Jennifer Sass at NRDC said:
> The clothianidin lawsuit was about process.
> Failure to provide an opportunity for notice and public comment.
> We won.
No, she got it wrong - the Clothianidin lawsuit was about FIOA requests, and
NRDC dropped their suit.
The Spirotetramat lawsuit was the one "about process", about "Failure to
provide an opportunity for notice and public comment"
But "Won"?
Neither one was a "win", if one cares about the environment and/or bees.
As a general consistent trend, newer pesticides are far less toxic than the
ones they replace by design. Spirotetramat was intended to replace older,
far more toxic pesticides, like organophosphates and carbamates, but it is
also significantly less toxic to honey bees than prior systemics, like
Imidacloprid.
If you read this, you'll find that Dave Mendes, Dave Hackenberg, and David
Fischer of Bayer (no relation, "Fischer" is a common German name) agreed
that, for Spirotetramat:
"There were no indications that Movento (Spirotetramat) had any negative
impacts on brood success or colony health or survival".
And this was when the stuff was sprayed at the maximum rate on
fully-blooming citrus, a worst-case scenario of misuse of the pesticide.
http://pollinatethis.org/beeblog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/rogers_movento-2
010.pdf
While the NRDC called Spirotetramat a "Bee Toxic Pesticide" in their press
releases, ( http://www.nrdc.org/media/2010/100323.asp ) it is actually one
of the LEAST bee-toxic pesticides yet developed. Even far less toxic than
other more recent systemics, like Imidacloprid.
Eating about 0.039 ėg of Imidacloprid will cause an acute kill of a honey
bee.
A bee has to eat 107.3 ėg of Spirotetramat to die an acute death.
That's needing to eat nearly 3,000 times as much to kill a bee.
So for each application of any prior pesticide replaced by Spirotetramat,
beekeepers could rightly say that we had "won".
When the NRDC crowed about the "Bee Toxic Pesticide Removed from Store
Shelves" in their press releases, they were working to delay the
introduction of something so much less toxic that even Dave Hackenberg
couldn't complain about it.
Growers were still going to spray for pests of course, and if they could not
buy Spirotetramat, they'd buy something else. And that something else was
absolutely certain to be far more toxic to bees and everything else.
So, while the NRDC says "we won", the bees and everyone else seems to have
lost.
Decades ago, the NRDC was a valuable watchdog on many important issues.
These days, they seem to create more and more drama over less and less.
In cases like this, they did nothing but actively delay new products that
are significantly LESS toxic.
They also created a period of "no rules" for the use of the subject
pesticide, as I explained in my prior post in this thread.
How did any of that help the bees?
I submit it only hurt the bees.
That's not a "win".
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