As is so often the case for controversies before the Supreme Court, this case isn't so much about glyphosate as it is about the interface between federal and state law.
Since 1991, the EPA has held that glyphosate is not carcinogenic; it was (at the time) categorized "Group E", which means that not only is there not evidence for it being carcinogenic, but that there is material evidence that it is not. Later, IARC (in a decision that was controversial among global public health agencies) listed glyphosate as a 2A probable carcinogen, alongside red meat, potatoes, deep fryer oil, and a slew of scary chemicals that includes many other insecticides and herbicides.
States like California enacted labeling-law regimes that key in part off IARC's classification, which meant that in those states Roundup products required labeling. Monsanto/Bayer lost civil cases based on failure to label.
That's the domain-specific stuff. What the court likely cares about is the preemption doctrine. In a variety of different situations, competing state and federal statutes are by explicit or implicit preemption rules. In many cases, federal preemption is a result of bargains with industry: for instance, we got programs like Energy Star after negotiations where industry (and the states dependent on those industries) made concessions to the federal government in exchange for exemptions from state regulation, which is why there's controversy over local municipal ordinances that attempt to ban gas ranges (apropos nothing, but: combustion products of gas ranges: also IARC carcinogens).
There's a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself (as someone else on this thread pointed out, glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments), but rather with the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops.
For those people it's worth knowing that the civil liability Monsanto/Bayer is trying to avoid here is approximately the same as the reason Jays Potato Chips bags sometimes have "Not For Sale In California" labeling. Nobody has declared that Roundup is categorically unsafe. Some states have declared that you have to label it the same way you would a gas station or Disneyland ride.
saghm 9 minutes ago [-]
> As is so often the case for controversies before the Supreme Court, this case isn't so much about glyphosate as it is about the interface between federal and state law.
I know what you meant, and I suspect everyone reading it does too, but this is the type of sentence where the ambiguity amuses me. It's certainly true that most of the controversies before the Supreme Court aren't about glyphosate!
MostlyStable 4 hours ago [-]
>As is so often the case for controversies before the Supreme Court, this case isn't so much about glyphosate as it is about the interface between federal and state law.
It was mentioned on a podcast recently that in many cases, the SC is not making a decision on what should/shouldn't happen/be the policy/is correct or whatever. They are deciding which layer of government gets to decide a given question. The Executive Branch? Legislation? Constitution? Who is the controlling entity?
Now, in a practical sense, by the time it gets to the SC, making a decision on who gets to decide, is, functionally, picking what the outcome is, since the various layers of government have already made their positions clear.
But the upshot is, if one is upset with what happens with a given policy after a SC decision, in many cases (although not all), the proper target of one's ire should not be the SC; since what they are usually saying is something like "this is something that is controlled by statute. If the statute is dumb/bad/poorly written, that is not our fault nor within our control, take it up with Congress to rewrite the statue", and instead one should be upset with whoever the controlling entity is for doing a bad job (in recent years: most commonly congress, not so much for doing a bad job so much as not doing any job)
0xbadcafebee 5 hours ago [-]
Important to note it's not Glyphosate on trial, it's Roundup. There is a huge gulf between studies and conclusions on Glyphosate, and studies and conclusions on Roundup. Glyphosate is the safest and most effective herbicide known to mankind. Roundup - which includes Glyphosate, in addition to other additives - may be unnecessarily dangerous.
Also worth noting that Monsanto could stop selling Roundup entirely, and it wouldn't really matter. Monsanto's Glyphosate patent expired, so you can get cheaper Glyphosate from many different manufacturers. Which is great, because it means we can avoid the potentially-more-dangerous Roundup, and use the simpler base chemical instead. Distancing the pesticide from the "evil corporation" might actually make people less afraid of it.
Like the tobacco industry before them, a Monsanto employee proposed producing a scientific paper with outside scientists: “by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak” — see https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art...
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
There isn't one single study that glyphosate safety is based on. It's an intensively studied substance.
keane 3 hours ago [-]
I didn’t claim there was only one study. The concern is the corporate culture introducing biases into studies. In the tobacco industry, this was a pattern.
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
There was overwhelming evidence, some of it preceding modern human health science, that smoking was damaging.
pfdietz 26 minutes ago [-]
Indeed. It's rare in environmental medicine to see an effect as strong as that from smoking. The straw the tobacco industry clung to for a while (it was debunked) was that people who had cancer smoked to sooth their lungs (or, that cancer caused smoking, not vice versa.)
parineum 4 hours ago [-]
> you can get cheaper Glyphosate from many different manufacturers. Which is great, because it means we can avoid the potentially-more-dangerous Roundup, and use the simpler base chemical instead.
Unspecified Glyphosate product isn't better because it's not Roundup. If some ingredient in Roundup is dangerous, let's drop the Glyphosate conversation and look for herbicides without that other mystery chemical.
It really seems like you're looking for a reason to justify Roundup as uniquely bad, in the face of evidence, with extremely vague statements.
victorbjorklund 3 hours ago [-]
They literally said that Roundup is bad because of the OTHER chemicals that it contains in addition to Glyphosate which is not dangerous. Then it makes total sense to use pure Glyphosate instead of Roundup.
Of course you can claim that they are wrong about their claim. But that is another point.
parineum 3 hours ago [-]
> Unspecified Glyphosate product isn't better because it's not Roundup. If some ingredient in Roundup is dangerous, let's drop the Glyphosate conversation and look for herbicides without that other mystery chemical.
2 hours ago [-]
victorbjorklund 2 hours ago [-]
That makes no sense. If you accept that Glyphosate is 100% harmless. Why on earth would you drop it?
recursive 2 hours ago [-]
> Why on earth would you drop [Glyphosate]?
You wouldn't. You'd drop the conversation regarding whether it was safe.
rpmisms 5 hours ago [-]
The best-reasoned criticism of glyphosate is that it disrupts the gut biome (this is a fact). I suspect that many "gluten allergies" are actually gut biome problems from glyphosate-desiccated wheat.
tptacek 5 hours ago [-]
Anything that reaches the gut intact disrupts (ie: manipulates, interacts with, alters, stimulates or suppresses, selects) the gut biome. I'm not pushing back on you except to say that as a mechanistic axiomatic claim of harm, it's missing most of the evidence. You could be right, but you could also be wrong; what you've said so far can't possibly be dispositive.
rpmisms 5 hours ago [-]
The mechanism of action of glyphosate inhibits several important amino acid production processes in the gut. I'm simplifying here, but not having glyphosate in the food supply would be a good thing for the gut, and the science agrees on this.
Glyphosate for field prep also doesn't really come through in food, it's much worse with the pre-harvest desiccation.
mapt 5 hours ago [-]
You are inferring from our crude understanding of processes in general. Evidence is more specific.
