[mmjaa]

"Blind opposition to industrial progress -- which is what you are suggesting -- carried by the rising tide of public opinion will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid."

The OP is clearly NOT suggesting "blind opposition" to industrial progress - in fact, what is wanted, is absolutely transparent, non-blinded research.

But, this is not what is on the table. You've skilfully managed to turn the argument away from the facts: companies such as Monsanto WANT BLIND FAITH in their products, and work very avidly to ensure that the public - and their representatives - do not get to see all the facts.

So, what exactly is your intention here?

[jjoonathan]

> The OP is clearly NOT suggesting "blind opposition" to industrial progress

Yes they are.

> "Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be."

OP is literally saying that from the moment the waters become slightly murky you can reasonably assume that the big vested interest is in the wrong. FUD stirring past this threshold is inevitable, so this amounts to blind opposition to >billion dollar vested interests, which are a reasonable proxy for industrial progress.

As for the inevitably of FUD-stirring, I'll again hold up Greenpeace as my example. Monsanto does many evil things, but instead of focusing on those, Greenpeace decided to engage in Fox-news level truth wrangling so that they could milk the juicy "terminator gene" soundbite. They did it again as the Seralini scandal developed -- but since I had my own "ground truth" opinion (which agrees with the scientific consensus supporting retraction) I saw their claims of suppression/censorship in a very different light. From that day forward I stopped assuming good intentions from environmental groups and adopted a "read both sides" policy. It was eye-opening.

> You've skilfully managed to turn the argument away from the facts

Right back atcha.

> So, what exactly is your intention here?

Self-styled environmentalists turned back the clock on clean energy by fifty years when they sank nuclear power. I don't want them to do the same to my food supply, but they're half way there. I don't want them to do the same to my cell phone, but I hear war drums beating in the distance.

[lioeters]

We could flip the original sentence as: "Blind faith in industrial progress..carried by the tide of public policy..is causing and will continue to cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid."

[hennsen]

Yes it will be paid back. By generations to come. While the corporations who invented/introduced/pushed the stuff and got governments to support them by adjusting laws to allow doing it keep flourishing...

[lioeters]

That's the sad truth, that coming generations will be paying for our short-sighted pursuit of profit and "progress".

This reminds me of the Long Now Foundation [0]. At least there is hope, that there are people aware of the need for long-term sustainable thinking, and are actively promoting it.

"Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed - some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries." Stewart Brand

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation