All posts in category Genetic Engineering

Greens to the Left- or Greens to the Right?

“You’re so Right-wing!” So I was told recently by one of my students who took exception to my pro-fact pro-evidence- based stance on things like genetic engineering and nuclear power. Another blurted out at me when I suggested her complaints about my course were mainly political “no it doesn’t matter how much of a fascist you are- if only you teach the course properly!”- which apparently means not presenting any facts or information unless they have been vetted and blessed in advance by her.

This kind of feed-back suggests that many prevailing views within the environmental movement are traditionally- even unquestioningly- considered to be “left-wing” and “progressive”: the struggle to protect pristine Nature and keep nasty chemicals and other such horrors out of our food and water share common cause with defending the rights of the common man against the ravages of untrammeled corporate capitalism.

Is this really the case? Or does environmentalism have its roots in the far-right? Or is it a strange hybrid of both Left and Right?

In a radio presentation last year Brendan O’Neill calls the more recent alliance between Green and Red a “historic betrayal”:

in going green the left has signaled abandonment of values that distinguished it from more conservative static views

This betrayal can be seen most clearly in the the original environmental cause of over-population, which comes of course from Malthus. But Malthus was an arch-enemy of Marx and Engels: Marx described him as ‘a professional sycophant of the landed aristocracy’ who was intent on ‘building the capitalist case for the inevitability of poverty’ (quoted by O’Neill here)

In other words, Malthus’ theory was entirely self-serving: the threat of a “population bomb” in the phrase of his more recent successor Paul Ehrlich, was invented in order to refute the radical idea that the poor and down-trodden would be able to overthrow their oppressors and that humanity in general- not just the ruling classes of whom Malthus was a member- would be able to improve their lot and aspire to greater things than just subsistence.

Marx and Engels disagreed with Malthus’ basic premise that over-population was a result of the Laws of Nature: rather, they saw the negative consequences of rapidly increasing populations as being the result of the social system, with specific causes according to the state of evolution of the society: in developing nations, it was a result of the legacy of colonialism; in capitalist nations, tied in with the Principle of the Reserve Army of Labour: in Marxist theory, capitalism required a large number of unemployed to draw on in times of rapid economic growth.

According to socialist theory, human problems are more social than natural; far from being the prisoner of Nature or Divinity, O’Neill argues there are no natural limits, but merely limits to our social imagination. He quotes Francis Bacon who stated that our mission is “to put nature on the rack and extract her secrets” and Sylwia Pankhurst who said “socialism means abundance for all… a great production that can provide more than we can consume.”

“How times have changed” laments O’Neill: through environmentalism, the Left is now at the forefront of arguing for natural limits; “Nature” is depicted as sentient force that punishes, and we see a return to 19th Century ideas of mankind as prisoner of nature.
Some even say we cannot end poverty:
Mark Lynas has claimed “the struggle for equity within the human species must take second place to the struggle for and intact and functioning biosphere.”

Although some greens, like Lynas, have repudiated the more obvious shortcomings of Malthus and distanced themselves from his incipient racism, O’Neill argues in his review of Fred Pearce’s PeopleQuake that they have really just re-phrased the reactionary case for limits by claiming it is not population per se that will be our undoing, but consumption:

Pearce describes Earth as a ‘finite planet’ and bizarrely claims that we are ‘consuming 30 per cent more resources each year than the planet produces’. This overlooks the fact – recognised by true humanists – that there is nothing fundamentally finite about Earth or its resources, since what we consider to be, and use as, a resource changes as society itself develops. The Malthusian idea that nature’s limits mean people must inevitably live in poverty is here. ‘It is of course true that poor people with small ecological footprints may grow rich… eventually assuming footprints as great as ours. If they do that, it is hard to see anything other than disaster ahead’, says Pearce.

