EPA Approval of Bee-Killing Neonics Struck Down by Court
A federal appeals court has made a swift decision that will not make the CEO of Dow AgroScience happy, though it just might help save our bees. Just weeks ago, the court struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval of an insecticide called sulfoxaflor, marketed by Dow. This was an important first step in supporting our pollinating insects, which are absolutely vital to our food supply.
Sulfoxaflor is in the neonicotinoid class of pesticides. Insecticides like sulfoxaflor have been drawing more and more attention from experts of late, concerned that the chemicals are killing bees and causing colony collapse disorder. The decision was blunt, and basically told the EPA that they could NOT give authorization for Dow to keep using a chemical which is harming pollinators.
Court documents state:
“The panel held that because the EPA’s decision to unconditionally register sulfoxaflor was based on flawed and limited data, the EPA’s unconditional approval was not supported by substantial evidence. The panel vacated the EPA’s unconditional registration because given the precariousness of bee populations, leaving the EPA’s registration of sulfoxaflor in place risked more potential environmental harm than vacating it.
Concurring in the judgment, Jude N.R. Smith agreed with the panel’s decision because he could not say the EPA supported its decision with substantial evidence.
He wrote separately to ask the EPA to explain the analysis it conducted, the data it reviewed, and how it relied on the data in making its final decision.”
Early studies showed that Dow’s chemical insecticide was harmful to bee populations. The court said that the ‘alarming’ demise of bees was reason enough for this neonics to be studied more fully and pulled off the market until it can be proven, unequivocally, that it is not responsible for bee deaths – but that is highly unlikely.
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Photo Credit: Travis Heying / MCT
So our pitiful court system finally got one right.
It is not the system that is to be pitied, but the bees. Take heart! Monsanto is going down the tubes. McDonald’s is ailing. People are waking up! Bernie Sanders is in the bullpen. FEEL THE BERN
One step forward, two steps back. And that’s how ya do the Corporate Rag. I tire of this silly game. 😐
”Abstract justice is, of course, impossible. Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation. As competition sharpens . . . religious ritual is supplanted by civil codes for the enforcement of contracts and the protection of the creditor class. The more society consolidates, the more legislation is controlled by the wealthy, and at length the representatives of the moneyed class acquire that absolute power once wielded by the Roman proconsul, and now exercised by the modern magistrate.
”Thus the modern legal system is infinitely subtle, and its enforcing officers equally efficient, in punishing those forms of theft which are not practiced by the ruling class; but robbery in the market-place is governed by primitive controls which lag far behind the sophisticated mechanisms which company lawyers contrive to circumvent them. One measure of a society is the problems it chooses to solve. Rome’s ruling class was unable to restrain its rapacity, even in its own ultimate interest. Adams saw what liberals are rarely willing to admit—namely, that a system based on corrupt practice cannot be saved merely by tinkering with it.”
‘The Economics of Human Energy’ in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald – by John Whiting, London University