHughen calls "economic terrorism." Businesses acquiesce and buy their products, while policy makers grant them the regulations that shield them from national and global competitors, especially those in developing countries.

"The major beneficiaries from these unscientific policies are activist groups that have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars from gullible donors; the natural and organic food industry, which has exploited the surfeit of misinformation; and the regulators themselves," write Miller and Conko. Policy makers "use the blandishments and demands of activists as cover for their own overregulatory tendencies," according to the authors. Regulators' own desires are for more responsibilities, larger budgets, and grander bureaucratic empires. Claiming an obligation to regulate anything the public believes is a concern, regulators use fears to spawn the growth of government agencies, leaving the public to foot the bill. Worse, say the authors, government involvement endorses the activists' claims and raises consumers' fears because people view things that are regulated as being the most dangerous. "Pandering to near-superstitious hysteria only serves to enhance anti-biotech mythology," said Miller and Conko.

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GREENIE DISHONESTY DESTROYING THEIR CREDIBILITY

Green activists have given "environmentalism" a bad name. Tsunami waters had barely receded, before Tony Juniper, spokesman for Friends of the Earth, told the press that the tragedy was "...consistent with climate change predictions." Hogwash! Climate change predictions are all over the yard, and all are based on computer models. None are supported by the actual scientific record. What is known is that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by about 100 parts per million during the last century, some of which is likely to be the result of using fossil fuel.

The BBC is touting a 2001 study by English scientist, Gerry Stanhill, which says the sun's radiation reaching the earth is diminishing, as a result of particulate matter in fossil fuel emissions. Does this mean that fossil fuel emissions may actually cause the earth to cool? Or does this mean that the earth would be warming much faster, were it not for the particulates?

The article goes on to say that "during the ice age, a similar rise in CO2 led to a temperature rise of six degrees Celsius." What was that? A similar rise in carbon dioxide during the ice age? How can that be? There were no SUVs. There were no factories or power plants belching out columns of pollution. There weren't even any people around to breathe out.

The fact is that science cannot predict the weather accurately more than a few days in advance. Any prediction of what the climate may be 100 years from now is, at best, a SWAG (the "S" is for sophisticated, the rest you know).

Of course, facts rarely matter to green activists. Was it not the Natural Resources Defense Council that produced a "scientific" study on which CBS based its now infamous alar report which claimed the chemical was a deadly toxin? Well after the report had aired, real scientists revealed that to match the dosage of alar fed to rats in the study, a human would have to eat 28,000 pounds of apples, each day, for 70 years. And that, when fed the equivalent of only 14,000 pounds of apples per day, the rats developed no tumors at all.

Louis J. Guillette told a Congressional Committee that "There is not a man in this room that is half the man his grandfather was," because a study conducted by Theo Colburn, a scientist for the World Wide Fund for Nature, said that man-made chlorine caused alligator penises to shrink.

To green activists, science is nothing more than a way to give credence to what otherwise would be ignored as an outlandish claim. If the science does not support the claim, they have no reluctance to fudge, or alter the science. Consider the case of the federal employees who wanted to lock up portions of the Northwest so badly that they planted lynx hairs in a study area so the area would be designated as critical habitat.

In their quest to abuse science, green activists regularly demean and ridicule scientists whose work produces results that disagree with the outcome desired by the activists. Their ridicule, through willing media, has produced a chilling effect among scientists who would prefer to stay out of the negative spotlight.

These antics have become so numerous over such a long period of time, that the word "environmentalist" has taken on a negative connotation. Focus groups conducted by expensive public relations firms have led to recommendations that environmental organizations abandon the use of the word, and to use the word "conservationist" instead.

Green activists created environmental organizations to increase the effectiveness of their efforts to clean up the environment. They did good work--in the beginning. The organizations, however, have long ago forgotten their original mission, and are now dedicated to building their financial and political empires. Having achieved most of their original goals, of cleaning up rivers and streams, reducing air pollution, and the like, they needed bigger goals, and scarier scenarios, to keep people digging deeper and deeper into their pockets to fund the ever-expanding bureaucracies of the environmental organizations.

Global warming is the granddaddy of all scary scenarios. It cannot be proved, nor disproved, so whatever symptom a green activist chooses to blame on global warming is fair game. Whether it's a tsunami in Sumatra, a mudslide in California, 19-feet of snow in Tahoe, or a heat wave in Europe--all of it is said to be caused by global warming. And everyone knows that humans--especially American humans--cause global warming. Such is the logic of green activists.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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