71–80 of 231 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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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.
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 (i…
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
You wouldn't. You'd drop the conversation regarding whether it was safe.
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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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.
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.