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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

You're referring to neonicotinoids. Let's stipulate that neonicotinoids are in fact the root cause of CCD, which is defined as the increase in overwintering colony losses.

Honey bees are a livestock animal, tied directly to agriculture. Neonicotinoids are popular in part because they're a narrow spectrum pesticide targeted at insect biology, and have fewer ill effects on other mammals than other pesticides.

Here's the question: if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture, and CCD can be mitigated by more aggressive colony generation strategies, why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all? The market seems to have already done that.

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> why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all?

Unintended consequences of large-scale ecological engineering perhaps. Sure, commercial beekeepers can increase prices and the neonicotinoid users can accept it as an indirect cost of their choice of pesticide, but what about the large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied into commercial interests, but on which we still depend?

Seems to me like there's a huge indiscriminant spillover effect into an incredibly complex system, the implications of which can not be easily predicted nor priced.

One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost onto carbon emissions. Also note how you said "have fewer ill effects on other mammals"... there are still effects, and asbestos seemed like a miracle material before the long-term effects were studied.

The indiscriminate usage of an chemical toxic enough to cause measurable ecological web disruption sounds like a geo-engineering quagmire to me, even if the commercial front-line can compensate with higher prices. How do you accurately price what you don't know?

>what about the large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied into commercial interests, but on which we still depend?

Going even further, what about the side-effects on the very same field?

Pesticides kill insects, but they kill both beneficial (pest eating) and pestilent insects. The problem is the bad guys can bounce back faster - picture the deer population vs. wolf population. This means that, paradoxically, the use of pesticides now leads to a greater need for pesticides later.

The solution is to step back, recognize this negative feedback loop, and address the root causes of pest invasion: dead soil and loss of biodiversity. This is where techniques like cover cropping, interplanting, and inoculating with compost (soil microorganisms) come in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_crop

http://extension.illinois.edu/soil/SoilBiology/soil_food_web...

One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost onto carbon emissions.

Actually, this isn't a shortcoming of the market as such. It's a failure in conjunction of our incomplete recognition of private property rights. By preventing certain types of property from having private ownership, we don't allow the market to correct itself. More specifically, if we had some private entity or entities that were recognized as the owners of air or water, then they would be able to recover damages from the polluters, thus removing ability to externalize the cost of pollution.

But once you start removing things from the purview of the market (in this case by saying that nobody can own it, and thus nobody has an ownership interest in protecting or has a right to damages), then you're actively preventing the market from correcting. I think it's really amazing that the market does as well as it does, considering how ubiquitous are the regulations that handicap it.

Edit: I should have read farther down the chain, where this [1] mentions the same idea.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024457

> if we had some private entity or entities that were recognized as the owners of air or water

I volunteer to be that entity.

I can't upvote you. Bravo.

Thanks, but why can't you upvote me?

I don't want to endorse your position as a monopoly owner of both air and water, and yet I want to reward you for boldness. There isn't a button for that.

> I don't want to endorse your position as a monopoly

I really don't think you need to worry too much about that.

>if we had some private entity or entities that were recognized as the owners of air or water

How exactly would that work? Say I buy a piece of land. Under your proposal, I presume I would have to pay a licensing fee to Nestle whenever it rains, and to 3M for the privilege of breathing?

So are you saying that the solution to externalisation of damage to the environment by a corporate entity is to have other corporate entities own everything? All the air, all the sea, all the rivers etc?

It's certainly one possible solution. This isn't just my idle speculation; see Coase Theorem [1] in economics:

The theorem states that if trade in an externality is possible and there are sufficiently low transaction costs, bargaining will lead to an efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property.

In the interest of intellectual honesty, I should go on to quote:

In practice, obstacles to bargaining or poorly defined property rights can prevent Coasian bargaining. ... Coase argued that real-world transaction costs are rarely low enough to allow for efficient bargaining and hence the theorem is almost always inapplicable to economic reality. Since then, others have demonstrated the importance of the perfect information assumption and shown using game theory that inefficient outcomes are to be expected when this assumption is not met.

That being said, it should be equally clear that the failures of public choice [2] are also legion, and in the example of pollution, it's clear that the regulatory system has bungled quite a lot of it, so it's far from obvious that the private ownership approach would be any worse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

Why can't the government be the entity that owns air and water and recovers damages?

Is it relevant that honeybees are not native to North America, and can't pollinate many native American plants?

One thing we can stipulate is that the chemistry of our planet is changing rapidly as result of human industry. We might not be able to prove that fact with conclusive evidence before any fallible human court of law, or public opinion. But whether we do or not doesn't change the fact that big changes in planetary chemistry mark major extinction periods in our planetary past, and that we are messing with forces far beyond our control. That is the height of hubris.

