German and French translations

The European Green Party released a report last week on agricultural alternatives to glyphosate; a project they had commissioned from Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Europe. Simply put, it is a “dumpster fire” of misleading claims (lies), naive assumptions, interesting omissions and a presentation of dubious research and bias. It represents a high-water mark of all that is lamentable in how the NGO activist community thinks they can operate: disrespectful to scientific methodology, agronomy, farmers, consumers and European taxpayers. Members of the European Parliament, who are supposed to have been elected to responsibly represent their electorates, will use this PAN-Europe campaign document to mislead debate and dialogue in Brussels as important decisions on sustainable farming need to be made. Ridiculous, shameful and pathetic are the first words that come to my mind.

I understand that the Green Party has ambitions of moving away from the fringe and playing a role in the political mainstream. If so, then they had better stop lying, scaring people, relying on bad science and using tired claims from charlatans that they know are baseless, alarmist and dispelled by the research community. This report merely demonstrates that the European Green Party is not ready to change from their cult-driven campaign dogma. Here is my assessment.

Hyperbolic fear-mongering

The Green Party resorted to fear-mongering rhetoric to make their points with the usual activist hyperboles laced throughout their report. They claim that “tonnes of pesticides” used every day, giving the consumer the idea that the use is indiscriminate and out of control. These activists declare that “farmers are completely dependent on herbicides”, likening them to addicts in some dark alley with no hope for the future as long as those evil industry pushers are allowed to continue feeding their addiction. The Green Party is attempting to present farmers as stuck in a hopeless poison loop because they “end up trapped on a pesticide treadmill”. Having a tool that allows you a possible solution to keep control of weeds when other measures fail is hardly being trapped on an endless cycle of futility. If the Green Party and their confrères in Pesticide Action Network get their way and ban all herbicides, farmers will indeed be trapped with far fewer options.

Of course, Fear-mongering 101 entails that if you want to scare people or generate outrage, make sure to stress the word ‘chemical‘. Most people with little understanding of science (assumedly most people involved with Pesticide Action Network) think that chemicals are inherently dangerous and man-made (when in reality, man is made of chemicals). So the Green Party report repeatedly referred to conventional farming as “chemical agriculture”, “chemical plant protection”, “chemical ploughing” and “chemical no-till farming”. Meanwhile, their good guys in organic farming are referred to as developing “ecologically friendly agricultural systems”.

Boo!

Another deceptive word-play is the report’s continued use of the term “synthetic pesticides”. This term assumes that natural-based pesticides are less dangerous or less toxic to human health and the environment. It has been almost eight years since I released the Risk-Monger’s Dirty Dozen highlighting twelve organic-approved pesticides (nature based) that were more toxic to human health and the environment than glyphosate. This did not stop the activists’ lies though. They just adjusted their campaign rhetoric to scare us about “synthetic” pesticides or “toxic” pesticides. They failed to address the question of the higher toxicity of organic-approved pesticides, but once their target audience is scared, facts don’t matter. I suppose if organic pesticides are not toxic, they work via some form of magic.

Then the authors came out with their usual activist chant: “We don’t want this!” claiming that “European citizens are also demanding a radical reduction of pesticide use”. Who is this “We”? They cited their 1.3 million signatures in a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) against pesticides. These ECIs are easy for large networks of little people to claim the proverbial ‘We’ but their signatures only amount to 0.3% of the EU population. If I had such an array of publicly-funded non-profit organisations at my disposal, I could easily get you a million signatures in an ECI demanding affordable food from the other 99.7% of the European population, but that is just common sense. And what would be the point? Why are these activists wasting their time with some rhetorical statement that sounds believable but at its heart is just hollow propaganda that the European Commission politely puts on a shelf?

Statements like these show how this European Green Party report, written by PAN-Europe, relies on rhetoric rather than intellect. We have to ask if this is a responsible approach for a political party claiming to legitimately represent the European public? Can anyone take the Green Party seriously as a fair actor in the dialogue process? Should they be allowed to propagate this nonsense via all of the privileged access tools the European policy system has granted them?

Uninformed or Misleading?

In reading this report, I found the usual activist tricks of omitting important information they surely know about, trying to downplay important benefits and misleading readers on the impacts of their solutions. I call this ‘lying’, but most Machiavellians consider this an essential tool in the activist battle of good versus evil.

