- As is so often the case for controversies before the Supreme Court, this case isn't so much about glyphosate as it is about the interface between federal and state law.
Since 1991, the EPA has held that glyphosate is not carcinogenic; it was (at the time) categorized "Group E", which means that not only is there not evidence for it being carcinogenic, but that there is material evidence that it is not. Later, IARC (in a decision that was controversial among global public health agencies) listed glyphosate as a 2A probable carcinogen, alongside red meat, potatoes, deep fryer oil, and a slew of scary chemicals that includes many other insecticides and herbicides.
States like California enacted labeling-law regimes that key in part off IARC's classification, which meant that in those states Roundup products required labeling. Monsanto/Bayer lost civil cases based on failure to label.
That's the domain-specific stuff. What the court likely cares about is the preemption doctrine. In a variety of different situations, competing state and federal statutes are by explicit or implicit preemption rules. In many cases, federal preemption is a result of bargains with industry: for instance, we got programs like Energy Star after negotiations where industry (and the states dependent on those industries) made concessions to the federal government in exchange for exemptions from state regulation, which is why there's controversy over local municipal ordinances that attempt to ban gas ranges (apropos nothing, but: combustion products of gas ranges: also IARC carcinogens).
There's a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself (as someone else on this thread pointed out, glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments), but rather with the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops.
For those people it's worth knowing that the civil liability Monsanto/Bayer is trying to avoid here is approximately the same as the reason Jays Potato Chips bags sometimes have "Not For Sale In California" labeling. Nobody has declared that Roundup is categorically unsafe. Some states have declared that you have to label it the same way you would a gas station or Disneyland ride.
- >As is so often the case for controversies before the Supreme Court, this case isn't so much about glyphosate as it is about the interface between federal and state law.
It was mentioned on a podcast recently that in many cases, the SC is not making a decision on what should/shouldn't happen/be the policy/is correct or whatever. They are deciding which layer of government gets to decide a given question. The Executive Branch? Legislation? Constitution? Who is the controlling entity?
Now, in a practical sense, by the time it gets to the SC, making a decision on who gets to decide, is, functionally, picking what the outcome is, since the various layers of government have already made their positions clear.
But the upshot is, if one is upset with what happens with a given policy after a SC decision, in many cases (although not all), the proper target of one's ire should not be the SC; since what they are usually saying is something like "this is something that is controlled by statute. If the statute is dumb/bad/poorly written, that is not our fault nor within our control, take it up with Congress to rewrite the statue", and instead one should be upset with whoever the controlling entity is for doing a bad job (in recent years: most commonly congress, not so much for doing a bad job so much as not doing any job)
- 3 equal branches is modern propaganda.
Congress has explicit authority to craft exceptions and regulations to SCOTUS appellate authority and what executive can do via power of the purse
Congress has explicit authority to reshape the court system
Legislative branches then have ultimate authority. The people in power are merely LARPing their hands are tied as they appeal to the propaganda we were all fed in public school (curriculum dictated by legislation)
It's all quid pro quo and intentional obfuscation by the people holding the scepter, gavel; whatever sigils and totem of power the elders worship blindly
SCOTUS authority should be whittled down the to explicitly defined powers with regard to ambassadors and treaties. The Judiciary as a whole should a part of these decisions not a cherry picked panel of obviously partisan hacks vetted by obviously partisan hacks
That we all sit around waiting on a bunch of incontinent elders glitching out live on TV is an massive indictment of the American public itself
My colleagues over seas are done with Americans as they feel they are not rising to meet the moment with the intensity required. They no longer see us as a reliable population interested in collaboration but as a bunch of low skilled, checked out, low effort analysts exploiting labor.
I don't blame them. You all keeping me off the hook for your healthcare with the lack of political action. So good luck but if you all end up homeless well by our cultural custom "not my problem thoughts and prayers"; guess you all should have planned better as a society
- > 3 equal branches is modern propaganda
It's not propaganda. It's a legal and historical theory that found popular purchase. The word propaganda has a meaning, and we're in a point in history where ensuring it retains that meaning is more important than in any other time in my life.
- Definition of language is not up to you but society in the aggregate.
You can claim as you wish while I and others can do the same.
If you're saying we need to hold to beliefs of the past, that's a position that physical reality makes untenable.
See you in church? That was the center of communal life for the majority for centuries. Anyone that's abandoned such agency has engaged in abandonment of history, of norms others can just as easily (and do) claim are more important than ever.
You can make whatever claims you want rhetorically but the non-fractal reality we live in does not allow for the strict conservatism you appeal for. Entropy gives rise to generational churn which gives rise to shifting social values.
These corny appeals to history you never directly experienced are little more than parroting grammatically correct statements you were taught.
- > Definition of language is not up to you but society in the aggregate
Sure. The definition of propaganda OP uses is an internet niche one to mean any broadly-held (and thus disseminated) theory one disagrees with.
The argument against co-equal branches is a legitimate one. Calling the theory propaganda cheapens a real argument by making it look childish.
- propaganda /prŏp″ə-găn′də/
noun The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.
...my use seems to fit the definition to me.
You are applying personal emotional bias to a very plain stated definition.
- > my use seems to fit the definition to me
Where is that definition from? It lacks key elements of the definition, notably, an agenda.
Your operating definition would turn the teaching of evolution (or frankly, any education or broadly-communicated message) into propaganda.
That isn’t a serious claim. If it is for someone, that person’s definition of propaganda isn’t the generally-accepted one, which means it’s unclear how they’re speaking about anything else. By being hyperbolic you’re getting downvoted and ignored.
> You are applying personal emotional bias
Nope. I’m explaining why a serious argument you’re making, one that deserves consideration, is being downvoted and ignored for being introduced with a thoroughly unserious assertion.
- IMO SCOTUS should retain the power to interpret vagaries of law; Congress still holds ultimate power, as it can pass a more specific law overriding their interpretation.
What about striking down unconstitutional laws, though? That has to be up to SCOTUS, nobody else can do it.
- SCOTUS granted itself that power. Their originalist powers are extremely limited.
So do not listen to justices that claim to be "originalist". SCOTUS authority to strike laws is self dealing and not at all an originalist power.
The original expectation was the public would demand such change via elections every 2-6 years and remove the corrupted Senator or Representative.
SCOTUS is not supposed to have power over theoretical cases yet it operates on concepts all the time. Just another way in which the system is rigged; the appeals of originalists who have clearly read the words, they're plain English, are just more self dealing power away from the public to the elites
- This is just not true. Yes the SCOTUS ruled that it had the right to judicial review, because that's what the constitution said it had the power to do. This isn't "granting itself that power" anymore than Congress granted itself the power to pass laws or the president granting themselves the power to execute laws.
