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Donald Trump Is Breaking Every Rule of Political Branding and Getting Away With It

by TerrencHazeltin Posted on September 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is breaking every rule in the “how to be a candidate” handbook—and maybe that’s his secret.

Unlike the often-stodgy conventional political campaign, Trump’s presidential bid resembles the rollout of a consumer brand. The reality TV star and real estate mogul has a keen knack for self-promotion and an entertaining product to peddle (his unfiltered self), and this is letting him get away with things his opponents can only dream of.

For instance, one key rule of running for president is that you should never, ever put on a hat—or any headwear. You will look goofy and unpresidential. (Remember what happened to Michael Dukakis?) But when Trump arrived to inspect the Mexican border last month, he strolled off his plane wearing an ill-fitting plain white cap, adorned with the words “Make America Great Again.” And he’s worn the hat pretty much everywhere since, sometimes exchanging it for a red version. Arguably, Trump could not make a public appearance outdoors without a cap—it’s unclear how his complexly coiffed mane might react to weather—but the image was as unstylish as any presidential candidate has managed recently. And yet, it works. As Slate put it in an article devoted entirely to Trump’s hat, “Juxtapose almost anything with Trump’s sour puss, and you’ve got yourself an indelible image.”

Despite the conventional wisdom that hats are a nightmare for a politician’s image, last week, at a focus group of Trump supporters run by GOP pollster Frank Luntz, the hat was a high point.

“We know his goal is to make America great again,” a woman in Luntz’s focus group said. “It’s on his hat. And we see it every time it’s on TV. Everything that he’s doing, there’s no doubt why he’s doing it: It’s to make America great again.”

Luntz gushed over the results of the session, claiming the level of avowed support for Trump articulated by the participants stunned him. “Like, my legs are shaking,” he told reporters afterward.

It was a small sample size, and maybe it’s not just the hat. There’s also the catchphrase. “Make America Great Again” is compelling in a way that other candidates’ slogans aren’t, says Tom Bassett, CEO at Bassett & Partners, a San Francisco brand and design strategy firm. Getting consumers to remember a product’s slogan is extremely difficult. Only a handful of brands ever achieve a level of awareness where the line can be recalled with ease. Bassett, who has overseen international ad campaigns for Nike, Apple, and Yahoo, thinks the phrase has an unusual resonance—a nostalgia for American success.

The message is simple and easy to process, Bassett says: “People are a little fearful and they’re looking for someone with a really firm hand to say, ‘We’re going to make it, we’re going to be great again!’ versus anything too intellectual.” He adds, “‘Make America Great Again’ has a sense of mission to it; it’s clear to the reader/viewer,” Bassett says. “Maybe there is something about the clarity of his mission that makes it easier for people to respond to him.”

He points out that this is not the case with the slogans of other candidates. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is using the catchphrase “Unintimidated.” (Merriam-Webster’s dictionary does not list “unintimidated” as an actual word, and it drives spell-checks crazy.) His campaign book is called Unintimidated. The super-PAC supporting him is called Unintimidated PAC. Last week, Walker made a major foreign-policy speech entitled “America Unintimidated,” and when he is unsure how to answer a question or is heckled, he frequently announces he is “unintimidated.”

But for all the synergistic branding effort, Walker is polling in the mid- to high single digits in most polls. (Trump is over 30 percent.)

Jeb Bush, meanwhile, has methodically built his campaign around the phrase “Right to Rise,” which is also the name of his super-PAC. But it isn’t a natural turn of phrase, and even Bush has to conspicuously shoehorn it into speeches.

Bassett asks, are “‘unintimidated’ or ‘right to rise’ a mission statement people can sign up for?”

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Donald Trump Is Breaking Every Rule of Political Branding and Getting Away With It

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Inside the Most Expensive Nuclear Bomb Ever Made

by KelleyGresswell Posted on August 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Engineers at the United States’ nuclear weapons lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have spent the past few years designing and testing the B61-12, a high-tech addition to our nation’s atomic arsenal. Unlike the free-fall gravity bombs it will replace, the B61-12 is a guided nuclear bomb. A new tail kit assembly, made by Boeing, enables the bomb to hit targets far more precisely than its predecessors.