Cover Crops are not Important

The report starts by stating situations where glyphosate is used in farming. Curiously they omitted any mention of the most important and ecologically sustainable advantage of the herbicide.

The main value of herbicides like glyphosate is that it can ensure complex multi-species cover crops and no-till farming to feed soil nutrition, protect from erosion, store carbon and humidity, discourage spreading of certain pests and encourage beneficial insects… The activists do not admit the ecological benefits of growing rich cover crops in the off season, in particular providing valuable nutrients to soil biota, insects, pollinators… This is only possible if the cover crops can be terminated with a herbicide like glyphosate (while organic farmers are forced to till their soil or combine far fewer crop species). Almost a decade ago I had written several articles on cover crops and visited many farms when I started to see the ecological nightmare that would happen should these urban elites succeed in banning glyphosate.

Trying to not draw attention to this important farmer-led development, the authors of the report deceptively referred to cover crops as “subsidiary crops” and then limited it to two paragraphs on certain types of green manure. Buried in the annex (ie, written by somebody else), the report recognises terminating cover crops as the first of eight uses of glyphosate and then cited several alternatives to treat cover crops like tillage, crimping and winter kill. This ignores the biodiversity benefits of planting multiple species of cover crops, the increased costs (to the environment) of mechanical treatment and the lost time the crops could add value to the ecological systems.

The report tries to justify a role for weeds in farming by saying “It is thus vital to have a diversity of plants to maximise the diversity of microbes, in order to optimise soil health.”. But isn’t that the goal of complex combinations of multiple species of cover crops, no-till farming and crop rotations? And isn’t glyphosate essential to achieve this?

Farmers are Stupid

Sadly, the Green Party is not doing a very good job hiding their cosmopolitan prejudice that farmers are stupid. They assume that farmers don’t know better, they are not trying other weed control measures and that they just dump chemicals onto their soil. It is quite clear the authors of this report, Pesticide Action Network, did not interview any conventional farmers to learn what they do to protect their soil, the different tools they use to control weeds and what experiences they could share. They assume these “chemical farmers” don’t care.

“Many farmers have abandoned several equally effective, non-chemical weed management methods”. Was there any discussion as to why they abandoned these methods? Only assumptions. And what were these “non-chemical weed management methods“? In the 1960s (and today on many smallholder farms in developing countries) these methods are namely using children and the short-handled hoe – both of which have been banned for humanitarian reasons (by all but the organic farmers who lobbied to be exempted from the legislation). See my (personal) history of the decline of the use of children and immigrants in North America with the introduction of herbicides in the 1960s and 70s and ask yourself why the Green Party would tolerate the violation of such basic human rights.

The report regularly returned to the usual misleading super-weed campaign slogans, that could easily be injected into a Vandana Shiva ‘chemical cartel’ rant, with expressions like: “they are also increasingly failing to work due to evolved resistance”. If they don’t work, then why do farmers want to keep using them? We know what these urban elites think of farmers. 

Removing glyphosate will have economic benefits

On the economic consequences, the authors did not get into how weeds evolve and spread over the years and that removing herbicides in one planting season may have a small consequence at first, but like pest build-up, the situation only worsens with time.

The report admits that removing glyphosate will entail higher mechanical applications and thus increased workload in the fields. Do the authors of this report have any idea about the difficulties farmers are presently facing to find qualified labour? Not every farmer is like Jeremy Clarkson with some Kaleb just randomly showing up at a simple beck and call. Given the activists’ devotion to the teachings of Lysenko, I would suggest that all of the PAN-Europe authors behind this report be sent to the fields for three months of hard labour every summer (that’s why we used to close grade schools at the time when the weeds were raging). If they are so driven to convince us there will be no problem with banning glyphosate, I can expect them to be bringing their families to volunteer as when necessary.

The increased mechanical operations will also entail more CO2 emissions (increased tractor diesel burnt and the release of carbon stored in the soil). These “environmentalists” somehow glossed over the consequences to the climate from their single-minded anti-glyphosate obsession (see below on the absurdity of their electrothermal and thermal weed management alternatives).

And after all of their arguments that there would be no economic impact from banning glyphosate (nothing to look at here, people, move along) they then concluded there were ample funds in the Common Agricultural Policy to compensate for the anticipated farmers’ losses. So in order to get what we want, let’s screw the European taxpayer!!! … Well this would not be the first time for the Green Party.