- Important to note it's not Glyphosate on trial, it's Roundup. There is a huge gulf between studies and conclusions on Glyphosate, and studies and conclusions on Roundup. Glyphosate is the safest and most effective herbicide known to mankind. Roundup - which includes Glyphosate, in addition to other additives - may be unnecessarily dangerous.
Also worth noting that Monsanto could stop selling Roundup entirely, and it wouldn't really matter. Monsanto's Glyphosate patent expired, so you can get cheaper Glyphosate from many different manufacturers. Which is great, because it means we can avoid the potentially-more-dangerous Roundup, and use the simpler base chemical instead. Distancing the pesticide from the "evil corporation" might actually make people less afraid of it.
- There are numerous studies that show glyphosate binds with aluminum and other metals, having negative impacts on public health.
"Aluminum and Glyphosate Can Synergistically Induce Pineal Gland Pathology: Connection to Gut Dysbiosis and Neurological Disease"
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=53106
"Glyphosate, a chelating agent—relevant for ecological risk assessment?"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5823954/
"Glyphosate complexation to aluminium(III). An equilibrium and structural study in solution using potentiometry, multinuclear NMR, ATR–FTIR, ESI-MS and DFT calculations"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01620...
- That first paper you cited is kind of a running joke. ScienceBasedMedicine ran a whole article on Seneff's work:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/glyphosate-the-new-bogeyman...
It's based on a Rube Goldberg causal mechanism and a slapdash correlation analysis that vibes glyphosate as the presumed cause of sleep disorder and autism diagnostic increases over the preceding 20 years --- glyphosate went up, autism went up, what more is there to say?
A later review of the literature on glyphosate went out of its way to exclude it:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00420-022-01878-0...
- A key paper on its safety from 2000 was retracted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161125
Like the tobacco industry before them, a Monsanto employee proposed producing a scientific paper with outside scientists: “by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak” — see https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art...
- There isn't one single study that glyphosate safety is based on. It's an intensively studied substance.
- I didn’t claim there was only one study. The concern is the corporate culture introducing biases into studies. In the tobacco industry, this was a pattern.
- There was overwhelming evidence, some of it preceding modern human health science, that smoking was damaging.
- Indeed. It's rare in environmental medicine to see an effect as strong as that from smoking. The straw the tobacco industry clung to for a while (it was debunked) was that people who had cancer smoked to sooth their lungs (or, that cancer caused smoking, not vice versa.)
- Monsanto is pretty consistent about trying to change the noun to glyphosate from roundup any chance they get.
If you refer to it as glyphosate, as GP does, that either means you've fallen victim to their PR campaign, or labels you as a paid astroturfer.
- While glyphosate may technically be considered safe, there are reports and I believe lawsuits about it reacting with hard water creating extremely unsafe compounds. ie. it poisons your ground water.
https://www.worldenergydata.org/roundup-herbicide-ingredient...
- I'm not opposed to further studies, but basic critical thinking makes it unlikely that this is a danger outside of those specific areas.
First remember that glyphosate has been used around the world continuously for 52 years. If there is some kind of pattern of harm due to its use, it's already happened, so it should be possible to find those harms all over the place.
85% of the USA has hard water. If glyphosate being in hard water causes 10% of children to have early onset kidney disease, we would have been seeing that in the USA for at least the last 42 years. But we haven't. So it's likely that whatever is happening in Sri Lanka, is specific to Sri Lanka.
You can take this same basic logical premise and apply it to all of the concerns about glyphosate. None of them stand up to scrutiny, because we have been using it for so long, everywhere, and despite that, we have no concrete evidence of any significant harms caused by glyphosate itself.
- And real farmers have bad days and have difficulty maintaining the prescribed application conditions.
For one, you can't control what the weather does in the afternoon after you've applied it in the morning (and it might take all morning because farms are huge and you have to tank up again)
- Real farmers, all 3,500 of them in local coop, take careful measures to control everything on large farms- spraying is generaly done at night for the cooler temps, rates are watched as over spray costs $$'s etc. Seed volumes are manually run through air seeder calibrate seed weight per acre, etc.
The trend today is toward AgBot / SwarmBot type boom sprayers with onboard weather stations for wind speed and air temp, coupled with computer vision to limit spray to actual weeds rather than broad area even spray for weed / non weed alike.
Again, driven by $$ watching, etc.
- > you can get cheaper Glyphosate from many different manufacturers. Which is great, because it means we can avoid the potentially-more-dangerous Roundup, and use the simpler base chemical instead.
Unspecified Glyphosate product isn't better because it's not Roundup. If some ingredient in Roundup is dangerous, let's drop the Glyphosate conversation and look for herbicides without that other mystery chemical.
It really seems like you're looking for a reason to justify Roundup as uniquely bad, in the face of evidence, with extremely vague statements.
- They literally said that Roundup is bad because of the OTHER chemicals that it contains in addition to Glyphosate which is not dangerous. Then it makes total sense to use pure Glyphosate instead of Roundup.
Of course you can claim that they are wrong about their claim. But that is another point.
- > Unspecified Glyphosate product isn't better because it's not Roundup. If some ingredient in Roundup is dangerous, let's drop the Glyphosate conversation and look for herbicides without that other mystery chemical.
- That makes no sense. If you accept that Glyphosate is 100% harmless. Why on earth would you drop it?
- > Why on earth would you drop [Glyphosate]?
You wouldn't. You'd drop the conversation regarding whether it was safe.
- > As is so often the case for controversies before the Supreme Court, this case isn't so much about glyphosate as it is about the interface between federal and state law.
I know what you meant, and I suspect everyone reading it does too, but this is the type of sentence where the ambiguity amuses me. It's certainly true that most of the controversies before the Supreme Court aren't about glyphosate!
- The best-reasoned criticism of glyphosate is that it disrupts the gut biome (this is a fact). I suspect that many "gluten allergies" are actually gut biome problems from glyphosate-desiccated wheat.
- Posted this above, but will repost here because it's relevant.
There are numerous studies that show glyphosate binds with aluminum and other metals, having negative impacts on public health.
"Aluminum and Glyphosate Can Synergistically Induce Pineal Gland Pathology: Connection to Gut Dysbiosis and Neurological Disease"
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=53106
"Glyphosate, a chelating agent—relevant for ecological risk assessment?"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5823954/
"Glyphosate complexation to aluminium(III). An equilibrium and structural study in solution using potentiometry, multinuclear NMR, ATR–FTIR, ESI-MS and DFT calculations"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01620...
- And, as noted above, the paper you're citing here is a joke. Its primary author isn't even a subject matter expert; their PhD is in computer science.