Greg Maxon

Using “Dial-a-yield” technology, the bomb’s explosive force can be adjusted before launch from a high of 50,000 tons of TNT equivalent to a low of 300 tons—that’s 98 percent smaller than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima 70 years ago.

Despite these innovations, the government doesn’t consider the B61-12 to be a new weapon but simply an upgrade. In the past, Congress has rejected funding for similar weapons, reasoning that more accurate, less powerful bombs were more likely to be used. In 2010, the Obama administration announced that it would not make any nuclear weapons with new capabilities. The White House and Pentagon insist that the B61-12 won’t violate that pledge.

The B61-12 could be deployed by the new generation of F-35 fighter jets, a prospect that worries Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “If the Russians put out a guided nuclear bomb on a stealthy fighter that could sneak through air defenses, would that add to the perception here that they were lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons?” he asks. “Absolutely.”

So far, most of the criticism of B61-12 has focused on its price tag. Once full production commences in 2020, the program will cost more than $11 billion for about 400 to 480 bombs—more than double the original estimate, making it the most expensive nuclear bomb ever built.

This story comes from our friends at Reveal. Read more of their coverage of the B61-12 and national security.

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Inside the Most Expensive Nuclear Bomb Ever Made

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Here Is a Video of Sarah Palin Interviewing Donald Trump. It Is Bonkers.

by KevinLeighton Posted on August 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hahahahaha.

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Here Is a Video of Sarah Palin Interviewing Donald Trump. It Is Bonkers.

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Have Plans Tonight? Cancel Them. Sarah Palin Is Interviewing Donald Trump.

by Monique62 Posted on August 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Fed up with media bullies attacking Donald Trump’s purported Bible fanaticism, Sarah Palin announced she will be interviewing the GOP front-runner and nonactive church member for what’s sure to be a circus of a conversation. In a Facebook post today, the former vice presidential candidate and fired Fox News host explained her plans:

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WTH, LAMESTREAM MEDIA! STAY OUT OF MY BIBLEWTH? Lamestream media asks GOP personal, spiritual “gotchas” that they’d…

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What exactly is One America News? Unclear, but here’s how to access it.

It’s all happening.

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Have Plans Tonight? Cancel Them. Sarah Palin Is Interviewing Donald Trump.

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4 Reasons Why a Biden Run Would Help Sanders

by SCUMagaret Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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The politerati are getting a slight break from Trumpalooza these days, thanks to the Biden Bump. The veep has been actively discussing a possible presidential run with Democratic donors and strategists as he moves toward a final decision, and political handicappers have upped the odds that Biden, still coping with the recent death of his 46-year-old son Beau, will enter the fray. This has led to a torrent of speculation about what Biden will do and what a last-minute leap might mean for the 2016 race. Could it hurt the once-inevitable-but-now-email-burdened Hillary Clinton by providing Nervous-Nellie Democrats with an alternative? Could it help Clinton by offering her a more establishment-oriented sparring partner to vanquish—which would yield a positive narrative for her campaign?

The other day, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent seeking the Democratic nomination who has drawn thousands to rallies and boomed in recent polls, was asked how a Biden bid would affect the contest. He characteristically pooh-poohed the question. “Politics is not a soap opera,” he said. “What impact it will have on the race, I honestly don’t know. I mean, I wish I could tell you, but I don’t. Will it help or hurt me? Will it help or hurt Hillary Clinton? I just don’t know.”

Yet there are several reasons why a Biden run would be good for Sanders.

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4 Reasons Why a Biden Run Would Help Sanders

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The United States Has Had More Mass Shootings Than Any Other Country

by AlbaSpinelli Posted on August 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Nearly one-third of the world’s mass shootings have occurred in the United States, a new study finds. Adam Lankford, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama, has released the first quantitative analysis of public mass shootings around the world between 1966 through 2012. Unsurprisingly, the United States came out on top—essentially in a league of its own.


