Within days of being sworn in, President Joe Biden elevated the Science Advisor to the President to a Cabinet rank, with a seat beside the Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury. This bold move signaled the administration's commitment to an evidence-based approach to policymaking.
Yet some are already threatening to undermine this forward-thinking policy.
Activist groups that helped put President Biden in the Oval Office are demanding the administration replace evidence-based research with activist-backed junk science. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), among others, is demanding a ban on eleven critical pesticides that farmers have relied on to feed the public during the pandemic.
These are products that have been thoroughly evaluated by career scientists at U.S. regulatory agencies under both Democratic and Republican administrations. They are safe.
Will the Biden administration follow empirical evidence, or junk science?
This new activist push is built around their assertion that insects are on a one-way trip to mass extinction. “The Insect Apocalypse is Here” was a New York Times headline, which even rhetorically asked, “What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?” Business Insider used the claim of an activist ecologist to claim that, “More than 50% of insects have disappeared since 1970” while National Geographic followed with, “Where have all the insects gone?”
These sensational assertions follow a well-worn pattern. Just a few years ago, is was claimed that honeybees were doomed. They cited claims that bees were “dying globally at an alarming rate” — even asserting a “40 percent decline” in the space of a few months. The claim, which was repeated so often itbecame a popular Internet meme, fizzled when scientists pointed out that the U.S. Department of Agriculture keeps close tabs on honeybee numbers and, far from declining, bee numbers had risen since the advent of the atrazine pesticide EWG wanted to ban. With 2.8 million bee colonies in 2019, they're up 8 percent from two decades ago.
We shouldn't make policy decisions based on 'bug splatter' estimates
The papers being touted when writing provocative headlines don't hold up under scientific scrutiny. One estimated that the number of insects splattering across Danish windshields declined 80 percent between 1997 to 2017. Another had 700 environmental volunteers self-report how many bugs their front license plate. They used that to claim “splat density” had dropped 50 percent from 0.2 “splats per mile” to 0.1 splats - and pesticides were the reason.
The purpose of the latter studyis clear from the participants’ own own website, whichconcluded the results established the need to, “STOP killing insectsby reducing our use of pesticides where we live, work and farm.” Conveniently,such statements of their motivation were left out of thegroup’s scientific paper.
Even so, the paper admitsup-front it’s built upon flimsy evidence. “Firstly, in 2004 participants werenot provided guidance on journey length,” the authors explained. Moreover,“Modern cars are more areodynamically [sic] designed than in the past, andchanges over time may affect the numbers of insects getting squashed.” Thosetwo factors are pretty important, but the study also leaves out the changing demographicsof the studied area. In the past 15 years, Kent has seen 15 percent populationgrowth, and in 2019 alone there were 48,775new homes waiting to be built.
Those homes arelocated near the roads where the surveys were conducted. So, what these squishedinsect studies prove is that there’s a rising amount of concrete and a highertraffic density near motorways. Had they asked, the UK Department for Transportwould have told these scientists that work van traffic in England hasjumped 106 percent in the past 25 years, with more than half of thatincrease taking place during the study period. It’s quite likely the influx of high-profilevehicles collected many of the insect “splats” that the volunteers simplyassumed were missing because of pesticides.
In other words, studies like thissay nothing about the total number of insects in the southeast of England, orin Denmark, or anywhere else because they’re not intended to withstand actualscrutiny. Instead, the idea is to drum up as many “insects are dying” studiesas possible so that the public hears the claim repeated so often it becomes anaccepted fact.
Fortunately, like every prophecyof doom, this one’s overblown. Remember when the world was supposed to end onDecember 21, 2012, because there were no pages left on the Mayan calendar?We’re still here. A bit over a century ago, the arrival of Halley’s Comet wassupposed to triggerdisaster for the earth. Hucksters turned fear into profit by peddling cometpills “for complete protection from the noxious gases emitted by Haley’s Comet.”The day after the comet passed, the headlines read: “Entireworld astir during comet crisis, but nothing happened.”
That’s how it always plays out,but society’s swindlers never stay long in one place. They’re always on the movefrom one con to the next. See, for instance, the massive fundraising campaignsginned up by the activist groups trying to protect honeybees that havetransitioned to hyping the more general insect decline. Soon they’ll have tocome up with the next imaginary disaster.
There are scientistswho’ve looked at the evidence honestly and debunked the hysterical claims aboutinsect decline. Universityof Georgia researchers used controlled monitoring sites, rather than carwindshields, to measure insect abundance and found the purported “decline” tobe “indistinguishable from zero.”
A study finding that “nothinghappened” will never receive the attention it deserves, as “we’re all going todie” makes a much more interesting headline. Let’s hope the nation’s newscientific advisor takes time to evaluate the evidence and not fall for thejunk science.
