Freedom Line Blog

From The Hill:

The Food and Drug Administration isn’t ready to embrace mandatory labeling regulations for foods made with genetically engineered ingredients, despite an aggressive push from lawmakers and advocates who cite health concerns.

Testifying before a House panel, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg told lawmakers this week that the agency remains comfortable with a 1992 policy decision concluding that food made with genetically modified organisms — or GMOs — is not materially different from other products.

“We have not seen evidence of safety risks associated with genetically modified foods,” Hamburg said during a House Appropriations Committee hearing to assess the FDA’s 2015 budget request.

She said the FDA is working on fresh guidance backing a voluntary system for GMO labeling, an approach critics regard as insufficient.

Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) criticized the FDA’s unwillingness to impose mandatory labeling requirements, saying the action is the least the government can do to give consumers more information about the food on their dinner table.

“It’s beyond me that we can’t have accurate labeling,” Lowey told Hamburg at the hearing. “The labeling can’t hurt anybody but it’s possible that the lack of adequate labeling could, of course.”

Actually, neither of those statements are true. The labels could hurt people and the lack of labeling won’t.

First let’s get some basics out of the way. What qualifies as a “genetically modified organism”? Have a purebred dog in your house? That’s one. A rose bush in your garden? Yep, that too. In essence, any living being that has been bred for certain traits is a genetically modified organism. What the critics are upset with are industrial processes by which companies can cultivate these traits in the lab instead of breeding for them over the course of generations.

So, is there a reason to be concerned? Over to the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Gregory Conko, writing in the Washington Examiner earlier this week:

The primary thing that makes genetic engineering unique is the power and precision it gives us to make those changes and then test for safety afterward. It has also given us food that is both safer for our families and better for the environment. Plants with a built-in resistance to chewing insects, for example, have allowed farmers to use millions of gallons less pesticide every year.

Dozens of the world’s most prestigious scientific bodies, including the National Academies of Science, the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization, have studied genetic engineering for more than 30 years and concluded that such foods are at least as safe as, and often safer than, conventionally bred ones.

The other thing that makes genetically modified plants different is they are subject to intense scrutiny by three different regulatory agencies in the U.S. alone. It takes an average of five to 10 years to develop and test a crop for consumer and environmental safety. This is followed by an additional two to four years of review by the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency. And because most American farmers will not plant genetically modified crops they cannot export to global markets in Europe, Asia and South America, the wait is even longer in order to secure approval overseas.

The regulatory costs alone for testing and getting approval for a genetically modified plant variety average more than $35 million. By the time a new crop makes it to market, its safety has been confirmed by regulators in dozens of countries.

In 30 years of testing and commercial use in more than two dozen countries, genetically modified foods have caused not a single sniffle, sneeze or bellyache. This outstanding safety record is why the FDA does not require blanket labeling of such foods. It does, however, require labeling any time a food differs from its conventional counterpart in a meaningful way – such as a reduction in nutrients, the introduction of an allergen, or even a change in taste or smell.

The science here is overwhelming — and has a decades-long track record. That’s part of what makes the labeling idea such a bad one. Proponents often brush the evidence aside and claim that, even if the produce is safe, consumers should know what’s in their food (though, in many cases, what’s in it is no different with GMOs than organics). But that’s not cost-free. There’s the price, of course, of actually producing the labeling, but the bigger potential cost is the loss of business that would occur if GMO labeling became pervasive.

The point of labeling as a tool of regulation is to increase consumer knowledge. In this area, however, it’s likely that labeling would only fuel ignorance. The public is already poorly informed about GMOs. Mandating they be labeled — which gives the appearance of a warning — would only fuel fears that have no basis in science.

Those who care the most about GMOs are those who are already eating organic foods — foods, it should be noted, that go out of their way to market themselves as an alternative to GMOs. In other words, the market has already solved their problem. There’s no compelling reason — as a matter of science or policy — for them to be allowed to brand the GMOs that feed hundreds of millions of Americans with a scarlet letter just because of their scientific illiteracy.

Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale, recently decided to do a study examining the relationship  between political ideology and scientific literacy. Though Kahan has not admitted this publicly, it’s reasonable to assume that his intent was the same as most surveys of this stripe: proving that his opponents were idiots. He didn’t get his wish. As Politico reports:

… Kahan posted on his blog this week that he analyzed the responses of more than 2,000 American adults recruited for another study and found that, on average, people who leaned liberal were more science literate than those who leaned conservative.

However, those who identified as part of the tea party movement were actually better versed in science than those who didn’t, Kahan found. The findings met the conventional threshold of statistical significance, the professor said.

Kahan’s results are interesting, though not especially suprising. Anyone who’s spent any time around Tea Party types knows that they’re interested in ideas. You don’t pick up an affection for the Founding Fathers, after all, without cracking a book every now and then. Therein lies the problem, however. Kahan hasn’t spent any time with Tea Party types:

Kahan wrote that not only did the findings surprise him, they embarrassed him.

“I’ve got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I’d be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension,” Kahan wrote.

“But then again, I don’t know a single person who identifies with the tea party,” he continued. “All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the ‘paper’ (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused Internet sites like Huffington Post and POLITICO). I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly, I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.”

When Richard Nixon won the 1972 presidential election in a landslide, the New Yorker’s film critic, Pauline Kael, reportedly said that she was shocked because “no one I know voted for him.” That story’s been a metaphor for liberal insularity ever since, but let’s be fair to Kael — she was on an arts beat at a famously liberal magazine.

Professor Kahan, by contrast, is a member of the faculty at arguably the most prestigious law school in the country — a place where one should theoretically be able to develop an understanding of a major stream of American political thought deeper than what can be gleamed from the digital pages of the Huffington Post. The key word there is “theoretically.”

From Quin’s lips to U.S. Senator Tom Coburn’s ears…

Yesterday, Quin highlighted one of the many wasteful uses of taxpayer money funded by the National Science Foundation, a federal government agency that subsidizes some pretty dubious projects. (Such as the sex lives of ducks.)

Also yesterday Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma and a committed budget cutter, persuaded a majority of his Senate colleagues to limit NSF political science grants to only those studies that are certified as “promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.”

Citing just one example, Coburn said that “There is no reason to spend $251,000 studying Americans’ attitudes toward the U.S. Senate when citizens can figure that out for free.”

As I understand it, Coburn’s amendment only curtails political science-related research, meaning that the project Quin cited may still be allowed going forward. Even so, it’s a hopeful sign that Coburn established a precedent for at least one part of the federal budget that aligns national spending with the (true) national interest.

Don’t bother me with the facts; we’re trying to save the world here!

That’s essentially what Patrick Michaels of the CATO Institute says the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did when it decided that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger the environment and must be regulated.

The problem for EPA is that its own Inspector General recently stated that the process EPA used to justify its decision violated both federal law and scientific integrity.  According to Michaels, federal law requires any endangerment finding that is “highly influential” to be rigorously peer-reviewed to ensure that economy-altering regulations are based on the best science available.

EPA violated that standard when it based its endangerment finding on a facially biased United Nations report favorably reviewed by at least one federal climatologist who worked for EPA – a clear conflict of interest.

The stakes are high.  EPA’s endangerment finding is the legal basis for the agency to dictate energy regulations down to the kind of light bulb Americans can use in their homes.  By cooking the books that authority rests on, EPA has destroyed any credibility it may have had.

Let the legal challenges begin (again).