- Anything that reaches the gut intact disrupts (ie: manipulates, interacts with, alters, stimulates or suppresses, selects) the gut biome. I'm not pushing back on you except to say that as a mechanistic axiomatic claim of harm, it's missing most of the evidence. You could be right, but you could also be wrong; what you've said so far can't possibly be dispositive.
- The mechanism of action of glyphosate inhibits several important amino acid production processes in the gut. I'm simplifying here, but not having glyphosate in the food supply would be a good thing for the gut, and the science agrees on this.
Glyphosate for field prep also doesn't really come through in food, it's much worse with the pre-harvest desiccation.
- You are inferring from our crude understanding of processes in general. Evidence is more specific.
Do you have an exclusion trial comparing glyphosate vs non-glyphosate diets? This is amenable to natural experiments where one country bans it on a specific date and the neighbor does not.
- Here's a decent one: 13% of the UK reports gluten intolerance symptoms, and only 7% of Germany does. The UK allows pre-harvest glyphosate desiccation, Germany doesn't. I would be happy to bet that the trend continues past my quick Google search.
- > Do you have an exclusion trial comparing glyphosate vs non-glyphosate diets?
That's a rather sneaky way to invert the issue. It's fishing for random luck when you ask for more and harder to obtain evidence given existing facts pointing to possible harm. A single study that doesn't show harm doesn't refute those that do.
You have to provide hard evidence that glyphosate (or another non-essential ingredient) does not cause adverse effects, and thoroughly explain the differences with the studies that show the opposite - until you do that, any in-vitro or other studies that show harmful effects count against the use of the product and you cannot ask for more evidence, you can only accept the remedies.
In this case, the appropriate remedies can be different: banning it altogether, limiting it to specific usage (e.g. no pre-harvest spraying), labeling using LARGE PRINT and scary language or some combination of the above.
- You can't even get smoked fish accepted through precautionary-principle logic like that. This is the same reasoning that puts cancer warnings on bags of potato chips.
- > You can't even get smoked fish accepted through precautionary-principle logic like that.
No, you really can't do that without breaking the Code of Federal Regulations. Smoked products must be labeled "smoked" in addition to many other requirements, and that despite the distinctive stink that self-labels these products. Even the font size is specified to be no smaller than the letters for the kind of meat on the label.
The real issue is why there's no such requirement for glyphosate, having it would be a good starting point.
> This is the same reasoning that puts cancer warnings on bags of potato chips.
I don't think all potato chips deserve, or have, such warnings but some might. Regardless, there might be specific regulations that are over the top and I don't mind admitting or discussing such cases but glyphosate isn't among them.
- Smoked fish is a side, wheat is a staple. Degree matters.
If 90% of the raw food at the grocery were 'processed' in the same way that a smoked fish, or a french fry was, I think we'd have very valid reasons to be displeased with many of the myriad problems that come with that.
- First, no it isn't, not in the cultures where it's believed to cause stomach cancer. Second: at the point where you're talking about distinguishing public policy based on whether something is a "side dish" or not, I think we've left the realm of plausibility and entered a wonderful new land I call "the voivodeship of special pleading".
- AFAIK the preponderance of the evidence is that most "gluten sensitivity" is actually just a FODMAP sensitivity, which also interacts with the gut biome.
- Off topic, but can someone ELI5 (or at least ELI20) what the deal is with FODMAP? I keep hearing about it, but I don't understand it at all.
- The Wikipedia page for it is pretty good. Basically, there are a number of short-chain carbohydrates that tend to pass through the small intestine (where nutrients are digested and absorbed into the bloodstream) and reach the large intestine (where water is removed). Bacteria in the large intestine eat these nutrients (fermentation). In some people, this causes intestinal distress. (Bloating, gas, discomfort, watery stool, etc.) It's not clear why this only affects some people.
You hear a lot about it because a large subset of people have discovered that a low-FODMAP diet relieves their torment of intestinal distress.
- FODMAP stands for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. FODMAPs generate gas as side effect of being fermented in the gut. Most people just pass this gas, but for some people, usually people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), it can be very uncomfortable and amplify their other IBS problems.
People who are suffering from pain and bloating with no obvious cause may be advised to go on a low-FODMAP diet for a few weeks to see if their symptoms go away.
- We just had a story about de-farting beans on the front page. The FODMAPs are (among other things) the bean farts.
- Roundup also contains a very strong surfactant and we know that those totally fuck up your GI as well.
- I will never understand this bizarre obsession with gut flora. We don't know what is normal, what is a beneficial ratio or when a change happens if that is good or bad thing. No one besides the people who study these things should be much attention to gut microbiomes. We just don't have enough information to let this be an influence on decision making.
- Your comment seems a little flippant honestly. I know what "disrupted" is, trust me. I developed a gluten sensitivity about 10 years ago but only figured it out 5 years ago. "Healthy" is "feels healthy" and "doesn't die young", that is pretty simple.
It sounds like you think this is about hypothetical and marginal health benefits but people have very acute and immediate physical (and cognitive) issues because of disrupted gut biome that are objectively improved by cutting out, in particular, gluten. This isn't just some weird obession.
- Gluten intolerance is a real thing but I don't think that necessarily means that your gut flora is damaged or whatever. Plenty of people are lactose intolerant, and their gut flora is fine, they're just lactose intolerant.
I don't think you could solve gluten intolerance but just improving your gut microbiome, so they're probably not related.
- Why not? A fecal transplant seems to work for C. difficile sufferers.
- A fecal transplant definitely doesn't work for celiac disease, which is the only gluten intolerance you have to worry about.
Other gluten intolerance is probably not gluten, gluten is just a close enough proxy. Could be FODMAP + IBS or maybe some other sensitivity.
- We know that it's really important to neurological function, which is enough reason to be careful.
- By itself, it's simply an argument that proves too much. Anything you ingest impacts your gut flora. There can be gut microbiome hypos about glyphosate! But you have to actually have them; you can't stop at "it impacts gut flora".
- Well, I didn't intend that as a conversation-ender, but it is true. This particular substance inhibits a particular function of certain gut flora that seems important. I think it's safe to call that significant.
- What "particular function" is that? If it's "the part that influences neurological function", you don't have a complete argument. If you can't be specific about this, your argument falls apart, because almost everything we eat potentially "inhibits" (or accelerates) different areas of our gut flora.
- I'm not trying to make a complete argument, I'm trying to raise a flag. This issue is not well-studied and has very large corporate sponsors who would like to keep selling Roundup-Ready™ crops. One particular measurable function is inhibition of the shikamate pathway in many different bacteria (the majority of the volume of your gut flora is affected).
