If you work at the higher levels of the kind of environmental groups that weaponize fear and doubt about science to raise money, like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, evidence-based decision-making is a big lump of coal in your stocking.

That is why these companies are in a panic about efforts in Europe to modernize regulations - to enter the 21st century. Farmers and the science community in Europe are increasingly worried they will be left behind for an entire generation if they don't accept that biotechnology is safe; they remain stuck in the 1950s world where mutagenesis, creating new strains of plants using chemical and radiation baths, is safe. It's even certified organic. But not more recent science.

They have trapped themselves in a box of their own creation in Europe. They lobbied heavily against GMOs and got away with it, because Monsanto was an American company making GMOs. They could invoke populism to appeal to voters by siding with BASF, which used older, less precise mutagenesis ... and is a European company. Masking their nationalism with 'we are not against science, we are against corporate control of food' rhetoric was okay for people who did not want to see facts, like that BASF was much larger than Monsanto. Once Bayer bought Monsanto and GMOs started to go off patent, so anyone can make them, that strategy went into disarray.



Meanwhile, progress still happened. Just like GMOs were different (and more precise) than mutagenesis, CRISPR-Cas9 is not a GMO, yet to the environmental community they are both the same because science. By switching the same anti-GMO argument to CRISPR, activists (and their eco-terrorist members) reveal themselves as clueless about the science they still claim they know is flawed. 

They invested so heavily in being anti-GMO that now they look ridiculous revealing that they are against all biotechnology; the very thing they said they were not against a few years ago.

Joining those deniers for hire are dozens of other activist groups, from the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements to VLOG to GenØk, all united in their common mission; seemingly to force Europe into Russia's sphere of control. Because Europe will never be able to feed itself using the ancient practices environmental groups have fetishized to make money. And the Russians have been happy to fund "green" groups in both Europe and the US to make sure their top two exports, energy and food, are under constant siege by merchants of doubt from social authoritarians who simply want to stay in the past.