I love this woman.......

[Obvious Li]

But what about the progressives' war on science? That war actually kills people. As Hank Campbell, co-author of the book Science Left Behind, writes, "If some crank school district tries to deny evolution, no one is going to die and it just makes them look backward and stupid. Denying food, medicine and energy science, like progressives do, is costing lives."



In Canada, the progressive war on science is aimed squarely at the energy industry. A large number of Canadians believe that anything connected to fossil fuels is inherently suspect. It's not just global warming – it's that they are thought to be inherently dangerous. They leak, spill, kill birds, devastate natural spaces and poison our earth, water and air. One reason nobody can get a pipeline built these days is because of ridiculously exaggerated safety fears. Yet pipelines are a robust and relatively safe technology, vastly improved over the past 60 years. The United States alone has 2.5 million miles of them, and while their safety record isn't perfect, it's vastly better than other ways of moving the stuff around.



The war on fracking is also entirely ideological. Any new technology will have challenges, but the National Academy of Sciences, MIT, and other bodies with no axes to grind say that fracking is safe. Environmentalists should love it, because natural gas emits far less carbon than oil. Instead, they want to ban it. They've persuaded Nova Scotia and New Brunswick that it's evil. Without fracking and without a pipeline to the east, Eastern Canada will keep importing foreign oil. Does that make sense? Only to progressives.



Hardly anybody knows basic science and technology these days. Few of us are going to wade through the National Academy of Sciences report. We depend on intermediaries to tell us what to think, and a lot of them are also scientifically illiterate. Most journalists are generally more interested in controversy than in evidence. [/b]Environmental activists are in the business of opposing, and have no interest in solving real-world problems like providing heat and light at a reasonable cost. The people who actually know how things work – engineers and technology types – tend to be uninterested in politics and are poor communicators. Meantime, some of the most deeply anti-science activists (like the artfully named Union of Concerned Scientists) are quoted as if they were neutral actors for the public interest.



Some of my dearest friends harbour irrational fears about nuclear power, agricultural chemicals and anything genetically modified. They consider themselves enlightened, and since enlightened people are against these things, they are too. These beliefs are an expression of identity, just as a belief in creationism is part of the identity of a Southern Baptist.



Fifty years ago, enlightened people campaigned to ban the bomb. Today, they campaign to ban GMOs and modern agriculture. Vivienne Westwood, the famous British fashion designer, hand-delivered an anti-GMO petition to the British government earlier this month. Asked about people who can't afford expensive organic food, she declared that they should "eat less." She believes one of the problems with non-organic mass food is that it's too cheap.



But in most parts of the world, food is not too cheap. And the fear-mongering campaign against genetically modified food by the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth has been a serious setback for global food security, depriving millions of people of more nutritious, affordable and sustainable food sources. "The actions of Greenpeace in forestalling the use of golden rice to address micronutrient deficiencies in children makes them the moral and indeed practical equivalent of the Nigerian mullahs who preached against the polio vaccine," says Mark Lynas, an environmental activist who reversed his position on GMOs and now campaigns for them. "They were stopping a lifesaving technology solely to flatter their own fanaticism."



The kind of doomsayers who warn that oil sands and pipelines will wreak environmental devastation are often the same people who warn that modern agriculture will prove catastrophic. These people are not harmless. As Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, observed, "If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years."



But nobody has heard of Mr. Borlaug. Nobody remembers a time when kids died of whooping cough, either. And that's part of the problem.

[Anonymous]

But what about the progressives' war on science? That war actually kills people. As Hank Campbell, co-author of the book Science Left Behind, writes, "If some crank school district tries to deny evolution, no one is going to die and it just makes them look backward and stupid. Denying food, medicine and energy science, like progressives do, is costing lives."



In Canada, the progressive war on science is aimed squarely at the energy industry. A large number of Canadians believe that anything connected to fossil fuels is inherently suspect. It's not just global warming – it's that they are thought to be inherently dangerous. They leak, spill, kill birds, devastate natural spaces and poison our earth, water and air. One reason nobody can get a pipeline built these days is because of ridiculously exaggerated safety fears. Yet pipelines are a robust and relatively safe technology, vastly improved over the past 60 years. The United States alone has 2.5 million miles of them, and while their safety record isn't perfect, it's vastly better than other ways of moving the stuff around.



The war on fracking is also entirely ideological. Any new technology will have challenges, but the National Academy of Sciences, MIT, and other bodies with no axes to grind say that fracking is safe. Environmentalists should love it, because natural gas emits far less carbon than oil. Instead, they want to ban it. They've persuaded Nova Scotia and New Brunswick that it's evil. Without fracking and without a pipeline to the east, Eastern Canada will keep importing foreign oil. Does that make sense? Only to progressives.



Hardly anybody knows basic science and technology these days. Few of us are going to wade through the National Academy of Sciences report. We depend on intermediaries to tell us what to think, and a lot of them are also scientifically illiterate. Most journalists are generally more interested in controversy than in evidence. [/b]Environmental activists are in the business of opposing, and have no interest in solving real-world problems like providing heat and light at a reasonable cost. The people who actually know how things work – engineers and technology types – tend to be uninterested in politics and are poor communicators. Meantime, some of the most deeply anti-science activists (like the artfully named Union of Concerned Scientists) are quoted as if they were neutral actors for the public interest.