Here's a decent paper that shows an adverse effect: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10330715/
I understand that this is the realm of crunchy weirdos, but thinking holistically doesn't mean you need to lobotomize yourself.
Here's another paper examining some brain effects of chronic gut inflammation, which could be reasonably inferred as a potential consequence of long-term glyphosate exposure: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10661239/
- You haven't raised a flag! You've observed (and cited a paper that shows in mouse models under relatively high human dosages) that glyphosate can impact certain gut bacteria species. That's plausible! But all sorts of things do that, and you haven't presented evidence that connects that to an adverse human health outcome. In particular: you haven't cited a source showing glyphosate is causative of gut inflammation.
"It impacts the gut biome" isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for these arguments; if it were, you could knock down all sorts of things, including specific diets (and most abrupt changes in diet).
- Call it (pun intended) a smell test. I have cited a study that shows biomarkers of gut inflammation strongly correlated with glyphosate exposure. Perhaps you should have read it.
I have raised a flag. Lowering your exposure to a novel chemical agent that directly impacts a massive and poorly-understood symbiotic system within the body isn't a bad response. Glyphosate exposure certainly isn't beneficial, so I'll treat it like Pascal's wager: avoiding this has more upside than downside.
- Changing your diet disrupts the gut biome. When I started eating bran flakes it massively disrupted my gut biome. Should I be alarmed? Or are you slipping a double standard in there, perhaps from the naturalistic fallacy?
- Maybe you should see if you adjust to the bran flakes, cut them out if you don't improve, and see if there's a difference? All sorts of things can disrupt gut biomes, and I think ancestral diets are an interesting area of study. Gut inflammation is absolutely rampant.
- That misses the point I was making.
- People who have gluten allergies have a legitimate disease, typically celiac disease.
Being tired after eating bread or whatever is not a gluten allergy, that's just how food works. A lot of people claim to have gluten allergies but no, you would know for sure if you had a gluten allergy.
- These aren't labeling cases. Durnell is the one the Supreme Court took, but it's one of tens of thousands. John Durnell sued Monsanto in Missouri state court after getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from twenty years of spraying Roundup as the "spray guy" for his neighborhood, and the jury gave him $1.25 million for his cancer, not a fine for a missing sticker. The legal theory is "failure to warn," but that's a tort claim about whether Monsanto adequately communicated the risk to users who then got hurt, not a regulatory question about what text has to appear on the bottle. Earlier California verdicts followed suit. Juries found Monsanto liable for the plaintiffs' cancer under regular product liability law. But, none of these are Prop 65 enforcement actions. [0]
The Jays chips comparison cuts the other way. CA's Prop 65 warning for glyphosate got blocked by a federal court in 2020, the Ninth Circuit upheld the block in 2023, and Prop 65 warnings for acrylamide in food were permanently shut down last May. So... California isn't actually making Roundup carry a Prop 65 warning, which is what your chips comparison assumes. The real question in Durnell is whether federal pesticide law stops a Missouri jury from finding Bayer liable for a specific person's cancer. Pretty different from whether you slap a warning sticker on a bag of chips (and Jay's doesn't carry a "Not for Sale" in CA -that's generally smaller companies who couldn't afford reformulation but the reality is they likely just didn't sell there). [1]
[0] https://legal-planet.org/2026/02/03/pesticides-cancer-and-fa... [1] https://www.greenbergglusker.com/publications/court-finds-re...
- I didn't say they had to pay a fine; I said they lost the strict-liability duty to warn claim, one of three, which requires Monsanto in that state to warn of any potential risks known at the time of manufacture. I think we're all clear it's a tort claim!
- > the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops
Is this true? Can't we we give in on glyphosphate without losing GMOs?
- Roundup-Ready is a subset of GMO crops. I don't know how profitable they are but it's one of the more loudly announced groups.
- We can, but why would we? Without GM in the background, nobody would be talking about glyphosate. It's just an herbicide. People have comfortable priors about herbicides already; the only interesting thing about glyphosate is that it's less gnarly than those priors.
- > why would we?
They’re annoying and might go home with a symbolic win.
- > There's a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself (as someone else on this thread pointed out, glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments), but rather with the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops.
I still don’t understand why people seem to care about genetically modified glyphosate tolerant soybeans and corn, they’re mostly fed to animals anyways.
Crossbreeding plants is genetic modification.
- Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.
Essentially turning
> You wouldn't download a car
into
> You wouldn't plant your seed for your crop.
Which is obviously absurd.
So while GM has enabled some pretty good things, it also comes with the same sort of intellectual property baggage that plagues many different areas of society, which on the face of it make some sense, but always seem to skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life, squeezing from those who have less to begin with.
- I don't think the case law supports this argument that farmers got roped into subscription crops. Farmers use this system because it has value, and is economically superior to the systems that preceded it (or they don't use it).
- There is a problem though. If you opt out of it and just use seeds without any IP and your neighbor uses IP seeds and some of the seeds are blowing into your field from your neighbour you risk trouble.
- No in fact you do not. This is an Internet/activist myth.
- Source that it is legal to keep the profits and the plants from a patented crop that can’t be prove you have intentionally planted it there? As far as I understand Montosanto claims it would always belong to them no matter how the seed ended up there.
- Feel free to cite the case they've brought where they claim that!
They have sued farmers for innocently acquiring their seeds (through the wind or whatever) and then spraying their crops with Roundup (ie: using the whole system).
- There is absolutely no case law suggesting it is illegal to harvest and keep accidentally cross contaminated seed. Seeing as farming seeds is default legal there would need to be precedent otherwise for such an act to be illegal.
- I worded it so carefully to not have an argument, just for illustration, but...
Yes, you are correct, and you are not contradicting me: This is a system that makes sense on the surface. It's economically superior to pay some more money to a seed supplier to get a better yield on my fields.
But this economic advantage is captured by the seed supplier after all farmers moved to this new system where you are no longer able to rely on the previous' harvest seeds. Once everyone is on the economically superior system, the seed supplier can start capturing more of the value that is created by farming.
The point here is that Monsanto creates a superior yield in a crop. All your farmer peers move to use it, and now you have to too or get priced out of the market.
hence: > skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life. > skew
The word "farmers" is doing some heavy lifting here - might be some multinational, might be a small family making a living.
The point is not that the market is pricing out inefficient farms, the point is that it turns a millennia old practice on it's head and using government force to enable monopolies to remove competition.
Farmers use it because their time horizon is 1-5 years, but the government monopoly on seeds is more like 20 years.
It's skewed.
Easy to disagree and argue with these points, but the original question was why there are people opposed to GMOs and while GMOs are not the only patented organisms they are the most obvious for people to have concerns over the economics
- I find the objection to patents on GMO plants to be completely indefensible.
