A new study found that Colorado's booming pot industry is causing more CO2 emissions than its coal - almost 50 percent more.The reason is that marijuana in Colorado has to be grown in giant greenhouses which require air conditioning or heat, plus giant lights. This does not include emissions associated with storage and processing.

In Issues&Insights, I note that that activist groups are demanding the administration replace evidence-based research with activist-backed junk science. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), among others, is demanding a ban on 11 critical pesticides that farmers have relied on to feed the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. These are all products that have been thoroughly evaluated by career scientists - not political appointees - at U.S. regulatory agencies numerous times, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. They are safe. And they are essential to keeping food affordable.

In Issues&Insights, I note that that activist groups are demanding the administration replace evidence-based research with activist-backed junk science. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), among others, is demanding a ban on 11 critical pesticides that farmers have relied on to feed the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. These are all products that have been thoroughly evaluated by career scientists - not political appointees - at U.S. regulatory agencies numerous times, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. They are safe. And they are essential to keeping food affordable.

The pandemic of 2020 caused a lot of people to rethink science beliefs that were more luxury than reality. Did you want your family protected by some stuff that claimed to be organic and natural or did you want Clorox, Lysol, and Purell that actually worked? Did you want Peruvian tree bark sold by Chris Cuomo and his wife or a COVID-19 vaccine?

A few short years after NASA got money for the successor to the Hubble telescope, they told Congress that 11 years would not be enough time to build it. They told the public they couldn't put a telescope into space by 2002, even though that was more time than it took to start from nothing and have living breathing humans walk on the moon.The James Webb Space Telescope is named after the NASA manager who oversaw that moon landing. Were he alive today he'd probably wish they had chosen Gene Kranz for the name instead. He'd certainly be skeptical that modern NASA can do any Big Science. Cute robots on Mars, sure, but not big stuff like this.

Activists like George Monbiot and Dave Goulson are parroting their environmental allies when it comes to neonics, but the science is clear - without thiamethoxam, sugar beet crops will continue to be devastated because older, less effective (but often certified organic) pesticides really only work if there are no pests to worry about.Nostalgia is fine for their backyard gardens but not agriculture. In the real world of food production, neonics are better for the environment than legacy products that were sprayed everywhere. Instead of being mass spraying, which can lead to runoff and persistence, neonicotinoids are derived from natural mechanisms. They are seed treatments, for when plants are most vulnerable to pests.

It may surprise you to read that once upon a time that nearly half of the scientists who paid to be part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) were religious. 

With CRISPR-Cas9 finally getting its Nobel Prize pundits talk about who was excluded, like Feng Zhang and his research group at the Broad Institute, but only a few talk about entire countries left out. And left behind in the 21st century.

You may heard "chestnuts on an open fire" at Christmas but they are a lot of rarer than they once were. That is due to nature, and importation of a fungus that decimated 4,000,000,000 American Chestnut trees and caused this beautiful hardwood to disappear from eastern forests.But after 28 years of research, an academic group solved the problem using a gene found in grains, strawberries, etc. It is completely harmless but prevents the tree from developing sores. It is nature fixing nature.

German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture data show that use of crop protection products, e.g. pesticides, went down last year and Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner notes that has been the trend since 2012. Klöckner says it shows Germany is "on the right track" when it comes to reducing use of pesticides but anti-science groups are angry.