So we can also stipulate that the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance.

Unfortunately our corporate law and ideas of rightful production were founded before accurate concepts of our place in the ecology of the planet were fully formed.

So we are dealing with a lot of retrograde ideas of a human centered produce chain, and these are based very firmly in law and ideas of right and good that are outdated in the anthropocene.

You can talk about a "net win for agriculture" and "aggressive colony generation strategies", however net wins and aggressive strategies need to be evaluated in the larger context of their impact on life on earth - the whole thing, not just human ability to pig out for another 50 or 100 years before we go extinct! Cheers.

I will not stipulate that "the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance", because I don't even know what that means. The Precautionary Principle works well in some places and not in others. In this case: you're pretending that the policy you're advocating doesn't have an embedded tradeoff, but it does. If you use less neonicotinoid pesticide, which you're hyperfixated on because of what seems to be a BS media trend story about bees, you will use more of other pesticides (or, worse, more land, which destroys habitat for all animals) which may be more harmful in the aggregate.

Honey bees are not a natural part of our ecology. They are a livestock animal. Worrying about their population and the energy it takes to sustain them is a lot like worrying about the population of dairy cows.

>If you use less neonicotinoid pesticide, you will use more land

If you think that the only possible way to grow food is monoculture fields sprayed with poison and fertilizer (aka the "green revolution"), then you'd be right.

But is that really true? Is that the only possible way to grow food?

I ask because forests seem to grow lots of food (an unmanaged forest generates many times more biomass per hectare than a farm field), without requiring nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, neonicotinoids, glycophosphates, diesel fuel...

But surely there's no way to design a system that operates with no inputs like a forest, and also turns much of that biomass into food for humans, right?

Oh wait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_forest

Just because the forest has more mass does not mean it produces more food. Trees produce tons of mass in an evolutionary war to be taller than all the other trees and get more sunlight. None of it is edible though.

All of them are in a highly competitive war for resources. Plants produced poisons to kill other plants. They try to spread their seeds faster. They try to grow taller and faster and steal sunlight. They grow bigger roots to steal water.

No plant wants to be eaten, and so many produce poisons and thorns other deterrents. Few of them keep all their calories in one place, and require highly specialized digestive systems which humans don't have.

The exception is fruit plants of course, but they only produce the minimal amount of food necessary. The fruit you buy in a store has been extensively bred by humans to be so large - and this domestication has a massive energy cost that makes them uncompetitive in the wild.

Anyway the point is that the wild is not optimized for humans at all. It's an incredibly inefficient way to produce food. The plants are spending most of their resources fighting each other, and insects, and everything else. The winner of this game is whatever plants reproduce the most, not the ones humans want. Permaculture is really cool, but you are never going to get anywhere near as many calories per unit of land.

You post is great until the last sentence:

Permaculture is really cool, but you are never going to get anywhere near as many calories per unit of land.

Permaculture means living such that we don't go extinct. Having a great portion of our workforce return to bucolic agrarian pursuits is one way to get there! As they say: it beats flipping burgers.

The point of a food forest is that it has been carefully cultivated to maximize your human edibles, without needing energy expensive, oil based, or otherwise negatively impactful external inputs. When you subtract the non renewable energy expenditure, you certainly will get as many calories per unit of land!

If you are optimizing towards energy use, we could theoretically make robots or tractors that are solar powered.

But this isn't an issue at all. Farm equipment does not consume that much fuel, and fuel isn't that expensive.

The energy costs of fertilizer and pesticides are the problem not the cost of robots/tractors.

All fossil fuels are going to be gone within 5k years. Humans are several times that old and presumably humans will want to survive that. Sure, we can kick the can on this one, but it is a long term problem.

In 5-20 years we will be able to grow food 30x cheaper in highly efficient bacteria and algae tanks: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/31zo1r/a_future...

Who knows what we will be able to do in 5,000 years. I wouldn't worry about it.

Any agricultural system that won't support near total automation of the harvesting of staples will not be sustainable for a planet with over 7 billion people. A food forest sounds great, but there's no way to drive a combine over it and feed a hundred thousand people with the labor of one.

(an unmanaged forest generates many times more biomass per hectare than a farm field)

Biomass is not the same thing as food. Are food forests actually capable of growing more calories (or fewer calories with enough compensating micronutrients) per unit area over an extended time compared to industrialized fields?

Ah but it isn't true. What is true is that industrial agriculture is the product of pecuniary exploit, not economy of scale, and definitely not the quest for the greater good.