If there was ever an area where patents are justified and necessary, this is it. This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again.
Objection to patents on GMO plants is just a way to object to GMO plants themselves without coming out and saying so directly.
- > This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again.
Isn't that a massive societal benefit vs rent seeking though?
- If we got the seeds from the GMO fairy, yes.
If we have to get the seeds from expensive R&D that wouldn't occur without patent protection, then no.
- > then no.
Why not?
It's literally a self replicating system. Trying to control that for rent seeking purposes seems pretty unethical.
- > Why not?
(rolls eyes)
Because if no one does the R&D to create the seeds they WON'T EXIST.
I would have thought that was 100% obvious, but apparently not!
- > Because if no one does the R&D to create the seeds they WON'T EXIST.
Sure. If no-one does the R&D.
Perhaps if rent seeking is the mechanism for getting there, then it's better off if they don't? :)
- Yes, yes, let's imagine automated turbo communism where all inventions can be made outside the free market.
Here in the real world, private firms are the source of things like this. Roundup Ready soybeans involved cooperation from multiple private firms that contributed various elements.
- That's the same line Private Equity often trots out, and those seem to corrode the world far more than they improve it.
- >Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.
The thing is, that existed for like 100 years before GMOs were a thing. Basically no one saves seeds to reuse and didn't even prior to GMOs. The whole "poor farmers can't save their seeds" thing is propaganda from the organics industry that gets repeated by people who don't understand modern (or even semi-modern) works.
- There are IP protections for non-GMO seeds as well.
- > Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.
They don't get roped into anything. They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost. Further, at least part of the reasoning for not allowing replanting is to avoid genetic deviation in future generations of crop.
- > They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost.
That is correct. They are so much better ( and I am in awe of that technology) that outside of some niches (depending on the crop) as a farmer you cannot afford not to use them. But now your farmer-timeframe of a few years is up against a 20 year artificial monopoly in the form of a patent. And all your peers are facing the same situation. This isn't a situation where you can just decide to do whatever you want.
You suddenly find yourself dependent on a third party that knows your situation exactly and will try to extract the most amount of value from you - trying to capture your profit while keeping you healthy enough to keep being a customer.
This skews towards the seed supplier.
- The major important gmo patents are expiring close to it. If that is your argument it isn't relevant. There are new patents but they are not hard to work around.
- > as a farmer you cannot afford not to use them.
Yes, because it's a good product.
Farmer's can't afford not to use tractors or artificial irrigation either.
It's not sinister to develop a product that is better than the competition.
> This skews towards the seed supplier.
Right up until someone else makes a better product.
- > Right up until someone else makes a better product.
Yes. A different seed supplier. My point isn't that it's morally wrong to make a better product. My point is that the way it's set up is that those who are in the position to make a better patented-product are in an unbalancedly better position towards the people who use the product to create something as fundamentally important as food.
- It's some combination of ideological opposition to GMOs and a way to get trade barriers against import of cheap grain and soybeans from the US to the EU. The latter is less important now that Trump has blown up free trade.
- So what do you think?
- I think that this will be material to me in the sense in which it resolves some questions about whether Oak Park, the ultra-blue inner-ring suburb suburb in which I live, can ban gas ranges, which I enjoy cooking on. I guess I think Bayer has the better case here.
In the message board controversy over glyphosate itself, I don't think this case has much to say. The state labeling regime was either preempted or not; that's a technicality of state and federal statutory evaluation. If the labeling regime is enforceable, it doesn't much matter whether it was about IARC classification or midichlorian counts. Strict liability is strict liability.
The substantive part of this case, whether glyphosate is an inherently dangerous or flawed product, was resolved by the trier of fact in favor of Monsanto.
A simpler way to say all of this: "the safety of glyphosate is not before this court".
- > whether glyphosate is an inherently dangerous or flawed product, was resolved by the trier of fact in favor of Monsanto.
You: "Courtrooms are the appropriate final venue to determine if something is inherently dangerous, using the word inherently purposefully, as I do not misuse words, as long as the result is something I agree with."
> Oak Park, the ultra-blue inner-ring suburb suburb in which I live, can ban gas ranges, which I enjoy cooking on
I guess this is why you and I write on random social media forums instead of getting elected.
- In the past several years I've proposed, help draft, and gotten passed one law (making us the first municipality in Illinois with an anti-surveillance ordinance), co-wrote our municipality's police general order on ALPRs limiting them to violent crime, and created the transparency regime that allowed us to cancel our Flock contract. I've spent the last 3 years working on eliminating single family zoning, which we are likely to accomplish in just a couple months. I've funded and run two campaigns, one of which succeeded. I'm an appointed commissioner in the muni.
I got all of this done by... posting on random forums.
- haha look i'll vote for you if you run for something, but you've run a campaign, you'll agree: all the activism in the world, and the people who win student council elections have won more elections than you and i have
- I'm not interested in running for office; I'm very interested in helping other people run. My theory of change doesn't involve me holding office. In fact: my theory of change is heavily dependent on posting comments! It seems to be working out for me.
- > a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself
Is it required that the public have a "good reason" for wanting something?
> glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments
We used to spray DDT everywhere. This isn't exactly a resounding recommendation. Perhaps there's a case for using as little additives in farming as is possible.
- I think this a very unsound place to start an argument. Food production is vital and has been refined over the entirety of human existence to be stable and bountiful. I think it's extremely reasonable to critique Roundup for other reasons - but if you want to blank-slate farming and go with a no-additive solution we're bringing a lot of technology and technique into question that is helpful.
While it's more difficult to formulate on the internet through brief interactions - the correct answer here is nuanced. Somethings are beneficial to farm land productivity and also beneficial to consumers by lowering prices, increasing availability to healthy food etc - and some things are not but might be highly profitable to conglomerates. We need to pick issues like this apart carefully.
- > We used to spray DDT everywhere. This isn't exactly a resounding recommendation. Perhaps there's a case for using as little additives in farming as is possible
It's not relevant to glyphosate, but there is such a thing. It's called Integrated Pest Management. I only know it wrt fruit crops. The main idea is to use the least-intrusive methods first, and pesticides last. For example, sanitation comes first: remove last year's debris where larvae and spores have over-wintered.
Glyphosate isn't a pesticide (unless it kills host plants? maybe?)
- > Is it required that the public have a "good reason" for wanting something?
Not required but it's a nice to have, especially if the thing they want done is to have the desired outcome.
- The desired outcome is simply not using Glyphosate. I'm not seeing how "reasonability" of this idea impacts it's implementation.
If you find someone using it you severely fine them and/or put them in jail.
