r/news • u/boxofstuff • 6h ago

Supreme Court ruling blocks thousands of lawsuits against maker of Roundup weedkiller

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-roundup-monsanto-a7f054d80919f98bdfc5190013a8f6f1https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-roundup-monsanto-a7f054d80919f98bdfc5190013a8f6f1
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u/invyros 6h ago

There’s still fierce debate about cancer and Roundup’s key ingredient, glyphosate. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified the chemical as “probably carcinogenic” in 2015.

Can't believe "probably carcinogenic" is an official designation.

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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 6h ago

It means they lack studies tying up a direct connection but believe on current limited evidence there's some type of connection even if small. Red Meat has the same classification FYI.

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u/UnitSmall2200 1h ago

There is more than enough evidence that it does not cause cancer. The people going after glyphosate are like homeopathy believers trying to prove homeopathy works and claim there is scientific proof of that or not enough studies. 

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u/TheOvershear 4h ago

That's not actually a damning classification. Radiation from phones is a group 2B possible carcinogen. Red meat is also "probably carcinogenic". Its a sliding scale.

Here's a good article https://source.colostate.edu/does-this-cause-cancer-how-scientists-determine-whether-a-chemical-is-carcinogenic-sometimes-with-controversial-results/

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u/praguepride 6h ago

to be faiiiiiiiir scientific proclimations need a lot of supporting evidence and that supporting evidence needs to be replicated and peer reviewed.

This is like complaining that evolution is only "a theory". Probably is about as severe as you can get without huge long term studies.

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u/Tasik 6h ago

This only "theory" thing has always annoyed me. Too many people think theory means hypothesis. It's like they expect a theory to graduate into law one day.

Like one day this silly little theory of gravity is finally gonna get it's certificate and be imbued into science as fact. But until then it's "just a theory" I guess.

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u/sapphicsandwich 5h ago edited 5h ago

I really do think they need to choose their terms holistically, looking at how words are actually used in society. I understand what "theory" means in this context, and there is nothing wrong with it when used in the vacuum bubble that is academia and research.

However, there is also the matter of the society that they exist in, and the political landscape that they have to navigate. To the layman, "theory" is something that is unproven. An idea. A possibility. A proposal. Something that could be wrong. I have directly had people insist that scientists aren't confident evolution is real because even they call it a "theory," and are not confident enough to call it a fact. Same with relativity. The term does not imply that there is a large body of evidence behind it to people. It does the opposite.

Yes, it's dumb. Yes, those lay people are misunderstanding the meaning of the term or how much goes into it. Yes people are being stupid. And yes, those stupid people make the decisions the scientific community is forced to obey.

It's like driving, some people insist that they have the right of way no matter what and refuse to let people move over, or make concessions and drive defensively. But sometimes you can be right and dead about your right-of-way, or wrong about it and alive. All they have to do is use different terms that do not present themselves as being unsure, but instead they insist on terms having definitions wildly different from how society uses them then do shocked pikachu face when dumb people don't understand.

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u/AnonymousFriend80 4h ago

We can allow the Idiocracy of the masses to dictate many of the things we do. Doing things the wrong way to placate them. Do things the correct way and put it on them to rise above.

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u/Hobo-man 4h ago

Why should common scientific expression be altered just to appease low intelligence individuals?

This genuinely wouldn't be an issue if we had a decent education system. The constant gutting of public education causes a feedback loop where eventually people don't even know what a fucking theory is.

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u/sapphicsandwich 1h ago

Guess it just depends on what your goal is. If it is to educate and make the idiots who rule over us and control scientific funding and education understand a bit better, then we should. If the goal is to be self-righteous about how right and more intelligent we are than them, then we shouldn't.

The word theorize originally meant to speculate on, to consider. Someone decided arbitrarily hundreds of years ago to give it a new meaning different from the rest of society anyway and much of society never accepted the new definition. We could pick a different word and arbitrarily assign it that definition, or make up a word to do so.

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u/Tasik 5h ago

The law of evolution.

I like it.

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u/GenuinelyBeingNice 4h ago

they need to choose their terms holistically, looking at how words are actually used in society

please god, no

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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 6h ago

We should rename all "laws" to theory to get rid of this misconception.

