Another P3 comment and an unformed braindump. This is confusing stuff and I'm a long way from spotting a path through it.
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There's some digging to be done into the recent resurgence of DDT + GM related stories. I got myself tangled in the GM stuff (defending the tech in the face of what I and others considered a badly misinformed protest) but pull that thread and a whole lot of baggage comes with it. e.g. old Monbiot stories about marxists-turned neoliberals starting science lobby groups (also active during the recent Rothamsted protests) or the GM Watch stuff. Climate scientist Simon Lewis was wondering on twitter: "perhaps it's important to ask of scientific experiments: is this the science of the 1%. Or the 99%", suggesting that any attempt to separate science from the issue of control or money was not possible. (Ironically plenty of climate deniers would completely agree.)

Then shortly after we start seeing the 'environmentalists can be just as scientifically illiterate' meme; e.g. here's Keith in April. I was kind of saying the same thing myself back in 2009, but just to make the obvious point: "it's quite possible there's an even spread of scientific knowledge across the political spectrum, but if your political leaning tends to make you sympathetic to climate change theory, you won't show up on anyone's radar as 'anti-science'." The issue of GM just happens to highlight some other places where that normal spread of scientific literacy exists.

But then DDT appears. I dug out this 'Progressive Vision Green Monitor' pamphlet I got given at a climate skeptic event a few years back, thinking "oh, this basket of issues again. Coincidence!" Progressive Vision is now defunct, I think, but the authors were self-described 'classical liberal' Shane Frith, director of the Institute for Economic Affairs Mark Littlewood and Sam Collins (who I can't find anything on, looks like he was their researcher). Here's a gallery of the pamphlet; text only just readable, apologies, but gives an overview of the topics: golden rice, DDT, GM, Palm Oil, BT Cotton, economic development in general. A great line: "Greenpeace has consistently worked to block new power supplies in Africa." Uh huh.

Delingpole sits at one extreme: Rachael Carson is 'environmentalism's answer to pol pot', maybe responsible for killing 50 million people. But the same theme runs through each of these rightwing takes on what they see as environmental sacred cows: they're actually responsible for killing the world's poorest or ruining their chances of a decent life.

But recall, that pamphlet was being distributed at a climate 'skeptic' event. I want to avoid doing what Monbiot or GM Watch did in those links above: it's quite possible to spin this stuff out until it becomes 'verdict by innuendo', but it does make getting at reality all the more complex. With GM, for instance, it's quite possible to be a potentially useful plant tech and for massive corporate interests to propaganda carpet-bomb. Here's a google search of Monbiot's stuff; he's done a massive trawl, including this apparently paid-for astroturfing of a Nature paper "which claimed that native maize in Mexico had been contaminated, across vast distances, by GM pollen".

So it's not like companies affected are likely to be taking no interest in how these conversations are going (just as many have thrown their wealth at climate FUD) and it does present a mind-numbing wall of complexity. In an ideal world, we'd be able to bring together opposing views and find some common ground - e.g. I don't agree with Steve Easterbrook's take on the 'take the flour back' protests. But isn't there some way to work out who's wrong, or what parts of the argument can't be reduced to that? Given the howling storm of FUD and politically lock-in bundling of concepts, I don't know.

Depends partly on the goal too: correcting one's own misconceptions is a very different thing to dealing with a hegemonic misrepresentation. The two are connected somehow: we can't create an effective political culture without tending to our own minds. But then there's the sort of consistently churned out lies of the UK coalition or update: the 'war on objectivity' described by* Krugman: "this is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign."

* This read before as "the lies of Krugman" - not my intention!