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Green challenge to the Left
How blue-green are your algae - er, candidates?
Learning from the Goldschmidt Report: Land Reform and American Agriculture
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US gets a pass to pass more gas
Pumping methyl bromide gas into the soil is a cheap, effective way of killing practically anything that grows or crawls.
Agricultural corporations love it.
But eventually most of the gas rises into the upper atmosphere. When it gets there it wreaks havoc with the Earth’s protective ozone layer. On the way it can destroy human repiratory and nervous systems.
World political leaders agreed in the 1997 Montreal Protocol to phase out the use of methyl bromide. It was supposed to be banned by 2005 in industrialized countries, and everywhere else by 2015.
But an escape clause allowed for "critical use exemptions" if it wasn’t "technically and economically feasible" to substitute other methods of pest control. President Clinton’s Agriculture Dept. concluded that it wasn’t feasible because it would cost US agribusiness $450 million per year.
It’s 2006 and we have not seen the last of methyl bromide. Last year the US was allowed to use 9,552,879 kilograms of the stuff—60 per cent of all the exemptions granted under the Protocol. Almost all the rest went to just five other countries—Italy, Israel, Spain, Japan, and France.
Farmers who made the switch in good faith are not happy. Even Dow Chemical is angry because it invested millions to develop substitute pesticides which it now can’t sell.
Meanwhile, the US has already signed up for the 2007 "critical use exemptions."
see Alison McCook, "The Banned Pesticide in Our Soil," The Scientist, January 2006