A Low Bar for Research Standards

It was painful to read all of the research presented in this report. Pesticide Action Network broke almost every rule of good scientific methodology. For example, they used a wide array of global data (eg, glyphosate amounts used in combination with herbicide-resistant GMOs) when they should be focusing on the European context. The report cited alarming data on acreage where glyphosate is used, but did not say how and when it is used (eg, no mention how much of its use was for terminating cover crops in keeping with sustainable no-till farming practises). They tried to present the use of glyphosate as a pre-harvest desiccant as being widespread, when in reality such use is banned or heavily restricted across most EU countries. PAN Europe literally shredded their data up and reconstituted it to fit their anti-pesticide agenda (and the European Green Party approved it).

The report repeatedly moaned how it is difficult to get detailed data on volumes and use of glyphosate (that tired, old trick of portraying industry actors and conventional farmers as non-transparent and untrustworthy), but then they seemed to provide a lot of detailed tables on volumes and sales.

Pesticide Action Network focused excessively on the impact on health and the environment of an herbicide additive, polyethoxylated tallow amines (POEA). POEA is a natural-based surfactant (thus OK for organic farming uses). After some painfully detailed rhetoric, the report finally noted that POEA was banned in the EU in 2016 (but still went on about the risks to reinforce their point that additives to herbicides can also be dangerous … even if glyphosate is not). They failed to acknowledge that Monsanto had removed POEA from its Roundup formulations in 2000 … but by this point in the report, only the seriously biased were still reading.

There were many embarrassing and sloppy mistakes in this official Green Party document. For example, they claim that “Spain is the country where most glyphosate-resistant crops are grown in the EU”. How is this the case when herbicide-resistant GMOs are not grown in the EU? Earlier they admitted that MON 810 is not herbicide-resistant and only 0.1% of crops grown in the EU are GMO. Did they mean herbicide tolerant? Or maybe they were referring to those nasty superweeds.

Figure 9 on page 18 shows how glyphosate is not even the main herbicide in use in the EU making the reader wonder what is then the point of such a long-winded report … on glyphosate. But what about those other herbicides? The report cites 515 cases of weed resistance but later admit only 56 are glyphosate resistant (and that there are 165 different herbicides). Most weed resistance can be dealt with via combined applications (their data reflects that) or coordinated with other measures. While most farmers are concerned about an over-reliance and over-use of a small number of actives, taking a variety of herbicides off of the market will certainly not make the situation better.

Give Zen Honeycutt her credit

In Chapter 4, on the impact of glyphosate on ecosystems, the authors rely on many questionable studies, weave in innuendo with clever wordsmithing like: “it may cause…”, “can with repeated use, be”…, “there are indications…” and use countless suspect and non-academic sources. Many of the scientists they referenced were far from credible, like their four references to Chuck Benbrook – scientist for hire for the US organic food industry lobby.

It is rare to see a scientific report rely on so many popular media sources like the Independent, EurActiv, Orf, RTL, Reuters and Stern. Then again, the report also pays homage to their activist brethren, citing the fine campaign-driven work from IPBES, Foodwatch, IFOAM, Beyond Pesticides, Greenpeace (multiple times), SumOfUs, the Center for Food Safety, HEAL and, my favourite, Moms Across America (which they did not properly cite in fn 22). In FOIAed emails, activist scientists warned their NGO tribes to keep a distance from “bat-shit crazy” activists like Stephanie Seneff and Moms Across America’s Zen Honeycutt. The authors of the Green Party report are well-aware of this but could not resist sourcing them (just so long as they hide their names and assume no one will take their references seriously enough to check them).

But to be fair, according to activist science standards, the research quality here is better than most. The author, Pesticide Action Network Europe, only cited their own work a mere ten times. That is not counting the long sections where they used their claims from two of their European Citizens’ Initiatives as if they were factual and evidence-driven.

Where were the Farmers?

This report did not consult farmers, presented a very naïve understanding of what farmers actually do and how they manage risks in their fields. But as these activists are much better at propagating their naïve narrative into the policy debate than farmers are, I suppose it wasn’t necessary.