Some of my dearest friends harbour irrational fears about nuclear power, agricultural chemicals and anything genetically modified. They consider themselves enlightened, and since enlightened people are against these things, they are too. These beliefs are an expression of identity, just as a belief in creationism is part of the identity of a Southern Baptist.



Fifty years ago, enlightened people campaigned to ban the bomb. Today, they campaign to ban GMOs and modern agriculture. Vivienne Westwood, the famous British fashion designer, hand-delivered an anti-GMO petition to the British government earlier this month. Asked about people who can't afford expensive organic food, she declared that they should "eat less." She believes one of the problems with non-organic mass food is that it's too cheap.



But in most parts of the world, food is not too cheap. And the fear-mongering campaign against genetically modified food by the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth has been a serious setback for global food security, depriving millions of people of more nutritious, affordable and sustainable food sources. "The actions of Greenpeace in forestalling the use of golden rice to address micronutrient deficiencies in children makes them the moral and indeed practical equivalent of the Nigerian mullahs who preached against the polio vaccine," says Mark Lynas, an environmental activist who reversed his position on GMOs and now campaigns for them. "They were stopping a lifesaving technology solely to flatter their own fanaticism."



The kind of doomsayers who warn that oil sands and pipelines will wreak environmental devastation are often the same people who warn that modern agriculture will prove catastrophic. These people are not harmless. As Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, observed, "If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years."



But nobody has heard of Mr. Borlaug. Nobody remembers a time when kids died of whooping cough, either. And that's part of the problem.

I work with a lady who will not buy anything if she knows it has been genetically modified..



I don't know anything about GMO's myself, so I cannot like it or loathe it.

[reel]

I work with a lady who will not buy anything if she knows it has been genetically modified..



I don't know anything about GMO's myself, so I cannot like it or loathe it.

Like anything, some of it is good, some of it is bad, and no one has the time or the inclination to sort out which is which.  The problem with GMOs is not so much the science component as the industrial / regulatory component.  GMOs are wonderful because they have solved many of the serious issues faced by a population that is slowly outgrowing the capacity of the earth to produce food.  Without them, we would have hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, starving.  However, much of the industry is controlled by a handful of corporations that write their own regulations and have some rather dubious practices that focus far more on profit margins and creating monopolies than on the quality of their product.  I view the rejection of GMOs as the natural counterbalance to their attempts to create a food monopoly.  Perhaps it's not a smart thing, but it's not a bad thing.

[reel]

The people who actually know how things work – engineers and technology types – tend to be uninterested in politics and are poor communicators.

Bitch.





Lol @ the fashion designer's "let them eat cake" statement.  I wonder if she did that on purpose.  



Munday, some might say (me for instance) that your black and white world of progressives and conservatives is a touch narrow.  This woman is rather disingenuous in presenting the anti-vaccination crowd, who are clearly idiots and are neither progressive, nor conservative, to open and then following through on the wave of that emotion into her argument about "progressives".  Clearly she is taking a page from her own book when she says that reporters are more concerned about controversy than science; so is she.

[Obvious Li]

The people who actually know how things work – engineers and technology types – tend to be uninterested in politics and are poor communicators.

Bitch.

smart bitch...correct bitch.....bitch good.......engineer bad......... ac_dance  ac_beating

[reel]

She's not so much right as she is not wrong.



Every one of the issues mentioned has an upside and a downside.  Since most people are incapable of rational thought and understanding, they gravitate to one extreme or the other, which eventually creates balance.  You would give carte blanche to industry and the greenies oppose it completely.  In the end, there is balance.  The engineers who actually create something, instead of just whining about everything, have to take both of your viewpoints into consideration, forcing them to be more efficient, but to also create better quality.

[Anonymous]

Like anything, some of it is good, some of it is bad, and no one has the time or the inclination to sort out which is which.  The problem with GMOs is not so much the science component as the industrial / regulatory component.  GMOs are wonderful because they have solved many of the serious issues faced by a population that is slowly outgrowing the capacity of the earth to produce food.  Without them, we would have hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, starving.  However, much of the industry is controlled by a handful of corporations that write their own regulations and have some rather dubious practices that focus far more on profit margins and creating monopolies than on the quality of their product.  I view the rejection of GMOs as the natural counterbalance to their attempts to create a food monopoly.  Perhaps it's not a smart thing, but it's not a bad thing.

I won't even get into the anti-oilsands/anti-pipeline crowd because that really is an industry financed by those who don't like competition from Canada.



As for GMO's, I hold a balanced view of it. The science behind is not evil as that hypotwat evs thinks it is. In fact, opposition to golden rice on ideological grounds is evil. I like at it on a case by case basis. Are there improvements that could be made? Most definitely, but don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Work to improve it, not eliminate it as extremists would like.

[reel]

We must have some means of controlling the surplus population.

[Anonymous]

We must have some means of controlling the surplus population.

True, but you have travelled the globe extensively. You and I both know what will NOT control it....pampered, self-indulgent Westerners telling people in the third world to have fewer babies.

[Anonymous]

I should read about genetically modified foods, but everything I have read seems very biased..



Besides, it is a busy time of year, perhaps in 2015.

[Obvious Li]

I should read about genetically modified foods, but everything I have read seems very biased..



Besides, it is a busy time of year, perhaps in 2015.

don't waste your time fash..it all tastes good...after all...what could go wrong when you splice the genes from a jackfish into a cucumber...seems logical to me......power to the people..... ac_drinks