How did this come about? While some from the Right have claimed that environmentalism is really just the new guise of socialism, trying to come in unnoticed through the backdoor as it were, Rupert Darwall, in The Age of Global Warming argues rather that after the Berlin Wall came down, the Left was simply too insipid to resist the rise of neo-Malthussians from the Far Right, with their Limits to Growth philosophy, and simply became subsumed by it.

The timing of the demise of Marxism as a living ideology meant that global warming never had to contend with opposition from the Left of the political spectrum.

Without even being aware of what had happened, the post-Soviet Left took on the mantle of much darker forces of environmentalism, inspired as they were by the early eugenics movement in Britain and the nature-worship and occult mysticism of the Nazis.

These origins can be most clearly seen today in the retro-romantic organics movement, still shaped and inspired by the cult of Steiner and his occult version of farming called biodynamics, which found common cause with the Blood and Soil- Blut und Boden- philosophy of the Nazis, as Staudenmaier has documented:

we find that the “ecological scene” of our time -with its growing mysticism and anti-humanism- poses serious problems about the direction in which the ecology movement will go…these reactionary and outright fascist ecologists emphasize the supremacy of the “Earth” over people; evoke “feelings” and intuition at the expense of reason; and uphold a crude sociobiologistic and even Malthusianbiologism. Tenets of “New Age” eco-ideology that seems benign to most people in England and the United States – specifically, its mystical and anti-rational strains- are being intertwined with ecofascism in Germany today.

Likewise the leaders of the anti-GMO movement and their allies, far from being representative of the Common Man or the rights of workers, are instead emanating from the privileged classes, lead by figures such as Goldsmith and Prince Charles, in the tradition of Schumacher, with paternalistic view of humanity that would not be so far from the contempt expressed by Malthus.

The fear of over-population, of the Yellow Peril or its equivalent, is still evident behind much anti-technology thinking amongst today’s Greens. Once, after a class discussion on global poverty and development, in which I expressed the hope that through technology and other factors, the bottom billion in the world might sometime improve their lot sufficiently to have at least some of the benefits that we have in the richer parts of the world, one earnest young student, no doubt considering himself radical and “left-wing” made a point of coming up to me afterwards to say emphatically: “No. We must stop them! They are much better off being poor.”

This blurring of the Left into the Far Right is also evident in the figure of the darling of the anti-GMO movement Vandana Shiva.

According to Noel Kinsbury in Hybrid:the History and Science of plant breeding

Meera Nanda, a leading Indian critic of what she calls “reactionary postmodernism,” points out, “the populist left opposition to the Green Revolution, GM crops, and other science intensive initiatives, is routinely co-opted by the ultra-nationalist, autarkic, elements of the Hindu right.” Shiva has been interviewed and favorably quoted by The Organiser, the journal of the Rashtriya Swayamsavak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist organization, the sight of whose members marching in formation wearing khaki shorts, is a powerful and frightening reminder of its original inspiration—Hitler’s brownshirts.554 Identity politics is the natural playground of the political Far Right. In rejecting the universality of Enlightenment values, antiscience critics on the Left have found themselves sharing a bed with those on the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Despite Shiva’s best efforts at condemning the poor farmers of her country to remain in their “natural state” of peasantry forever, many Indian farmers showed they had other ideas:

Shiva’s “Operation Cremate Monsanto” had spectacularly failed, its anti-GM stance borrowed from Western intellectuals had made no headway with Indian farmers, who showed that they were not passive recipients of either technology or propaganda, but could take an active role in shaping their lives. What they did is also perhaps more genuinely subversive of multinational capitalism than anything GM’s opponents have ever managed.

Greens often seem far more concerned that a corporation like Monsanto might make filthy profits than ordinary farmers might actually benefit from the technology they have developed, just as green activists themselves seem only too happy to use technology such as computers, cars and airplanes, and organic farmers to use polytunnels and tractors and pop to the supermarket for cheap industrial food when it suits them.

