In just seven decades, America’s conventional (non-organic) farmers increased per-acre corn yields by an incredible 500% – while using steadily less water, fuel, fertilizer, and pesticides – feeding millions more people.
Among the many reasons for this miracle is their ability to control weeds that would otherwise steal moisture and nutrients from this vital food, animal feed, and fuel (ethanol) crop. [bold, links added]
Long-lasting herbicides don’t just control weeds. They also promote no-till farming, which helps farmers save costly tractor fuel and avoid breaking up soils – thereby reducing erosion, retaining soil moisture, safeguarding soil organisms, and locking carbon dioxide in the soil (reducing risks of “dangerous man-made climate change,” some say).
In the United States, the second most widely used herbicide after glyphosate (Roundup) is atrazine, which is critical to controlling invasive and hard-to-kill weeds impervious to other herbicides. Atrazine is used on 65 million acres of corn, sorghum, and sugarcane.
That’s equivalent to Colorado or Oregon, on croplands scattered across a dozen Midwestern states. It’s also used on millions of acres of golf courses, lawns, and highway medians nationwide.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has periodically reviewed atrazine science – which now comprises more than 7,000 studies over the past 60 years. It has been found that the herbicide is safe for people, animals, and the environment.
But that hasn’t stopped the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), Pesticide Action Network (PAN), and other groups from campaigning to have atrazine banned outright or regulated into oblivion.
Extreme environmentalists also oppose fossil fuels, genetically engineered crops, non-organic fertilizers, and insecticides.
But they are silent about dangerous “natural” organic pesticides, including many that are lethal to bees and fish – and about cadmium and other toxic metals that can leach out of solar panels dumped in landfills – even though all these toxic chemicals could end up in our potable water.
Last year, I explained how activists successfully used collusive sue-and-settle lawsuits to force EPA to develop a formal process for evaluating whether endangered species were “likely” to be “adversely affected” by exposure to common pesticides.
Facing court-ordered deadlines for completing the new assessments, the agency unsurprisingly found that the vast majority of species would “likely be adversely affected” by herbicides and other pesticides.
But it did so by employing the standard that even one affected plant or animal of a species would trigger prohibitions on using the chemicals.
The EPA also utilized hopelessly deficient satellite imagery, statewide crop and atrazine data, toxicity studies of unrelated laboratory animals, computer models, and best guesses. The garbage-in, garbage-out exercise bears little relation to real-world use, exposure, or risks.
CBD, PAN, and other anti-pesticide groups recently sued EPA again, in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The EPA used the lawsuit to justify asking the court to order the agency to “reconsider” a 2019 regulation.
So now the EPA has proposed that detectable levels of atrazine in US aquatic ecosystems must not exceed the astonishingly low average level of 3.4 parts per billion (ppb) over a 60-day period.
The EPA calls this the “concentration equivalent level of concern,” or CE-LOC. But 3.4 ppb is equivalent to 3.4 seconds in 11,500 days – nearly 32 years!
Atrazine isn’t plutonium. It’s been used and studied since 1958. To suggest that 3.4 ppb could devastate American ponds and rivers defies reason and science.
These outfits aren’t even dealing with actual field or pond observations and evidence of harm.
They’re talking about extrapolations, backed up mainly by secretive models, conjectures, and activist pressure. However, the effects on American agriculture are likely to be profound and widespread.
This focus on protecting aquatic life goes back two decades or more; it is so “inside baseball” in its details and complexity that eyes roll and readers fall asleep.
The essence is this. Barely three years ago, the EPA set the atrazine CE-LOC at 15 ppb, based on a host of government, academic, industry, and activist studies and comments.
Even the US Geological Survey and Agriculture Department weighed in. Prior to that, it was the still-reasonable level of 10 ppb.
In 2016, the EPA proposed but ultimately rejected the 3.4 ppb LOC, after numerous farmers and scientific groups pointed out the shoddy methods and poor science the agency used to get there.
But this June 30 – employing the court order that the agency itself asked for – EPA “re-evaluated” its decision. The agency dishonestly claimed it had intended all along to set that extremely low standard, and presented its decision for public comment as a fait accompli.