Do you have an exclusion trial comparing glyphosate vs non-glyphosate diets? This is amenable to natural experiments where one country bans it on a specific date and the neighbor does not.
rpmisms 2 hours ago [-]
Here's a decent one: 13% of the UK reports gluten intolerance symptoms, and only 7% of Germany does. The UK allows pre-harvest glyphosate desiccation, Germany doesn't. I would be happy to bet that the trend continues past my quick Google search.
tptacek 43 minutes ago [-]
Surely there are no other lifestyle, supply chain, or medical system differences between the UK and Germany! Open and shut!
fragmede 38 minutes ago [-]
I mean, I went to an Ikea and a McDonald's in both those places, and they were the same, so surely everything else must be homogenized!
bigbadfeline 2 hours ago [-]
> Do you have an exclusion trial comparing glyphosate vs non-glyphosate diets?
That's a rather sneaky way to invert the issue. It's fishing for random luck when you ask for more and harder to obtain evidence given existing facts pointing to possible harm. A single study that doesn't show harm doesn't refute those that do.
You have to provide hard evidence that glyphosate (or another non-essential ingredient) does not cause adverse effects, and thoroughly explain the differences with the studies that show the opposite - until you do that, any in-vitro or other studies that show harmful effects count against the use of the product and you cannot ask for more evidence, you can only accept the remedies.
In this case, the appropriate remedies can be different: banning it altogether, limiting it to specific usage (e.g. no pre-harvest spraying), labeling using LARGE PRINT and scary language or some combination of the above.
tptacek 1 hours ago [-]
You can't even get smoked fish accepted through precautionary-principle logic like that. This is the same reasoning that puts cancer warnings on bags of potato chips.
bigbadfeline 6 minutes ago [-]
> You can't even get smoked fish accepted through precautionary-principle logic like that.
No, you really can't do that without breaking the Code of Federal Regulations. Smoked products must be labeled "smoked" in addition to many other requirements, and that despite the distinctive stink that self-labels these products. Even the font size is specified to be no smaller than the letters for the kind of meat on the label.
The real issue is why there's no such requirement for glyphosate, having it would be a good starting point.
> This is the same reasoning that puts cancer warnings on bags of potato chips.
I don't think all potato chips deserve, or have, such warnings but some might. Regardless, there might be specific regulations that are over the top and I don't mind admitting or discussing such cases but glyphosate isn't among them.
vkou 1 hours ago [-]
Smoked fish is a side, wheat is a staple. Degree matters.
If 90% of the raw food at the grocery were 'processed' in the same way that a smoked fish, or a french fry was, I think we'd have very valid reasons to be displeased with many of the myriad problems that come with that.
tptacek 42 minutes ago [-]
First, no it isn't, not in the cultures where it's believed to cause stomach cancer. Second: at the point where you're talking about distinguishing public policy based on whether something is a "side dish" or not, I think we've left the realm of plausibility and entered a wonderful new land I call "the voivodeship of special pleading".
ottah 2 hours ago [-]
I will never understand this bizarre obsession with gut flora. We don't know what is normal, what is a beneficial ratio or when a change happens if that is good or bad thing. No one besides the people who study these things should be much attention to gut microbiomes. We just don't have enough information to let this be an influence on decision making.
eagsalazar2 2 hours ago [-]
Your comment seems a little flippant honestly. I know what "disrupted" is, trust me. I developed a gluten sensitivity about 10 years ago but only figured it out 5 years ago. "Healthy" is "feels healthy" and "doesn't die young", that is pretty simple.
It sounds like you think this is about hypothetical and marginal health benefits but people have very acute and immediate physical (and cognitive) issues because of disrupted gut biome that are objectively improved by cutting out, in particular, gluten. This isn't just some weird obession.
array_key_first 10 minutes ago [-]
Gluten intolerance is a real thing but I don't think that necessarily means that your gut flora is damaged or whatever. Plenty of people are lactose intolerant, and their gut flora is fine, they're just lactose intolerant.
I don't think you could solve gluten intolerance but just improving your gut microbiome, so they're probably not related.
rpmisms 2 hours ago [-]
We know that it's really important to neurological function, which is enough reason to be careful.
tptacek 1 hours ago [-]
By itself, it's simply an argument that proves too much. Anything you ingest impacts your gut flora. There can be gut microbiome hypos about glyphosate! But you have to actually have them; you can't stop at "it impacts gut flora".
rpmisms 45 minutes ago [-]
Well, I didn't intend that as a conversation-ender, but it is true. This particular substance inhibits a particular function of certain gut flora that seems important. I think it's safe to call that significant.
tptacek 41 minutes ago [-]
What "particular function" is that? If it's "the part that influences neurological function", you don't have a complete argument. If you can't be specific about this, your argument falls apart, because almost everything we eat potentially "inhibits" (or accelerates) different areas of our gut flora.
pfdietz 24 minutes ago [-]
Changing your diet disrupts the gut biome. When I started eating bran flakes it massively disrupted my gut biome. Should I be alarmed? Or are you slipping a double standard in there, perhaps from the naturalistic fallacy?
jandrewrogers 5 hours ago [-]
AFAIK the preponderance of the evidence is that most "gluten sensitivity" is actually just a FODMAP sensitivity, which also interacts with the gut biome.
AnimalMuppet 2 hours ago [-]
Off topic, but can someone ELI5 (or at least ELI20) what the deal is with FODMAP? I keep hearing about it, but I don't understand it at all.
jml7c5 53 minutes ago [-]
The Wikipedia page for it is pretty good. Basically, there are a number of short-chain carbohydrates that tend to pass through the small intestine (where nutrients are digested and absorbed into the bloodstream) and reach the large intestine (where water is removed). Bacteria in the large intestine eat these nutrients (fermentation). In some people, this causes intestinal distress. (Bloating, gas, discomfort, watery stool, etc.) It's not clear why this only affects some people.
You hear a lot about it because a large subset of people have discovered that a low-FODMAP diet relieves their torment of intestinal distress.
saxonww 55 minutes ago [-]
FODMAP stands for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. FODMAPs generate gas as side effect of being fermented in the gut. Most people just pass this gas, but for some people, usually people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), it can be very uncomfortable and amplify their other IBS problems.
People who are suffering from pain and bloating with no obvious cause may be advised to go on a low-FODMAP diet for a few weeks to see if their symptoms go away.
tptacek 40 minutes ago [-]
We just had a story about de-farting beans on the front page. The FODMAPs are (among other things) the bean farts.
array_key_first 13 minutes ago [-]
People who have gluten allergies have a legitimate disease, typically celiac disease.
Being tired after eating bread or whatever is not a gluten allergy, that's just how food works. A lot of people claim to have gluten allergies but no, you would know for sure if you had a gluten allergy.
themafia 4 hours ago [-]
> a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself
Is it required that the public have a "good reason" for wanting something?
> glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments
We used to spray DDT everywhere. This isn't exactly a resounding recommendation. Perhaps there's a case for using as little additives in farming as is possible.
parineum 1 hours ago [-]
> Is it required that the public have a "good reason" for wanting something?
Not required but it's a nice to have, especially if the thing they want done is to have the desired outcome.
themafia 1 hours ago [-]
The desired outcome is simply not using Glyphosate. I'm not seeing how "reasonability" of this idea impacts it's implementation.
If you find someone using it you severely fine them and/or put them in jail.
sokoloff 50 minutes ago [-]
I’m sure someone’s desired outcome is to stop using urea or ammonium nitrate as a fertilizer.
“Reasonability of X” factors into many people’s assessment of “should we do X or not-X?”
tptacek 39 minutes ago [-]
Why is that a desired outcome?
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
No, it isn't. What's your point?
themafia 1 hours ago [-]
Your quip follows a trope:
"There's a weird reason the public wants this and it has little to do with the thing itself."
Very often the implication being:
"Therefore the public is wrong and should be ignored."
tptacek 40 minutes ago [-]
I think the public is in fact wrong, but that has nothing to do with my argument.
quickthrowman 5 hours ago [-]
> There's a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself (as someone else on this thread pointed out, glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments), but rather with the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops.
I still don’t understand why people seem to care about genetically modified glyphosate tolerant soybeans and corn, they’re mostly fed to animals anyways.
Crossbreeding plants is genetic modification.
yosamino 4 hours ago [-]
Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.
Essentially turning
> You wouldn't download a car
into
> You wouldn't plant your seed for your crop.
Which is obviously absurd.
So while GM has enabled some pretty good things, it also comes with the same sort of intellectual property baggage that plagues many different areas of society, which on the face of it make some sense, but always seem to skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life, squeezing from those who have less to begin with.
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think the case law supports this argument that farmers got roped into subscription crops. Farmers use this system because it has value, and is economically superior to the systems that preceded it (or they don't use it).
yosamino 32 minutes ago [-]
I worded it so carefully to not have an argument, just for illustration, but...
Yes, you are correct, and you are not contradicting me: This is a system that makes sense on the surface.
It's economically superior to pay some more money to a seed supplier to get a better yield on my fields.
But this economic advantage is captured by the seed supplier after all farmers moved to this new system where you are no longer able to rely on the previous' harvest seeds. Once everyone is on the economically superior system, the seed supplier can start capturing more of the value that is created by farming.
The point here is that Monsanto creates a superior yield in a crop. All your farmer peers move to use it, and now you have to too or get priced out of the market.
hence:
> skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life.
> skew
The word "farmers" is doing some heavy lifting here - might be some multinational, might be a small family making a living.
The point is not that the market is pricing out inefficient farms, the point is that it turns a millennia old practice on it's head and using government force to enable monopolies to remove competition.
Farmers use it because their time horizon is 1-5 years, but the government monopoly on seeds is more like 20 years.
It's skewed.
Easy to disagree and argue with these points, but the original question was why there are people opposed to GMOs and while GMOs are not the only patented organisms they are the most obvious for people to have concerns over the economics
pfdietz 12 minutes ago [-]
I find the objection to patents on GMO plants to be completely indefensible.
If there was ever an area where patents are justified and necessary, this is it. This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again.
Objection to patents on GMO plants is just a way to object to GMO plants themselves without coming out and saying so directly.
victorbjorklund 3 hours ago [-]
There is a problem though. If you opt out of it and just use seeds without any IP and your neighbor uses IP seeds and some of the seeds are blowing into your field from your neighbour you risk trouble.
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
No in fact you do not. This is an Internet/activist myth.
victorbjorklund 2 hours ago [-]
Source that it is legal to keep the profits and the plants from a patented crop that can’t be prove you have intentionally planted it there? As far as I understand Montosanto claims it would always belong to them no matter how the seed ended up there.
tptacek 1 hours ago [-]
Feel free to cite the case they've brought where they claim that!
They have sued farmers for innocently acquiring their seeds (through the wind or whatever) and then spraying their crops with Roundup (ie: using the whole system).
HDThoreaun 1 hours ago [-]
There is absolutely no case law suggesting it is illegal to harvest and keep accidentally cross contaminated seed. Seeing as farming seeds is default legal there would need to be precedent otherwise for such an act to be illegal.
parineum 1 hours ago [-]
> Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.
They don't get roped into anything. They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost. Further, at least part of the reasoning for not allowing replanting is to avoid genetic deviation in future generations of crop.
yosamino 22 minutes ago [-]
> They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost.
That is correct. They are so much better ( and I am in awe of that technology) that outside of some niches (depending on the crop) as a farmer you cannot afford not to use them. But now your farmer-timeframe of a few years is up against a 20 year artificial monopoly in the form of a patent. And all your peers are facing the same situation. This isn't a situation where you can just decide to do whatever you want.
You suddenly find yourself dependent on a third party that knows your situation exactly and will try to extract the most amount of value from you - trying to capture your profit while keeping you healthy enough to keep being a customer.
This skews towards the seed supplier.
parineum 18 minutes ago [-]
> as a farmer you cannot afford not to use them.
Yes, because it's a good product.
Farmer's can't afford not to use tractors or artificial irrigation either.
It's not sinister to develop a product that is better than the competition.
> This skews towards the seed supplier.
Right up until someone else makes a better product.
yosamino 3 minutes ago [-]
> Right up until someone else makes a better product.
Yes. A different seed supplier. My point isn't that it's morally wrong to make a better product. My point is that the way it's set up is that those who are in the position to make a better patented-product are in an unbalancedly better position towards the people who use the product to create something as fundamentally important as food.
victorbjorklund 3 hours ago [-]
There are IP protections for non-GMO seeds as well.
pfdietz 17 minutes ago [-]
It's some combination of ideological opposition to GMOs and a way to get trade barriers against import of cheap grain and soybeans from the US to the EU. The latter is less important now that Trump has blown up free trade.
doctorpangloss 5 hours ago [-]
So what do you think?
tptacek 5 hours ago [-]
I think that this will be material to me in the sense in which it resolves some questions about whether Oak Park, the ultra-blue inner-ring suburb suburb in which I live, can ban gas ranges, which I enjoy cooking on. I guess I think Bayer has the better case here.
In the message board controversy over glyphosate itself, I don't think this case has much to say. The state labeling regime was either preempted or not; that's a technicality of state and federal statutory evaluation. If the labeling regime is enforceable, it doesn't much matter whether it was about IARC classification or midichlorian counts. Strict liability is strict liability.
The substantive part of this case, whether glyphosate is an inherently dangerous or flawed product, was resolved by the trier of fact in favor of Monsanto.
