That Politico article is a poor re-hash of research that's been published and evaluated for a decade or more.  What that opinion article mostly ignores is the context of an entire daily diet.  Neither people nor bees subsist on a single food source.  We, for example, eat fruits, vegetables, meats, beans, grains (and more candy that I should).  Very little of your total daily protein intake comes in the form of vegetables.  Even if the protein content of every piece of vegetable you ate dropped by half, it would make a difference of less than half a percent of your total diet - something that you would easily and unconsciously compensate for with another spoonful of beans or forkful of meat.

Note, by the way, that the total percentage of plant protein in our preferred foods has declined by over 50% since the early 1800s.  That change was almost entirely the result of our choices toward yield, flavor, spoilage-resistance and hybridization.  Even the most dramatic research and predictions about potential future impacts of CO2 on plant protein find effects roughly an order of magnitude smaller than what we've already done to ourselves in the name of taste.  The allegations that the future CO2 effect will hurt those at the margins ignores the fact that poverty and nutrition problems among that same population have dramatically declined despite the documented plant-protein trend to date.  In other words, the evidence to date shows that the availability of more food has significantly outweighed the rather slight loss in vegetable quality.

Back to bees.  We broadly say that bees get their nutrition from two primary sources - nectar for carbohydrates and pollen for protein.  We already know that they shift their foraging behavior in response to need, availability and yes, nutrient levels.  When they need more protein, they bring in more pollen.  I see no evidence that they will suddenly lose that natural ability to adjust their own diets.  Absent such evidence, this seems like a tempest in a teapot.

(For those wanting to read the raw research, you can find full citations to many of the studies on CO2 and nutrition in the pages linked at http://www.co2science.org/subject/n/nutrition.php  Note:  I do not necessarily endorse all of that website's conclusions.  But they do a whole lot better job of citing to research than Politico.)

Mike Rossander



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