EU approves controversial weedkiller glyphosate for another 10 years
A win for sanity. Because it is cheap and very effective the Green/Left have long hated it and tried to drum up evidence of its harmfulness. The big problem is that it is NOT harmful in normal use. Lawsuits have however cost Monsanto a lot of money. Background on the campaign against it below
https://antigreen.blogspot.com/2019/03/rounding-up-roundup-racket-matt-ridley.html
The European Commission has approved the use of the controversial weedkiller glyphosate for another decade, with a spokesperson for Australian growers backing the move as good news for exports.
Authorisation in European Union countries was set to expire on December 15, after a one-year extension was given last year.
Without access to the chemical, which kills a broad spectrum of weeds, farmers claimed food production would have been affected.
The weedkiller is also widely used among the broader population by backyard and professional gardeners.
Farmers globally were worried the commission would not renew its approval, given strong pressure from anti-glyphosate campaigners, and claims that glyphosate is a health hazard.
But the commission defied those expectations in a split decision this week, after key member states France, Germany and Italy abstained from voting.
Earlier this year, a class action lawsuit was launched against the makers of glyphosate by people diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma who used or were exposed to Roundup.
In September, a preliminary nine-week trial in the Federal Court in Melbourne heard from expert witnesses about whether glyphosate is carcinogenic to humans.
Closing submissions in that trial are scheduled for January.
Research on glysophate 'intensifying'
In a statement, the European Commission said the approval was "based on comprehensive safety assessments carried out by the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency, together with the member states".
It said there was "no evidence to classify glyphosate as being carcinogenic".
In granting a 10-year extension, rather than the usual 15-year time frame, the commission said research on glyphosate was "intensifying".
"New insights on the properties of glyphosate relevant for the protection of human health and environment can be expected," it said.
It also said the 10-year approval came with several new conditions, including the prohibition of use as a desiccant, or drying agent, and the setting of maximum application rates.
The European Union's (EU) chemical regulation system is a two-step process, meaning member states have the right to ban products even if approved at EU level.
Shona Gawel, chief executive of peak body GrainGrowers, said a glyphosate ban in the EU would have been bad news for Australian growers. "I don't like to speculate on exactly what it would have meant but … it could have impacted on exports," she said.
"There are also other countries that watch the EU fairly closely, so we suspect that would mean they might have started to reflect the EU requirements."
Ms Gawel said Australia's chemical regulator, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA), had ruled glyphosate to be non-carcinogenic.
"I know the APVMA scientists have reviewed close to 4,800 peer-reviewed articles and datasets around glyphosate usage, so I think we have to trust the science," she said.
Ms Gawel said that while farmers do use chemicals that are harmful to human health, it was done in a safe way.
"It's a little bit like with our family pets at home — if we give them a flea treatment, if we used a chemical like that outside of the way the label dictates, it would be harmful," she said.
"So it's the same approach when it comes to the use of chemicals on farms, that growers have training and they use chemicals in compliance with labels."
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While Hamas Planned Its Attack on Israel, Biden’s Intel Community Was Focused On Climate Change
As the Israel-Gaza conflict enters its second month, congressional leaders are beginning to examine whether the Biden administration’s intelligence shift—which included adding a climate scientist to his Intelligence Advisory Board, a task force that tracks national security issues, and executive orders that required the intelligence community to assess security threats posed by climate change—may have contributed to America’s failure to spot Hamas’s planning beforehand. Hamas had been planning the attack for over a year, according to reports.
"The world faces unprecedented threats from Communist China, the Iran regime, and Russia yet the Biden administration is shifting intelligence and defense assets to focus on climate change," Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told the Washington Free Beacon. "Just this past March, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines testified before Congress that climate was an intelligence priority. The blatant political posturing on climate change within our intelligence community endangers the U.S. and our allies by sidelining other threats."