A simpler way to say all of this: "the safety of glyphosate is not before this court".
doctorpangloss 4 hours ago [-]
> whether glyphosate is an inherently dangerous or flawed product, was resolved by the trier of fact in favor of Monsanto.
You: "Courtrooms are the appropriate final venue to determine if something is inherently dangerous, using the word inherently purposefully, as I do not misuse words, as long as the result is something I agree with."
> Oak Park, the ultra-blue inner-ring suburb suburb in which I live, can ban gas ranges, which I enjoy cooking on
I guess this is why you and I write on random social media forums instead of getting elected.
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
In the past several years I've proposed, help draft, and gotten passed one law (making us the first municipality in Illinois with an anti-surveillance ordinance), co-wrote our municipality's police general order on ALPRs limiting them to violent crime, and created the transparency regime that allowed us to cancel our Flock contract. I've spent the last 3 years working on eliminating single family zoning, which we are likely to accomplish in just a couple months. I've funded and run two campaigns, one of which succeeded. I'm an appointed commissioner in the muni.
I got all of this done by... posting on random forums.
doctorpangloss 3 hours ago [-]
haha look i'll vote for you if you run for something, but you've run a campaign, you'll agree: all the activism in the world, and the people who win student council elections have won more elections than you and i have
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not interested in running for office; I'm very interested in helping other people run. My theory of change doesn't involve me holding office. In fact: my theory of change is heavily dependent on posting comments! It seems to be working out for me.
nekusar 4 hours ago [-]
> Since 1991, the EPA has held that glyphosate is not carcinogenic; it was (at the time) categorized "Group E", which means that not only is there not evidence for it being carcinogenic, but that there is material evidence that it is not. Later, IARC (in a decision that was controversial among global public health agencies) listed glyphosate as a 2A probable carcinogen, alongside red meat, potatoes, deep fryer oil, and a slew of scary chemicals that includes many other insecticides and herbicides.
Excuse me if I dont believe "this stuff isnt harmful".
And Arsenic was once safe.
Asbestos was the most amazing fireproof wonder material.
Thalidomide was a wonder drug with no side effects.
Tetraethyl lead was perfectly safe everywhere.
Fen-phen was a great diet drug.
Id also add "consumption of fluoride in water supply" (topical/toothpaste makes sense, consumption does not).
atrus 2 hours ago [-]
Those aren't really great examples, considering that Arsenic and Asbestos have been known to be harmful for centuries/millennia.
Thalidomide never even made it to use in the USA.
Fluoride being good for teeth was discovered by fluoride naturally being in the water already
Can't speak for the other two, but I hope you're not basing your fears on stuff like that.
FireBeyond 57 minutes ago [-]
> Thalidomide never even made it to use in the USA.
What? It was initially blocked by the FDA, but was later approved for use in cancer, where it is in fact a front line drug for some myelomas, albeit with significant usage warnings.
atrus 42 minutes ago [-]
Fair, I was talking more the initial pregnancy use, but even still that further pushes my point that those examples have either never been considered perfectly safe, or have been in active normal usage for so many years that you really have to squint to say it's unsafe.
tptacek 37 minutes ago [-]
It was never approved in the US for the on-label use for which it gained its reputation (it's a potent teratogen and was prescribed --- never officially in the US --- for morning sickness).
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, you can believe whatever you want to believe, and the EPA can be wrong, but "the EPA has been claiming X since 1991" is not a very powerful argument for "not X".
(There are mechanistic reasons to believe glyphosate is less harmful than other landscaping treatments; it has a fairly elegant mode of action.)
keane 3 hours ago [-]
Omitted here is mention that the EPA designation is under review: “the Agency is currently updating its evaluation of the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate to better explain its findings and include the current relevant scientific information”. Their February 2020 registration review decision was withdrawn and their new interim registration has not been completed.
—https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/glyp...
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
I don't really care about EPA's designation. I discussed it upthread because it's very important to the legal case.
keane 3 hours ago [-]
I’m not claiming you needed to mention this in your original post about the lawsuit. This fact would be relevant in the sub thread here with nekusar about what we can or cannot draw from the designation.
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
The logical flaw in their argument also doesn't depend on the EPA's actions! In fact, the additional color you added works against the claim, in their logic.
keane 60 minutes ago [-]
Strictly speaking, you're right: they're more than prepared to disregard the position of the EPA (all of us seem willing to). But said designation being currently under review is pertinent to the possibility they raise, namely that consensus has changed in the past, and sometimes the more skeptical or conservative heading taken preemptively has been borne out wise.
nekusar 3 hours ago [-]
Part of that is that I've seen enough evidence between the FDA and EPA that regulatory capture is a thing, and more stuff that we are exposed to and consume are more poisonous than they let on.
Ive also seen that with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ractopamine which is banned in most of the world. Decent countries straight up banned it, since it doesnt degrade with slaughter or cooking. My SO is also allergic to it as well - thats evidenced by not being able to eat US/Canadian pork, but being able to eat Spanish/European pork.
Tl;dr. Regulatory capture has made most of US food not good, potentially toxic, and full of nasty shit we dont want to eat. But hey, selling toxic food makes money for someone.
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not arguing that the EPA is right or trustworthy. I'm saying that if you want to argue the opposite of what they claim, you need evidence beyond "the EPA disagrees with me".
mindslight 5 hours ago [-]
It sounds like this would actually be good to decide now if the court were truly a "conservative" court - there is no legitimate reason for preemption to apply to labeling laws (even as broken as California's labeling law is), as labeling a product a certain way is not a mutually-exclusive action. But I expect the rank hypocrisy will win out, especially with the "culture war" backdrop of California delenda est.
AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago [-]
> there is no legitimate reason for preemption to apply to labeling laws (even as broken as California's labeling law is), as labeling a product a certain way is not a mutually-exclusive action.
That's not really what preemption is about. A major point of having "interstate commerce" -- actual products crossing state lines -- at the federal level, is to prevent states from enacting trade barriers.
Suppose California disproportionately has more organic food producers and other states make higher proportions of food products grown with glyphosate. California then passes a law requiring the latter (i.e. disproportionately out-of-state) products to carry a scary warning label based on inconclusive evidence. Are they trying to enact a trade barrier? It sure looks like one. Meanwhile if the stuff is actually dangerous then it's dangerous in all 50 states, so the warning label should either be everywhere or nowhere according to the evidence, right?
Relatedly, having dozens or (at the city level) hundreds of different sets of rules is also a kind of trade barrier. Some small business in Ohio is willing to ship nationwide but every state has different rules, they might be inclined to cut off everyone who isn't in the local area since that's where they get most of their current sales, but that's bad. So then there is a legitimate interest in being able to say the rules have to be uniform if the states start trying to micromanage too much.
