There are many ways to reject science, of course, and quite often there’s a cost to that rejection. In this case, it’s the fear of gene engineered food crops, as noted in NewScientist (3 April 2021):
[Emma Kovak at the Breakthrough Institute in California] and her colleagues have now worked out what the change in carbon emission would have been if the adoption rates of five key GM crops – soya bean, maize, cotton, rapeseed and sugar beet – had been as high in Europe as they were in the US in 2017, which has a much more favourable view of genetic engineering.
The team used data from a global metastudy of GM crops and previous studies of land-use change to calculate the 33 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent figure. This is a substantial amount, equivalent to 8 per cent of all the EU’s agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in 2017. For comparison, total global emissions from all human activities are around 100 million tonnes of CO2 per day.
And does this cost get advertised? Probably not. The emphasis with be on Frankenfoods and the terrible dangers associated with gene-engineered foods – whatever those might be.
