Does Global Warming Cause War?
A new paper suggests that the world's largest polluters remain safe from the environmental damage they help create and the countries least to blame face the greatest threats because of, oddly, violent conflict.This is counter-intuitive but it is the same argument we used to read about "virtual water". Those arguments are fine in a spreadsheet, it gets advocates worked up, but fails in the real world as readily as most economic projections do.(1) The authors argue that they correlate armed conflict and the environment.
Instead Of Genetically Engineering Bedbugs, EPA Should Re-Evaluate DDT
In the 1950s, the global infestation of bed bugs was nearly eradicated, thanks to the pesticide dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, popularly known as DDT.Due to outcry from environmentalists and concern about Rachel Carson's Silent Spring(1), and over the objections of scientists, the attorney who had been appointed to run the new Environmental Protection Agency created by President Nixon, William Ruckelshaus, banned it.(2)
Drones Work For Pesticide Applications
Though organic™ farmers sell bucolic imagery of hoeing by hand and sunsets over fields of corn, it is just marketing to the gullible. All farmers who make more than enough money to pay their real estate taxes(1) are high-tech gurus. They use real-time data on the health of their land and their crops, they want to use just enough product to get the most food with the least environmental strain.It's a long way from the $3 billion environmental imagery of farmers with leaky backpacks drenching plants in science and cackling like Scrooge McDuck on a pile of coins about it.
Pesticides: Environmental Threat Or Anti-Science Populism?
With former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dictating a lot of science policy for the Trump administration, anti-science activists have been quietly cheering even though they uniformly voted for his opposition.They need a win. Claims that bees are dying off have been met with a resounding thud, we have more bees than at any time since records have been kept. Concerns about GMOs have fared as poorly. Trillions of animals have been fed using GMOs and neither any of them or the billions of people who ate food grown using them have gotten so much as a stomachache. Food activism likes to gloss over how often organic lettuce gives consumers E. coli.
If You Buy Magic Rocks, You’re The Target Market For HoLDI-MS To Detect Nanoplastic
Homeopathic levels of plastic are the latest environmental scaremongering fad (Nanoplastics! Microplastics!) dominating partisan corporate media when they are not suddenly simping for Trickle Down Economics, Vaccines, and Capitalism they distrusted just a short while ago.Naturally, companies are rushing to keep you safe from plastic which can be detected in everything. If you want to detect it in your home and annoy your family talking about how much virtual cancer you want to avoid, A McGill team fired up the 3-D printer and made the hollow-laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (HoLDI-MS) test platform.
That's right, a plastic detector made from...plastic.
Only Polarized People Want Companies In Polarized Political Issues
Last year, companies began to pull back from promoting their Diversity Equity Inclusion efforts and social justice activists blamed the incoming Trump administration. It has been a violation of federal law to discriminate for 60 years so to moderates it seemed odd to add a layer of discrimination in hiring, even one deemed positive. And they never considered it may have instead been done at all due to pressure from the previous administration.The backlash was entirely predictable, but in both cases it was on the fringes. For no benefit, corporate CEOs were ignoring the 'stay out of it unless your customers are dominated by it' mantra.
PM2.5 Is Killing You, Claim Ecologists, Except There Are No Deaths
A new simulation claims small-micron particulate matter, so small you need an electron microscope to see it, is killing 250,000 people each year. PM10, 10 microns in size, is a well-known killer. That is wildfires and smog but after smog was drastically reduced in the 1990s, the target went down 400%, to 2.5. Suddenly air quality maps could be orange and red again, even though the air is cleaner in wealthier countries than it has been since the 1980s.COVID-19 Border Closures Increased German Dislike Of Immigrants
Early in 2020, the President of the United States said America should cut travel from China due to COVID-19 concerns. This was dismissed as xenophobia by states like New York and California, because the World Health Organisation had not declared it a pandemic.(1)In Europe, 18 countries knew better than to wait for WHO to ignore claims from China that it was not a pandemic and closed their borders.
Opiate Of The Masses: Ancient Andes Used Hallucinogens To Keep People Positive
Americans like to be outraged by things, in 2025 the right is outraged by seed oils while the left is outraged about lack of capitalism, but older civilizations wanted people to stay calm.When we think of the Andes today, we may think of the Incas, but they were colonizers just like Spain. Some 2,000 years before the Inca the Chavín had extensive farms and art and architecture throughout what Europeans later named Peru. And they did it with a lot less violence than most other prehistorical cultures on the continent.(1)
How Things Are Made
If the supply chain collapsed tomorrow, could you build a toaster?Would you really even want to try? People make homemade jam and all-natural weedkillers that are ironically stuffed with chemicals but no one makes their own toaster. It would be among the first things dismissed as unimportant in a post-apocalyptic world.