Friends of the Earth was famously started by an anti-nuclear activist who believed his employer, Sierra Club, did not hate science enough.
You read that right. Sierra Club, founded by a rabid eugenicist, was still too nice for David Brower. So he went to, wait for this, Robert Orville Anderson, Chairman of the the Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) Oil Co. and largest landowner in the United States, and told him he was going to run nuclear energy out of existence. Anderson thought it might be good to have a San Francisco "useful idiot" out there campaigning against an energy competitor and wrote a check.
So Friends of the Earth was quite literally created by Big Oil.
The real founder of Friends of the Earth was wealthy oligarch, landowner, and oil baron Robert Orville Anderson.
Since then, they have branched into every progressive anti-science position - they loved hydroelectric power, natural gas and biofuels until those got popular enough to sue over. They hate "nanotechnology", whatever they think that means, because that sounds futuristic enough to terrify ironically-named progressives. When the COVID-19 pandemic happened, they accused scientists of creating "vaccine apartheid" (even though the first Trump administration was only one to remove FDA red tape in 20 years) and prior to that they were against "GMOs" - though not the predecessor of GMOs, Mutagenesis, which they cheered about being certified Organic despite those being random mutations forced into being by chemical and radiation baths.
Now they are against a new wheat that has been approved because it contains a gene from...a sunflower. It is more resistant to drought and the weedkiller glufosinate. Less water and less herbicides are good things, if the environment is important.
For Friends of the Earth, Beyond Pesticides, and others, it is not about the environment. It is about blocking science, just as it has always been. That's where the money is, in rich countries. It is sure not on the pro-science side.
Friends of the Earth demonstration in Berlin of 2013. By Dirk Ingo Franke - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
Hating science is good business. The Friends of the Earth president makes $300,000 per year, funded by celebrity musicians such as Paul McCartney and, of course, groups that made their wealth using the products Friends of the Earth claims to oppose, like Ford Foundation. They lobbied General Mills to remove GMOs years ago and the result was a huge flop for the company. It turns out that progressives are not going to buy your processed cereal no matter what you do; they are in the ban business, not the buying business.
Now that are back at it, because they believe if they got dumb marketing people to cave into hysteria once, they can do it again.
Hopefully, General Mills is smarter this time.
GMO Wheat has been in the works for a long time and though Friends of the Earth members cheered eco-terrorists destroying plots involved in previous trials, they didn't directly do it. When you are making $300,000 per year you need to spend money on political lobbyists and fundraising,(1) not risk your job being involved in terrorism and conspiracy. You have to leave the violence to Earth Liberation Front and groups they encourage members to create, like Take The Flour Back.(2)
Atheists hate religion so they learn the Bible better than religious people to trip them up. Activists lack that kind of intellectual clarity, they learn no science, perhaps fearing it might convert them. If they learned science, they would know GMO Wheat - resistant to modern pesticides so it will mean a lot less chemicals used - has been in development since even before President Clinton ordered his US Department of Agriculture to create a government Organic marketing group.
HB4 is one of the most thoroughly products ever tested and it sailed through FDA scrutiny. And GMOs in other foods have yet to cause a single stomach-ache. Organic-certified lettuce a few weeks ago sickened more people than GMOs have since they came into existence.
FDA career scientists - they are not Trump appointees any more than they were appointed by Biden or Obama - have found no issues with HB4. Friends of the Earth may simply be upset that since an Argentine company developed it, they can't sue the way they could in Amerca.
So they are calling on General Mills to ban it.
16th century peasants who could not read easily understood 'the dose makes the poison' but environmental progressives insist any dose will kill you. They believe in homeopathy and acupuncture and that science is evil, Except climate change. Anything that can be used for their doomsday prophecy is fine. Ho science studies have shown this can be toxic at orders of magnitude below the approved levels so activists rely on epidemiology - they create spreadsheets of surveys where people claim to have eaten foods and then see who got cancer and ate any food that had a weedkiller used in growth. Then they "suggest" a link. It's fraud, but that is most environmentalism.
Ban a product that is completely safe but uses less herbicide, less water, and increases affordabiliy. No company in their right mind would do that, though plenty of poorly-run ones have. And Friends of the Earth is counting on General Mills being just as poorly-run as they were in 2015.
Activists have yet to help anyone while science has continued to improve things thoughout history. GMO Wheat can do it again.
NOTE:
(1) If you want to promote violence, do what China and Russia do and donate using offshore donor-advised funds like Tides Foundation.
(2)
How to spot someone who hates science. They rush to tell you they don't hate science before they destroy it. They provided the date to scientists when they were going to conduct their eco-terrorism but knew police would be there so it may just be coincidence a fifth columnist went in and caused destruction a week prior. They denied all knowledge that one of their members was planning that - 'encourage then deny' is a staple tactic - and when they showed up to pretend it was the real attack and saw police, they shouted some stuff and went home.
