Environment

A new paper seeks to take some of the guesswork out of subjective "sustainable" diets. Activists like True Health Initiative try to claim that a meatless diet is better for human health and the environment, for example, but their corporate sponsorships lead to skepticism. Claims about the emissions impact of meat production are often exaggerated by 700 percent. Environmentalists have never visited a farm if they think all grazing land could be growing tomatoes. Likewise, a paper in a publication named Environmental Justice is going to be more fundamentalism than science, but there is one…

A small percentage of farmers engage in an alternative form of agriculture termed "organic" because they believe it is a more natural manufacturing process, since it was used in the past. The scientific flaws in that logic are well known, but the higher profits and environmental effects are real. Though California has only a tiny amount of organic produce, it requires 300 percent more pesticides to grow the same food as it would if they used regular farming. Organic farmers believe the higher profits are worth the higher economic and environmental costs. It may be even worse, as a study…

A new estimate says that of 378 metropolitan areas, many could actually exist on locally grown food - if the local area is up to 200 miles away, which means New York City could claim farms in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut are local to New York.  Even then, diets would have to change, because progress has meant having diversity and choice, and if locally-grown were really necessary, the population would starve along the Eastern Seaboard and the Southwest of the U.S. And meat would only be for the rich. Those in less fertile countries…

The majority of today's plant-based food was created using scientific optimization of traits - genetic engineering. Watermelons, bananas, tomatoes, lettuce, and corn are all great examples of genetically engineered foods that few realize are not natural even if they carry an "organic" manufacturing process sticker. Despite that success, government-funded scientists are reporting less funding than ever and the reason is largely because the private sector has done so well. It may also be because the war against agriculture is being waged by those often in the same political tribe as those who…

Tennessee corn, soybean, cotton and wheat producers are estimated to have declines in income of $58.8 million, $21.4 million, $20.3 million and $1.2 million, respectively, for a total decline of $101.7 million - and that's just what is known right now. Consumers have been able to endure this COVID-19 pandemic in large part thanks to food remaining plentiful and therefore affordable, but processors are a huge revenue source for farmers and with restaurants and suppliers cut in half, there is far less demand. With the temporary closures of restaurants and several beef slaughter and packing…

Though periodic deaths of bees continue to happen, and have been documented for as long as records of bees have been kept, over 1,000 years, efforts to blame the most recent statistical blip on a newer class of pesticides designed to reduce pesticide usage, neonicotinoids, have fallen flat. Parasites remain the big killer, as does winter, even changes in land. Arguably the only thing not killing bees are seed treatments created so there would be less pesticide in the environment. As a result, anti-science activists have been forced to change targets. They now insist that "bird biodiversity is…

With the world COVID-19 pandemic in its sixth month, food activists are back to trumpeting locally grown, and even home grown, as a viable option for mass food production, but for most of the world how realistic is that? It's fine if Michael Pollan claims it is from his walled Berkeley back yard, but even most New York Times subscribers can't afford that. To make it suitably ironic, environmentalists who have spent decades and $40 billion on campaigns saying single-family homes in suburbia are a blight on nature and we should all live in urban apartments are now claiming we should be growing…

By Gurkiran Dhuga and Glen Pyle Throughout the last few decades health concerns related to air pollution have been rising. Despite this focus there has been little research on the impact of air pollution on specific health conditions and mortality, even though there is a strong association between air pollution and overall life expectancy. A global study lead by researchers in Germany outlines the detrimental changes air pollution can have on human life expectancy. One surprising finding of the study was that cardiovascular disease, and not respiratory conditions, are the primary cause of…

One of the glaring errors in the controversial United Nations IPCC report critical of agriculture was that it used the Greenhouse Gas Protocol yet ignored the carbon sequestration of crops. A politically neutral examination of the science shows that agriculture is nowhere near as big a problem in emissions as activists have claimed. A model from Spain shows it again. Though agricultural activity is only a small fraction of the total emissions of greenhouse gases in Spain, the new computer projection shows it can increase sequestration of organic carbon in soil in the soil even more - and…

Is citizen science a luxury for wealthy countries? Pastimes like bird watching, which require very little wealth to start, are more common in developed lands, but it would help fill the gaps in science elsewhere. Birders around the world contribute every day to a massive database of bird sightings worldwide. It has a long tradition, but as paper guidebooks and life lists have given way to digital records and mobile apps, birders have become more connected, compiling their data into near real-time global snapshots of where and when birders are seeing species. A new analysis of the citizen…