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Over those five decades, the United States had 90 public mass shootings, defined as shootings that killed four or more victims. Of the 170 other countries examined in the study, only four even made it to double-digits: The Philippines had 18 public mass shootings, followed by Russia with 15, Yemen with 11, and France with 10.

Mass shooters in the United States stood out from those in other countries in a few ways. Compared with attackers abroad, Americans were more than three times as likely to use multiple weapons, and they tended to target schools, factories, and office buildings. (Shooters in other countries were more likely to strike at military bases and checkpoints.) But shootings in the United States often killed fewer people than attacks overseas: On average, 6.9 victims died in each mass shooting incident on American soil, compared with 8.8 victims for each shooting in other countries. That may be because American police officers have been trained to respond more quickly to these situations and are often heavily armed, Lankford suggests.

The study drew largely on data from the New York City Police Department and the FBI. It did not consider gang-related or drive-by shootings, as well as hostage-taking incidents, robberies, and shootings in domestic settings.

Lankford suggests America’s high rate of public mass shootings is connected with the number of guns circulating in the country. “A nation’s civilian firearm ownership rate is the strongest predictor of its number of public mass shooters,” he explained in a statement, noting that the United States, Yemen, Switzerland, Finland, and Serbia, which are among the top 15 countries for mass shooters per capita, also rank in the top five countries for firearms per capita, according to the 2007 Small Arms Survey.

But the number of guns in circulation might be less important than ease of access to them. As my colleague Mark Follman has reported, most mass shooters in the United States obtained their weapons legally.

For more of Mother Jones’ reporting on guns in America, see all of our latest coverage here, and our award-winning special reports.

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The United States Has Had More Mass Shootings Than Any Other Country

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This Chart Will Make You Even More Pissed Off About Your Ballooning Student Debt

by AlenaWhiting Posted on August 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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For the tens of thousands of college students who are taking out another year’s worth of debt in preparation for the start of classes, here’s a rage-inducing data point: Many universities spend way more managing their investment portfolios than they do assisting students with tuition.

A New York Times op-ed published Wednesday by Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of San Diego, lays out this disparity. Fleischer cited Yale University, which paid its fund managers nearly $743 million in 2014 but gave out just $170 million in scholarships. He also noted that many universities, large and small, public and private, show the same imbalance in spending. “We’ve lost sight of the idea that students, not fund managers, should be the primary beneficiaries of a university’s endowment,” he writes. “The private-equity folks get cash; students take out loans.”

Fleischer provided Mother Jones with more of his data, which is gleaned from tax forms, financial statements, and annual reports. Here’s how the numbers shake out at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. On average, these four wealthy, elite universities spend 70 percent more on managing their investment portfolios than they do on tuition assistance. (Complete scholarship data for 2014 was not available, and some investment management fees are estimated.)

That disparity is even more glaring when you consider the tax benefits fund managers derive from working with universities. Fleischer notes that investors typically pay their fund managers about 20 percent of their investment profits. That money, called carried interest, is taxed at a lower rate for fund managers, who can claim it as capital gains instead of income.

Some universities justify the high management fees by arguing that they ensure top financial performance for their endowments. It’s true that these portfolios have done quite well: Harvard’s endowment is nearly $36 billion, and Yale’s is more than $25 billion, a 50 percent increase since 2009. But, writes Fleischer, a little less endowment hoarding and a little more spending, both on financial aid and other educational goals, would still allow universities’ money to grow generously while eliminating the hefty tuition increases that force students to take on burdensome debt.

Fleischer proposes that when Congress moves to reauthorize the Higher Education Act this term, lawmakers should require universities with assets greater than $100 million to spend 8 percent of their endowment each year. Even doing that, universities would likely continue to get exponentially richer. As he notes, the average endowment has grown 9.2 percent annually for the past 20 years (after accounting for 4 percent annual spending), a more than respectable rate of return.