The better way to do this would be to only apply the interstate commerce rules to actual interstate commerce. So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California. A lot of states would then say you have to follow the federal interstate rules even if you don't cross state lines, but it would be their decision and some might not.
vkou 1 hours ago [-]
> Meanwhile if the stuff is actually dangerous then it's dangerous in all 50 states, so the warning label should either be everywhere or nowhere according to the evidence, right?
Only if other states or the federal government give that much of a shit about food safety, which is not a guarantee, both in theory and in practice. They might, for instance, care more about agri-profits than California does.
> So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California.
That's just a regulatory-arbitrage race to the bottom. You'd just have out-of-state producers that don't have to follow any of your laws out-competing local ones.
tptacek 36 minutes ago [-]
It's the opposite of a race to the bottom. The federal government sets a single standard for the country. The same logic you're advocating is also the conservative argument for health care regulation --- that is, allow the states to preempt the federal standards so they can offer cheaper insurance by lowering standards.
tptacek 2 hours ago [-]
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munk-a 14 minutes ago [-]
Isn't there some bureaucratic way to just tie up the Supreme Court for three years? Their rulings have been extremely damaging and we need a sane balance to return before important stuff like this ends up being decided.
chromacity 5 hours ago [-]
It's striking how many of these "product safety" cases are decided in the court of public opinion, independent of actual scientific merit. The case of DDT was pretty interesting. More recently, we have microplastics - no one has really shown they're dangerous to humans, but there's enough hand-waving that "everyone knows" they're killing us. And aspartame, etc...
Glyphosate is probably the safest of the things people spray their lawns with. I don't think we should - the worst you get on a typical suburban lawn if you mow but don't spray are dandelions and clover - but it's probably not giving you cancer. As for food... again, there are far worse, more persistent pesticides that escape this kind of scrutiny.
pfdietz 3 minutes ago [-]
> Glyphosate is probably the safest of the things people spray their lawns with.
Glyphosate kills grass, so I would not recommend this unless you are planning to reseed from scratch (or replace the grass with something else).
Are there "Roundup Ready" grass seeds?
titzer 3 hours ago [-]
Well I don't know of people claiming that microplastics are "killing us", there are dozens of papers that implicate microplastics in negative health effects from hearts to intestines, to sperm.
There are a lot of studies that find correlations, and then are studies like this one that show that the direct introduction of microplastics alters cell functions negatively:
I think at this point we should stop talking about how "there's no data" or "no studies" and "no one has shown" and graduate to "oh, maybe should figure out the extent of the damage."
Microplastic pollution is a global problem amongst a whole host of global pollution problems. We'd do well to try to figure out how bad it is, because it isn't going away. Oh, and we should probably work on fixing all of our pollution problems, especially cumulative ones like this.
(This is a summary of a Nature Matters Arising article).
adzm 2 hours ago [-]
People are usually spraying broadleaf herbicides on their lawn like 2,4-D to control things like dandelions and yard plantains. Glyphosate just kills everything. Personally I only use it very selectively on poison ivy.
thayne 5 hours ago [-]
> the worst you get on a typical suburban lawn if you mow but don't spray are dandelions and clover
I also get a lot of morning glory AKA bindweed that kills my grass. But spraying doesn't really help with that anyway, so :shrug:.
EvanAnderson 4 hours ago [-]
Bindweed is evil incarnate in plant form. Wouldn't wish that on anybody.
jay_kyburz 2 hours ago [-]
We hand some log droughts here about 10 years ago where you were not allowed to water the lawn at all.
I would have expected a single dominate weed to take over, but instead, if I let the grass grow for 6-8 weeks in summer I get this amazing field of different knee length plants. And it alive with bee's and butterflies.
I much prefer it to lawn.
tptacek 5 hours ago [-]
Worth noting here that the trier of fact in this case mostly agrees with you about this stuff; the issue is that the state statutes in question created strict liability conditions for failure to comply with warning label regimes. The plaintiff brought substantive charges about Roundup to the case, and the jury rejected them.
5 hours ago [-]
dralley 6 hours ago [-]
Still probably the safest herbicide, mainly because the competition (organophosphates, etc.) is so much worse.
whyenot 5 hours ago [-]
From an environmental perspective you are probably right. One of the nice things is that glyphosate, unlike most herbicides, is broken down quickly by soil bacteria.
The longer term issue is evolved weed resistance due to its over use with "Roundup Ready" crops and for end of the season dry down.
saalweachter 5 hours ago [-]
I think the fears about glyphosate resistance owes too much to antibiotic resistance, but I am not really sure it makes sense.
I suppose there's some regimen where you carefully monitor every plant sprayed with a weedkiller is monitored for survival and killed with fire if it survives, or some other extreme measure to be sure there are no survivors to develop resistance, but realistically the weeds are going to develop resistances over time.
And ... so what? The value of a weedkiller like glyphosate is using it to kill a lot of weeds in wide-scale agriculture. If the weeds develop a resistance to it, and we stop using it because it's no longer effective, we're not really in a worse position than if we never used it at all. It's not like there are some really bad weeds we need to save it to be able to combat.
philips 6 hours ago [-]
What point are you trying to illuminate with this comment?
A 22 caliber is safer than a 40 caliber. But, I still wouldn’t a hole made in me from either.
tptacek 6 hours ago [-]
That people would be on the whole less healthy had glyphosate not been on the market, because other herbicides, all of which were and are in common use, are worse.
It's not a complicated argument.
Der_Einzige 6 hours ago [-]
The alternative is mass starvation.
yxhuvud 6 hours ago [-]
No, mass starvation would not ensue from having to fight weeds using mechanical means. It would take more work and more fuel, but it is eminently doable if the need is there. Especially if the change would be gradual.
Making do without artificial fertilizer would be a lot harder.
bluGill 5 hours ago [-]
Increased fuel means a lot more CO2. That is a very significant factor you cannot ignore.
nozzlegear 4 hours ago [-]
Perhaps if herbicides weren't viable, more work would've gone into developing the mechanical alternatives and we'd have had solar-powered machines removing weeds from fields.
yxhuvud 2 hours ago [-]
More CO2 compared to what tractors use today, yes. But that is not a lot compared to the rest of the human civilization spend on transportation.
So no, it is not a very significant factor.
gustavus 6 hours ago [-]
Increased work and fuel means increased costs, increased costs means increased prices, increased prices means less food available for purchase by those on the margins, less food means starvation.
jayd16 6 hours ago [-]
So anything that effects food prices, regardless of magnitude, causes mass starvation?
victorbjorklund 3 hours ago [-]
No, not regardless of magnitude. But anything that have a large impact on food prices will decrease the ability of poor people to pay for it. It’s not rocket science.
jayd16 2 hours ago [-]
Then it's a discussion about magnitude and jumping to starvation is unfounded.
HDThoreaun 1 hours ago [-]
Anything that causes food prices to rise a lot causes starvation yea, when prices go up people consume less.
conductr 3 hours ago [-]
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luigibosco 5 hours ago [-]
I don't think that is the only alternative. If the end goal is to preserve life for humans, completely nuking the soil into a wasteland, treating it with carcinogens and then allowing a company to genetically modify seeds and copyright them is a pretty bad and short sighted strategy.
Allowing a known carcinogen to make crops "easier to harvest" has to do with profit margin not food supply. People literally use this to kill dandelions in their yards. I have known many people who have died from cancer. I have eaten dandelions, while bitter, are actually healthy. A good start would be to work with nature instead of trying to out engineer it.
If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.
0xbadcafebee 4 hours ago [-]
> If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.
Yes. That is literally exactly what we're doing. You can't sustain the current human population without fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels. Half the people on the planet would die.
If we don't want half the planet to die, we need pesticides. So do you choose a pesticide that's more harmful, or less? If you said "less", then you want glyphosate.
criddell 4 hours ago [-]
I think you meant to write herbicide rather than pesticide.
tptacek 5 hours ago [-]
You both have premises that are too far apart to debate productively; what you're really debating is naturalism vs. technology, scale vs. degrowth, humanism vs. environmentalism. All worthwhile philosophical debates, but you won't get anywhere sniping at each other about them.
cmiles8 4 hours ago [-]
The evidence on glyphosphate causing cancer isn’t particularly strong.
I wouldn’t bathe in the stuff, but the data strongly indicates it’s one of the more benign compounds used in agriculture and landscaping.
perrygeo 3 hours ago [-]
WHO classifies it as "Probably carcinogenic to humans". But it's important to talk about the exposure model.
Glyphosate in our food supply - almost no evidence of cancer risk. (The gut microbiome is affected though).
Direct and sustained contact to glyphosate as an agricultural worker - potentially very severe risks, particularly non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The data is strong but epidemiological.
So yeah, I think your conclusion is roughly correct. Don't bathe in it. Probably avoid using it at home or work. But otherwise, its not a serious risk to consumers.
parineum 1 hours ago [-]
Included in this list under the same classification (2A)[1]:
> Night shift work
> Red meat (consumption of)
> Very hot beverages at above 65 °C (drinking)
Defined as[2]:
> Group 2A: The agent is probably carcinogenic to humans
> This category is used when there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and either sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals or strong mechanistic evidence, showing that the agent exhibits key characteristics of human carcinogens. Limited evidence of carcinogenicity means that a positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent and cancer but that other explanations for the observations (technically termed “chance”, “bias”, or “confounding”) could not be ruled out with reasonable confidence. This category may also be used when there is inadequate evidence regarding carcinogenicity in humans but both sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals and strong mechanistic evidence in human cells or tissues.
Only a matter of time before japanese knotwood takes over north america. Glyphosate seems to be the only thing that stops this aggressive weed
matthest 4 hours ago [-]
Goats > glyphosate
conductr 3 hours ago [-]
If you found a way to train them to only eat the weeds I think you’d be onto something
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
They definitely taste better.
burnt-resistor 2 hours ago [-]
A reminder that most US non-organic oats contain high levels of glyphosate residues because farmers use it as a desiccant to reduce harvest fuel consumption.
And also almost all bread in the US including organic contain 10-1000 ppb of glyphosate.
America's food supply is fucked because of rampant greed, a lack of proper regulation, and a lack of application of the precautionary principle.
nemo44x 3 hours ago [-]
Roundup has saved far more lives than it may have cut short, if any.
Since 1991, the EPA has held that glyphosate is not carcinogenic; it was (at the time) categorized "Group E", which means that not only is there not evidence for it being carcinogenic, but that there is material evidence that it is not. Later, IARC (in a decision that was controversial among global public health agencies) listed glyphosate as a 2A probable carcinogen, alongside red meat, potatoes, deep fryer oil, and a slew of scary chemicals that includes many other insecticides and herbicides.
States like California enacted labeling-law regimes that key in part off IARC's classification, which meant that in those states Roundup products required labeling. Monsanto/Bayer lost civil cases based on failure to label.
That's the domain-specific stuff. What the court likely cares about is the preemption doctrine. In a variety of different situations, competing state and federal statutes are by explicit or implicit preemption rules. In many cases, federal preemption is a result of bargains with industry: for instance, we got programs like Energy Star after negotiations where industry (and the states dependent on those industries) made concessions to the federal government in exchange for exemptions from state regulation, which is why there's controversy over local municipal ordinances that attempt to ban gas ranges (apropos nothing, but: combustion products of gas ranges: also IARC carcinogens).
There's a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself (as someone else on this thread pointed out, glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments), but rather with the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops.
For those people it's worth knowing that the civil liability Monsanto/Bayer is trying to avoid here is approximately the same as the reason Jays Potato Chips bags sometimes have "Not For Sale In California" labeling. Nobody has declared that Roundup is categorically unsafe. Some states have declared that you have to label it the same way you would a gas station or Disneyland ride.
I know what you meant, and I suspect everyone reading it does too, but this is the type of sentence where the ambiguity amuses me. It's certainly true that most of the controversies before the Supreme Court aren't about glyphosate!
It was mentioned on a podcast recently that in many cases, the SC is not making a decision on what should/shouldn't happen/be the policy/is correct or whatever. They are deciding which layer of government gets to decide a given question. The Executive Branch? Legislation? Constitution? Who is the controlling entity?
Now, in a practical sense, by the time it gets to the SC, making a decision on who gets to decide, is, functionally, picking what the outcome is, since the various layers of government have already made their positions clear.
But the upshot is, if one is upset with what happens with a given policy after a SC decision, in many cases (although not all), the proper target of one's ire should not be the SC; since what they are usually saying is something like "this is something that is controlled by statute. If the statute is dumb/bad/poorly written, that is not our fault nor within our control, take it up with Congress to rewrite the statue", and instead one should be upset with whoever the controlling entity is for doing a bad job (in recent years: most commonly congress, not so much for doing a bad job so much as not doing any job)
Also worth noting that Monsanto could stop selling Roundup entirely, and it wouldn't really matter. Monsanto's Glyphosate patent expired, so you can get cheaper Glyphosate from many different manufacturers. Which is great, because it means we can avoid the potentially-more-dangerous Roundup, and use the simpler base chemical instead. Distancing the pesticide from the "evil corporation" might actually make people less afraid of it.
Like the tobacco industry before them, a Monsanto employee proposed producing a scientific paper with outside scientists: “by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak” — see https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art...
Unspecified Glyphosate product isn't better because it's not Roundup. If some ingredient in Roundup is dangerous, let's drop the Glyphosate conversation and look for herbicides without that other mystery chemical.
It really seems like you're looking for a reason to justify Roundup as uniquely bad, in the face of evidence, with extremely vague statements.
Of course you can claim that they are wrong about their claim. But that is another point.
You wouldn't. You'd drop the conversation regarding whether it was safe.
