Forget that even a San Francisco judge - the city environmental lawyers love to file lawsuits in because they lead the U.S. in anti-science beliefs - throws out meta-analyses that were clearly manufactured to get media attention for a potential juror as junk science.(2) Or that organic food means more toxic chemical in European kids. Or that there are legitimate concerns about the safety of food sold in farmer's markets precisely because organic farmers have no accountability.
Anti-science mullahs like Pesticide Action Network and Swiss Public Eye can't help themselves when it comes to scaremongering - it is how they get paid - but environmental reality has bad news for them. Farmers are not the key source of glyphosate and aminopolyphosphonates found in water - the European fetish for laundry additives is.
A meta-analysis of 100 sites found that European patterns of glyphosate concentrations correlate to municipal wastewater, because if it was due to farming, there would be seasonal spikes. Instead it was about the same all during the year. Just like drugs in European municipal water - and there is a lack of aminopolyphosphonates in U.S. detergents.
None of this will change the $3 billion per year environmental industry. The Greens lost a lot of ground due to public unhappiness after believing them on solar and wind power and now suffering under high costs of that plus expensive food, but they are still a dominant force in European politics. The government pays them to stay that way.
NOTES:
(1) If they use common weedkillers like glyphosate (Roundup) they will even suggest it is giving people cancer. If you are reading here instead of Mother Jones you know plants are not little people. Scientists don't like to speak in absolutes but it is impossible for a chemical that only acts on a pathway existing in plants to kill humans.
(2) Because jury trials don't consider science, those are just environmental lawyers attempting to shame Evil Science, it is easy to get some cosmic judgment. Appellate courts do consider science, so those judgments are often then thrown out or reduced to a pittance. The last time a company was dumb enough to settle when they knew they did nothing wrong was PG&E over hexavalent chromium. But PG&E is the de facto official utility of California. They were probably told to settle by government. All of the costs were passed along to consumers. And the supposed victims got very little money. One of the lawyers involved in shaking down PG&E is now in federal prison for fraud.
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