Monsanto Company is the dominant player in commercial genetically engineered (GE) crops, the biggest seed company in the world, and—to hear them tell it—a leader and innovator in sustainable agriculture.

Monsanto aggressively touts its technology as vital to achieving laudable goals such as ensuring adequate food production, responding to the challenge of global warming, and reducing agriculture’s negative impacts on the environment.

The reality is not so flattering. In fact, Monsanto has held back the development of sustainable agriculture, and continues to do so, in several ways:

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The Union of Concerned Scientists is the leading science-based nonprofit working for a healthy environment and a safer world. UCS combines independent scientific research and citizen action to develop innovative, practical solutions and to secure responsible changes in government policy, corporate practices, and consumer choices.

Sign the petition, please.

Here’s the response from Climate Communication:

Do you consult your dentist on your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field, and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.

On January 27, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed on climate change by the climate science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology. While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert. This happens in nearly every field of science. For example, there is a retrovirus expert who does not accept that HIV causes AIDS. And it is instructive to recall that a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science.

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Also from Think Progress:

Panic Attack: Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal Finds 16 Scientists to Push Pollutocrat Agenda With Long-Debunked Climate Lies

This is an old story but worthy of coverage because we still live with the consequences.  It’s about rBST and Monsanto.  Since this story ran, milk product producers, knowing that the word on the dangers of rBGH or rBST is growing began labeling their products as rBGH or rBST free products. Monsanto in turn, sued to have the labels removed. The final result was any product that has that label also has a disclaimer that rBGH or rBST produced milk is essentially no different than other milk. Look at the labels next time you’re in the market. So, the rubber stamp of safety given by the FDA opened the door for this result as well.

There’s more heartbreaking news. President Obama hired Monsanto executives to work in high positions at the FDA during this term. Even a President, who gets heckled as a supposed socialist, is influenced by corporate power in ways that aren’t always apparent, and you won’t see if you get your news from the teevee set.

Another thing about the rBST. What happens is that the rBST makes the cows produce more milk, it makes their udders larger. And also, they get more infections. So there is a higher chance you will get milk with pus in it. When the milk is pasteurized, the bacteria is killed, but you are still drinking pus. Brought to you by our friends at Monsanto. Use only organic dairy products or those labeled rBST free, that’s the only way, or stop using them. Otherwise you may get unwanted hormones and pus in your milk.

During the late-December media lull, the USDA didn’t satisfy itself with green lighting Monsanto’s useless, PR-centric “drought-tolerant” corn. It also prepped the way for approving a product from Monsanto’s rival Dow Agrosciences—one that industrial-scale corn farmers will likely find all-too useful.

Dow has engineered a corn strain that withstands lashings of its herbicide, 2,4-D. The company’s pitch to farmers is simple: Your fields are becoming choked with weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. As soon as the USDA okays our product, all your problems will be solved.

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From the folks at Climate Change crock of the Week:

Hope from the evangelical community on climate change. Some wisdom from climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe

The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880, according to NASA scientists. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, released an updated analysis that shows temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline.

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So get off your butt and get busy. If we don’t fight to take our country back, our children and their children will suffer the consequences of living in a neo-feudal society. It’s just that simple. Visit Amend2012

This is courageous and noteworthy.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a voter, and will vote again for Obama. The alternatives, including Ron Paul who has some good ideas and some deeply delusional ones, are non-starters, period. I think that we as Americans better get used to the idea that we have to hold the people we voted for accountable in the same way we would want to hold those we would never vote for accountable. None of these folks are trustworthy, I just want to keep the objectivists, plutocrats and sociopaths out of office, that would be a miracle unto itself.

I still value hope and change. I hope Barack Obama changes.

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