Glyphosate for field prep also doesn't really come through in food, it's much worse with the pre-harvest desiccation.
Do you have an exclusion trial comparing glyphosate vs non-glyphosate diets? This is amenable to natural experiments where one country bans it on a specific date and the neighbor does not.
That's a rather sneaky way to invert the issue. It's fishing for random luck when you ask for more and harder to obtain evidence given existing facts pointing to possible harm. A single study that doesn't show harm doesn't refute those that do.
You have to provide hard evidence that glyphosate (or another non-essential ingredient) does not cause adverse effects, and thoroughly explain the differences with the studies that show the opposite - until you do that, any in-vitro or other studies that show harmful effects count against the use of the product and you cannot ask for more evidence, you can only accept the remedies.
In this case, the appropriate remedies can be different: banning it altogether, limiting it to specific usage (e.g. no pre-harvest spraying), labeling using LARGE PRINT and scary language or some combination of the above.
No, you really can't do that without breaking the Code of Federal Regulations. Smoked products must be labeled "smoked" in addition to many other requirements, and that despite the distinctive stink that self-labels these products. Even the font size is specified to be no smaller than the letters for the kind of meat on the label.
The real issue is why there's no such requirement for glyphosate, having it would be a good starting point.
> This is the same reasoning that puts cancer warnings on bags of potato chips.
I don't think all potato chips deserve, or have, such warnings but some might. Regardless, there might be specific regulations that are over the top and I don't mind admitting or discussing such cases but glyphosate isn't among them.
If 90% of the raw food at the grocery were 'processed' in the same way that a smoked fish, or a french fry was, I think we'd have very valid reasons to be displeased with many of the myriad problems that come with that.
It sounds like you think this is about hypothetical and marginal health benefits but people have very acute and immediate physical (and cognitive) issues because of disrupted gut biome that are objectively improved by cutting out, in particular, gluten. This isn't just some weird obession.
I don't think you could solve gluten intolerance but just improving your gut microbiome, so they're probably not related.
You hear a lot about it because a large subset of people have discovered that a low-FODMAP diet relieves their torment of intestinal distress.
People who are suffering from pain and bloating with no obvious cause may be advised to go on a low-FODMAP diet for a few weeks to see if their symptoms go away.
Being tired after eating bread or whatever is not a gluten allergy, that's just how food works. A lot of people claim to have gluten allergies but no, you would know for sure if you had a gluten allergy.
Is it required that the public have a "good reason" for wanting something?
> glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments
We used to spray DDT everywhere. This isn't exactly a resounding recommendation. Perhaps there's a case for using as little additives in farming as is possible.
Not required but it's a nice to have, especially if the thing they want done is to have the desired outcome.
If you find someone using it you severely fine them and/or put them in jail.
“Reasonability of X” factors into many people’s assessment of “should we do X or not-X?”
"There's a weird reason the public wants this and it has little to do with the thing itself."
Very often the implication being:
"Therefore the public is wrong and should be ignored."
I still don’t understand why people seem to care about genetically modified glyphosate tolerant soybeans and corn, they’re mostly fed to animals anyways.
Crossbreeding plants is genetic modification.
Essentially turning
> You wouldn't download a car
into
> You wouldn't plant your seed for your crop.
Which is obviously absurd.
So while GM has enabled some pretty good things, it also comes with the same sort of intellectual property baggage that plagues many different areas of society, which on the face of it make some sense, but always seem to skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life, squeezing from those who have less to begin with.
Yes, you are correct, and you are not contradicting me: This is a system that makes sense on the surface. It's economically superior to pay some more money to a seed supplier to get a better yield on my fields.
But this economic advantage is captured by the seed supplier after all farmers moved to this new system where you are no longer able to rely on the previous' harvest seeds. Once everyone is on the economically superior system, the seed supplier can start capturing more of the value that is created by farming.
The point here is that Monsanto creates a superior yield in a crop. All your farmer peers move to use it, and now you have to too or get priced out of the market.
hence: > skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life. > skew
The word "farmers" is doing some heavy lifting here - might be some multinational, might be a small family making a living.
The point is not that the market is pricing out inefficient farms, the point is that it turns a millennia old practice on it's head and using government force to enable monopolies to remove competition.
Farmers use it because their time horizon is 1-5 years, but the government monopoly on seeds is more like 20 years.
It's skewed.
Easy to disagree and argue with these points, but the original question was why there are people opposed to GMOs and while GMOs are not the only patented organisms they are the most obvious for people to have concerns over the economics
If there was ever an area where patents are justified and necessary, this is it. This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again.
Objection to patents on GMO plants is just a way to object to GMO plants themselves without coming out and saying so directly.
They have sued farmers for innocently acquiring their seeds (through the wind or whatever) and then spraying their crops with Roundup (ie: using the whole system).
They don't get roped into anything. They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost. Further, at least part of the reasoning for not allowing replanting is to avoid genetic deviation in future generations of crop.
That is correct. They are so much better ( and I am in awe of that technology) that outside of some niches (depending on the crop) as a farmer you cannot afford not to use them. But now your farmer-timeframe of a few years is up against a 20 year artificial monopoly in the form of a patent. And all your peers are facing the same situation. This isn't a situation where you can just decide to do whatever you want.
You suddenly find yourself dependent on a third party that knows your situation exactly and will try to extract the most amount of value from you - trying to capture your profit while keeping you healthy enough to keep being a customer.
This skews towards the seed supplier.
Yes, because it's a good product.
Farmer's can't afford not to use tractors or artificial irrigation either.
It's not sinister to develop a product that is better than the competition.
> This skews towards the seed supplier.
Right up until someone else makes a better product.
Yes. A different seed supplier. My point isn't that it's morally wrong to make a better product. My point is that the way it's set up is that those who are in the position to make a better patented-product are in an unbalancedly better position towards the people who use the product to create something as fundamentally important as food.
In the message board controversy over glyphosate itself, I don't think this case has much to say. The state labeling regime was either preempted or not; that's a technicality of state and federal statutory evaluation. If the labeling regime is enforceable, it doesn't much matter whether it was about IARC classification or midichlorian counts. Strict liability is strict liability.
The substantive part of this case, whether glyphosate is an inherently dangerous or flawed product, was resolved by the trier of fact in favor of Monsanto.
A simpler way to say all of this: "the safety of glyphosate is not before this court".
You: "Courtrooms are the appropriate final venue to determine if something is inherently dangerous, using the word inherently purposefully, as I do not misuse words, as long as the result is something I agree with."
> Oak Park, the ultra-blue inner-ring suburb suburb in which I live, can ban gas ranges, which I enjoy cooking on
I guess this is why you and I write on random social media forums instead of getting elected.
I got all of this done by... posting on random forums.
Excuse me if I dont believe "this stuff isnt harmful".
And Arsenic was once safe.
