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Chipotle announced this week that it will stop serving food made with genetically modified organisms. The company wants you to think the decision is “another step toward the visions we have of changing the way people think about and eat fast food,” apparently because GMOs are regarded with at best suspicion and at worst total revulsion by lots of Americans.
There’s data to support that notion: A Pew poll released earlier this year found that less than 40 percent of Americans think GMOs are safe to eat.
Here’s the thing, though: GMOs are totally safe to eat. Eighty-eight percent of the scientists in that same poll agreed. As longtime environmentalist Mark Lynas pointed out in the New York Times recently, the level of scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs is comparable to the scientific consensus on climate change, which is to say that the disagreement camp is a rapidly diminishing minority. Lynas also made the equally valid point that so-called “improved” seeds have a pretty remarkable track record in improving crop yields in developing countries, which translates to a direct win for local economies and food security. (Although there is evidence that widespread GMO use can lead to an increased reliance on pesticides.)
But there’s an even more important reason why Chipotle’s announcement is little more than self-congratulatory PR, even if you think that GMOs are the devil. As former MoJo-er Sarah Zhang pointed out at Gizmodo:
For the past couple of years, Chipotle has been getting its suppliers to get rid of GM corn and soybean. Today’s “GMO-free” announcement comes as Chipotle has switched over to non-GMO corn and soybean oil, but it still serves chicken and pork from animals raised on GMO feed. (Its beef comes from pasture-fed cows.) A good chunk of the GM corn and soybeans grown in America actually goes to feed livestock, so a truly principled stance against GMOs should cut out meat from GM-fed animals, too.
The same caveat applies to soda, which is also made mostly from corn.
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By Eve Andrewson 27 Apr 2015commentsShare
Last week, Hillary Clinton gave the keynote address at the 2015 Women in the World Summit, and fired a couple of shots at certain should-be-fossilized religious institutions that, for some reason, remain in a more or less constant tizzy over women deciding what to do with their uteri.
Far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive healthcare and safe childbirth. All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. Rights have to exist in practice, not just on paper. Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will; and deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed. As I have said and as I believe, the advancement of the full participation of women and girls in every aspect of their societies is the great unfinished business of the 21st century.
And then:
America moves forward when all women are guaranteed the right to make their own healthcare choices — not when those choices are taken away by an employer like Hobby Lobby.
OK! Hard to argue with that. And yet …
Of course, Clinton never uttered the word “abortion” in her speech, but conservatives are already up in arms about her so-called mission to open “the path to Abortion Nirvana,” which is not a set of words I could ever be dumb enough to make up.
So, to refresh: It’s 2015, some morons out there are still conflating reproductive healthcare with baby-killing sprees, and Hillary’s fed up — as are we all.
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Hillary can’t believe we’re still fighting over this whole reproductive rights thing, either
Mother Jones
Okay, so deforestation is sad, and it’s Arbor Day so we should be extra sad about it. But there are so many things to be sad about, right? Well maybe this stat, from a study that came out last month, will make the loss of the world’s forests sink in for you:
More than 70 percent of the worlds’s forests are within 1 kilometer of a forest edge. Thus, most forests are well within the range where human activities, altered microclimate and nonforest species may influence and degrade forest ecosystems.
That’s right, we’ve arrived at the point where the majority of the forest in the world is just a short walk from the stuff humans have built. If you need that in graph form, here you go:
Science Advances
According to the study, which was published in the journal Science Advances, the largest remaining contiguous forests are in the Amazon and the Congo River Basin. The study also synthesized past forest fragmentation research and found that breaking up habitats to this degree has reduced biodiversity by as much as 75 percent in some areas.
Happy Arbor Day…
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Mother Jones
Back in April 2012, the Food and Drug Administration launched an effort to address a problem that had been festering for decades: the meat industry’s habit of feeding livestock daily low does of antibiotics, which keeps animals alive under stressful conditions and may help them grow faster, but also generates bacterial pathogens that can shake off antibiotics, and make people sick.
The FDA approached the task gingerly: It asked the industry to voluntarily wean itself from routine use of “medically important” antibiotics—those that are critical to human medicine, like tetracycline. In addition to the light touch, the agency plan included a massive loophole: that while livestock producers should no longer use antibiotics as a growth promoter, they’re welcome to use them to “prevent” disease—which often means using them in the same way (routinely), and at the same rate. How’s the FDA’s effort to ramp down antibiotic use on farms working? Last week, the FDA delivered an early look, releasing data for 2013, the year after it rolled out its plan. The results are … scary.
FDA
Note that use of medically important antibiotics actually grew 3 percent in 2013 compared to the previous year, while the industry’s appetite for non-medically import drugs, which it’s supposed to be shifting to, shrank 2 percent. A longer view reveals an even more worrisome trend: between 2009 and 2013, use of medically important drugs grew 20 percent.And the FDA data show that these livestock operations are particularly voracious for the same antibiotics doctors prescribe to people. Farms burn through 9.1 million kilograms of medically important antibiotics vs. 5.5 million kilograms of ones not currently used in human medicine. That means about 62 percent of their total antibiotic use could be be helping generate pathogens that resist the drugs we rely on. (According to Natural Resources Defense Council’s Avinash Kar, 70 percent of medically important antibiotics sold in the US go to farms.)