Farmers do not want to use pesticides if they don’t have to – it is expensive, time consuming and entails risks. They will look for alternatives first, and if these alternatives work and are more sustainable, they will use them. There is no herbicide treadmill trapping farmers from other options. Farmers are constantly trying to find solutions to protect their soil, crops and livelihood. They are the ultimate risk managers fighting an enormous number of exposures to countless often unforeseen hazards. To randomly take one tool out of their risk management toolbox because of some anti-synthetic, anti-corporate cult ideology is idiotic. I assume this is why farmers also have no time to bother with such useless conversations with such uninformed and deceptive activists. That is probably why the authors of this document on an important agricultural tool did not bother to consult farmers.

I was informed, for example, by a farmer who saw this report that there is a project currently being trialled in the UK that is trying to control weeds via non-chemical methods (crushing seeds via a seed control unit attached to harvesters). This was not mentioned in the expensive Green Party report because the authors were too arrogant to take the time to do the research, engage and listen to farmers.

Farmers care about their soil, they care about their crops, they care about the quality of the food they grow – they work hard and deserve our respect. To insult them as “chemical farmers” is vulgar, insensitive and completely unprofessional for politicians claiming to represent the voice of European citizens. Does the Green Party want to be seen as a group open to dialogue and compromise or as a narrow-minded activist cult willing to lie, insult and create suffering in order to blindly impose their dogma?

Most of the solutions the Green Party report offers are already being done. Could farmers do better? Of course, and they are continually making improvements. But the politicians attacking glyphosate are taking garden-sized studies and extrapolating their solutions to 100 hectare fields. The activists behind this report also seem to assume that their alternatives are possible because “some organic farmers” have been using them and look, they’re fine. No details were provided on who these farmers were and what “fine” actually meant.

Redefining ‘Weeds’

In Disney’s 1951 adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the flowers could not place Alice under any genus, so they determined that she was a weed. In the Green Party Wonderland, weeds do not exist.

In what the report’s authors thought was a particularly insightful moment, they attempt to define away weeds. “…weeds are not a scientific concept: there is, for example, no botanical category of “weeds”. Weeds are entirely value judgments about the “goodness” or “badness” of particular plants”. Very philosophical to assume that weeds are just plants in the wrong place at the wrong time. But in risk management situations, a constant reality on the farm, weeds are defined as a hazard and measures must be taken to reduce exposure that could destroy crops, soil and food security.

If we are going to play the value judgment game, weeds can then be defined as heartless serial killers. Take the brutal palmer amaranth – an average plant can produce 250,000 seeds and grow quickly to more than two metres tall. How can a short-stalk wheat head with 22 grains compete against that? Only someone with the gall of a Vandana Shiva would defend such an agronomic predator (although Vandana may have confused it with other amaranth species, she’ll never admit such a mistake).

Other Plants

The Green Party though wants to define three types of plants: crop plants, harmful plants and other plants. So now we have a “category of Aliae Plantae (other plants) which are not harmful to the crop but are rather benign to it or even beneficial to the agro-ecosystem.” Let nature take its course on the farm and as aliae plantae “are on balance not causing significant harm and can therefore just be left alone”.

This keeps in line with the left-wing Zeitgeist of the Green Party: farmers need to be more inclusive and more tolerant toward weeds.

This also keeps in line with the low level of research capacity available to the author of the report, Pesticide Action Network: give your redefinition of other plants a Latin name to make it sound more intellectual and academic. If they can pronounce Aliae Plantae credibly at conferences or in the European Parliament, people will be impressed thinking they know what they are talking about. Cute!

But their idea that certain plants can be beneficial to the agro-ecosystem is nothing new. It is already being done with the increased use of biodiversity strips, leaving fields to fallow, crop rotations and multi-species cover cropping. The only difference is that farmers are targeting the best aliae plantae (see, the Risk-Monger is also an intellectual!) for their ecosystem rather than leaving it to a random survival of the fittest.

Alternatives to Glyphosate: It’s Elementary

Once weeds have been redefined and conventional farmers, with their zero weed tolerance, have been painted as eco-terrorists dumping tonnes of glyphosate down the throat of Mother Nature, the report is then ready to introduce its alternatives to chemical farming, outlining their simple steps toward an integrated weed management (IWM) agricultural system with no chemicals.

“The core of sustainable weed management is to integrate a wide range of different methods to manage weeds, each one adapted to the type of weed and type of crop and usually applied in combination, at specific times during the life cycle of the crop.”

If you think that the only thing that farmers do is poison their soil with herbicides, then this sounds like revolutionary thinking whose time has finally come. But where have I read similar text and heard these ideas before? Maybe from the Bayer website? Maybe from every farmer I have visited and spoken with? The question then is: Should glyphosate be part of IWM? If you are campaigning to ban glyphosate, I suppose the answer is: “No”. If you are someone with an interest in sustainable farming to meet the needs of growing populations, the answer is “Of course”.

The Green Party report listed a series of IWM studies in project stage (probably a Google search of “IWM”) glancing over the point that almost all of them have herbicides as a tool (hammer) in the weed-control box. They also glance over the fact that most farmers are already using many of these IWM tools (cover cropping, crop rotations, grazing, mulching…). Other IWM tools proposed, like hand weeding (finger weeding), hoeing and tilling should be avoided for socio-economic and humanitarian reasons.

Then the report went down the rabbit hole. Electrothermal and thermal IWM solutions like electro-shocking weeds, torching them with flame throwers, scalding them with hot water or steaming them out are all presented as better weed treatment alternatives than glyphosate. At some point we have to ask: On what planet are these people living? What are the consequences to the climate of using such high CO2 emitting solutions? If these activists were actually worried about soil biota, how in hell’s name, literally, would blasting the soil at ultra-high temperatures help? What about nests, beneficial insects, earthworms? Someone please help me to fathom the costs per hectare of such solutions and the efficacy if the weed’s root systems remain intact. This was perhaps the most ridiculous part of the Green Party’s report (but if you are obsessed with banning glyphosate, these scorched straws are worth clutching at).

Plough, baby, plough

The report contained 14 pages of sales brochure photos of different weed tilling machines (many dating back to the 1960s and several that we had used when I was growing up on a farm in Canada). Curious that the tillage machines and techniques are also practised by conventional farmers and that they are being advised to till less to improve the soil ecosystems. Also curious that many of the brochure photos are showing the ploughs working in perfectly manicured, well-tilled fields.

The Green Party is rightly uncomfortable about getting into the no-till and sustainable farming debate with conventional farmers so they try, like the use of pesticides in organic farming, to take the Roman Catholic approach: It’s OK but only just a little. The report favours reduced tillage – or shallow ploughing – which only disturbs the soil until 15cm. Sorry but that is pretty deep! I would call that shallow thinking.

Some of the robot weeders from their brochure analysis are quite complex and expensive. At a time when farmers are struggling with so many challenges to bring food to market at a competitive price, we had better have a good reason to tell them that they need to invest hundreds of thousands of euros on an alternative to using a few litres of glyphosate once or twice a year. (NB, the Green Party’s anti-chemical, anti-industry obsession does not qualify as a good reason.)

The idea of inundative biocontrol agents (spraying large volumes of invasive microorganisms across fields to attack weeds) raises many issues (including costs, equipment and training) but we simply need to ask: How afraid are we of a benign herbicide that we are willing, as an alternative, to unleash microbial biocontrol agents into an environment with little idea of the long-term consequences on soil biota? How do you spell “stupid”?

If you think glyphosate could affect our digestive system, wait for the next NGO campaign to highlight the risks of these unknown microorganisms in our food supply. Pass the organic popcorn.

Organic First, Organic Only

On organic herbicides: “A range of materials for organic herbicides has been tried including plant oils such as pine, cypress, cedar, manuka, eucalyptus, red clover, clove, lemongrass, cinnamon, mint, rosemary, and sage.” They have been tried … yes … and if these organic herbicides were effective and safe, then they would be widely used. Evidently they are not! But the authors of this report are not interested in sharing that information. So instead they end with their tired, predictable claim: “Nevertheless, there is a need for more research to accelerate the development and implementation of effective organic-compliant herbicides that are environmentally safe and that help the producer meet increasing consumer demand for organic products.” Right … because over the last several decades there has been no research funding at all in organic alternatives.

I am not going to get into the absurdity of the European Commission’s Farm2Fork objectives, but needless to say, the Green Party report loves this agenda and thinks that a ban on glyphosate is crucial to meeting these arbitrary pesticide reduction targets.