- I’m sure someone’s desired outcome is to stop using urea or ammonium nitrate as a fertilizer.
“Reasonability of X” factors into many people’s assessment of “should we do X or not-X?”
- Why is that a desired outcome?
- Why is using Glyphosate worth defending? Does it make food taste better, or grow larger, or become more nutruitious?
If the only value is to increase the value of crops, by planting patent seeds, and then dousing the land in weed killer, perhaps people, regardless of the published scientific quality of their rationale, think that our food supply would be better off without it.
Unless the suggestion that Glyphosate is the only way to grow the necessary amount of food then I think the question should be: What justifies it's use? So then why would you bother to care if the imputed and over generalized public rationale is right or wrong?
If it is in fact so worth using then why shouldn't the government use imminent domain to capture the patents and distribute the technology for free?
- No, it isn't. What's your point?
- Your quip follows a trope:
"There's a weird reason the public wants this and it has little to do with the thing itself."
Very often the implication being:
"Therefore the public is wrong and should be ignored."
- I think the public is in fact wrong, but that has nothing to do with my argument.
- It sounds like this would actually be good to decide now if the court were truly a "conservative" court - there is no legitimate reason for preemption to apply to labeling laws (even as broken as California's labeling law is), as labeling a product a certain way is not a mutually-exclusive action. But I expect the rank hypocrisy will win out, especially with the "culture war" backdrop of California delenda est.
- > there is no legitimate reason for preemption to apply to labeling laws (even as broken as California's labeling law is), as labeling a product a certain way is not a mutually-exclusive action.
That's not really what preemption is about. A major point of having "interstate commerce" -- actual products crossing state lines -- at the federal level, is to prevent states from enacting trade barriers.
Suppose California disproportionately has more organic food producers and other states make higher proportions of food products grown with glyphosate. California then passes a law requiring the latter (i.e. disproportionately out-of-state) products to carry a scary warning label based on inconclusive evidence. Are they trying to enact a trade barrier? It sure looks like one. Meanwhile if the stuff is actually dangerous then it's dangerous in all 50 states, so the warning label should either be everywhere or nowhere according to the evidence, right?
Relatedly, having dozens or (at the city level) hundreds of different sets of rules is also a kind of trade barrier. Some small business in Ohio is willing to ship nationwide but every state has different rules, they might be inclined to cut off everyone who isn't in the local area since that's where they get most of their current sales, but that's bad. So then there is a legitimate interest in being able to say the rules have to be uniform if the states start trying to micromanage too much.
The better way to do this would be to only apply the interstate commerce rules to actual interstate commerce. So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California. A lot of states would then say you have to follow the federal interstate rules even if you don't cross state lines, but it would be their decision and some might not.
- More importantly in this case, a commitment to federal preemption allowed Congress to come to an agreement on a more ambitious set of federal regulations than would have been obtainable without it.
- My point was specifically in regards to labeling, for which it's an awful stretch to call a trade barrier. If a label is "scary" enough to dissuade a potential purchaser, then it seems like the purchaser wasn't really informed about what they might have bought in the first place.
> So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California
In my ideal world I'd slightly adjust the framing here. California law should apply to products that are being sold within California, regardless where they may have previously been (yes, that would be a complete repudiation of Wickard v Filburn's declaration that a butterfly flapping its wings is interstate commerce). A California distributor or retail store that gets shipments from Ohio but then sells locally should be required to follow California law about what they're selling, as those sales are occurring wholly in California. Also if Ohio and California can agree on something that differs from federal, then that should also take it out of federal preemption territory. But of Ohio and California cannot agree, and someone in California orders direct from Ohio, only then federal law should step in with preemption.
- > Meanwhile if the stuff is actually dangerous then it's dangerous in all 50 states, so the warning label should either be everywhere or nowhere according to the evidence, right?
Only if other states or the federal government give that much of a shit about food safety, which is not a guarantee, both in theory and in practice. They might, for instance, care more about agri-profits than California does.
> So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California.
That's just a regulatory-arbitrage race to the bottom. You'd just have out-of-state producers that don't have to follow any of your laws out-competing local ones.
- It's the opposite of a race to the bottom. The federal government sets a single standard for the country. The same logic you're advocating is also the conservative argument for health care regulation --- that is, allow the states to preempt the federal standards so they can offer cheaper insurance by lowering standards.
- That's exactly how it currently works, though. Different states can and do set different healthcare standards, above some minimum floor.
I'm not sure why you think there's a problem with that. (I mean, I think it's a problem for the residents of a lot of states, but that's their problem, that they have agency to fix, not mine.)
If the Midwest likes using paint chips as food coloring, that's not my problem. And it should still not be my problem if they elect some brain-worm addled moron to a federal office who goes and raises the federally permitted amount of paint in my food.
- > Since 1991, the EPA has held that glyphosate is not carcinogenic; it was (at the time) categorized "Group E", which means that not only is there not evidence for it being carcinogenic, but that there is material evidence that it is not. Later, IARC (in a decision that was controversial among global public health agencies) listed glyphosate as a 2A probable carcinogen, alongside red meat, potatoes, deep fryer oil, and a slew of scary chemicals that includes many other insecticides and herbicides.
Excuse me if I dont believe "this stuff isnt harmful".
And Arsenic was once safe.
Asbestos was the most amazing fireproof wonder material.
Thalidomide was a wonder drug with no side effects.
Tetraethyl lead was perfectly safe everywhere.
Fen-phen was a great diet drug.
Id also add "consumption of fluoride in water supply" (topical/toothpaste makes sense, consumption does not).
- Those aren't really great examples, considering that Arsenic and Asbestos have been known to be harmful for centuries/millennia.
Thalidomide never even made it to use in the USA.
Fluoride being good for teeth was discovered by fluoride naturally being in the water already
Can't speak for the other two, but I hope you're not basing your fears on stuff like that.
- > Thalidomide never even made it to use in the USA.
What? It was initially blocked by the FDA, but was later approved for use in cancer, where it is in fact a front line drug for some myelomas, albeit with significant usage warnings.
- It was never approved in the US for the on-label use for which it gained its reputation (it's a potent teratogen and was prescribed --- never officially in the US --- for morning sickness).
- Fair, I was talking more the initial pregnancy use, but even still that further pushes my point that those examples have either never been considered perfectly safe, or have been in active normal usage for so many years that you really have to squint to say it's unsafe.
- I mean, you can believe whatever you want to believe, and the EPA can be wrong, but "the EPA has been claiming X since 1991" is not a very powerful argument for "not X".
(There are mechanistic reasons to believe glyphosate is less harmful than other landscaping treatments; it has a fairly elegant mode of action.)
