Friday, August 31, 2018
Environmentalist scare stories – Never mind!
Here's yet another environmental doom and gloom story that fizzled out...
I found this posted by a guest on the WattsUpWithThat blog:
"Environmental activists always claim they merely want better public policies, to save the Earth and its endangered species. Far too often, their real goal is acquiring more money and power – by misdiagnosing and misrepresenting, exaggerating and fabricating, ecological crises. It’s the road to the hell of bad public policy. And it’s not always paved with good intentions.
A perfect example is their use of the (temporary) decline in domesticated honeybee numbers to drive fundraising campaigns – and demands that regulators ban neonicotinoid pesticides, the low-risk crop protection insecticides that are mostly applied as seed treatments that get taken up into plant tissue, so that they only attack pests that feed on crops. Now suddenly, the Sierra Club and Xerces Society have finally admitted that 'honeybees are at no risk of dying off.
While diseases, parasites and other threats are certainly real problems for beekeepers, the total number of managed honeybees worldwide has risen 45% over the last half century. Honeybees are not going to go extinct.'
But now they’re claiming that multiple species of WILD bees face extinction, likely because of neonics."