The absurdity of this ‘organic-first’ argument highlights the problem: there are no effective organic-approved herbicides. This is making organic farming less competitive and less sustainable and the reason why the organic food industry lobby has been so vociferous in its funding of campaigns to ban herbicides (and through that, make GMOs less profitable as well). If my practises are at a disadvantage, the scientific solution would be to adopt the technologies that work. The activist solution is to destroy the advantage that conventional farming has. Most children have a stronger sense of right and wrong than these lamentable dogmatic fundamentalists. But the Brussels playground has never been fair and these bullies are free to do what they want.

An admission of pointlessness:

After showing all of the wonderful alternatives to glyphosate, the authors took a moment to reflect on the consequences of some of them.

“One of the key concerns about the use of flame and steam weeding is the large amounts of fossil fuels used, mainly LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) and propane, which in the age of climate change is unacceptable (Bond et al., 2003). Firstly, due to its high cost and lower work rates, the use of flame and steam is limited to high-value crops, such as vegetables and perennials, so it is not widely used, indeed it is a highly specialised technique, that is generally only used when no other options are available.

But if glyphosate is rarely used in vegetables and perennials, what is the point of this alternative? This admission reflects the sheer pointlessness of the report (and the entire anti-glyphosate campaign).

Ethically-Challenged Zealots

The European Green Party gets a budget from the European taxpayer to conduct research. They gave this money to their collaborators in Pesticide Action Network to write a long-winded, unprofessional report. The goal is that this activist campaign literature would then be widely communicated and used in European Parliament Committees, Working Groups and debates.

The Green Party is merely serving as PAN-Europe’s poodle and gladly giving them funding. Easy money no doubt, but it is essentially an illicit donation from an activist political party to a sister NGO (where many MEPs likely had worked before being elected). In any other world, this would be prohibited as a corrupt donation. How would people feel if a political party gave European funds to a company like ExxonMobil to conduct a study on the risks of renewable energy? In a world built on integrity and honesty, PAN Europe should pay the money back and the Green Party should apologise. But who am I kidding? These zealots will do whatever it takes to win, regardless of the consequences to farmers, consumers, the environment and the economy. They have no integrity.

With this report, did the European Green Party get their money’s worth? Of course not, but that was never the point. It was meant to fund Pesticide Action Network, an NGO woven into the fabric of the green movement and promote the group’s campaign within the European Parliament. PAN simply pulled out some documents from their campaign files and threw it together in a poorly written, poorly conceived report. Will it have an influence on the glyphosate debate? Most people in Brussels want to hear bad news about chemicals, industry and agriculture and will use this to justify their bias. Pity there is no science-based organisation in Brussels that could draw attention to the lack of evidence, poor methodology and abundance of factual errors and omissions.

The solutions provided are either already used, unsustainable or impractical. As one farmer shared with me, they offer nothing new for farmers. Farmers use glyphosate for a reason and it is a testimony of the arrogance of these cosmopolitan zealots to think they could just waltz in with no knowledge of agronomy and dictate to farmers what they need to do. Shameful.

This is a serious problem. When a band of convinced dogmatic fundamentalists have such a high level of influence on the policy debate, use rhetoric over reason and ruthlessly attack industry and conventional farming, any rational dialogue becomes well-nigh impossible. As I have argued before, this brings us back to a 1933 environment. We are now seeing angry mobs radicalised by militant NGOs take action to attack farmers (Sainte-Soline was merely the first battlefield, and as I write this, over ten thousand far left agitators are assembling in the Deux-Sèvres region of France to attack farmers who want to build irrigation ponds to address the high risks of droughts). When gendarmes are injured or even killed by environmental militants, the Green Party can pretend to be shocked, but their present report shows how they contribute to the rhetoric.

A zealot is single-minded, eg, We must stop all synthetic pesticides! In being blinded by their objectives, they reach out for other solutions, any solution, in order to achieve their goals. They do not consider the consequences of their alternatives (to farmers, consumers, human health or the environment) or the lost benefits of banning products that, over time and practise, have been determined as the best solutions. A scientist looks at all of the alternatives and choses the best option. In the case of weed management, there are many options including herbicides. A zealot is blocked by certain caveats that restrict their decision-making process (eg, only natural substances) severely limiting what options are left.

This is not rational. They are not rational.

In Brussels today, zealots have more influence in policy debates and with sustainability as their virtue, they feel morally empowered to lie, deceive and act according to another set of rules. With this pathetic little report, the Green Party has demonstrated where they want to take the policy process. Will anyone stand up and oppose them?