The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it - Henry David Thoreau

Monday, February 05, 2007

Hot on the heels of their paranoid opposition to anything with the word “nuclear” in it, no matter how beneficial it may be, here’s the latest technological innovation which environmentalist lunatics will oppose.

If 4 million cars were taken off the road in a single year, stopping 9 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide being discharged, most environmentalists would whoop with joy. But what if the same saving came from planting genetically modified crops?

This is the claim of an annual audit of GM crops by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA), which is funded largely by the GM industry.

The audit, published on 18 January, bases its estimate on GM planting in 2005 in the US, Canada and Argentina. Graham Brookes of PG Economics in Dorchester, UK, who supplied the data, says 85 per cent of the savings come from the fact that farmers growing weedkiller-resistant GM crops don’t have to plough their fields to get rid of weeds, so organic matter in the soil is not exposed to the atmosphere. This, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, prevents the release of 300 kilograms of CO2 per year per hectare. The rest of the figure is from fuel savings (Agbioforum, vol 9, p 139).

This is a perfect illustration of why I am so hostile to the environmental movement.  It’s a left-wing political ideology tarted up in the bunting of protecting the environment.  The socialists and communists tried for 100 years to hamstring capitalism and markets and enterprise but they failed miserably.  Now they’re trying a new tactic, using the overhyped fear of environmental catastrophe to force governments to implement the very political changes they failed for so long to achieve.

We have corporations sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into biotechnology, something which has a demonstrable benefit to mankind.  Why?  Because there will be a market for them, and the profit potential is enormous, since everyone has to eat.  But these activists can’t have that, because (a) it doesn’t require socialism to implement, and (b) corporations will make money off it.  It doesn’t matter how beneficial a new technology might be, or how many lives might be saved, anything of that nature.  All that matters are the political goals.