Progress?

10-03-09
Boston Globe
Chamber of overstated horrors
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2009/10/03/chamber_of_overstated_horrors/
 IT IS refreshing to see three energy companies - the nuclear power operator Exelon; Pacific Gas and Electric; and New Mexico’s largest electricity provider, PNM - quitting the US Chamber of Commerce over that organization’s increasingly shrill, doom-saying opposition to climate change legislation in Washington. The chamber claims that limits on greenhouse gas emissions by Congress or the Environmental Protection Agency would be “a job killer,’’ would “completely shut the country down,’’ or, even worse, “virtually destroy the United States.’’
The chamber went completely off the rails in August. It proposed to take the climate change debate all the way back to the 1920s, to a “Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.’’ William Kovacs, the chamber’s vice president for environmental regulation, told the Los Angeles Times that a public hearing on the evidence of climate change “would be evolutionism versus creationism. It would be the science of climate change on trial.’’
The verdict has long been in from the vast majority of climate scientists that humans are changing the atmosphere. What’s becoming increasingly clear is that fighting climate change is good for business, because restrictions on carbon emissions will foster innovations in efficiency and renewable-energy technologies. Last month at a forum in New York - organized in part by the Boston-based business and environmental coalition Ceres - a group of 181 investors handling more than $13 trillion in global assets called for greenhouse gas emission reductions of between 50 percent and 85 percent by 2050.
Going backward eight decades was too much for Exelon, PG&E and PNM. Also protesting somewhat this week was Nike. The sneaker maker did not quit the chamber, but resigned from the board of directors. These are welcome cracks in the stone wall of the chamber. The question is how many more of the chamber’s 3 million members need to quit before the organization alters its retrograde view.

7-19-07
A Change in the Wild
From President James Madison's "Address to the Agricultural Society of Albemarle," 1819
http://www.achangeinthewind.com/2007/07/james-madison-w.html
Agriculture, once effectually commenced, may proceed of itself, under impulses of its own creation. The mouths fed by it increasing, and the supplies of nature decreasing, necessity becomes a spur to industry; which finds another spur in the advantages incident to the acquisition of property, in the civilized state. And thus a progressive agriculture, and a progressive population ensue.
But although no determinate limit presents itself. to the increase of food, and to a population commensurate with it, other than the limited productiveness of the earth itself, we can scarcely be warranted in supposing that all the productive powers of its surface can be made subservient to the use of man, in exclusion of all the plants and animals not entering into his stock of subsistence; that all the elements and combinations of elements in the earth, the atmosphere, and the water, which now support such various and such numerous descriptions of created beings, animate and inanimate, could be withdrawn from that general destination, and appropriated to the exclusive support and increase of the human part of the creation; so that the whole habitable earth should be as full of people as the spots most crowded now are or might be made, and as destitute as those spots of the plants and animals not used by man.
The supposition cannot well be reconciled with that symmetry in the face of nature, which derives new beauty from every insight that can be gained into it. It is forbidden also by the principles and laws which operate in various departments of her economy, falling within the scope of common observation, as well as within that of philosophic researches.
The earth contains not less than thirty or forty thousand kinds of plants; not less than six or seven hundred of birds; nor less than three or four hundred of quadrupeds; to say nothing of the thousand species of fishes. Of reptiles and insects, there are more than can be numbered. To all these must be added, the swarms and varieties of animalcules and minute vegetables not visible to the natural eye, but whose existence is probably connected with that of visible animals and plants.
On comparing this vast profusion and multiplicity of beings with the few grains and grasses, the few herbs and roots, and the few fowls and quadrupeds, which make up the short list adapted to the wants of man, it is difficult to believe that it lies with him so to remodel the work of nature as it would be remodelled, by a destruction not only of individuals, but of entire species; and not only of a few species, but of every species, with the very few exceptions which he might spare for his own accommodation.
Such a multiplication of the human race, at the expense of the rest of the organized creation, implies that the food of all plants is composed of elements equally and indiscriminately nourishing all, and which, consequently, may be wholly appropriated to the one or few plants best fitted for human use. Whether the food or constituent matter of vegetables be furnished from the earth, the air, or water; and whether directly, or by either, through the medium of the others, no sufficient ground appears for the inference that the food for all is the same.
Different plants require different soils; some flourishing in sandy, some in clayey, some in moist, some in. dry soils; some in warm, some in cold situations. Many grow only in water, and a few subsist in the atmosphere. The forms, the textures, and the qualities of plants, are still more diversified. That things so various and dissimilar in their organization, their constitutions, and their characters, should be wholly nourished by, and consist of precisely the same elements, requires more proof than has yet been offered.
10-05-09
GE News
GM Flax Contamination from Canada Soars to 28 Countries
But Canadian farmers still have no answers
CBAN
http://co113w.col113.mail.live.com/default.aspx?n=1662870526&wa=wsignin1.0
Ottawa - 28 countries, including more European countries as well as Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Thailand, have now been affected by contamination from genetically modified (GM) flax in Canadian exports since contamination was first reported on September 8.
 