In January, President Joe Biden signaled his administration’s shift to climate change when he appointed the first-ever climate scientist to his Intelligence Advisory Board, a decades-old task force that tracks national security issues across the globe. Brown University professor Kim Cobb, an "expert on climate extremes and coastal flooding," was tasked with reviewing "the work of U.S. spy agencies to make sure they are considering threats from all angles," as well as policing the board "to make sure that the intelligence offered to the president is taking into account climate-related security issues," the Washington Post reported.
Biden followed this with several executive orders that reportedly "required the intelligence community to assess the national security threats posed by climate change." Biden’s focus on climate change also extended to the American military, with the Pentagon classifying these issues in 2021 as "a critical national security issue."
The American intelligence community’s pivot to climate issues is under renewed scrutiny from Republican foreign policy leaders in Congress in the wake of Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,200 Israelis—an attack that has raised many questions about how the United States failed to spot Hamas’s military buildup in advance. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said during an Oct. 11 press briefing that the attack was "a massive intelligence failure."
The Biden administration’s focus on climate change was on full display during Haines’s testimony earlier this year in front of Congress.
"Climate change remains an urgent threat that will increasingly exacerbate risks to U.S. national security as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount over the global response to the challenge," Haines said.
The State Department, America’s diplomatic face across the world, followed the intelligence community’s lead when it appointed John Kerry as its first special presidential envoy for climate, a position that has enabled the former secretary of state to cut deals with China on issues like carbon emissions.
The administration’s focus on what Republicans view as far-left priorities may have diverted America’s intelligence capabilities, leading to what even the White House admits was a significant intelligence failure on Oct. 7, according to one congressman.
"Joe Biden is pushing to publicly release the Pentagon’s carbon emissions, needlessly gifting our adversaries valuable intelligence on U.S. military strength. At the same time, he’s telling American intelligence officials to focus on phantom weather risks instead of the growing and all-too-real threats of Iranian-backed terror and Communist China," Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Free Beacon.
"The administration’s obsession with putting leftist politics before our national security has had disastrous effects on morale, public trust, recruiting, overall readiness, and even intelligence collection," Banks said. "Our adversaries are laughing at us."
The politicization of America’s intelligence bodies was also spotlighted during a recent conversation between Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Rick Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence during the Trump administration.
"How on Earth did we get to a point where we missed the boat?" Cruz asked Grenell during an episode of his podcast, referring to the United States’ failure to detect Hamas’s months of planning.
"I actually don't believe that we didn't know that Iran and Hamas were planning, there's just no possible way that we didn't have pieces of raw intelligence," Grenell told Cruz. "I think one of the crises that we have within the intelligence world right now is we have too many people playing politics that are analyzing the information."
With Hamas, those analyzing the raw intelligence failed to connect the dots, Grenell said.
"I actually believe that the United States and the Israelis, of course, had the raw intelligence, that the analytical people just didn't put it together," he said. "They didn't want to assume that Hamas was going to make such a jump."
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The Global South (and China) Say Nyet to Net Zero
Like the biblical “voice crying in the wilderness,” German Finance Minister Christian Lindner this week left Green Party activists and others enamored by the green religion gnashing their teeth.
“Until it is clear,” said Lindner, “that energy is available and affordable, we should end dreams of phasing out electricity from coal in 2030. Now is not the time to shut down power plants.”
Lindner also urged Germans to expand domestic production of natural gas as well as production of renewable energies. Germany’s cost for electricity has doubled in the past 20 years, such that the nation now pays some of the world’s highest prices to turn on the lights.
Over in London, British purists are set to celebrate the long-anticipated end to all use of coal for electricity by next October, a year ahead of earlier schedules. Already, there is very little coal being delivered to or from Newcastle.
British electricity prices have soared in recent years, with the average net selling value (pence per kilowatt-hour) to all consumers (scaled to 1990 GDP) rising from 2.28 pence in 2000 to 12.43 pence in 2021 and 21.77 pence during the energy crisis in 2022.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., President Biden (or those who may really be in charge) continues to rail against not just coal, but oil and gas, as if generating electricity and fueling motor vehicles were only uses America has for those “fossil fuels.” Electricity prices in the U.S. vary widely from state to state, but overall have risen at rates above the inflation rate during the 21st Century.
