GM CORN: ANOTHER GREENIE FRAUD

Post lifted from the Adam Smith blog

The Telegraph's science editor, Roger Highfield, reports on the strange disappearance of what was hailed as the world's worst leakage of genetically modified crops into regular strains.

Four years ago, researchers reported finding cobs of genetically modified maize in Oaxaca, Mexico, suggesting that GM maize (corn) from the US had invaded a traditional maize variety.

This contamination was loudly trumpeted by anti-GM campaigners, even though the GM variety had no adverse effects on people. What happened then was strange. The magazine Nature disowned the original paper by researchers at the University of California in Berkeley.

The paper had sparked a protest to Nature by 100 biologists and was disowned by the Mexican government after its scientists could not repeat the experiment. The anti-GM lobby portrayed the row as an attempt to discredit the research and as part of a biotech industry vendetta.

The story becomes stranger. A two-year study by Ohio State University researchers, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds there has been no spread of GM strains into native crops.

The researchers gathered more than 153,000 seeds from 870 maize plants in 125 fields in Oaxaca, for the first survey of foreign "transgenes" in native varieties, and found no evidence of contamination. The finding surprised the researchers, said Prof Snow, because millions of tons of GM grain were imported from the US each year for processed food and animal feed.

It all makes the findings of the original Berkeley study seem extraordinary. What was claimed as the worst incident of GM contamination has disappeared into thin air. The refutation might not get quite the coverage the original scare generated, however.






SKEPTICISM ABOUT THE BRITISH "GREENBELT"

Which was an elitist idea long before the Greenies were thought of. Many British cities have areas around them on which housing is not allowed to be built. The reason why is very poorly thought-out

Apparently, 84 per cent of people want to save the green belt and keep if safe from urban sprawl. Can it be true? Can 16 per cent of the country really believe that it's right to pave over our pleasant land? I thought it was just me who reckoned the green belt was a colossally misguided scheme to inflate house prices, cripple the economy and do absolutely nil for the environment.

Try telling people that you think the green belt should be scrapped - worse still, that you think the entire system of Government planning should be done away with - and you won't win many friends. To argue against the belt, which surrounds London, Birmingham and other big cities and which celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, is to most people like calling for clean drinking water to be abolished, or campaigning to bring back witch-ducking.

Never mind that nobody seems to know what it looks like, or whether any of it is very nice. I've lived in London all my life and I've never hear anyone saying that they're off to spend a weekend in the green belt, what with it being so close by and everything. Maybe the BBC's new hit series Coast only narrowly beat a rival show called Disused Gravel Pits in Tilbury, but I doubt it. The point is, for every Chiltern hill or slope of the North Downs that the scheme protects, massive chunks of land that are downright foul are kept at bay from the potentially cheering extension of the suburbs.

Green belts do not create parkland within easy reach. Their real point is to prevent sprawl - although why London or Newcastle should be equally stopped from sprawling is hard to explain: they can't both be the ideal size, surely. Green belts increase pollution by encouraging development farther from the city, so adding to the number of miles commuters have to drive. Mark Pennington, an economics lecturer at Queen Mary College, points out that the new towns will often end up being built on much more environmentally valuable land than the belt itself. All that green belts do is to halt city growth, regardless of the economic benefits of new construction.

Ah. That word - economic - gets you in trouble. The complaint comes that letting the market run loose would cause havoc, because "land is a finite resource": once we've paved over Britain, we can never get it back. But economics is all about managing scarce resources - oil, labour or anything else. And economists will tell you that to manage resources effectively, you need information about their relative values. There is a word for such information: prices. Some of the green belt is lovely, some of it is awful - but greenbelt policy sucks because by shutting down the system of prices it fails to distinguish one from the other. If green belt land were traded freely, and could be developed without constraint, the magic of the price mechanism would get to work. Beautiful land would come at a higher price than ugly land, and developers would be guided to build in cheaper areas.

But alarm has been the sole response to Government plans, unveiled last month, to make planning more responsive to housing demand. Frankly, it would be hard to dream up a system less responsive to housing demand than the current planning laws. Anyone who has tried to get a building project approved will know how slow, expensive and often corrupt the set-up is. Planning is the legacy of the postwar Town and Country Planning Act, which tried to do to home building what the Attlee Government was also trying with coal, steel and other industries: control them from above. But, unlike those dinosaurs, planning has never been reformed, and it remains more like a vast, sclerotic, nationalised industry than anything else. Even John Prescott has been unable to break the logjam. Despite his threatening year after year to swamp the Thames Gateway and Bedfordshire with Barratt homes, the big build remains stubbornly unbuilt.

People think that if you got rid of government planning you would have anarchy. But that's not how things work in other parts of the economy. Prices allow a much more sophisticated level of co-ordination, in which demand for houses, offices and open spaces are all stirred into the mix. Do you live in an area with lots of attractive Victorian homes, where buildings that are out of character would damage the appeal? So club together with your neighbours, sign a restrictive covenant that bans everyone in the group from making changes, and watch the market response. Everyone in the group should see their house price rise, because each house becomes more valuable in an area guaranteed to stay attractive.

Having said all of that, I'm not against planning. Planning a town, working out how to mix homes, infrastructure and open spaces, is difficult, but not impossible. The problem is that there is only ever one planner - the Government. To scrap state planning would bring about a renaissance in a forgotten world from a century ago, when private corporations bought land speculatively and created garden cities and suburbs, many with restrictive covenants to keep them from decline. Competition between planners - something the current system lacks - drove up standards of design.

Thanks to the efforts of private planners, we now have picturesque suburbs and towns such as Highgate, Summertown and Letchworth. It could happen again. Tesco towns? They'd certainly beat a weekend for two in a gravel pit.

Source





In Situ Stable Isotope Probing of Methanogenic Archaea in the Rice Rhizosphere

Comment on the paper abstracted below: Rice agriculture is possibly the biggest source of anthropogenic methane and methane is one of those wicked greenhouse gases. Though carbon dioxide is also a greenhouse gas, methane is dozens of times more so. Rice paddies cover about 130 million hectares of the earth's surface, of which almost 90% are in Asia, and emit 50 to 100 million metric tons of methane a year. So stop those gooks growing all that rice! Let them eat cake!

(By: Yahai Lu1,2 and Ralf Conrad2. 1 College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100094, China. 2 Max-Planck-Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, Karl-von-Frisch-Strasse, 35043 Marburg, Germany.)

Microorganisms living in anoxic rice soils contribute 10 to 25% of global methane emissions. The most important carbon source for CH4 production is plant-derived carbon that enters soil as root exudates and debris. Pulse labeling of rice plants with 13CO2 resulted in incorporation of 13C into the ribosomal RNA of Rice Cluster I Archaea in the soil, indicating that this archaeal group plays a key role in CH4 production from plant-derived carbon. This group of microorganisms has not yet been isolated but appears to be of global environmental importance.

Science, Vol 309, Issue 5737, 1088-1090 , 12 August 2005

The Doi (permanent) address for the above article is here

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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.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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