Monday, December 11, 2023

GMO's Jeremy Grantham warns eventually only the rich will procreate as chemicals leave the poor sterile

This might be important. A repost from April 2023:

Although this piece is over three years old it's just been sitting in the link-vault, coming around on the carousel every eight or nine months but not getting posted.

From CNBC, February 10, 2020: 

KEY POINTS
  • "If we do not ban whole classes of chemicals in the next 10 years, we will face a crash in the number of new births," GMO co-founder Jeremy Grantham said in a letter.
  • Grantham gained influence as an investor after correctly calling the dotcom bubble in 2000 and the market's dramatic downturn in 2008.
  • Grantham ended his letter by warning that major chemical companies could soon be hit by widespread bans on some of their key products.
High-profile investor Jeremy Grantham warned in a letter that falling birth rates in the developed world could accelerate in coming years due to increasing chemical toxicity, allowing only wealthy people to have children.
 
In recent years, economists have raised concern about the impact on economic growth of slowing birth rates in the developed world. Grantham, who co-founded GMO in the 1970s and is famous for calling the last two major market bubbles, said that trend is poised to accelerate due to increased chemical toxicity in the environment and food products.

"This interference is growing at such a rapid rate that if left alone it is likely to leave us sterile in a few decades with only the rich able to easily afford the healthy lifestyles and the exotic medical help required to have babies," Grantham said.
 
While acknowledging that changes in lifestyle choices is responsible for at least some of the slowing birth rates, Graham said increased chemical toxicity is making it harder for women to conceive and lowering sperm counts in men.
 
"The net effect of choice and postponement combined with the recent decade of 'help' from toxicity has been an unexpected and accelerating decline in delivered fertility in developed countries, as well as the critically important China and India, with new annual cohorts of babies already declining in absolute numbers, not just growth rates," Grantham said.

He also pointed to dramatic population declines in some species of insects as an example of how increased chemicals in the environment can hurt reproduction rates.
 
He ended his letter by warning that major chemical companies could soon be hit by widespread bans on some of their key products.

"The bottom line is this: either endocrine disrupting chemicals will go out of business or we will!" Grantham wrote....
....MORE
 
And though we didn't link to the CNBC article we did link to Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo under the headline:
GMO's Jeremy Grantham Talks Sex
which was not nearly as clickbaity a title as one might think.
We wrapped the GMO essay: "CHEMICAL TOXICITY AND THE BABY BUST: Unexpected threats to human fertility and, hence, chemical companies" with an intro and outro:
So there I was, reading an AgFunder post: "One future of pest control: Grow and release swarms of sterile male insects" which got me thinking about soy boys and if there was anything to the hypothesized relationship between phytoestrogens and feminization—or at minimum decreasing potency/virility—of human males. Not just sperm counts, though that has been widely reported, but population-wide decreases in testosterone levels as well.

So pests and soy boys and sterility all mixing it up in the noggin when the following shows up in an email from a friend.
*****
Surprisingly Mr. Grantham does not mention the population-wide (as opposed to individual, possibly age-related) decrease in serum testosterone levels observed in American males.

Here's a dandy little paper from way back in 2007, from the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism:
A Population-Level Decline in Serum Testosterone Levels in American Men

And some further discussion at Healio Endocrine Today:
Generational decline in testosterone levels observed

A similar study concluded:
Testosterone levels decreasing in Danish men

Somethings up.  

We've had a few posts on endocrine disruptors, this one's from 2022: 

"Weed-killing plant-based foam shown to be as effective as herbicides"

We should probably* do as much as we can to reduce the use of endocrine-disruptor chemicals and that include herbicides.

From New Atlas, October 13:

It's no secret that herbicides can be harmful to the environment, plus they're costly, and weeds may develop a resistance to them. New research now suggests that farmers could get the same weed-killing results from a hot biodegradable foam.

In the past, scientists have tried killing weeds by scalding them with steam and/or hot water. This approach has only met with limited success, however, due to the fact that the heat simply escaped into the atmosphere before much of it was transferred into the weeds. What was needed was a substance that retained heat for a longer period of time.

That's where the Foamstream system comes in.

Developed by British agricultural company Weedingtech, it incorporates a liquid foam made of plant oils and sugars, which is mixed with hot water and sprayed via a hand wand directly onto weeds. The foam then forms a layer of insulation, keeping the heat on the weeds long enough for it to penetrate their leaves' outer surface, then travel down their stems and into their roots – effectively killing them. Once its job is done, the foam dries up and biodegrades into the soil....

*I say probably because at the population level there are benefits from using the chemicals: increased food production being the main one. A statistician smarter than I could probably come up with the tradeoffs in an hours time and pinpoint where the breast cancer line cross with the malnutrition-induced diseases line.

At the individual level, avoid any and all synthetic chemicals that the species hasn't been dealing with for, say, five thousand years. Although even there, overindulgence in beer or too many yummy char-broiled fat molecules from your Wagyu can wreck the best laid plans. But if possible, leaving only the dozens of naturally occurring carcinogens the opportunity to have their way with you is the best course.

Also from 2022:
....Meanwhile, one of the biggest backers of faux meat has man boobs: 

I'm not saying it's phytoestrogens in the product but geez, he's our health and wellness guru.

Since I've somehow wandered onto the subject:
"Washington Post Denies Claim New Estrogen-Packed 'Impossible Whopper' Will Make Men Grow Breasts"
Yellow Pea Protein In The Financial Times: People Have Thoughts (but no mention of man boobs

Probably related:
at