"Confronting pesticide industry science denialism."
"In the wake of this year’s global climate summit, advocates are raising the alarm about how industry continues to distort climate policy with public relations spin.
Indeed, one of the most critical challenges of our times is the need to confront corporate disinformation. While the stakes of Big Oil’s climate denialism and greenwashing are ever clearer — as wildfires tear through communities, entire nations are threatened by rising sea levels, and farmlands are ravaged by extreme weather — a more stealthy set of devastating impacts hides behind the lies fabricated by Big Pesticide corporations.
Like Big Oil, pesticide companies spend hundreds of millions every year on deceitful PR strategies to keep their hazardous products on the market, even as evidence mounts that many pesticides still used today are tied to certain cancers, damage to children’s developing brains, biodiversity collapse, and more.
In a new report, Merchants of Poison, we document a case study of just such pesticide industry disinformation, revealing a PR playbook similar in strategy, institutions — and at times the very same individual players — as that of the fossil fuel industry. As nearly all agricultural chemicals are derived from fossil fuels, this interconnection should come as no surprise. "
Stacy Malkan, Kendra Klein, and Anna Lappé report for Environmental Health News December 8, 2022.
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