There are of course many political causes that one might want to support. Today’s mega-corporations should be held accountable for their workers’ conditions, and should be compelled to pay their taxes. I am more than willing to hear good well-thought out political arguments concerning social justice etc; unfortunately it is very rare if ever these days that I hear any such argument from Greens, so completely dominated they seem to have become by eco-fascist ideology and back-to-nature woo-woo naturalistic beliefs.

And thus I find myself in the peculiar situation of being insulted as being “right-wing” for defending ideas that are in fact far closer to traditional Marxism: that progress and innovation and technology are generally forces for good, and that human creativity is, almost by definition, something that uniquely can break the chains of natural limits.

11 Comments
by skepteco on June 16, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Anthroposophy, Environmentalism, Genetic Engineering, Marxism, New Age, Politics, Population
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Posted by skepteco on June 16, 2013

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/greens-to-the-left-or-greens-to-the-right/

Who is the Most anti-Science of Them All?

A fascinating debate was recently aired by the Canadian public affairs program The Agenda With Steve Paikin featuring Michael Shermer, Chris Mooney and Mark Lynas.

The topic under discussion was whether the charge of being “anti-science” was just as valid for the Left as for the Right.

Shermer, a libertarian skeptic thinks yes- there is Liberal War on Science; Mooney, author of The Republican Brain, disagrees. In a strongly entitled piece for Mother Jones There is no such Thing as a Liberal War on Science he argues that although liberals and the Left certainly reject science on specific topics such as vaccines and GMOs, these positions have been marginalised by the mainstream Left/Liberal political establishment, while on the Right, “Republicans today are majority creationist (58 percent, according to Gallup) and majority climate denier.”

As Lynas says, the political spectrum is not clearly divided along these lines in Europe; the alignment of the US Republican Party with creationist religion does not really have a parallel here, so while there are some similarities, this discussion is no doubt colored by my Euro-centric bias.

Mooney goes on to say

polls alone don’t tell enough of the story. Evolution denial and climate denial on the right are much more politically problematic—because conservatives, not liberals, are going around trying to force these wrongheaded views on children in schools. Oh, and by the way: By denying global warming, they also jeopardize the planet and the well-being of humanity. In my view, not all wrong beliefs are equally harmful—rather, wrong beliefs are harmful in proportion to their bad consequences.

There is a couple of things wrong with this position I think, as Mooney fails to distinguish between very different kinds of scientific issues, and their policy implications.

Firstly, the issue of conservatives trying to force “anti-science” views on schoolchildren made me think immediately of an instance of this from the Left: Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was incorporated into the school curriculum in the UK, leading to a court action by a concerned parent. The judge upheld the complaint that the film contained many scientific inaccuracies, including that

The film said a sea-level rise of up to 20ft would be caused by melting of either west Antarctica or Greenland in the near future; the judge ruled that this was “distinctly alarmist”

I am not suggesting that this is directly comparable to teaching creationism or denying evolution; on the other hand, it seems inescapable that this is indeed an example of politics masquerading as science, and as such its placing in schools in this way is highly questionable. There is no scientific debate about evolution vs Intelligent Design, but to pretend that everything about man-made global warming is “settled science” – including what to do about it (Gore’s film implies that changing your lightbulbs might be an appropriate response to ensuring Manhattan is not inundated with sea water) is itself political.

(Ironically, Shermer used to question climate science himself, and cites An Inconvenient Truth as one of the influences that made him change his mind.)

Secondly, Mooney does not really address Shermer’s point that Republicans only reject science on these specific topics because they conflict with specific beliefs they have. While Creationism is a core belief of many right-wing Christians, and climate change skepticism a reaction to what they see as a ruse to impose more government regulation on every aspect of their lives, they do not take an “anti-science” position per se.

