NRDC

Atrazine has come under attack by a group called the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Now, any group in America has a right to protest what they want, but this group is different: They’ve already demonstrated their ability to orchestrate campaigns of misinformation with the explicit intent of bringing down an industry they don’t like. They’ve done it before.

See Atrazine; ‘Son of Alar’: The New Pesticide Scare Campaign

Let’s take apples, for example. The NRDC gained fame in the late 1980s by claiming to have “evidence” that a chemical then commonly used on apple crops, called alar, caused cancer in humans. Famous television news programs aired lengthy reports on the claims. Newspapers, magazines and even major movie stars joined the anti-alar bandwagon, claiming in shrill, alarmist voices that alar, which some growers sprayed on apple trees prior to flowering to prolong ripening and shelf life, caused cancer in people.

Only problem was, it didn’t. But before the EPA  special panel of scientists declared the NRDC “research” too flawed to use, and rejected it for not conforming to minimum quality standards (read more about those  EPA standards here), more than 20,000 U.S. growers lost a lot of money, and some their very businesses, as the market for U.S. apples plummeted.

Here’s the cynical part. It later came out that, in 1988, the NRDC had hired a PR company to spread the lies. And the head of that company, David Fenton, of Fenton Communications, later

bragged that the campaign to kill alar had been designed from the start to make money for the NRDC, including $700,000 selling a book on their claims

when they appeared on the Phil Donahue show during their media blitz.

Is that an organization that is qualified to dictate our policy on atrazine?