GMO goes Global Warming

Monsanto has found that bribes don't do much for the bottom line and promoting the GMO business, so they have hopped on the Global Warming bandwagon to promote their products:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/01/monsanto_pays_1.php

News just in, that grows on our post about the WorldWatch history of GMOs. “American agribusiness giant Monsanto has agreed to pay a $US1 million penalty to settle charges of bribing the Indonesian Government. The company "agreed to accept responsibility for the conduct of its employees in paying the bribe and making the false books and records entries," the US Justice Department said in a statement. The bribe made by a Monsanto employee was aimed at facilitating the cultivation of genetically modified crops and falsely certified as "consultant fees" in the company's books and records, assistant US Attorney-General Christopher Wray.



Now they're working on plants that survive heat stress and are suitable for biofuel production. If you can't eat it, burn it in your car:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/03/basf_and_monsan.html

BASF and Monsanto to Collaborate on Plant Biotechnology R&D and Commercialization
21 March 2007

BASF and Monsanto Company announced a long-term joint research and development (R&D) and commercialization collaboration in plant biotechnology that will focus on the development of high yielding crops and crops that are more tolerant to adverse environmental conditions such as drought. The collaboration is effective immediately.

Over the life of the collaboration, the two companies will dedicate a joint budget of potentially US$1.5 billion (€1.21 billion) to fund a dedicated pipeline of yield and stress tolerance traits for corn, soybeans, cotton and canola.

The joint pipeline will include the companies’ existing and planned yield and stress tolerance programs and be comprised of projects generated by independent plant biotechnology discovery and research from each company. The first product developed as part of this collaboration is expected to be commercialized in the first half of the next decade.

Current trends driving agricultural research are per-acre productivity, water use and nitrogen use in the context of rapidly increasing demands to supply biofuel requirements, a growing concern over water supply (agriculture consumes 75% of the world’s fresh water) and the rising costs of nitrogen-based fertilizers.



http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/07/374/

The Big Circus Tent: Industry Hucksters Get in on Global Warming
by Andrew Christie

Did you hear? Genetic engineering will curb global warming!Liquefied natural gas will curb global warming!

Nuclear power will curb global warming!

All of these claims are from actual press releases, or ripped from the day’s headlines, or ripped from a headline placed over a press release by an accommodating news editor or syndicate.

The success of an idea in its travels through the public marketplace can be measured by its corruption; the eagerness with which it is seized upon and bent to the ends of its appropriators. When Social Darwinism perverted Darwinism into “survival of the fittest” as justification for late 19th-century predatory capitalism, that was the surest indicator that the theory of evolution had become widely accepted.

Now it’s global warming’s turn. Human-caused climate change has become a star ascendant in the marketplace of ideas, which means we must all be prepared to unhitch the wagons of Very Bad Ideas that will increasingly attempt to hitch themselves to that star. Even before this week’s landmark Supreme Court ruling forcing the federal government to admit that CO2 is a pollutant, P.R. consultants were obviously hipping their corporate clients to the fact that if you need to distract public attention from certain aspects of your product, there’s nothing hotter than global warming.

So: Will genetic engineering curb global warming?