On the Left however, despite scientists and academics being overwhelmingly liberal themselves as both Mooney and Shermer agree, there tends to be an underlying current of suspicion of science in and of itself. The liberal mind wants purity of nature and purity of their bodies, and is prone to suffer excruciatingly from the naturalistic fallacy; they are more likely to be anti-technology which they distrust as leading to yet more environmental destruction and an aspect of increased corporate control- even when being introduced for humanitarian reasons as with Golden Rice.

This callousness of progressive activists towards the poor who really need access to better technology also calls into question Mooney’s claim that they are motivated emotionally by sticking up for the underdog and fighting against injustice: all too often, the main priority seems to be just to kick “science” or “technology” or “corporations” where it hurts, and to hell with the poor (who, let’s face it, are much happier anyway just being poor).

Mooney points to research showing that the trust in science has declined precipitously in recent years- but I am just wondering whether this itself can be partly explained by the clear liberal bias amongst scientists and scientific institutions- particularly when they are seen, rightly or wrongly, to promote left-wing policy responses to complex scientific issues like climate change. Of course, this is often translated into a suspicion of the basic science of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, but there is no reason for the Right (or anyone) to have particular position on this but for the implications of left-wing policies being promoted as to remedy the situation: as I say, questioning CO2 as a greenhouse gas is not a core belief in and of itself for the religious right in the same way creationism is- it is purely a reaction to the policies of the Left.

I am not defending the misrepresentation of science by any side in this- merely pointing out that Mooney is misreading the context and mis-diagnosing the underlying causes.

What about Mooney’s contention that “wrong beliefs are harmful in proportion to their bad consequences”? He claims that opposing the “science” of climate change will lead to a “global disaster that we are going to regret for all time- so how could it be bigger than that?” This seems to be an ideologically loaded statement that is a far remove from the “consensus science” on global warming, which can only give us different scenarios of how much warming based on different emissions trajectories, none of which there is any great certainty about as Mooney is implying. He seems to have slipped seamlessly from the science of CO2 as a warming gas and that humans are contributing to warming, to just the kind of alarmist rhetoric that Gore was guilty of.

The fact is, we don’t know what to do about global warming, or at least the solutions offered seem themselves to be split down political lines: on the one hand, more government regulation and the creation of powerful supra-national organisations which can usurp national governments’ ability to determine their own energy policy;
on the other hand, the potential for technological innovation to move much faster at reducing emissions than treaties have been able to, as we are seeing with the failure of Kyoto and the success of shale gas in the US.

A good example of this is the Keystone XL pipeline which has been a figure-head for “climate action” recently, but which has no real bearing on climate change regardless of whether you “deny” or “accept” the consensus scientific position.

This is what happens constantly in the climate debate which renders such discussions about who the the most anti-science fairly redundant: the science quickly merges into questionable policies or activist causes; question the policy, you become a “science denier”.

So it seems to me highly questionable- and certainly not scientific- for Mooney to suggest that “science denial” to the extent that it does exists on the Right can really be blamed for putative future global catastrophe; claiming certainty that the science is wrong for political reasons is of course damaging, but in this case we simply don’t know precisely what the correct course of action will be and we have to weigh it up against other considerations including the obvious need to keep the lights on and warm our homes.

It is possible then that thwarting certain liberal policies on climate could actually turn out to be the best thing to do- even if for entirely the wrong reasons.

Compared with the damage already done by opposing GE crops the damage done by questioning climate science, even in an extreme way, seems speculative at best, and in fact entirely unknown.

As Shermer points out, the left doesn’t seem to care what the actual solutions to global warming are anyway- which is why a strong contingent of the grassroots at least (whatever about Obama’s stance) is fundamentally opposed to both fracking and nuclear: they just want to impose “more government”, or, as I would prefer to say, they just want their solutions.

I have often argued, and still do, that the Left’s apparent pro-science stance on climate change is really just opportunistic, since they are so anti-science on some of the obvious and most promising solutions.

Mooney is correct that the Left and the Right are promiscuous with the science in different ways- but he just seems to be scoring political points in claiming the Left is worse- a rather obvious trap to fall into when claiming to understand the psychology of the opposition, but not your own.