- Omitted here is mention that the EPA designation is under review: “the Agency is currently updating its evaluation of the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate to better explain its findings and include the current relevant scientific information”. Their February 2020 registration review decision was withdrawn and their new interim registration has not been completed. —https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/glyp...
- I don't really care about EPA's designation. I discussed it upthread because it's very important to the legal case.
- I’m not claiming you needed to mention this in your original post about the lawsuit. This fact would be relevant in the sub thread here with nekusar about what we can or cannot draw from the designation.
- The logical flaw in their argument also doesn't depend on the EPA's actions! In fact, the additional color you added works against the claim, in their logic.
- Strictly speaking, you're right: they're more than prepared to disregard the position of the EPA (all of us seem willing to). But said designation being currently under review is pertinent to the possibility they raise, namely that consensus has changed in the past, and sometimes the more skeptical or conservative heading taken preemptively has been borne out wise.
- Part of that is that I've seen enough evidence between the FDA and EPA that regulatory capture is a thing, and more stuff that we are exposed to and consume are more poisonous than they let on.
Ive also seen that with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ractopamine which is banned in most of the world. Decent countries straight up banned it, since it doesnt degrade with slaughter or cooking. My SO is also allergic to it as well - thats evidenced by not being able to eat US/Canadian pork, but being able to eat Spanish/European pork.
Tl;dr. Regulatory capture has made most of US food not good, potentially toxic, and full of nasty shit we dont want to eat. But hey, selling toxic food makes money for someone.
- I'm not arguing that the EPA is right or trustworthy. I'm saying that if you want to argue the opposite of what they claim, you need evidence beyond "the EPA disagrees with me".
- It's striking how many of these "product safety" cases are decided in the court of public opinion, independent of actual scientific merit. The case of DDT was pretty interesting. More recently, we have microplastics - no one has really shown they're dangerous to humans, but there's enough hand-waving that "everyone knows" they're killing us. And aspartame, etc...
Glyphosate is probably the safest of the things people spray their lawns with. I don't think we should - the worst you get on a typical suburban lawn if you mow but don't spray are dandelions and clover - but it's probably not giving you cancer. As for food... again, there are far worse, more persistent pesticides that escape this kind of scrutiny.
- Well I don't know of people claiming that microplastics are "killing us", there are dozens of papers that implicate microplastics in negative health effects from hearts to intestines, to sperm.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2309822
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c09524
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c03924
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...
There are a lot of studies that find correlations, and then are studies like this one that show that the direct introduction of microplastics alters cell functions negatively:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12692081/
I think at this point we should stop talking about how "there's no data" or "no studies" and "no one has shown" and graduate to "oh, maybe should figure out the extent of the damage."
Microplastic pollution is a global problem amongst a whole host of global pollution problems. We'd do well to try to figure out how bad it is, because it isn't going away. Oh, and we should probably work on fixing all of our pollution problems, especially cumulative ones like this.
- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/micropla...
(This is a summary of a Nature Matters Arising article).
- I understood that article as there being many bad studies on how much plastics are in our body. But I find it highly unlikely there isn't any plastic in my body, from my toothbrush or chewing gum or water bottle or that old black plastic spatula I fry my eggs with or the air that pushes all kinds of particles into me etc. etc. And studies like your parent comment's https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12692081/ make it seem likely that they could have some negative effect. So I'm not worried about it, but I also find it a good idea to be cautious (maybe I'll avoid heating food in plastic containers) and for there to be more research into it.
- > Glyphosate is probably the safest of the things people spray their lawns with.
Glyphosate kills grass, so I would not recommend this unless you are planning to reseed from scratch (or replace the grass with something else).
Are there "Roundup Ready" grass seeds?
- People are usually spraying broadleaf herbicides on their lawn like 2,4-D to control things like dandelions and yard plantains. Glyphosate just kills everything. Personally I only use it very selectively on poison ivy.
- > the worst you get on a typical suburban lawn if you mow but don't spray are dandelions and clover
I also get a lot of morning glory AKA bindweed that kills my grass. But spraying doesn't really help with that anyway, so :shrug:.
- Bindweed is evil incarnate in plant form. Wouldn't wish that on anybody.
- We hand some log droughts here about 10 years ago where you were not allowed to water the lawn at all.
I would have expected a single dominate weed to take over, but instead, if I let the grass grow for 6-8 weeks in summer I get this amazing field of different knee length plants. And it alive with bee's and butterflies.
I much prefer it to lawn.
- Worth noting here that the trier of fact in this case mostly agrees with you about this stuff; the issue is that the state statutes in question created strict liability conditions for failure to comply with warning label regimes. The plaintiff brought substantive charges about Roundup to the case, and the jury rejected them.
- Still probably the safest herbicide, mainly because the competition (organophosphates, etc.) is so much worse.
- From an environmental perspective you are probably right. One of the nice things is that glyphosate, unlike most herbicides, is broken down quickly by soil bacteria.
The longer term issue is evolved weed resistance due to its over use with "Roundup Ready" crops and for end of the season dry down.
- I think the fears about glyphosate resistance owes too much to antibiotic resistance, but I am not really sure it makes sense.
I suppose there's some regimen where you carefully monitor every plant sprayed with a weedkiller is monitored for survival and killed with fire if it survives, or some other extreme measure to be sure there are no survivors to develop resistance, but realistically the weeds are going to develop resistances over time.
And ... so what? The value of a weedkiller like glyphosate is using it to kill a lot of weeds in wide-scale agriculture. If the weeds develop a resistance to it, and we stop using it because it's no longer effective, we're not really in a worse position than if we never used it at all. It's not like there are some really bad weeds we need to save it to be able to combat.
- It's a matter of when, not if, and that _when_ was more than a decade ago. Round-up resistant Kochia (a weed) has spread across Western Canada and was first observed in 2011. Pretty difficult stuff to get out of your field once it takes root.
As for solutions, I agree with you that there's no single clean solution to mitigate resistance. But it seems like some weeds' reproduction paths are better suited for resistance than others (Kochia produces tens of thousands of seeds and spread similar to tumbleweeds, so there's a lot of potential for mixing and genetic diversity relative to other weeds).
https://saskpulse.com/resources/kochia-resistance-update-res...
- I have no idea why this is downvoted because it's exactly right. Unlike antibiotic resistance where the consequences can be measured in human lives, it just doesn't matter for weed killers: and the iteration time on new compounds is much faster.
