Comment by lenerdenator
3 hours ago
Scientific fraud here feels like a reaction to people not understanding the bargain we have to make given the needs of the world's population. It should be punished, but I can't help but feel there's a point that doesn't get discussed.
The thing that sucks about this is, past a certain point, herbicide/pesticide safety doesn't matter.
We use this stuff, at least industrially, to grow food. Humans need food to live. More food, generally speaking, means healthier humans, Western processed food trends notwithstanding. There's the consumer market that uses glyphosate to make yards pretty in North America, but that's not the real reason we invent herbicides, and yards themselves are problematic, so we'll ignore that for now.
It's not an accident that global starvation deaths have decreased since the 1960s[0]. We started applying chemistry and automation to agriculture. Food security and yields went up. Some of these chemicals we use are, over the long term with chronic low-level exposure, hazardous to human health.
However, they're still less immediately hazardous to the general public than malnutrition and starvation, so the question becomes this: Do you want millions to die of malnutrition now, or do you want an unknown number of people to die of various health issues (particularly cancer, though there are others) caused by chemical exposure at an unknown point in the future, and gamble that medicine will, some day, be able to treat or cure the health issues?