16 Comments
by skepteco on March 6, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Genetic Engineering, Politics
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Posted by skepteco on March 6, 2013

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/who-is-the-most-anti-science-of-them-all/

Will the Genes Escape?

Patrick Whitefield has entered the discussion on genetic engineering over at the Small Farm Future blog.
Patrick is the UK’s leading permaculture teacher and author of The Earth Care Manual.

Patrick makes two main points: that he thinks there is evidence that GE can be as dangerous as some now-banned chemicals; and that with GE “The big difference is that once they’re released into the biosphere it’s not always possible to withdraw genes.”

“To me” he says, “this is the clinching argument. No amount of short term trials can tell us how gm will behave in the biosphere in the long term. We’re just taking a punt on it all turning out OK.”

Here is my reply:

“The big difference is that once they’re released into the biosphere it’s not always possible to withdraw genes.” I dont see why this is the “clinching argument” – surely also debatable at least?
There is no reason to think the risks of genes escaping and causing problems are a greater threat from GMOs than from other breeding methods, eg mutagenesis, of which there are thousands of varieties and these are accepted under organic standards. Even crop rotation has been known to put selection pressure on pests.

http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/22/the-top-five-lies-about-biotech-crops/2

The whole 10,000 year-old project of farming has already changed the environment so much in ways that can never be undone, with or without GMOs. Nor does it seem reasonable to compare genetic engineering with dangerous chemicals, implying that they are all spawned of the same mindset- lets call it “Scientism” – and therefore must be equally bad. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that GE crops have reduced the use of pesticides, and allowed the substitution of dangerous chemicals with much more benign ones.

GE is a biological approach, in line with permaculture principles, and something Rachel Carson would have approved of, in line with organic principles of avoiding chemicals. Chemicals have also been unfairly demonized but this is much more understandable because as you say some were very dangerous – and have rightly been banned. I think we have to have some trust in the regulatory process- the anti-GE movement depends on a suspicion of science and flagrant scare-mongering.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/08/12/would-rachel-carson-embrace-frankenfoods-this-scientist-believes-yes/

GE is just another way of making new varieties and likely safer than more scatter-gun approaches including traditional breeding. It also has a lot of advantages over other methods and solves problems they cannot- eg with the Rainbow Papya. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/feb06/aaas.gonsalves.papaya.sd.html

Also, Patrick your attitude does not explain the blanket opposition to all GE crops including potatoes which could save many fungicide sprayings each year and has negligible chance of “escaping” into the wild, a risk that is negligible for other crops as well.

http://www.biofortified.org/2010/11/the-likelihood-of-pollen-from-ge-cotton-causing-harm-to-the-environment-is-about-as-likely-as-a-poodle-escaping-into-the-wild/

The issue of escaping genes ironically is something that could have been addressed with Gene Use Restriction Technology (GURT) aka Terminator- too bad Monsanto were compelled under activist pressure to shelve it. But since we so have GE crops being grown over a larger area each year, would you prefer Patrick to see it resurrected?

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2012/09/02/the-truth-about-the-terminator/

There is overwhelming scientific consensus that these risks are no greater for GE than other methods, most likely less; I dont like the analogy with climate science but I still think you have to explain why you dont accept the science on this.

6 Comments
by skepteco on February 27, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Environmentalism, Genetic Engineering, Permaculture
Tagged , , ,

Posted by skepteco on February 27, 2013

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/will-the-genes-escape/

Golden Rice and the abuse of Science

After a fruitless discussion with Paul Kingsnorth last week on my post Rape of the Earth the venerable Deep Ecologist, anti-humanist and anarcho-primitivist author went into meltdown this morning, firing off ten irate tweets at me – and then blocking me.
I cannot embed them as I am blocked, so I have copied some of them here:

@Skepteco Obviously I won’t be reading your latest stream of drivel. But I’ve come to some conclusions about your politics.