Biden’s EPA has threatened to dismantle 60 percent of the U.S. power supply nearly overnight. The U.S. coal fleet is facing six rules designed to work in unison to accelerate plant closures. Biden’s Clean Power Plan 2.0 has even his own Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman, Willie Phillips, saying, “I am extremely concerned about the pace of retirements we are seeing of generators which are needed for reliability.”
The Biden Administration is also spending U.S. tax dollars to bribe other nations to cut their use of coal. Last November, Indonesian President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) accepted a $20 billion commitment by the Biden White House via a “just energy transition partnership” toward a goal of capping carbon dioxide releases from its electricity sector at 290 megatons by 2030.
The JETP says it will cost $600 billion to wean Indonesia from coal by 2050 – five years earlier than its previous proposal. Indonesia, with 25 billion tons of coal reserves (11th largest in the world), is today the world’s fifth largest coal producer, using about 100 million tons domestically and sending 400 million tons abroad. Don’t bet on Indonesia to quit coal soon.
In India, by contrast, the coal ministry just announced plans to increase the nation’s coal production to 1.404 billion tonnes by 2027, with an eye to further increase production to 1.577 billion tonnes by 2030. That’s a big jump from current production totals of 1.0 billion tonnes.
Currently, coal-fired power plants in India are using about 821 million tonnes per year, but the ministry is anticipating major growth in coal demand in coming years. To meet demand, the ministry is planning to open new coal mines, expand existing mine capacities, and better utilize captive and commercial mines.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, with whom the coal-hating President Biden is meeting this week, in April 2021 pledged to “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects” in China – with his fingers crossed. In the real world (not the green fantasy world), the Chinese government continues to grow the nation’s coal industry.
In the two years prior to Xi’s pledge, China approved 127 coal plants with a combined capacity of 54 gigawatts. Since the pledge, that number has risen to 182 plants with 131 gigawatts of coal power. The upshot – China has over doubled its new coal power capacity while the U.S. and European nations have shrunk theirs.
Irish journalist Thomas O’Reilly predicts that “the growing divide” between the West, China, and the Global South will be a hot topic at the upcoming UN Climate Conference (COP 28) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
The self-named “High Ambition Coalition” of European Union member states and the United Kingdom is expected to push for a global commitment to phase out new coal production worldwide despite its being the fuel of choice in much of Asia and the developing world. [Coal is plentiful and affordable, qualities critical for energy development in poor nations.]
The representatives of rich, mostly former colonial, nations wants to force other nations to adopt more aggressive climate goals. They flatly oppose the use of carbon capture technologies by developing nations, one way these nations try to appease the ravenous West’s demands for obedience to their diktats.
A more likely outcome at Dubai is that China will lead its own coalition of coal-using and coal-producing nations to tell the Europeans (and Biden Democrats) to pound sand.
China, along with India, Russia (which is also ramping up coal production, even in heavily snow-covered Elga, Siberia), and South Africa (the world’s fifth largest coal producer), are bonded together in the BRICS bloc. Even founding member Brazil is the world’s 25th largest coal user – but its coal reserves are the world’s 15th largest.
BRICS just added six countries – Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE (host to COP 28) to its membership. None of these nations appears eager to kowtow to the EU or U.S. The harder the West stamps its Rumpelstiltskin-like feet, the less likely Net Zero will remain a global vision. The world wants and needs more energy and will not let the decadent West dictate just what energy is “acceptable” and what is not.
But the West, too, would do well to abandon the “impossible dream” of decarbonization of a society comprised of carbon units (humans).
Emeritus British engineering professor Michael Kelly says while, technologically, the West MIGHT achieve Net Zero with a vast fleet of wind farms and a gigantic store of green hydrogen, barring a series of dramatic tehnological breakthroughs the costs of getting there would make Britain’s recent energy price crisis “look like nothing.”
With China, India, and much of the developing world saying “Nyet to Net Zero,” maybe it is time for the “virtuous” coalition (the West) to put a stop to its own wishful thinking.