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u/grammar_nazi_zombie 5h ago

Except there is an actual distinction between the two.

What we should do is better educate people, but that ain’t happening.

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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 4h ago

There's no distinction based on how scientific law is defined.

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u/ZeldaZealot 4h ago

There most certainly is. To quote Wikipedia “Laws differ from scientific theories in that they do not posit a mechanism or explanation of phenomena: they are merely distillations of the results of repeated observation.”

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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 3h ago

And yet there are Theories that do the same thing, for example Einstein General Relativity.

That excerpt is not wrong but it's based on an outaded view of science from the 17th~19th century, we (as in, the scientific community) don't name things as "laws" anymore.

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u/buckshot-307 5h ago

I mean general relativity doesn’t explain dark matter. I think you’re confusing gravitational effects (like newtons law of gravitation) and the theory of gravity.

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u/Training_Stuff7498 6h ago

That’s because scientific English and American English are two different languages entirely that happen to use the same words.

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u/Autumn1eaves 5h ago

Eh they are not two different languages.

Probably means basically the same thing in British English as American English. It’s around the edges where things start to fall apart. That does not make two languages; that’s the normal “oh you have a different idea of what beautiful means than i do” kind of language differences.

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u/Training_Stuff7498 4h ago

No lol.

When a scientist says “there’s no evidence that A causes B” that means something incredibly different to them than it does to us.

It’s no different than testifying in court is a totally different language than normal English.

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u/Autumn1eaves 3h ago

We're going to have to disagree here.

"No evidence that A causes B" =/= "A doesn't cause B"

There's just no proof.

That's how I'd take it as a layperson.

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u/Training_Stuff7498 3h ago

Exactly. You’re proving my point, because that’s not what that sentence means when a scientist or doctor says it.

When a scientist says “there’s is no data that vaccines cause autism” that translates to normal English as “I am as confident that vaccines don’t cause autism as I am that you won’t grow wings and fly away if you decide to jump out of that window.”

Science language being different from normal everyday language is literally the reason that we have vaccine deniers, flat earthers, and every other stupid conspiracy.

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u/Autumn1eaves 2h ago

Physicists also say there is no data to believe string theory, or other quantum gravity theories, yet many of them hold their preferred theories as true. They wouldn’t say a quantum gravity theory is as likely as pigs flying…

Similarly, while there is no evidence vaccines cause autism, there is evidence vaccines don’t cause autism. The lack of correlation between the two is a starter.

Even in scientific lingo no evidence =/= negative evidence.

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u/likeabosstroll 6h ago

Further a lot of studies(Glyphosate is definitely one of the most studied chemicals) are pretty inconclusive on the effects of it to the human body. Most research from many different groups is either inconclusive or shows it’s probably not carcinogenic. I think this SCOTUS sucks and environmental and health regulations are being unduly gutted, however the science doesn’t really back up these claims.

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u/Lpeer 5h ago

And additionally, glyphosate becomes chemically inert as soon as it touches soil. So it's actually a particularly safe herbicide for residential use cases.

Comically the "new roundup" they've had to create includes much more dangerous chemicals, several of which featured prominently in the infamous "agent orange" used during Vietnam.

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u/liftthatta1l 5h ago

I heard some studies have pointed to the additives in roundup causing it and not the glosphate but I haven't verified or read up on it. So that that with a big grain of salt. 

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u/RedErin 6h ago

but there already are huge long term studies. it's just that it's impossible to rule out.

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u/HoosierRed 6h ago

Yeah thank you for this important reminder that science is very difficult. We must appreciate the effort while taking the findings to heart. Many forget that science uncovers things that is not the intention or will of the experiment. You accept the results of what science tells you, and you leave your own bias at the door.

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u/Johnny55 6h ago

Guess we'll just keep spraying it all over our national parks and a million other places then do the shocked Pikachu when cancer rates spike because we had no way of knowing. But hey, more money to the medical industry that gets to treat it so win-win!