Elite schools do offer need-blind admission and some of the best financial aid for low-income students. But for many students, tuition increases still mean more loans: On paper, many middle-class students often don’t qualify for large scholarships, but their families also can’t afford more than $50,000 in annual tuition. More generous allocation of endowments could help to roll back that trend while also funding more teaching and research. As Fleischer writes in the Times, “Only fund managers would be worse off.”

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This Chart Will Make You Even More Pissed Off About Your Ballooning Student Debt

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Winter Is Coming. Here’s What to Expect Around the Country.

by ElishaRicketts Posted on August 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There’s a silver lining to all this talk of a super mega record-breaking Godzilla El Niño: The seasonal weather outlooks for this fall and winter will be some of the most accurate ever issued.

Last spring I profiled what El Niño—a periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean—means for 60 places across the globe. Now that the event is in full swing, we have an even better idea of how US weather will be affected over the next nine months. That’s because El Niño acts like a heat engine that bends weather in a predictable pattern worldwide. Typically, the stronger El Niño is, the more predictable its influence. And this year’s event is on pace to be one of the strongest ever recorded. By some measures, it already is.

“We’re correct more than the usual proportion of the time when there’s an El Niño,” said Tony Barnston, chief forecaster at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, in a video statement. Barnston and his team—which actually invented successful El Niño prediction—recently issued an astounding forecast that essentially locks in a strong El Niño through next spring.

Globally, it’s now virtually certain that 2015 will be the hottest year in history. That’s a pretty remarkable thing to be able to say with more than four months of the year remaining. Last week data from NASA and the Japan Meteorological Agency confirmed that last month was the hottest July on record, joining every month so far this year except February and April as the warmest ever measured, according to calculations from Japan. As of mid-August, the Pacific Ocean had configured itself into an unprecedented temperature pattern, with record-setting warm water stretching from the equator all the way northward to Alaska. Thanks to the pattern’s expected persistence, we can already piece together a pretty good guess of the implications—months ahead of time.

So, without further ado, Here’s what to expect this winter:

Will California get some drought relief?

To answer everyone’s question, yes, this winter will likely bring above-normal rainfall to California. To answer a related question, no, it won’t end the drought. After a record-breaking four-year stretch, California has racked up a mind-boggling rainfall deficit: San Francisco is more than 31 inches behind—meaning this winter would have to feature a year and a half of extra rainfall during the six-month rainy season to break even. That very likely won’t happen, and even if it did, flooding and mudslides would create an even bigger problem than another year of drought would.

What’s more, there’s an especially big caveat this winter. Current temperatures off the West Coast are already far warmer than anything ever measured. The placement of that huge mass of warm water—cutely called “the blob” by local scientists—tends to work against heavy rainfall in California, and it’s a big reason why the drought has been so bad there the last couple of years. This’ll be an epic battle between dueling masses of warm water (El Niño vs. “the blob”) all winter long on the high seas of the North Pacific (and in the atmosphere above it), but as of now, it looks like California will indeed get some desperately needed rain—enough to matter, just not enough to end the drought.

Will the Pacific Northwest get some drought relief?

One place that probably won’t benefit from this winter’s El Niño is the Northwest. It’ll be another low-snowpack year, putting additional pressure on salmon, hydroelectricity, and ski resorts in the Cascades. Local officials are treating the current “wet drought”—in which rain and high temperatures have replaced snow for many parts of the Northwest—as a possible preview of global warming. Officials in Washington state, for example, are modifying river flows as a last-ditch effort to provide cooler water for migrating salmon. As this year has proved, a dearth of snow has lasting implications for several months—including an increased risk for huge wildfires come summer. Expect more of the same next year.

Sorry, Pacific Northwest. What about ski conditions in Colorado?

In sharp contrast to the Northwest, this winter could bring a good snowpack to the southern Rockies, a boon to tourism and a continuation of relatively recent drought-free conditions in Colorado.

A heavy snowfall would also be a significant boost to the fragile Colorado River basin, which is inching toward first-ever mandatory water restrictions after decades of over-allocation have pushed Lake Mead to record low levels. Lots of snow this winter in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico could help delay Arizona’s inevitable droughtpocalypse by another year or two.

