May 16, 2018 04:18 PM
http://www.science20.com/henry_i_miller/...law-232399
EXCERPT: Five years after the European Union imposed a temporary ban on neonicotinoid pesticides, an “experts committee” of the member states has now finally voted to make the ban permanent. This was hardly a surprise. The vote followed shortly after the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) published their advisory opinion that neonics “represent a risk to wild bees and honeybees,” a finding that got banner headlines across Europe and the U.S.
Any reporter who actually read the report, however, would have discovered that EFSA found nothing of the sort. What they actually found was that it’s very difficult in the real world of science to prove a negative, which is why the most repeated phrase on the inside pages was that a “low risk could not be confirmed.”
The distance between saying something “represents a risk” and the peculiar assertion that a “low risk could not be confirmed” is quite wide, of course. In criminal law, it’s the difference between how we do things in democracies, where the government is required to prove your guilt, and Soviet-style justice where you have to prove your innocence.
[...] Usually, when people cheat, they try to hide it. [...] however, EFSA’s “cheat sheet” [...] is available for all to see on the EU’s website, here. Known as the Bee Guidance Document, or BGD for short, it created the regulatory framework that EFSA used to make its assessments.
[...] EFSA needed to provide the veneer of a scientific rationale for the ban – i.e. to find some excuse to ignore the field studies and base their finding on inapposite lab experiments instead. That veneer is just what the BGD provides. How? Simply by creating requirements for field studies that are literally impossible to meet, allowing EFSA to dismiss or heavily discount the results of every single field study ever conducted....
MORE: http://www.science20.com/henry_i_miller/...law-232399
EXCERPT: Five years after the European Union imposed a temporary ban on neonicotinoid pesticides, an “experts committee” of the member states has now finally voted to make the ban permanent. This was hardly a surprise. The vote followed shortly after the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) published their advisory opinion that neonics “represent a risk to wild bees and honeybees,” a finding that got banner headlines across Europe and the U.S.
Any reporter who actually read the report, however, would have discovered that EFSA found nothing of the sort. What they actually found was that it’s very difficult in the real world of science to prove a negative, which is why the most repeated phrase on the inside pages was that a “low risk could not be confirmed.”
The distance between saying something “represents a risk” and the peculiar assertion that a “low risk could not be confirmed” is quite wide, of course. In criminal law, it’s the difference between how we do things in democracies, where the government is required to prove your guilt, and Soviet-style justice where you have to prove your innocence.
[...] Usually, when people cheat, they try to hide it. [...] however, EFSA’s “cheat sheet” [...] is available for all to see on the EU’s website, here. Known as the Bee Guidance Document, or BGD for short, it created the regulatory framework that EFSA used to make its assessments.
[...] EFSA needed to provide the veneer of a scientific rationale for the ban – i.e. to find some excuse to ignore the field studies and base their finding on inapposite lab experiments instead. That veneer is just what the BGD provides. How? Simply by creating requirements for field studies that are literally impossible to meet, allowing EFSA to dismiss or heavily discount the results of every single field study ever conducted....
MORE: http://www.science20.com/henry_i_miller/...law-232399
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