Henry I. Miller ,
CONTRIBUTOR
I debunk junk science and flawed public policy..
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Never let a good crisis go to waste, Rahm Emanuel famously said. But what do you do if the “crisis” turns out to be a dud? Easy–invent a new one.
That’s what we’re seeing currently in Washington and Brussels, where government regulators, deprived of one environmental calamity–by, of all things, data–are scrambling for a new narrative.
For years environmentalists have been raising alarms about the “bee-pocalypse”–a supposed catastrophic decline in honeybee populations–and calling for an immediate ban of a new class of state-of-the-art “systemic” pesticides called neonicotinoids (“neonics” for short) which they blamed for the die-offs.
The media were all over the story, endlessly replaying the environmentalist meme that without bees to pollinate our crops, “one-third of every bite of food we eat” would disappear. Banning neonics and saving bees was tantamount to saving the world from starvation.
The science supporting a ban was questionable, to say the least. Poorly designed experiments that overdosed bees in the lab were contradicted by large-scale field studies that confirmed real-world experience–honeybees actuallythrive in neonic-treated crops. But those lab studies were enough for the regulators in Brussels, who ignored their own scientists and the loud objections of the British, among others, and passed an EU-wide ban which started at the end of 2013.