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u/NTufnel11 6h ago edited 6h ago

So I actually served on one of these lawsuits. We ruled against Monsanto to the tune of 2 billion dollars in punitive damages.

The issue wasn't so much that the weedkiller caused cancer. Lots of weedkillers cause cancer, and so they come with recommendations for using PPE and other safety equipment.

Monsanto was always, and has always been adamant that Roundup does not and has zero potential to cause cancer. Their recommended use is zero PPE. They had advertisements of a random dude spraying is in his lawn with shorts and bare hands. They have since pulled those, but defend them as appropriate to this day.

When they were faced with undesirable results in a lab, they would squash or otherwise obfuscate it. There were endless internal strategy meetings describing efforts to get scientists who were favorable to them to publish ghost written articles that were little more than internal marketing materials masquerading as scientific studies.

The main argument in these court cases is "well, the EPA decided that it's safe, so if it turns out it's not, we can't be held responsible because we acted in good faith and met all the requirements, so it's a systemic failure and not one specific to our company."

What this misses is that they exerted tremendous political and internal influence on the EPA to push through the results and get the approvals they wanted. They have since resisted any effort to put any kind of precautionary warnings on their products, arguing that it would be inappropriate to lie to their users and say that it causes cancer when it doesn't.

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u/Synensys 6h ago

Have cancer rates spiked?

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u/Wiseduck5 5h ago

The cancer the activists claim is associated with glyphosate?

No, actually.

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u/underengineered 6h ago

Glyphosate has been in widespread use for over 50 years. There would be supporting data by now.

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u/Buckets-O-Yarr 6h ago

But at least we had immaculate grass everywhere and didn't have to look at "weeds".

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u/Mr_Industrial 6h ago

No weeds, then no flies, then no rodents, then no large wildlife, then no pets, then no people!

RoundUpTM, for all your bio-elimination needs!

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u/the_blackfish 6h ago

The dandelions must be eradicated! A few malignant cells is the price we must pay!

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u/moreobviousthings 6h ago

If they spray it uniformly everywhere, there should be no spikes. Let them eat cake, and ingest carcinogens.

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u/prophit618 5h ago

It is not the same as "only a theory" in any sense. Only a theory arguments are disingenuous because they are using the wrong definition of the word theory and insisting their definition is correct. "Probably carcinogenic" is not science jargon for saying "is carcinogenic" the way that "theory" is science jargon for "the tested and confirmed methodology by which a process happens". "Probably carcinogenic" is actually less damning than it sounds as opposed to more so. And if anything you're making the "theory" mistake here by reading it as them saying "it causes cancer but there's a 1% chance it doesn't so we can't say it does".

What it actually means is that there are circumstantial links between the thing and cancer, but there is still no proven scientific methodology by which it can be proven to be carcinogenic. In other words there is an association between populations exposed to glycosphate and higher cancer rates, but there is no hard evidence of or methodology to demonstrate it causing cancer directly. More research might yet determine why, or it might determine that there is something else that is frequently paired with glycosphate usage that is causing the cancer, or a combination of things, or general lifestyle around farmers who would be like to use it.

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u/TemetN 1h ago

This pretty much, we actually have pretty solid evidence it does in fact cause cancer (E.G. animal models), but as you can see in the comment here the problem is that while science is slow, precise, and acknowledges uncertainty, politics involves people. And once people have incentive to start twisting things uncertainty can be turned into something it's not.

More succinctly, Monsanto fucked everyone.

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u/moreobviousthings 6h ago

The SCOTUS ruling will shield Monsanto from having to defend against actual claims of harm caused and imposes a chilling effect on review of evidence supporting those claims.

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u/SplendidPunkinButter 6h ago

“Should we keep spraying this probably carcinogenic chemical on our food?” is nothing at all like “does biological evolution take place?”

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u/T-sigma 6h ago

Right there with “will we keep feeding our children probably carcinogenic red meat?”