It's also inevitable: there are weeds which have substantially changed their appearance to more closely resemble crops as an adaptive strategy just to human driven control measures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry
Which is a problem which mechanical weed control measures will exacerbate probably in bizarre ways (e.g. the weed is no longer selecting against the human vision system but instead a machine vision model)
Edit: though probably worth noting that encouraging weeds to compete against a machine vision model opens up interesting possibilities - e.g. encoding a failure mode for something which the active model can't spot, then running it competitively against a model trained to sport the adaptation and then switching back over when your hit rate falls below a certain level - trap the weed in a controlled local minima. You can't replace human image recognition and new compounds are hard, but updating software is easy.
- The one I'm seeing now for crops (along with GMO crops to resist it) is Liberty, generic name glufosinate. What's interesting about it is that it's a natural product (although obtained in bulk by synthesis) produced by several species of Streptomyces soil bacteria.
- What point are you trying to illuminate with this comment?
A 22 caliber is safer than a 40 caliber. But, I still wouldn’t a hole made in me from either.
- That people would be on the whole less healthy had glyphosate not been on the market, because other herbicides, all of which were and are in common use, are worse.
It's not a complicated argument.
- The alternative is mass starvation.
- No, mass starvation would not ensue from having to fight weeds using mechanical means. It would take more work and more fuel, but it is eminently doable if the need is there. Especially if the change would be gradual.
Making do without artificial fertilizer would be a lot harder.
- Increased fuel means a lot more CO2. That is a very significant factor you cannot ignore.
- Perhaps if herbicides weren't viable, more work would've gone into developing the mechanical alternatives and we'd have had solar-powered machines removing weeds from fields.
- Soil resistance is worse than air resistance, but similar concept. It needs a lot of energy to overcome.
- More CO2 compared to what tractors use today, yes. But that is not a lot compared to the rest of the human civilization spend on transportation.
So no, it is not a very significant factor.
- Increased work and fuel means increased costs, increased costs means increased prices, increased prices means less food available for purchase by those on the margins, less food means starvation.
- So anything that effects food prices, regardless of magnitude, causes mass starvation?
- No, not regardless of magnitude. But anything that have a large impact on food prices will decrease the ability of poor people to pay for it. It’s not rocket science.
- Then it's a discussion about magnitude and jumping to starvation is unfounded.
- Price increases due to disruption of Ukrainian grain shipments from the war substantially threatened African food stability.
Despite their being plenty of capacity elsewhere because the smaller redirects of trucking into the European markets crashed prices enough that it led to protests in Poland and discontent elsewhere (though probably with significant Russian psyops involvement).
- Anything that causes food prices to rise a lot causes starvation yea, when prices go up people consume less.
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- I don't think that is the only alternative. If the end goal is to preserve life for humans, completely nuking the soil into a wasteland, treating it with carcinogens and then allowing a company to genetically modify seeds and copyright them is a pretty bad and short sighted strategy.
Allowing a known carcinogen to make crops "easier to harvest" has to do with profit margin not food supply. People literally use this to kill dandelions in their yards. I have known many people who have died from cancer. I have eaten dandelions, while bitter, are actually healthy. A good start would be to work with nature instead of trying to out engineer it.
If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.
- > If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.
Yes. That is literally exactly what we're doing. You can't sustain the current human population without fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels. Half the people on the planet would die.
If we don't want half the planet to die, we need pesticides. So do you choose a pesticide that's more harmful, or less? If you said "less", then you want glyphosate.
- I think you meant to write herbicide rather than pesticide.
- Ah you're right, glyphosate is the herbicide. We also need the pesticides to keep the yields up.
- You both have premises that are too far apart to debate productively; what you're really debating is naturalism vs. technology, scale vs. degrowth, humanism vs. environmentalism. All worthwhile philosophical debates, but you won't get anywhere sniping at each other about them.
- My personal interest in this case is that I have used Roundup for years. What are the odds that the new formulation without glyphosate is safer than the old one? Are we replacing it with something worse?
A note: It appears that the picture in the article is if the new formulation for tonight, not the one containing glyphosate.
- If all of agriculture went fully organic tomorrow, no fertilizer, no fungicide, no insecitizide, no herbicide- billions would starve. Organic advocates who do not present viable alternatives are monsterous.
We almost saw that played out in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_economic_crisis_(20... - and its a call for genocide on the economic less prosperous by economic means. It should be treated as that - regardless of the appeal of the ideology pushing for such measures.
And that is coming from someone rooting for weeding robots to remove parts of the pressure to use herbicides.
- The evidence on glyphosphate causing cancer isn’t particularly strong.
I wouldn’t bathe in the stuff, but the data strongly indicates it’s one of the more benign compounds used in agriculture and landscaping.
- WHO classifies it as "Probably carcinogenic to humans". But it's important to talk about the exposure model.
Glyphosate in our food supply - almost no evidence of cancer risk. (The gut microbiome is affected though).
Direct and sustained contact to glyphosate as an agricultural worker - potentially very severe risks, particularly non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The data is strong but epidemiological.
So yeah, I think your conclusion is roughly correct. Don't bathe in it. Probably avoid using it at home or work. But otherwise, its not a serious risk to consumers.
- Included in this list under the same classification (2A)[1]:
> Night shift work
> Red meat (consumption of)
> Very hot beverages at above 65 °C (drinking)
Defined as[2]:
> Group 2A: The agent is probably carcinogenic to humans
> This category is used when there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and either sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals or strong mechanistic evidence, showing that the agent exhibits key characteristics of human carcinogens. Limited evidence of carcinogenicity means that a positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent and cancer but that other explanations for the observations (technically termed “chance”, “bias”, or “confounding”) could not be ruled out with reasonable confidence. This category may also be used when there is inadequate evidence regarding carcinogenicity in humans but both sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals and strong mechanistic evidence in human cells or tissues.
[1] https://monographs.iarc.who.int/list-of-classifications
[2] https://monographs.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/I...
- Isn't there some bureaucratic way to just tie up the Supreme Court for three years? Their rulings have been extremely damaging and we need a sane balance to return before important stuff like this ends up being decided.
- Alito and Thomas are retiring while Trump is in office.
- Only a matter of time before japanese knotwood takes over north america. Glyphosate seems to be the only thing that stops this aggressive weed
- I am really very confused because I have seen documentaries related to this[1] and would like to understand where are the errors when there are more cancer cases close to these areas.
[1] Cancer incidence and death rates in Argentine rural towns surrounded by pesticide-treated agricultural land: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221339842...
- Roundup has saved far more lives than it may have cut short, if any.
- A reminder that most US non-organic oats contain high levels of glyphosate residues because farmers use it as a desiccant to reduce harvest fuel consumption.
And also almost all bread in the US including organic contain 10-1000 ppb of glyphosate.
America's food supply is fucked because of rampant greed, a lack of proper regulation, and a lack of application of the precautionary principle.
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147 points by mikhael 20 hours ago | 190 comments