Politics Seen to Limit E.P.A. as It Sets Rules for Natural Gas

When Congress considered whether to regulate more closely the handling of wastes from oil and gas drilling in the 1980s, it turned to the Environmental Protection Agency to research the matter. E.P.A. researchers concluded that some of the drillers’ waste was hazardous and should be tightly controlled.

But that is not what Congress heard. Some of the recommendations concerning oil and gas waste were eliminated in the final report handed to lawmakers in 1987.

“It was like the science didn’t matter,” Carla Greathouse, the author of the study, said in a recent interview. “The industry was going to get what it wanted, and we were not supposed to stand in the way.”

Read the full story in The New York Times

Food Safety Czar's Fuel Farms

While the world has been transfixed by events in the Middle East, food safety czar Michael Taylor (senior advisor to the commissioner of the FDA and formerly chief lawyer at chemical giant Monsanto) quietly helped win a major victory for the ethanol industry, striking a potential blow to the health of corn crops used for food. On February 11 the Department of Agriculture (with the FDA's blessing) approved a new type of genetically modified "self-processing" corn, Enogen, that completes the first step of conversion into the automotive fuel ethanol all by itself, before it's even harvested. With a full 40% of all corn being grown today currently earmarked for ethanol (which requires vastly more fertilizer and pesticides than other potential biofuel feedstocks, such as perennial grasses) that's a lot of corn with the potential to harm food crops and impact people's health.

This sleight of genetic engineering is great for Ethanol producers, who have been under pressure for concerns about pollution and for driving up the price of corn. Developed by Swiss company, Syngenta, Enogen corn produces an enzyme that spontaneously breaks down the starch contained in the kernel into liquid sugar, saving an entire step and reducing water utiilzation in the manufacturing process. But what about the rest of us?

If we've learned anything over the past decade of growth of GMO crops, it is the very real potential for accidental mingling of GMO crops with conventional crops. It's highly possible the ethanol-ready corn seeds will jump the fence into corn destined for the food supply. Security is based on an industry plan to grow the Swiss-made self-processing corn in contained fields near the roughly 200 ethanol plants in operation in 27 states. The escape of just a few kernals could wreak havoc on one of the great icons of American agriculture. It was a feature of the first Thanksgiving Feast for goodness sake!

Even the industry-friendly Miller's Association is calling for a more thorough scientific review, and has raised concerns about Syngenta's own data showing that as little as one fuel-corn kernel mixed with 10,000 conventional kernels could be enough to weaken conventional corn starch and disrupt food processing operations. Just such a contamination happened in 2000, when a genetically modified corn approved only for animal use got into the human food supply, prompting huge recalls and disrupting American exports. If Enogen were to co-mingle with conventional crops, corn lovers everywhere could have puddles of sugar on their plates when they bite into their first golden ear of summer corn. Corn chips would crumble, corn flakes would not crunch.

Most disturbingly, like all GMO crops, we don't understand the potential health effects of this new corn, which contains a synthetic gene derived from micro-organisms that live near hot-water vents on the ocean’s floor. There's growing concern in the scientific community over the lack of GMO safety research. Says Chuck Benbrook, Chief scientist at agricultural watch-dog The Organic Center, “They don't know whether the promoter gene, which has been moved into the plant to turn on the new piece of genetic material, will influence some other biosynthetic pathway that's in the plant, turning on some natural process of the plant when it shouldn't be turned on, or turning it off too soon.” In general, GMO science is rife with unknowns, including how GMO crops will evolve and effect eco-systems, agricultural systems and human health over time. 

Clearly, government policy should err on the side of caution in approving new GMO crops. Instead, approvals appear to be accelerating. Just two weeks before the Enogen approval, the Agricultural Department approved the unrestricted cultivation of biotech alfalfa over the objections of some environmental groups and the organic food industry. A week later, it cleared a partial de-regulation that will allow continued planting of biotech sugar beets (currently 90% of all beets under cultivation) even though the department has not finished its own enviornmental impact statement regarding GMO beets. Both the alfalfa and beets (developed largely by Monsanto) have a gene making them tolerant of the herbicide Roundup (also a Monsanto product.) At the very least, these approvals mean more of the endocrine disrupting pesticide Roundup will be used on American cropland, with the potential to contaminate the food supply and leach into water tables. In the worst case, the stage is now set for widespread exposure to genetically modified plant foods with the potential to harm people's health.

