Bill Nye: GMOs are a great benefit

[RandySF]

Bill Nye the Science Guy has always been a virulent defender of science, taking pseudo-science supporters to task on issues including climate change, evolution and vaccinations. However, he maintained that genetically-modified organisms posed a serious risk to the Earth’s ecosystem, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. However, in March, after a visit to Monsanto, Nye changed his mind about the controversial practice.

Last week, in an interview with HuffPost Live, Nye explained the rationale behind his new support for GMOs.

“GMOs are not inherently bad. My concern was always, you don’t want these… unintended consequences, where you’ve done something, created a species that does something to the ecosystem, doing something that you didn’t anticipate it doing,” Nye said.

“We are able to feed 7.2 billion people, which a century and a half ago you could barely feed one and a half billion people, and it’s largely because of the success of modern farming. And genetically modified foods where you put the herbicide and the pesticide in the plant rather than spraying it on them and having it run down into the stream– but you do not want unintended consequences.”


http://www.salon.com/2015/05/11/bill_nye_explains_why_he_changed_tune_on_gmos_theyre_actually_a_great_benefit/

[NYC_SKP]

1. Zero Sum. There's no free lunch.

We can't magically get more food out of the soil without consequences, unsustainable side effects that will bite us in the butt.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

3. No, that's simply false.

Go and look up the three-field system.

Agriculture absolutely isn't a zero-sum game in any way, shape or form, and better science absolutely can produce far more food from a given amount of soil without negative side effects.

[NYC_SKP]

6. More people on the same piece of planet is not sustainable.

It's more complex than the food production only, the people come with other problems.

[NYC_SKP]

7. Without negative side effects?

Are you including all of the externalized impacts with that conclusion?

It's impossible to sustainably produce more food from a given amount of soil. Period.

To produce more, you have to replenish the nutrients of that soil.

When crops are harvested and taken off site, all of that organic material is now missing and has to be replaced.

Crop rotation helps to keep the balance of nutrients, ph, etc., but the soil still becomes depleted unless supplemented with something brought from the outside.

Usually these are fossil fuel based materials, but even use of organic supplements usually involve uses of energy and resources to produce and deliver them.

Cheers.

[immoderate]

2. If you eliminate the monocultures there's no need for GMOs

--imm

[eridani]

4. GMOs have fuckall to do with agricultural improvements, and everything to do

--with corporate dictatorship over the food supply.

I actually use insulin derived from genetically modified bacteria, but adding the human insulin gene was far from the only thing they did to those organisms. They also sliced out key genes from a number of nutrient-producing metabolic pathways, so that the bacteria could not live except in media containing all the missing metabolites.

If releasing GMOs into the environment is no big deal, please explain why they bothered with that.

[Nye Bevan]

5. Anti-GMOers = Anti-vaxxers = Climate change deniers (nt)

[Freddie Stubbs]

8. He has just exposed himself a corporate shill

[RandySF]

9. Yes, because we know better than a scientists who has been widely cheered on DU.