Asbestos was the most amazing fireproof wonder material.
Thalidomide was a wonder drug with no side effects.
Tetraethyl lead was perfectly safe everywhere.
Fen-phen was a great diet drug.
Id also add "consumption of fluoride in water supply" (topical/toothpaste makes sense, consumption does not).
Thalidomide never even made it to use in the USA.
Fluoride being good for teeth was discovered by fluoride naturally being in the water already
Can't speak for the other two, but I hope you're not basing your fears on stuff like that.
What? It was initially blocked by the FDA, but was later approved for use in cancer, where it is in fact a front line drug for some myelomas, albeit with significant usage warnings.
(There are mechanistic reasons to believe glyphosate is less harmful than other landscaping treatments; it has a fairly elegant mode of action.)
Ive also seen that with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ractopamine which is banned in most of the world. Decent countries straight up banned it, since it doesnt degrade with slaughter or cooking. My SO is also allergic to it as well - thats evidenced by not being able to eat US/Canadian pork, but being able to eat Spanish/European pork.
Tl;dr. Regulatory capture has made most of US food not good, potentially toxic, and full of nasty shit we dont want to eat. But hey, selling toxic food makes money for someone.
That's not really what preemption is about. A major point of having "interstate commerce" -- actual products crossing state lines -- at the federal level, is to prevent states from enacting trade barriers.
Suppose California disproportionately has more organic food producers and other states make higher proportions of food products grown with glyphosate. California then passes a law requiring the latter (i.e. disproportionately out-of-state) products to carry a scary warning label based on inconclusive evidence. Are they trying to enact a trade barrier? It sure looks like one. Meanwhile if the stuff is actually dangerous then it's dangerous in all 50 states, so the warning label should either be everywhere or nowhere according to the evidence, right?
Relatedly, having dozens or (at the city level) hundreds of different sets of rules is also a kind of trade barrier. Some small business in Ohio is willing to ship nationwide but every state has different rules, they might be inclined to cut off everyone who isn't in the local area since that's where they get most of their current sales, but that's bad. So then there is a legitimate interest in being able to say the rules have to be uniform if the states start trying to micromanage too much.
The better way to do this would be to only apply the interstate commerce rules to actual interstate commerce. So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California. A lot of states would then say you have to follow the federal interstate rules even if you don't cross state lines, but it would be their decision and some might not.
Only if other states or the federal government give that much of a shit about food safety, which is not a guarantee, both in theory and in practice. They might, for instance, care more about agri-profits than California does.
> So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California.
That's just a regulatory-arbitrage race to the bottom. You'd just have out-of-state producers that don't have to follow any of your laws out-competing local ones.
Glyphosate is probably the safest of the things people spray their lawns with. I don't think we should - the worst you get on a typical suburban lawn if you mow but don't spray are dandelions and clover - but it's probably not giving you cancer. As for food... again, there are far worse, more persistent pesticides that escape this kind of scrutiny.
Glyphosate kills grass, so I would not recommend this unless you are planning to reseed from scratch (or replace the grass with something else).
Are there "Roundup Ready" grass seeds?
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2309822
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c09524
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c03924
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...
There are a lot of studies that find correlations, and then are studies like this one that show that the direct introduction of microplastics alters cell functions negatively:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12692081/
I think at this point we should stop talking about how "there's no data" or "no studies" and "no one has shown" and graduate to "oh, maybe should figure out the extent of the damage."
Microplastic pollution is a global problem amongst a whole host of global pollution problems. We'd do well to try to figure out how bad it is, because it isn't going away. Oh, and we should probably work on fixing all of our pollution problems, especially cumulative ones like this.
(This is a summary of a Nature Matters Arising article).
I also get a lot of morning glory AKA bindweed that kills my grass. But spraying doesn't really help with that anyway, so :shrug:.
I would have expected a single dominate weed to take over, but instead, if I let the grass grow for 6-8 weeks in summer I get this amazing field of different knee length plants. And it alive with bee's and butterflies.
I much prefer it to lawn.
The longer term issue is evolved weed resistance due to its over use with "Roundup Ready" crops and for end of the season dry down.
I suppose there's some regimen where you carefully monitor every plant sprayed with a weedkiller is monitored for survival and killed with fire if it survives, or some other extreme measure to be sure there are no survivors to develop resistance, but realistically the weeds are going to develop resistances over time.
And ... so what? The value of a weedkiller like glyphosate is using it to kill a lot of weeds in wide-scale agriculture. If the weeds develop a resistance to it, and we stop using it because it's no longer effective, we're not really in a worse position than if we never used it at all. It's not like there are some really bad weeds we need to save it to be able to combat.
A 22 caliber is safer than a 40 caliber. But, I still wouldn’t a hole made in me from either.
It's not a complicated argument.
Making do without artificial fertilizer would be a lot harder.
So no, it is not a very significant factor.
Allowing a known carcinogen to make crops "easier to harvest" has to do with profit margin not food supply. People literally use this to kill dandelions in their yards. I have known many people who have died from cancer. I have eaten dandelions, while bitter, are actually healthy. A good start would be to work with nature instead of trying to out engineer it.
If roundup is your alternative to starvation you're probably just delaying the inevitable.
Yes. That is literally exactly what we're doing. You can't sustain the current human population without fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels. Half the people on the planet would die.
If we don't want half the planet to die, we need pesticides. So do you choose a pesticide that's more harmful, or less? If you said "less", then you want glyphosate.
I wouldn’t bathe in the stuff, but the data strongly indicates it’s one of the more benign compounds used in agriculture and landscaping.
Glyphosate in our food supply - almost no evidence of cancer risk. (The gut microbiome is affected though).
Direct and sustained contact to glyphosate as an agricultural worker - potentially very severe risks, particularly non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The data is strong but epidemiological.
So yeah, I think your conclusion is roughly correct. Don't bathe in it. Probably avoid using it at home or work. But otherwise, its not a serious risk to consumers.
> Night shift work
> Red meat (consumption of)
> Very hot beverages at above 65 °C (drinking)
Defined as[2]:
> Group 2A: The agent is probably carcinogenic to humans
> This category is used when there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and either sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals or strong mechanistic evidence, showing that the agent exhibits key characteristics of human carcinogens. Limited evidence of carcinogenicity means that a positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent and cancer but that other explanations for the observations (technically termed “chance”, “bias”, or “confounding”) could not be ruled out with reasonable confidence. This category may also be used when there is inadequate evidence regarding carcinogenicity in humans but both sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals and strong mechanistic evidence in human cells or tissues.
[1] https://monographs.iarc.who.int/list-of-classifications
[2] https://monographs.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/I...
And also almost all bread in the US including organic contain 10-1000 ppb of glyphosate.
America's food supply is fucked because of rampant greed, a lack of proper regulation, and a lack of application of the precautionary principle.