Mere weeks are left before farmers in Canada finish harvesting their flax and yet farmers still don't know the source or full extent of the GM contamination - and it could be weeks before authorities in Canada confirm any details. Flax prices remain depressed.
 
GM flax is not approved for human consumption in the following 28 countries where contamination has now reached: Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Czech Republic, Spain, Denmark, Estonia, Norway, Finland, France, Greece, Romania, Portugal, Iceland, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Mauritius. Companies are removing products from the market as the GM flax has been found in cereals, bakery products, bakery mixtures and nut/seed products. 9 GM flax contamination notices have been filed so far through the European Commission's Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed.
 
European authorities have named the source of contamination as the GM flax "Triffid", which was developed in Canada but was deregistered in 2001 and has been illegal to sell since that time. While there is a test for the Triffid flax available from the company Genetic ID, the Flax Council of Canada is delaying confirmation as it waits for the Plant Biotechnology Institute in Saskatoon to develop a new test for Triffid.
 
"Its been nearly a month since contamination was first found, but neither the Canadian government nor industry has come forward with any answers," said Stewart Wells, President of the National Farmers Union of Canada. "The continued uncertainty and unanswered questions show the need for more strict regulation of GM crops in Canada."
 
"Farmers face the threat of unwanted contamination from GM crops, even when the crops are not supposed to be grown," said Arnold Taylor an organic flax grower and Chair of the Organic Agriculture Protection Fund of the Saskatchewan Organic Directorate. "Someone's going to have to pay for testing our crops for contamination and any required clean-up. Who will be liable?"
 
"The Canadian government still refuses to consider market harm when they decide to approve GM crops. This obviously has to change immediately," said Lucy Sharratt, Coordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network. "The entire regulatory system needs urgent reform or we will see even more widespread market chaos."
 
For more information:
Stewart Wells, National Farmers Union of Canada, 306 773 6852 or cell: 306 741 7694; Arnold Taylor, Saskatchewan Organic Directorate, cell: 306 241 6126 or 306 252 2783; Lucy Sharratt, Coordinator, Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, cell 613 263 9511 or 613 241 2267 ext. 6
 
Comment from Joe Cummins: The Canadian Flax Council is using the GM Triffid scandal to attack the EU's zero tolerance food safety policy for unapproved GMOs.The flax council should realize that they are selling flax to countries in Europe and the world. They are not bureaucrats dictating to all the countries of the world that those countries must consume polluted flax grown by the flax growers of Canada.
According to the Plant Biotechnology Institute in Saskatoon, which developed the GMO variety Triffid, which is now causing the trouble, there is no specific test to identify the presence of this material. That is a startling confession. GM crops should not be tested in the openen environment nor should they be deregulated until there is a proven test for the transgenes in the modified crops!
The current incident makes the regulation of GM crops in Canada seem to be haphazard and feckless. Canadian politicians seem to be uneducated or incapable of oversight.