Did you down a glass of neonicotinoids today? They’re delicious, nutritious, and totally not killing all the bees.
An ever-accumulating weight of evidence links declining honeybee health with neonicotinoids, which have exploded in use since the late 1990s. Yet CEI completely denies any harm to bees from the chemicals, and rejects any role for government action in protecting bees.
CEI would be the “Competitive Enterprise Institute,” a lobbying group that specializes in fossil fuels and big agriculture. CEI is also home to Myron Ebell, the climate change-denier that Donald Trump has selected to lead the transition of the EPA.
But it isn't just greenhouse gas emissions that are likely to get a free ride under an Ebell-influenced EPA. Farm chemicals, too, would likely flow unabated if Ebell's agenda comes to dominate Trump's Environmental Protection Agency.
Ebell is behind the site SafeChemicalPolicy.org where you can learn that concerns about chemicals in the environment are “fearmongering” and that since honeybees in the United States are a non-native “farmed species,” that’s the real “tampering with nature.” Kill them. Kill those nasty bees.
Honeybees bad. Pesticides good. But Ebell’s group doesn’t stop there. He directly attacks scientists attempting to research effects of chemicals and pollution.
Ebbell’s group denies that there is a connection between chemicals and cancer, along with frequently blowing the trumpet of “pesticides are worth any risk because they stop pests that cause diseases,” which is, not coincidentally, a frequent theme on the alt-right where diseases of all sorts are blamed on the banning of pesticides.
So, Ebell's group doesn't just brazenly trash established science when it comes to climate change, to the delight of the fossil fuel industry. CEI provides the same service for the companies that dominate agrichemical production.
But remember, it’s not pesticides that are the problem. It’s those bees.