Needlenose

The opening paragraphs of this Washington Post story on Sunday sound more like a pitch for a science-fiction movie:

For plants designed in a lab a little more than a decade ago, they’ve come a long way: Today, the vast majority of the nation’s two primary crops grow from seeds genetically altered according to Monsanto company patents.

Ninety-three percent of soybeans. Eighty percent of corn.

The seeds represent “probably the most revolutionary event in grain crops over the last 30 years,” said Geno Lowe, a Salisbury, Md., soybean farmer.

From there, the story goes on to what it sees as the important issue — Monsanto is steadily raising the prices of the seeds, and the Obama administration is considering antitrust actions.

But me, I’m still stuck on this 80-90% of seeds being genetically altered based on a single company’s patents.  And it gets even more disturbing when you learn the reason why these seeds dominate the market:

The modified plants can stand up to the powerful herbicide glyphosate, best known commercially as Roundup, allowing them to use the weedkiller not just before planting but also after the crops have come up.

And who makes Roundup?  Why, Monsanto, of course!

Before it jumped into biotechnology, Monsanto was already one of the nation’s largest chemical companies and had patented glyphosate, bringing it to market as Roundup in the ’70s.

The product kills just about all weeds, and for farmers it served as a wonderfully effective herbicide. Instead of tilling the earth, they could simply blanket it with Roundup. . . .

If there was a practical drawback with Roundup, it was that it couldn’t be used after planting: Applying Roundup at that point would kill the crops, too.

But where there’s science and profit involved, there’s always a solution:

Monsanto was producing Roundup at a plant in Luling, La., and the water and sludge in the waste ponds around the plant were exposed to the chemical. . . . After bacteria discovered in the pond sludge proved resistant to the chemical, scientists isolated the gene that gave the bacteria Roundup tolerance and placed that gene, known as CPS4, into soybeans, then corn.

The resulting plants, called “Roundup Ready,” represented a billion-dollar breakthrough and, as Monsanto sees it, a just reward for its $1.5 billion investment in biotech research.

Got that?  A chemical company develops a near-monopoly on the weedkiller market… and before too long, it’s an agriculture company with a near-monopoly on corn and soybeans that are compatible with the weedkiller.  And the only problem anyone seems to have with it would be if Monsanto gets a little too greedy in its pricing.

“Everybody likes Roundup Ready,” said William Layton, a grain farmer on the Eastern Shore. “Maybe it costs a little more than we like. But everybody’s going to keep using it.“

It’s not hard for me to imagine this going horribly, catastrophically wrong at some point.  And I don’t even read that much science fiction.

Limbaugh the Nazca denounces the liberal tree hugging alarmism

Well okay, maybe rampant deforestation created conditions for terrible erosion and floods that brought down the Nazca civilization, but otherwise…poppy-cock!  Er…and of course the deforestation of Easter Island had similar consequences…oh yeah, and the Anasazi had a similar problem…but under no circumstances is that anyway comparable to today’s increasing desertification and global warming which of course have nothing to do with human activities and certainly won’t lead to the collapse of our civilization…

In the very beginning of the Judeo-Christian bible, God allegedly grants humanity

“…dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

And so it came to pass.  And speaking of creeping things that doth creepeth, it seems the creeps have inherited the Earth, creeps that seem intent to stomp every creeping thing over which they have dominion into extinction (and don’t forget the permanent snuffing the fowl of the air).

You’re probably wondering why I’ve decided to bum you out tonight.  I’m blue because of these new bummer tidbits, the massive die-off and looming extinction of nine species of shark due to the charming practice of ‘finning’ the poor critters for shark-fin soup while tossing the still alive but mutilated shark back into the ocean to effectively die slowly from blood loss and asphyxiation.

