> The status quo is we keep doing what we are currently doing for decades. The risks of doing that are far greater in my opinion.
Still a hard no.
It's precisely this attitude that got us where we are today. 50 years ago, the response would have been 'the status quo is we're headed towards mass starvation as we become unable to feed the giant post-war population boom using traditional agricultural techniques'.
Now we're faced with the possibility of widespread ecological collapse of marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Species are going extinct at thousands to millions of times the background rate. Even if we merely survive, the loss of genetic diversity will reverberate through millions of years and likely result in heavily degraded, less productive ecosystems that will require heavy human intervention in perpetuity to continue to function. We're basically cutting a huge hole in the boat underneath us, and signing ourselves up to bail out the water ... forever.
Let's be honest: we don't know the long-term ecological consequences of what we do. We didn't know 100 years ago, we didn't know 50 years ago, and we still don't know today. We do not have the ability to determine the long -term negative boomerang effect of mass application of so-called 'targeted' intervention.
> It's chemically identical to what you consume every day.
And how do you know drastically increasing the amount has no effect over the long term? Note that snippets of dsRNA floating around are potent immune system inducers, because it's what viruses create [1]. Does it have a long term pro-inflammatory effect? So let's assume you're correct, the dsRNA degrades quickly before humans eat it.
What about the transient immune responses of all flora and fauna in the sprayed area? What effect on the soil microbiome?
> no genetic modification
Literally modifying the genomes of fauna in the environment en masse in a highly selective way, putting enormous selective pressure in particular species. Do we even have any idea what that selective pressure will do? Will targeted species undergo rapid mutation and speciate? Will the descendant species become both more aggressive and harder to target, due to there being an empty ecological niche? Do those targeted species take on critical ecosystem roles that we're not yet aware of?
Note that this isn't idle speculation - just look at the enormous rise of MDR bacterial infections in hospitals, precisely the result of applying selective pressure for just a couple of generations.
The crux of all our problems is a chronic inability to admit that we don't know, and perhaps cannot safely know, the ecological consequences of our actions. But sure, kill away. If we're lucky, we won't be around when the boomerang hits.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5924774/