EPA Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Bees

hether writes "The mystery of the disappearing bees has been baffling scientists for years and now we get another big piece in the puzzle. From Fast Company: 'A number of theories have popped up as to why the North American honey bee population has declined — electromagnetic radiation, malnutrition, and climate change have all been pinpointed. Now a leaked EPA document reveals that the agency allowed the widespread use of a bee-toxic pesticide, despite warnings from EPA scientists.' Now environmentalists and bee keepers are calling for an immediate ban of the pesticide clothianidin, sold by Bayer Crop Science under the brand name Poncho."

Comments

Re:malicious skepticism

[BlueStrat]

The free market system in this regard is failing, it's making people make bad decisions due to their own greed.

No, the _government_ failed. Government !== the free market. It was the government that failed to pay attention to it's own research, and allowed this compound to be sold the same as any other insecticides that have been *properly* tested & approved.

The government took upon itself the responsibility of determining what is safe. It wasn't bad decisions by the farmers, as they were using something that the government said was OK to use. Farmers, of all people, would understand that killing bees that pollinate their crops is a very bad thing and not worth a fraction of a percent in additional yield.

Does anyone doubt that there was some political and/or financial quid-pro-quo going on that got that damning research ignored? This is one of the problems with a huge government; oversight becomes increasingly difficult and ineffective the larger government grows. It just creates too many "cracks" through which corruption and incompetence can slip undetected and uncorrected, with occasionally-disastrous results as exemplified by this incident.

Strat