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More fearmongering from the federal government, with the only solution being to give Washington and the climate cultists more power.
The sky is falling, but there’s still time to hand over more control of the U.S. economy to a bunch of federal bureaucrats to slow its falling. That in a nutshell summarizes the recently released National Climate Assessment.
The report, compiled by 14 federal agencies with the input of some 700 scientists, is little other than a climate alarmist’s gospel. Yet the compilers of the twice-a-decade report appear keenly aware that Americans have become less impacted or alarmed by the apocalyptic predictions that never quite materialize.
In an effort to scare Americans into buying the Left’s climate alarmism, which dubiously and tellingly can only be addressed through ever more government control of the economy, the report warns of the astronomical cost of climate change without massively expensive government intervention.
According to the report, climate change is costing the U.S. economy $150 billion annually. How, exactly? Well, climate change supposedly makes for more severe weather events (except when it doesn’t because they tell us climate change has little to do with the weather), therefore costing Americans even more of their hard-earned cash.
Then again, $150 billion annually is a bargain compared to the Democrats’ desired Green New Deal. That had an original price tag of $93 trillion over 10 years.
The climate report also claims that “while some economic impacts of climate change are already being felt across the country, the impacts of future changes are projected to be more significant and apparent across the U.S. economy.” Be afraid, folks, because it’s only going to get worse! Droughts, hurricanes, floods, and fires will be rising in frequency — that’s the dire prediction of the climate alarmists.
Never mind the historical data that simply doesn’t back up those alarmist claims. The fact of the matter is that coping with events has always been a reality for humanity. Furthermore, as the climate warms, it actually has benefited humanity in key ways, such as food production.
Another is reducing death. A related study claims that heat-related deaths could quadruple without certain “action” on climate change. What they don’t tell you is that cold kills nine times more people than heat.
Demonstrating just how woke the National Climate Assessment is, there are entire sections focused on promoting the Left’s favorite issues of diversity and equity. It even has a section ridiculously asserting that indigenous people had developed a holistic earth-friendly culture that can be harnessed to better react to climate change. It’s that old trope that everything was perfect, peaceful, and harmonious in North America before those foolish and reckless white Europeans arrived.
This is not science; it’s a cult.
The report focuses on the inequitable impact of climate change on lower-income people and minorities. When in the history of the world has the climate not had an inequitable impact on people with lower incomes? This is not due to climate change but is purely the economic reality of the haves and the have-nots.
Solomon Hsiang, a lead assessment author and climate economist at the University of California, Berkeley, states the obvious: “The research indicates that people who are lower income have more trouble adapting [to climate change], because adaptation comes at a cost.” He then adds, “If people can’t pay for it, then [they] can’t protect themselves.”
The great irony is that Joe Biden’s administration is making everything cost more via product regulations on everything from stoves to air-conditioners to lightbulbs to vehicles. If it wasn’t for the regulatory commissars making the cost of goods rise, then it would be easier for lower-income Americans to afford to adapt to a changing climate.
The report attempts to connect all of Americans’ lives to climate change, claiming that everything from their emotional well-being to their physical health to their bank accounts are under dire threat thanks to climate change. One of the report’s authors insists that climate affects “every sector of human and natural society.” If that isn’t cultish thinking, then what is?
In the end, the biggest bogeyman is the fossil fuel industry, which is essentially blamed for everything to the point that the language of social justice is applied as if it’s a battle of good verses evil.
The truth is, without fossil fuels, life on planet earth would be much more difficult. Lives would be shorter and death would be much more common, and all the wonderful technologies that we take for granted, like readily available clean water, would not be possible. Indeed, the actual injustice is the concerted effort by climate cultists to demonize fossil fuels, which still provide the only cost-efficient means for humanity to adapt to a changing climate.
As the climate changes — which it has throughout earth’s history — humans are far better suited to adapt through the free market than under the tyranny of government
https://patriotpost.us/articles/102189-national-climate-alarmism-assessment-2023-11-16
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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