The report also delivers a stark view into just how routine antibiotics have become on farms.
FDA
Note that 74 percent of the medically important drugs being consumed on farms are delivered through feed, and another 24 percent go out in water. That means fully 95 percent is being fed to animals on a regular basis, not being given to specific animals to treat a particular infection. Just 5 percent (4 percent via injection, 1 percent orally) are administered that way.
Anyone wondering which species—chickens, pigs, turkeys, or cows—get the most antibiotics will have to take it up with the FDA. The agency doesn’t require companies to deliver that information, so it doesn’t exist, at least not in publicly available form. The FDA only began releasing any information at all on livestock antibiotic use in very recent years, after having its hand forced by a 2008 act of Congress.
Meanwhile, at least 2 million Americans get sick from antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year, and at least 23,000 of them die, the Centers for Disease Control estimates. And while all of that carnage can’t be blamed on the meat industry’s drug habit, it does play a major role, as the CDC makes clear in this handy infographic.
CDC
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The FDA Just Released Scary New Data on Antibiotics And Farms
Mother Jones
Would you like fries with your hospital stay? If so, you’re in luck: Many hospitals house fast-food restaurants. Some even offer delivery to patient rooms. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) isn’t wild about this phenomenon and made this map, which shows the US hospitals with fast-food chains inside them:
Image by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
Of the 208 hospitals—most of them public—that PCRM investigated in its report, 43 had fast-food chains inside, mostly McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Chick-Fil-A. PCRM staff dietitian Cameron Wells told me that some of the fast-food joints have contracts that require them to give a certain percentage of their profits to their hospitals, “meaning the more unhealthful food the restaurant sells to patients and their families, the richer the hospital gets,” she said.
Six of the fast-food-serving facilities in the report were children’s hospitals. One of those, Children’s Hospital of Georgia, offers delivery service from McDonald’s straight to patients’ beds. “Seeing this in a children’s hospital—that’s the most vulnerable population,” Wells says. “Fast food is not going to help children get better.”
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By Suzanne Jacobson 3 Apr 2015commentsShare
Some things get better when you take them out of the freezer. Ice cream, for example, is unarguably more delicious when it gets a little melt-y. (Unarguably, I say! Come at me, trolls.) But other things get remarkably worse. Take bananas — the next time you whip up a smoothie, leave the frozen banana to defrost on your counter and watch in horror as it turns into a yellowish brown pile of watery mucus.
And then there’s permafrost: You don’t even want to know what happens to that shit when it thaws … but actually, it’s pretty important when it comes to climate change, so let’s talk about it.
Permafrost is basically soil that stays frozen all year long. Because it never melts, it holds thousands of years worth of dead plants and their carbon. About 24 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere is covered with the stuff. But here’s Chris Mooney at the Washington Post on what might happen to all that frozen dirt as the earth gets warmer:
As permafrost thaws, microbes start to chow down on the organic material that it contains, and as that material decomposes, it emits either carbon dioxide or methane. Experts think most of the release will take the form of carbon dioxide — the chief greenhouse gas driving global warming — but even a small fraction released as methane can have major consequences. Although it doesn’t last nearly as long as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, methane has a short-term warming effect that is many times more powerful.
So, Mooney explains, thawing permafrost would classify as one of those juicy “positive feedback” cycles that make climate change so exciting in that life-is-an-action-movie-and-someone-will-save-us-in-the-end-right?-RIGHT?!! sort of way:
More global warming could cause more thawing of Arctic permafrost, leading to more emissions of carbon into the atmosphere, leading to more warming and more thawing of Arctic permafrost — this does not end in a good place.
According to the National Academy of Sciences, the amount of carbon stored in northern permafrost (1,800 billion tons) is more than double the amount that’s currently in the atmosphere (800 billion tons).
Kevin Schaefer, a scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, told Mooney that the latest IPCC climate projections didn’t account for thawing permafrost because this area of research is relatively new. Still, early estimates show that permafrost could be emitting an average of 160 billion tons of carbon per year by the end of the century. Which would be bad since, according to the National Academy of Sciences, we need to keep atmospheric carbon below 1,100 billion tons if we want to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius.
Of course, this is climate science, so uncertainties abound. As Schaefer pointed out, scientists are only beginning to understand the implications of thawing permafrost. Still, it seems like something worth paying attention to … kind of like that pile of watery banana-mucus you left on your kitchen counter.
Source:
The Arctic climate threat that nobody’s even talking about yet
, The Washington Post.
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Thawing permafrost could be the worst climate threat you haven’t heard of
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