Anticipating the uproar its proposal would cause, EPA said it would seek “external peer review” of its aquatic species risk assessment and 3.4 ppb decision.
But this is a far cry from having a formal, balanced Scientific Advisory Panel do a full, impartial, scientific review, under standards actually set by the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).
This 3.4 ppb LOC will result in major restrictions on atrazine use and/or necessitate extensive, expensive measures by farmers to control runoff – all based on estimated, predicted, computer-generated atrazine levels across multi-county or multi-state watersheds in which atrazine-based herbicides are used on acreage in who-knows-what proximity to those watersheds.
The near-zero LOC amounts to an effective ban on using atrazine-based herbicides – amid growing international grain shortages, widening hunger, soaring fuel and fertilizer prices, increasing mandates to turn more corn into ethanol (to replace “non-renewable” gasoline), and other important considerations.
This Biden EPA decision certainly looks like a “major federal action,” representing a “transformative expansion” in EPA’s regulatory authority and raising “major questions” about what specific language in FIFRA gives EPA such enormous, unprecedented authority.
It would certainly seem that this 3.4 ppb edict defies the legal standards just recently articulated by the US Supreme Court in West Virginia v. EPA, regarding the agency’s asserted authority to regulate power plants in the name of climate change – wherein the court used precisely those quoted terms to reject the EPA’s arrogation of authority.
The EPA’s proposed standard would certainly result in significant regional and national political, economic and agricultural consequences.
It would certainly affect a significant segment of the US economy – and intrude into areas that are the province of the US Departments of Agriculture and Energy (USDA, DOE). It would also undermine EPA’s own climate change mitigation and prevention initiatives.
America’s premier environmental agency seems to be telling the Supreme Court: try and stop us again.
Biden Administration policies have already made energy insanely expensive (up to $5 a gallon for regular and $9 in some California cities), created supply chain crises for baby formula and other essential consumer goods, and sent inflation soaring to 9.1% annualized, compared to 1.5% in January 2021.
These policies are battering millions of American families.
The President just returned from Saudi Arabia, where he begged the king and prince to produce more oil, so that Team Biden can continue restricting the production of America’s own vast petroleum resources.
This is embarrassing, demeaning, hypocritical, and destructive.
Amid widespread hunger in Sri Lanka, and even in Germany and the UK, due to extreme green policies, Team Biden seems to think it should cause still more damage – and must kowtow more to extremists.
As the nation flirts with the possibility of a recession, would Team Biden really risk another Depression-Era Dust Bowl – which occurred in part because of too much plowing, amid still-record high temperatures and droughts decades before anyone conceived of man-made fossil-fuel-driven climate crises?
This 3.4 ppb LOC is bad science, bad policy, bad agriculture, bad economics, and perverse morality. Anyone wishing to weigh in on the proposal can submit comments until September 6 at:
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/EPA-HQ-OPP-2013-0266
Paul Driessen is a senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and the author of books, reports, and articles on energy, environmental, climate, and human rights issues.
Go back to plowing with a stick all over a this fake crisis How about if all the world leaders did someone to help their people instead of making stupid demands of the rest of us
The left has been claiming there will be crop failures and starvation due to glowball warming for decades. Since it isn’t happening by itself, they are determined to do it by themselves.
Get ready to be told that you are starving because of glowball warming.
I’m sure that there’s some people willing to make salads out of weeds. Tastes great, less filling.
Everyone should now know the climate nazis hope to starve millions of people to death as they play their part in the Great Reset. The globalist have begun their plan to by attacking farmers with new anti-production requirements. These black hearted fascists hope to starve/murder millions of us to save the planet! Globalists don’t care if we die from starvation, heatwaves or freezing cold they just want us dead!
The Eco-Nazis/Watermelons want to force us all to live in crowded Cities as millions of acres of Farm and Ranch land is returned to Wilderness all part of the Wildlands Project and something they call The Buffalo Commons the idea from a couple of crack-pots from Rutgers Frank and Debera Popper