News Updates
GENETIC ENGINEERING
In our last newsletter we reported in some detail about the Starlink corn snafu. You may recall that this genetically engineered product, which had been approved for animal feed only, turned up all over the country last fall in taco shells, beer, and dozens of other items. This story continues. On the front page of the Washington Post’s March 1 edition we learn that, although the Starlink variety had been shelved, seed supplies destined for spring planting have been found to contain the offending protein. The next day a Wall Street Journal article on the matter was little more reassuring: “Although the altered seeds were on their way to farms, it isn’t believed that any were planted.” (The passive voice is always comforting. “Mistakes were made,” is the classic of the genre.) A week later the Department of Agriculture announced that less than 1% of corn seed intended for this year’s crop was a problem and that it intended to spend as much as $20 million buying it all back. The next day Kellogg Co. told the government that it wasn’t recalling its Morningstar Farms vegetarian corn dogs but was sending them in for testing because Greenpeace said it had found Starlink corn in the product. We await the results. An independent science advisory panel told the EPA in December that it saw only a “medium likelihood” that the Starlink protein could trigger allergic reactions in humans.
Meanwhile, on the issue of human cloning, a fertility specialist from Virginia and his partner, an Italian obstetrician, have announced that they will clone a human being. And this year’s winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Arthur Peacocke, an Anglican priest and biochemist, said “if you really are curing human disease, I don’t find (cloning) so objectionable.” He did allow, however, that moral theologians should point out to scientists that there are problems if fully cloned people are released into the world without loving parents and everything else that contributes “to the nature and dignity of a human being.”
GLOBAL WARMING
For a brief time this winter the new administration had everyone—polluters and environmentalists alike—shaking their heads. In late February new EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey and a Republican luminary, announced that the administration might push to place limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. “There is no question,” she said, “that global warming is a real phenomenon, that it is occurring.” She went on to say that the carbon dioxide regulation might be part of a broader administration initiative to regulate other pollutants that result from burning fossil fuels. Then it got even crazier. The administration approved a regulation prepared in Clinton’s final days that requires oil refineries to remove 97% of the sulfur from diesel fuel by 2006. It would also require, beginning a year later, cleaner diesel powered trucks and buses. “I am requiring that I get a review of this on an annual basis as to its implementation,” Whitman said this time.
It didn’t take long, however, to right the ship. Corporations, their lobbyists, and their “think tanks” swung into action. Contacts were made, op-ed pieces appeared everywhere, and soon it was just a matter of how gracefully this could all be fixed. The solution was surprisingly simple. Vice President Cheney told a group of senators that the administration would prepare a policy statement that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. And, by mid-March they were busy jettisoning existing regulations in an effort to lower gasoline prices in the Midwest.
PATRICIA WOLF TAKES HELM AT ICCR
Patricia Wolf, a Sister of Mercy from New York, has emerged from the field of over 100 candidates to become the new Executive Director of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility. SRIC is, of course, an active member of the ICCR and takes its lead and cooperates with its other members in many corporate actions.
Sister Patricia has a wealth of leadership experience that includes a term as chair of the ICCR Board in the 1980s. She succeeds the legendary Tim Smith who resigned last September after nearly 30 years in the position.