@Skepteco Your refusal to engage, your dishonesty and your deliberate manipulation of facts give the lie to your claim to be a ‘pragmatist.’

@Skepteco I think you’re actually a nihilist. You’ve nothing to offer but self-righteous bile and intolerance.

@Skepteco In that respect, you’re a fascist too – you want to eliminate everyone who doesn’t conform to your narrow worldview.

@Skepteco Of course, fascism is a sign of insecurity. I wonder what you’re running from?

@Skepteco But whatever it is, it’s not my business. Good luck with your campaign to liquidate the deviants. I’m off to write a novel.

In the comments on my post Kingsnorth takes me to task for my “silly ‘science versus ideology’ confection” :

this is one of the weirdest and most sinister aspects of the neo-green approach. It begins by (rightly) criticising green pseudo-science but very quickly segues into a claim that the ONLY valid approach to green issues is a scientific one. This effectively excludes morality, ethics, epistemology, culture and politics from the debate – conveniently for you, because those things are complex, value-laden and often subjective. There are no numbers attached to them. But they are the stuff of life.

At the same time though he quotes his own “proper” scientists, not to contradict any specific scientific issue but to claim authority for the argument that what I am presenting as “science” is really ideology.

In this he shares a lot of common ground with Chris Smaje who I took to task on Lynas’ Oxford speech on GMOs.

Like Kingsnorth, Smaje’s main gripe is with “scientism”: an ideological stance that presumes Science and its High Priests the Scientists to have complete ownership of the Truth, ruling over the ignorant minions to further the Cause of Progress and Technology.

Smaje now has a new post out in which he says of Lynas

his talk had very little to do with actual science, and a lot to do with invoking the word “science” as a kind of religious incantation to justify his views….

I was prompted to post on Lynas’s talk because of how blatantly rhetorical his appeal to the concept of “science” was. But as a social scientist like Lynas, I don’t have the biological background always to be able to sort the scientific wheat from the chaff in everything I read about GM. One might think that there should be public institutions employing disinterested scientists to do this on behalf of laymen like me. But that would turn scientists into priests (ironically something of a problem in contemporary society, as demonstrated in Lynas’s lecture) – and many of the questions about GM are not scientific ones anyway.

Is this true? Well, certainly Lynas makes “discovering science” the core reason for his conversion; but there is no doubt what he is talking about:

I’d assumed that GM benefited only the big companies. It turned out that billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers needing fewer inputs.

I’d assumed that Terminator Technology was robbing farmers of the right to save seed. It turned out that hybrids did that long ago, and that Terminator never happened.

I’d assumed that no-one wanted GM. Actually what happened was that Bt cotton was pirated into India and roundup ready soya into Brazil because farmers were so eager to use them.

I’d assumed that GM was dangerous. It turned out that it was safer and more precise than conventional breeding using mutagenesis for example; GM just moves a couple of genes, whereas conventional breeding mucks about with the entire genome in a trial and error way.

But what about mixing genes between unrelated species? The fish and the tomato? Turns out viruses do that all the time, as do plants and insects and even us – it’s called gene flow.

But this was still only the beginning. So in my third book The God Species I junked all the environmentalist orthodoxy at the outset and tried to look at the bigger picture on a planetary scale.

All these issues are testable hypotheses; they are what “science” with a small “s” is really good at: and they are all issues where it is easy to find examples of where activists abuse the evidence, use junk studies etc.. This is all well known and par for the course.

“Science” with a big “S” on the other hand is what Smaje and Kingsnorth are complaining about- a slavish following of Science as dogma, or obeisance to the authority of scientific establishments even when the issue is more one of policy than verifiable evidence; and along with this, a religious faith in the benefits of Progress that Science is supposed to deliver.

It is important to clarify which is which because they can often get mixed up. But in terms of ideology, the converse is also true- a suspicion of both science and Science- which comes from mixing them up- and a conviction that the kind of solutions offered by science is not the right one can also be ideological.