This latest approval of ethanol-ready corn, in which government regulators appear to place corporate interests over all else, represents one of the first times a GMO plant was designed to be used strictly for industrial purposes. It's unchartered territory for corn. And if ingested (albeit by accident) it would be unchartered territory for the human body.

Update on Tuesday, March 1, 2011 at 9:36AM by Kathy

Read Farm Aid's guide to shopping for non-GMO produce. It includes apps that help navigate clear of GMO foods in the grocery store.

Human Error Responsible For GM Crop Escapes

Quit blaming the bees. Careless handling of seeds may be the key reason for the unintended spread of genetically modified (GM) crops, a study has found.

The discovery challenges the widespread belief that the main source of GM contamination is the transfer of pollen by bees from GM crops to non-GM counterparts in neighbouring fields. Human error during seed production and handling is the more likely culprit, say the researchers.

Stands of non-GM crop plants are currently planted near or within fields of modified crops to provide refuges for pests. This technique helps prevent the pests developing resistance to the pesticides used on GM crops. But human error could undermine this widely used strategy, the paper says.

Shannon Heuberger, an entomologist at the University of Arizona, and her colleagues measured the gene flow — the movement of genes between different populations that occurs when a plant from one population fertilises a plant from the other — in Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton, the widely planted GM crop, in 15 fields in Arizona.

They found that gene flow via the transmission of pollen by bees was rare. Fewer than one per cent of seeds produced by ordinary cotton plants contained genes from Bt cotton that had been transmitted in this way.

But poor seed-sorting resulted in some seed bags intended for planting in non-GM fields containing as much as 20 percent GM seed. One non-GM field was found to have a large number of GM plants due to human error in planting.

Read the full story in The Guardian.

Renewed Advice for Surviving a Nuclear Detonation: Head to the Basement

A new analyses from government scientists shows that heading to the basement would be the best bet for surviving a nuclear explosion. The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives, according to the New York Times. Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far.

Read the article.

Cadmium, Lead Found in Drinking Glasses

File this under the "When is China going to get it?" category:

By Justin Pritchard

The Associated Press

Drinking glasses depicting comic book and movie characters such as Superman, Wonder Woman and the Tin Man from "The Wizard of Oz" exceed federal limits for lead in children's products by up to 1,000 times, according to laboratory testing commissioned by The Associated Press.

The decorative enamel on the superhero and Oz sets - made in China and purchased at a Warner Brothers Studios store in Burbank - contained between 16 percent and 30.2 percent lead. The federal limit on children's products is 0.03 percent.

The same glasses also contained relatively high levels of the even-more-dangerous cadmium, though there are no federal limits on that toxic metal in design surfaces.

In separate testing to recreate regular handling, other glasses shed small but notable amounts of lead or cadmium from their decorations. Federal regulators have worried that toxic metals rubbing onto children's hands can get into their mouths. Among the brands on those glasses: Coca-Cola, Walt Disney, Burger King and McDonald's.

The Coca-Cola Co., which had been given AP's test results last week, announced Sunday evening that after retesting it was voluntarily recalling 88,000 glasses over concerns regarding the mainly red glass in a four-glass set.

The AP testing was part of the news organization's ongoing investigation into dangerous metals in children's products and was conducted in response to a recall by McDonald's of 12 million glasses this summer because cadmium escaped from designs depicting four characters in the latest "Shrek" movie.

The New Jersey manufacturer of those glasses said in June that the products were made according to standard industry practices, which includes the routine use of cadmium to create red and similar colors. That same company, French-owned Arc International, made the glasses that Coca-Cola said it was pulling.