Back to droughts. How are things looking for South Florida?

The driest spot east of the Rockies right now is in southern Florida, where this summer’s rainy season has been the worst in 70 years. That’s a big problem, because as sea levels rise, the Miami area needs a steady supply of freshwater as a counterforce against saltwater intrusion and as a salve for Everglades restoration. Ultimately, this is a battle the region cannot win, but for now southern Florida is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new pumps to keep the sea at bay.

The polar vortex last winter was brutal. Will it be bad again?

If the last two years are any indication, winters in the east are getting weirder. There are lots of theories for this, including the exceptionally warm Pacific Ocean and melting Arctic sea ice, as well as plain old natural variability. A broad signal for further rounds of extreme cold air outbreaks, especially for the Southeast, is present again this winter.

Should everyone in Boston move?

There’s good and bad news for Boston and other East Coasters. It almost certainly won’t be as cold as last year in the Northeast, but fierce Nor’easters could be commonplace, bringing a return of heavy snowstorms.

Back in 2012, in my New York City weather column in the Wall Street Journal, I did a quick analysis that showed El Niño winters brought an additional 10 inches of snowfall to the Big Apple, all else being equal. To get especially strong winter storms in the Northeast, the large-scale El Niño signal (which increases the amount of wintertime moisture available along the East Coast) needs to coincide with a weak and wavy jet stream. That’s a recipe for heavy snow, even if temperatures aren’t as brutally cold as the last two winters. Watch for big dips in the North Atlantic Oscillation (a rough approximation for jet stream strength) this winter for signs a big storm could be on the way.

Update: You forgot the entire middle part of the country! What’s going to happen in Texas and in the Midwest?

Sorry! After a very rainy summer, drought has reappeared in eastern Texas. But since El Niño tends to bring above normal rainfall to the South during the winter months, the current dry spell should quickly come to an end.

Further north, the coming winter should be warmer than average in the Upper Midwest. That’s got to be welcome news: The region has endured exceptionally cold stretches leading to record-setting ice cover on the Great Lakes in recent years, but snowfall should be below normal this time around, giving cities like Chicago and Minneapolis a well-deserved break.

It’s August. How the heck did you come up with this forecast?

To make the above predictions, I took a blend of the most recent North American Multi-Model Ensemble, my go-to source for seasonal forecast information, and a blend of the large-scale weather during four past El Niños that I think are particularly close fits with the current one. Those four El Niños are: 1957–58, 1986–87, 1987–88, and 1997–98. Each of those El Niños peaked at least at “moderate” strength (more than 1 degree Celsius above normal in a key section of the tropical Pacific) and at the same time, each of those four El Niños also featured a strongly positive Pacific Decadal Oscillation—more than 1 degree Celsius above normal across a specific region of the north Pacific off the west coast of North America.

Got any weather maps?

You can find the raw seasonal forecast maps I used to make this forecast here.

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Winter Is Coming. Here’s What to Expect Around the Country.

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There Might Be Fracking Wastewater on Your Organic Fruits and Veggies

by ManuelMaurer Posted on August 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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The US Department of Agriculture’s organics standards, written 15 years ago, strictly ban petroleum-derived fertilizers commonly used in conventional agriculture. But the same rules do not prohibit farmers from irrigating their crops with petroleum-laced wastewater obtained from oil and gas wells—a practice that is increasingly common in drought-stricken Southern California.

As I reported last month, oil companies last year supplied half the water that went to the 45,000 acres of farmland in Kern County’s Cawelo Water District, farmland that is owned, in part, by Sunview, a company that sells certified organic raisins and grapes. Food watchdog groups are concerned that the state hasn’t required oil companies to disclose all the chemicals they use in oil drilling and fracking operations, much less set safety limits for all those chemicals in irrigation water.

A spokesman for the USDA’s National Organics Program confirmed that it has little to say on the matter. “The USDA organic regulations do not directly address the use of irrigation water on organic farms,” said the spokesman, who asked to be quoted on background, “but organic operations must generally maintain or improve the natural resources of the operation, including soil and water quality.”