I can’t tell you how depressed I get knowing that over the course of my lifetime I’ve watched the biggest species die-off since the disappearance of the dinosaurs.  Except for a few modest successes (think a few species of whales, wolves, American bison), people world-wide seem driven to destroy as many habitats and species as rapidly as possible, whether through global warming, deforestation, desertification, strip mining, urban sprawl, polluting and increasing the acidity of fresh and salt water, overfishing, poaching and just polluting the air and land in general.  Is the game to see how many of them we can take with us before our fossil fuel runs out and civilization collapses?

In the case of creatures like pelagic sharks or other deepsea fish, we’re looking at the classic tragedy of the commons writ large.  Unless some modern day, environmentally-motivated Captain Nemo decides to take matters into his own hands, it’s pretty much all she wrote for these poor creatures.  Wouldn’t hurt to have some more (and less gentle) Bruno Mansers on land as well.

There might be a bit more hope for the poor vaquita which recently lost funds for protection due to the economic downturn.  Rather than watch it follow the Yangtse River Dolphin, perhaps a campaign funded by private donations run by a group such as the WWF could make up the shortfall?

The only thing that depresses me more than the actual mass extinction event underway is how people seem to care so little about it.

Recently I railed about the high levels of pharmaceuticals found in fish caught off the coast of several major cities.  I had naively thought that stemmed from medicines passed from overmedicated Americans through their urine that weren’t being filtered out by wastewater treatment plants (an earlier explanation I had read).

Well that could certainly be a contributor, but who would have thought Big Pharma would just be dumping medicine-laden water directly (and legally) into the sewer system?

Three woeful facts here – one, that discharges of these chemicals isn’t regulated, two these discharges are mostly not even monitored, and three – we don’t filter these chemicals out of the waste stream before they enter our seafood pantry.

Enough to make me a vegetarian.  Oh wait…I already am one!

Forget bothering to get perscription medicine, just eat more medicine-laden fish:

“Fish caught near wastewater treatment plants serving five major U.S. cities had residues of pharmaceuticals in them, including medicines used to treat high cholesterol, allergies, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder and depression, researchers reported Wednesday.”

Shame that doesn’t make a saner, healthier population of fish.

Check out this Scientific American article that details the massive amounts of water used to produce our energy – in an increasingly water-strapped world. Then consider one of the issues with the T. Boone Pickens energy plan – much of the U.S. natural gas reserves require – you guessed it – lots of water to extract. And some ‘fracking’ chemical additive whose identify the industry refuses to divulge.

As the energy bill wends its way through the Greedy Old Pig-party controlled Congress, it’s rapidly shedding any vestige of public interest and looking more like the same-old same-old. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M. (who heads up the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources) has managed to whack out the bill’s renewable portfolio standard (mandated that U.S. utilities purchase a meagre 10% of energy from renewable sources, eliminated a ban on toxic MTBE additives (and put in legislation to protect MTBE polluters from lawsuite), put back in the caribou-killing plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and open more protected federal lands to exploration and drilling.

For the one self-style Libertarian that peruses this blog (are you reading this Gun Buddy?) who doesn’t care much about nature and stuff, but always rails on about corporate welfare and government waste, The Greedy Old Pigs have sequestered themselves in a smoke-filled room behind locked doors to go about the business of slingin’ pork in earnest, including:

* $33 billion in tax credits and incentives for for oil, gas, nuclear, coal and electric utilities
* $1.1 billion for making a hydrogen fustion reactor (what’s 1 billion more after we’ve already wasted $10 billion on perpetually ‘around the corner’ fusion energy?)
* $800 million in ‘targeted pork’ to build a Minnesota coal-burning power plant (watch Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn flip-flop and vote yes to drilling the ANWR now. )
* $125 million in loan guarantees for Healy Clean Coal Plant – to retrofit the failed ‘clean coal’ experiment back to a traditional coal plant!!!!
* $1.3 billion in new loans to the money-losing Bonneville Power Administration – sure, enterpise is ‘free’ when the taxpayers foot the bill!
* price subsidies (of as-yet unknown cost) for the to-be-developed Alaska Gas Pipeline

Energy Bill? Energy Scam is what this is! Trash the America of tomorrow – today!