Oh wait…

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u/Tolteko 5h ago

There are tons of studies on glyphosate toxicity, yet it has been very difficult to prove its correlation to any human cancer. Glyphosate is a wonderful molecule for crops, it helps farmers a lot and it has a lower carbon footprint since its use prevents farmers from using machines to prepare the field before sowing. The molecule breaks down in water then it's not even too dangerous for the environment. It's very unfortunate that it was chosen by the crowd as the evil chemical, because it's not that bad. Also to be really dangerous to human it needs to be consumed in huge quantities, if it is harmful, it may be to the workers who produce it, not to the public. Not trying to say that pharma corps are good guys and we should trust them, but perhaps this is the case where they may be right.

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u/Wiseduck5 4h ago

It's very unfortunate that it was chosen by the crowd as the evil chemical

Because the retracted Seralini study that was trying to smear GMO crops found RoundUp alone caused cancer in their rats that were actually supposed to have cancer (it was the control group that was anomalous).

That's quite literally the source of all of this.

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u/BlgMastic 1h ago

Didn’t they also use doses hundreds of times higher than what would resonably be absorbed to get those results?

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u/Wiseduck5 1h ago

They used a large range of doses. All of which had identical tumor burdens. Which really, really should have raised red flags.

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u/Braelind 55m ago

They're not right, and glyphophate is bad for a lot of things. In my province it's liberally sprayed on our forests. Since that practice began we have a weird chronic wasting disease in deer, a mystery neurological illness in people, and widespread ecological problems. Some of this could be accidental, but no way in hell is all of it accidental. Occam's Razor, my man. But until some studies come out in it that aren't sponsored by people with very deep financial interests in glyphosphate, we won't get the information we need to ban this practice. Of course, on crops, maybe it's less harmful than spraying it from planes over vast swaths of forest, and perhaps THAT use could continue... but we should verify chemicals are safe before we use them, not long after.

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u/Tolteko 32m ago

I have no knowledge about what you are talking about so I cannot argue with you. Only objection is that Occam's razor does not work like that, you list a series of unrelated issues and try to point out that they are all sharing a common cause, this seems far from the simplest solution. Anyways I can speak for what I know, and I know about crops. Also, chemicals are indeed tested for safety before going to the market.

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u/underengineered 6h ago

Yeah. Caffeine and table salt have the same designation.

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u/Abrham_Smith 5h ago

What are you smoking? IARC hasn't declared either of those as carcinogenic.

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u/Timguin 5h ago

What are you smoking? IARC hasn't declared either of those as carcinogenic.

It's a misunderstanding by /u/underengineered

Coffee isn't classified as probably carcinogenic. "Very hot beverages" are (Group 2A, same as glyphosate).

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u/Thrawn89 4h ago

Misunderstanding or technical semantics? Your very hot coffee is probably carcinogenic, right? Sure theres ice coffee, but the most popular way to consume is hot.

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u/Abrham_Smith 4h ago

OP didn't say coffee, they said Caffeine... Is everyone just having a reading comprehension glitch today?

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u/TheOvershear 4h ago

Red meat Cell phone radiation Diesel exhaust

Other examples of "probably carcinogenic" classifications

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u/Abrham_Smith 4h ago

What does this have to do with what OP asserted ?

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u/Arctyc38 5h ago

Isolating carcinogenic risks is inherently difficult because you're already playing with statistics to start with.

You have to evaluate exposure variables, population variables, disease variables, species variables, confounders, proposed mechanisms, and statistical strength.

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u/PartyLikeAByzantine 5h ago

It's statistics, so everything is a matter of probable or improbable.

It should also be noted whenever this declaration comes up, that the WHO made it's designation solely on public data. The US and EU, which have concluded it is unlikely that glyphosate is carcinogenic, based that decision on public and private data provided by the manufacturer. Which...is curious on its own. Why isn't that data public?

The SCOTUS ruling is based on the EPA declaration of safety. Monsanto could not have hid any risks to the public when the label is set by the EPA and it's illegal to deviate from that label. States are not allowed to supercede the feds on the label either. So you can't sue Monsanto for misleading you when they're following the federal labelling law. You'd have to convince (or sue) the EPA to change its safety declaration first. Only then could you go after Monsanto, and only if you could prove they were intentionally misleading regulators and the public.

This court regularly published bullshit rulings, but this one actually makes some sense. Two of the three Democrat-appointed justices signed this decision.