Of course, that’s easier said than done. USDA organic regulations do not require farms to perform water quality tests, and irrigation water is not evaluated as an input by the Organic Materials Review Institute, which vets products used on organic farms. Calls placed to California Certified Organic Farmers, which certifies organic farms in California, were not returned.

Irrigation water appears to be a major loophole in a food safety program that otherwise strictly controls what farmers can apply to their land. Notably, the organics program does prohibit the use of sewage sludge-based fertilizer, a product widely used on nonorganic farms that sometimes contains chemicals such as flame retardants and pharmaceuticals.

On Monday, California Assemblyman Mike Gatto, a Democrat from Glendale, introduced a bill that would require crops irrigated with wastewater from oil and gas operations to be labeled as such. “No one expects their lettuce to contain heavy chemicals from fracking wastewater,” he explained in a press release.

That’s especially true if their lettuce is labeled “organic,” adds Adam Scow, the California director of the environmental group Food and Water Watch: “I think most people’s logic would tell them that’s not a practice consistent with organic standards.”

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There Might Be Fracking Wastewater on Your Organic Fruits and Veggies

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New Monsanto Spray Kills Bugs by Messing With Their Genes

by Elinor6783 Posted on August 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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In a fascinating long piece in MIT Technology Review, Antonio Regalado examines the genetically modified seed industry’s latest blockbuster app in development—one that has nothing to do with seeds. Instead, it involves the industry’s other bread-and-butter product: pesticide sprays. But we’re not talking about the poisonous chemicals you convinced your dad to stop dousing the lawn with. The novel sprays in question are powered by a genetic technology called RNA interference, which promises to kill specific insects and weeds by silencing genes crucial to their survival, while leaving nontarget species unscathed.

RNAi, as it’s known, is an emerging science; the two US researchers who discovered it brought home a Nobel Prize in 2006. Regalado describes the process like this:

The cells of plants and animals carry their instructions in the form of DNA. To make a protein, the sequence of genetic letters in each gene gets copied into matching strands of RNA, which then float out of the nucleus to guide the protein-making machinery of the cell. RNA interference, or gene silencing, is a way to destroy specific RNA messages so that a particular protein is not made.

If you can nix RNA messages that exist to generate crucial genes, you’ve got yourself an effective bug or weed killer. And GMO seed and pesticide behemoth Monsanto thinks it has just that. Robb Fraley, the company’s chief technology officer and a pioneer in creating GM seeds, told Regalado that within a few years, RNA sprays would “open up a whole new way to use biotechnology” that “doesn’t have the same stigma, the same intensive regulatory studies and cost that we would normally associate with GMOs.” Fraley described the novel technology as “incredible” and “breathtaking.”

It’s not hard to see why the veteran agrichemical and biotech exec is so amped for something new to load into a crop duster. Monsanto’s GM herbicide-resistant and insecticidal traits still dominate the highly lucrative US corn, soybean, and cotton seed markets, but these cash-cow products are victims of their own success, so widely used that weeds and pests are rapidly developing resistance to them. The company’s flagship herbicide, Roundup, still generates about $5 billion in sales annually, but it went off-patent years ago, and it was recently declared a “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization—a finding Monsanto disputes.

Such concerns are widely seen as the reason Monsanto is so hotly pursuing a takeover of its rival, Syngenta, which focuses much more on pesticides than novel seeds. Syngenta, too, is developing RNAi technology, reports Regalado—back in 2012, it spent $523 million to buy Devgen, a company that had been developing the novel sprays.

However, there’s no reason to assume crop dusters will be strafing farm fields with gene-silencing sprays anytime soon. As Regalado notes, they’re very little studied outside of corporate labs. “So far, only a few scientific publications even mention the idea of RNA sprays,” he writes. “That makes it hard to judge companies’ claims.”

The first obstacle is technological—the problem of “how to get a large, electrically charged molecule like RNA to move through a plant’s waxy cuticle and into its cells,” Regalado writes. That’s crucial, because the technology works like this: A targeted bug—the one drawing attention now from Monsanto is the Colorado potato beetle—chomps on a leaf that’s been sprayed by RNA solution and then, fatally, gets critical genes turned off. To make that happen, you have to get the RNA material into the leaf.

The most promising solution so far is to “encapsulate the RNA in synthetic nanoparticles called lipidoids—greasy blobs with specialized chemical tails,” Regalado reports. “The idea is to slip them into a plant, where the coating will dissolve, releasing the RNA.”

This nanotech booster to Monsanto’s new bug killer won’t likely raise red flags from government overseers. As I’ve shown before, both nanotechnology and adjuvants—the compounds mixed with pesticides to help them break into plants—are lightly regulated.

However, the RNAi compound itself will have to be reviewed by the Environmental Protection Agency, which vets new pesticides before they reach farm fields. Early indications suggest the going will be bumpy. Last year, the EPA convened a scientific advisory panel to assess the human health and ecological risks posed by emerging RNAi crop technologies.

The panel concluded there’s “no convincing evidence” that RNAi material poses a threat to humans or other animals—the digestive process likely destroys it before it can do harm. But for nontarget insects in the field, they concluded, it’s a different story. The technology’s boosters claim the technology can target particular pests and leave everything else in the ecosystem alone. The independent scientists on the EPA panel were not convinced. They noted “uncertainties in the potential modes of action in non-target species, potential for chronic and sublethal effects, and potential unintended consequences in the various life stages of non-target organisms.” As a result, they found “sufficient justification to question” whether the EPA’s current methods of evaluating new pesticides, which were designed to vet chemicals, apply to these gene-altering treatments.

And the technology is so novel that figuring out what those tests should be will be hard— it “cannot be done without a better understanding” of exactly how the technology works, the panel concluded. US Department of Agriculture entomologists Jonathan Lundgren and Jian Duan raised similar concerns in a 2013 paper.

One particular concern for the EPA panel was the amount of time RNAi material stays intact after it’s sprayed. Monsanto says not to worry, because “when the company doused dirt with RNA, it degraded and was undetectable after 48 hours,” Regalado reports. But he adds that Monsanto “wants to develop longer-lasting formulations,” noting that another RNAi spray it’s developing for trees was shown to persist for months. “What’s more,” Regalado notes, “Monsanto’s own discoveries have underscored the surprising ways in which double-stranded RNA can move between species”—not exactly a comforting aspect of a technology Monsanto hopes to see widely used on farm fields.

A Monsanto exec told Regalado that the company hopes to get its first RNAi spray, one targeting potato beetles, into the market by 2020. The company is also working on an RNAi product to add to its failing Roundup herbicide—one it hopes can turn off the resistant genes in the superweeds now rampant on US farm fields. But that’s well behind the potato beetle product in Monsanto’s development timeline, a company spokeswoman told me.

In addition to its sprays, Monsanto has an RNAi-enhanced corn crop in the pipeline: a corn type engineered to contain RNA that was designed to kill a common pest called the rootworm. It’s “currently pending approval from the EPA,” the Monsanto spokeswoman said. “We are planning for a full commercial launch by the end of the decade, pending key regulatory approvals.”

Doug Gurian-Sherman, a plant pathologist by training who covers biotechnology for the Center for Food Safety, echoed the EPA panel’s concerns.”These are very complex biological systems, and their interactions evolve, and are not static,” he said. “So it is really impossible to predict all the things that could go wrong. That does not mean we should be paranoid about them, but we should be at least reasonably cautious and skeptical about claims of both safety and efficacy, since there is little experience or research to rely on.”

He also questioned Monsanto’s claim, reported by Regalado, that insects won’t likely develop resistance to the RNAi treatments, as they have to most chemical treatments in the past. “This is surprisingly reminiscent of Monsanto’s assurances in the ’90s that weeds would be very unlikely to develop resistance to the glyphosate Roundup herbicide…and now we have an epidemic of glyphosate resistant weeds,” Gurian-Sherman said.

Excerpt from:

New Monsanto Spray Kills Bugs by Messing With Their Genes

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