You not knowing what that means is a good thing. That's where you and all the industrial production chain should start PRIOR to deciding that one toxic chemical really ought to be used in place of ten others, etc. A proper foundation for any use of industrial, planet scale chemistry is: I don't know what the effect will be.

That's why I'm not narrowly focused on neonicotinoids at all, and didn't mention them in my post. I'm focused on the entire supply chain, from legos to legumes. It should all be looked at with a big dose of critical skepticism.

From there, understanding the difference between growing beans and dumping weird plastic molecules into the ecosystem is pretty fundamental to knowing what is and isn't a natural party of our ecology. That's the wisdom that should sit at the top of our supply chain.

"PRIOR to deciding that one toxic chemical really ought to be used in place of ten others"

Points 1 and 2 from "5 Simple Chemistry Facts That Everyone Should Understand Before Talking About Science[1]" apply here.

1) Everything is made of chemicals, and

2) There is no such thing as a toxic chemical, there are only toxic doses. Let me say that again: all chemicals are safe at a low enough dose, and all chemicals are toxic at a high enough dose.

The idea that we can live in a world in which humans do no harm is untenable. Almost every single action we perform does some harm to some thing, and picking and choosing which things we can harm and which we cannot is rather arbitrary. Further, the idea that proving that "my chemical" does no harm is quite an impossible task, no matter how noble the chemical. H2O is responsible for innumerable floods, drownings, mudslides, erosion, etc. If your test fails for water, I think it's safe to say that your test is broken.

[1] - http://thelogicofscience.com/2015/05/27/5-simple-chemistry-f...

The argument is duplicitous! :}

If you and I are responsible for a man who is exposed to doses of radiation everyday and I stand up and say, you know, we shouldn't have this guy exposed to radiation because it could be lethal, and you say, hoooold on, there's no such thing as lethal radiation, just lethal doses of radiation ... then I gotta wonder who you are working for!

Because both our points are that you gotta know how much radiation he is getting, and not according to some chart generated by someone who is benefitting from the labor from a distance, but actually what the effect of the dose is over the course of the guy's life.

We agreed about dose, but you don't tell me that I'm in the wrong for saying "halt work", by saying " but it's a question of dosage " and let the guy keep working while you do a 20 year study! You protect him first!

I disagree. The point isn't that no research should be done, but that nothing is safe. Your point was

"So we can also stipulate that the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance."

That is an impossible task. Water is not safe. Oxygen is flammable. The number of things we can do that are not harmful to anyone or anything is closer to zero than you think.

If you set the bar at impossible, and I lower it to something achievable, it is bad form to evaluate my reasonableness as duplicitous.

Oxygen is not flammable (neither is fluorine... every other element is, in the sense that it forms stable compounds in exothermic reactions with oxygen.)

Oxygen is, however, fairly toxic (2 atmospheres partial pressure starts to get pretty dangerous after relatively short times.)

You are indeed correct, and had I taken more care, I would have stated that oxygen encourages flammability... which is still not entirely correct, but closer.

Thank you for the correction.

But you destroy your own point. Everyone on earth is exposed to "doses of radiation" every single second. It's just a small enough amount of radiation as to be benign.

Not at all! It's a leading cause of death and we certainly do what we can to minimize our exposure.

Is the answer partly that its a classic Pigouvian property rights issue? The pesticide users are not compensating the bee users for the damage to their property. There may be some overlap in the forms of agriculture, but I'm guessing its not 100%.

> Here's the question: if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture, and CCD can be mitigated by more aggressive colony generation strategies, why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all? The market seems to have already done that.

I'm concerned that we haven't proven yet that we can properly mitigate CCD long term with aggressive colony generation strategies, at least not long term. We need more data.

Use of the three most common neonicotinoids has been severely restricted in the EU since 2013. If they can withstand the lobbying pressure from Bayer, who makes literally billions of dollars selling these, we'll hopefully have good data in a few years time.

Because honeybees are just one of many pollinating insects whose numbers are falling dramatically. They just happen to get talked about a lot in the press because there are people with a direct economic interest in them.

Can you cite statistics showing that e.g. mason bee populations are collapsing?

I'm not in the US but this seems to be the biggest study there http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6127/1611

>Using historic data sets, we quantified the degree to which global change over 120 years disrupted plant-pollinator interactions in a temperate forest understory community in Illinois, USA. We found degradation of interaction network structure and function and extirpation of 50% of bee species. Network changes can be attributed to shifts in forb and bee phenologies resulting in temporal mismatches, nonrandom species extinctions, and loss of spatial co-occurrences between extant species in modified landscapes. Quantity and quality of pollination services have declined through time. The historic network showed flexibility in response to disturbance; however, our data suggest that networks will be less resilient to future changes.