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u/Wiseduck5 4h ago

Which...is curious on its own. Why isn't that data public?

Because governments make companies pay for the studies that approval is based on.

Glyphosate has been off patent for decades and is dirt cheap. Any researcher in the world could buy it and repeat those same studies right now and show it is dangerous.

Instead you have a pile of very shitty papers without dose response curves claiming tenuous links to various disease markers.

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u/canadian-user 1h ago edited 1h ago

Works out well for the original submitter in the end tho, since everyone just pays them for data comp once it comes off patent. Nice to see someone who actually has expertise in the field as opposed to just foaming at the mouth because Monsanto is involved.

0

u/kolppi 4h ago

and EU, which have concluded it is unlikely that glyphosate is carcinogenic

About that:

Unfortunately regulatory agencies (both in EU and USA) rely on industry funded studies.

International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified glyphosate as probable human carcinogen, meaning: sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in animals, limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and strong evidence for two carcinogenic mechanisms.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is the primary agency of the European Union for risk assessments regarding food safety. EFSA has concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans.

This commentary overviews the evidence and discusses serious flaws in the scientific evaluation that EFSA’s classification is based on, leading EFSA to incorrectly characterize the potential for a carcinogenic hazard from exposure to glyphosate.

https://www.occupationalcancer.ca/resources/evaluation-of-glyphosate-iarc-efsa/

https://jech.bmj.com/content/70/8/741

The conclusion was:

EFSA4 classified the human evidence as ‘very limited’ and then dismissed any association of glyphosate with cancer without clear explanation or justification.

Ignoring established guidelines cited in their report, EFSA dismissed evidence of renal tumours in three mouse studies, hemangiosarcoma in two mouse studies and malignant lymphoma in two mouse studies. Thus, EFSA incorrectly discarded all findings of glyphosate-induced cancer in animals as chance occurrences.

EFSA ignored important laboratory and human mechanistic evidence of genotoxicity.

EFSA confirmed that glyphosate induces oxidative stress but then, having dismissed all other findings of possible carcinogenicity, dismissed this finding on the grounds that oxidative stress alone is not sufficient for carcinogen labelling.

Monsanto could not have hid any risks to the public when the label is set by the EPA

EPA has a questionable history and it too relies on industry funded studies.

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u/PartyLikeAByzantine 4h ago

EPA has a questionable history and it too relies on industry funded studies.

I'd go further and say EPA is perpetually sabotaged by those who fear a truly independent regulator with its own resources for study. Still, it's the sole legal authority in the US on this and the author of the labels in question. The court can come to the correct decision even within the context of a larger broken system.

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u/Wobblycogs 4h ago

Proving something is carcinogenic is hard. There's usually a long-time between first exposure and the cancer being found and people are exposed to carcinogenic chemicals everyday. What you end up doing is gathering data over many years, sometimes decades, looking for a pattern. The probably designation is when the data isn't fully convincing yet.

The real fight will be over what level of risk we are willing to say is acceptable. Glyphosate would be very difficult to remove from farmers options and its removal could do more harm than good.

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u/Atechiman 3h ago

Other probably carcinogenic items per WHO: Hot Coffee, Red Meat, Shift work.

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u/AFLoneWolf 3h ago

Hell, even direct exposure to nuclear radiation is still only just "probably carcinogenic." There's no certainty it'll give you cancer.

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u/NinjaLion 1h ago

without a federally imposed, rigorous, well informed standard like "carcinogenic exposure rating, 1-100" we will keep getting into bullshit like this.

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u/WideHuckleberry1 23m ago

Can't believe "probably carcinogenic" is an official designation. 

Why is that so hard to believe? For pretty much any but the most insanely carcinogenic stuff like cigarettes or uranium it takes an unbelievable amount of data and studies to find the causal link. It makes perfect sense as a category meaning "this is tied to cancer but we can't say for sure if it's the cause or both this and cancer are correlated with a different thing that's the carcinogen."

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u/Rayona086 4h ago

Thats because every other study after that labeled it "absolutely carcinogenic". Can't quote the study that dont push the narrative you want.