News article: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/28/wild-bees...

Pesticides are far from the only factor, but adding that to habitat loss and climate change is hardly helping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Other_wildlife

REVIEW: An overview of the environmental risks posed by neonicotinoid insecticides http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12111/f...

Forget about the bees, it doesn't sound like something i would like to have on my food...

Because wild populations of bees are affected too.

From a strictly utilitarian point of view, that reduces biodiversity, which increases the risk of disease. The narrower the gene pool, the greater percentage of animals could be lost to a particular virus or bacteria.

From a broader perspective, it would be a bummer of a world of the only bees are managed colonies that are trucked around from farm to farm. Goodbye to fields of wildflowers with bees buzzing around, and goodbye to all sorts of wild plants that depend on wild bee pollination.

So brutally rapid market driven natural selection of the honey bee population is a good thing, hmm. Darwinian both financially and biologically, and fits with prevailing American economic philosophy. I venture that we're performing an uncontrolled experiment with known benefits and risks we are just beginning to understand. Not worth it. One can only hope the E.U invades in Operation American Freedom and imposes the Precautionary Principle on us.

Honey bees are not American. They're livestock brought into the country by settlers.

This is a narrow view. As go the honey bees, so go the indigenous pollinators.

That does not in fact appear to be the case.

As I am not American. My forebears came here as settlers.

The EU should concentrate on keeping themselves viable, I am not sure they can afford to worry about Americans.

Edit: I have a lot of sympathy for the EU, they are in a tough situation.

>if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture

The logic here seems to be that:

* Farmers buy neonicotinoids.

* Therefore, neonicotinoids have a net positive effect on agriculture.

(in other words, like a good libertarian you are assuming that the market has complete/perfect/accurate information)

Unfortunately that's just not true. Today's farmers simply don't have the required soil science/botany/ecology/hydrology knowledge. Worst, they are actively misled by biocide and fertilizer salesmen, who have a natural profit motive to convince farmers that their products are essential.

Far from being essential, in reality pesticides destroy the nutrient harvesting ability of healthy soil. Soil microbiologist Dr. Elaine Ingham explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag

I would appreciate it if you would not call me a libertarian, as I am not one of those, and you couldn't possibly know anyways. This mistake --- the fundamental attribution effect --- causes more bullshit misunderstandings on HN than anything except for perhaps the is-ought fallacy.

Whether or not you call yourself the "L" word, you argument relies on free market fundamentalism, which is just as bad.

Free Market Fundamentalism: the belief that markets are giant calculating machines that output optimal social relations, i.e. Pareto optimal transactions

That is also false. Please don't use me as a coat rack for arguments you want to make that are unrelated to mine.

To be fair though, neonicotinoids have become popular since the 90's because they are much more narrow spectrum than previous pesticides. In particular, they are not harmful to mammals, which is often seen as a good thing.

By destroying the soil, you kill everything (mammals included) because they're all part of the same food web. The video I linked explains this.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I definitely agree that using less (ideally no) pesticides is the best. But moving from a pesticide with more side effects to one with less is an improvement any way you look at it. Also, I believe it's an open question whether we would be able to feed the world population without using pesticides. If you have to choose between adverse affects on soil quality and potentially having people starve, the choice for policy makers is obvious.

> I believe it's an open question whether we would be able to feed the world population without using pesticides.

I would counter that it is a closed question whether we can feed the world population with pesticides, and the answer is "no."

The industrial food system is not a viable replacement for itself. People tend to forget that that's all "unsustainable" means.

>If you have to choose between adverse affects on soil quality and potentially having people starve

False choice. That's like asking someone to choose between inhaling and exhaling.

Nations are built, both literally and figuratively, on their soil. Nations that forget this perish.

Nations are built, both literally and figuratively, on their soil. Nations that forget this perish.

That's empty rhetoric. What actual alternative do you suggest?

Step 1: devise a sustainable system of growing food, where "sustainable" means that the process can be maintained for at least five hundred years without exhausting resources.

An example of unsustainable agriculture is a model based on mining phosphate.

An example of sustainable agriculture is a model where human waste can be converted into fertilisers (e.g. by processing sewage using reed beds, then charring the reeds to use as biochar and mulch).

Turn our attention to plants which will efficiently store phosphorous in a biologically available form, and ensure that the phosphorous we currently discard in effluent can be captured.

Treat spaceship Earth as a closed system and relise that we have to plumb our outputs back into our inputs or there will be a heck of a mess to clean up later.

There is also the issue of the begged question when asking, "how do we feed 9 billion people?"

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