Take the case of Golden Rice. In his Oxford talk, Lynas slates Greenpeace for their latest scare-mongering campaign over the children who they claimed were “human guinea-pigs” – despite no harm came to them in trials to test the effectiveness of the vitamin-D enhancement. Greenpeace have been opposed to Golden Rice since at least 2001. As Norm Benson points out, Dr. Ingo Potrykus said to Greenpeace in that year, “If you plan to destroy test fields to prevent responsible testing and development of Golden Rice for humanitarian purposes, you will be accused of contributing to a crime against humanity. Your actions will be carefully registered and you will, hopefully, have the opportunity to defend your illegal and immoral actions in front of an international court.”

Smaje argues that Golden Rice has not been tested in the field, it is not cost-effective, there are better alternatives, no-one can be sure that the traits will remain stable over time- in other words, he takes the Greenpeace story hook line and sinker. But he refuses to condemn them for their tactics in China because:

I won’t be posting anything that singles out Greenpeace for criticism because if I were to draw up an indictment sheet of organisations that are culpable for inflicting global misery Greenpeace would still come pretty low down on my list.

So why is he singling Lynas out for criticism rather than the IMF or the WTO himself? Instead, he gives Greenpeace a free pass on their manipulative tactics, and claims that “on the question of moral repugnance my feeling is that you’re using the emotive issue of children’s deaths to spin your own particular line on GM”- even though it is clearly Greenpeace who played on the emotive issue of children being used as guinea-pigs- and there really is evidence and good reason to believe that delaying and withholding this technology has cost lives.

Meanwhile, according to Jon Entine

While Golden Rice was developed over ten years at the miniscule total cost of $2.6 million, in an extraordinary public-private partnership using funds donated by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Swiss Federation, the National Science Foundation, and the European Union, Greenpeace International alone annually spends about $270 million annually, and upwards of $7 million each year specifically dedicated to burying Golden Rice and any other food or crop developed using biotechnology.

So much for “cost-benefit”- the people screaming loudest about this pouring vast sums and energy into trying to bury Golden Rice. The campaigners and the activists and the petition-signers who support them are not achieving the amelioration of VAD by other means; in fact the only reason it is even an issue is because it is GMO. If there was rice fortification by some other breeding method no-one would be paying a blind bit of notice. This is about one thing and one thing only: banning or hindering GMOs for political reasons.

(Lynas interviewed Professor Federoff on his blog recently who had this to say on the matter: “The simple answer to this is that the continued GM activism against “golden rice,” especially the recent efforts to discredit the trials that were being carried in China, is a humanitarian abomination.”)

All Smaje’s arguments amounts to is a distrust of science and an appeal to the Precautionary Principle. We cannot know for absolute certain how effective Golden Rice will be so let’s put all our energy into stopping it. The ideology comes first; if it is found to be “cost-efficient” something else will be found wrong.

So this is not really about countering the High Priests of Science- both Kingsnorth and Smaje both invoke their own High Priests, just as homeopaths are fond of decrying science as “just another way of knowing” and then popping out their own cherry-picked bogus study themselves.

What is really interesting is that this mistrust of scientific institutions is shared by another group who my protagonists on the Golden Rice issue would probably prefer not to feel aligned with: climate skeptics.

One of the main objections to the way climate science is translated into policy is that it is done to serve a political and ideological agenda, including of course massively increasing the power and funding of those scientific institutions. This is why I think it is a mistake for Lynas to equate climate skepticism with anti-GMO activism. While Smaje and Kingsnorth confuse Science with science on GMOs, most climate skeptics do not take issue with CO2 as a greenhouse gas, or that warming has been happening, but with the policies that are proposed to deal with the issue, often backed by incorrigible scare-mongering of exactly the same end-of-the-word kind that Greenpeace and other anti-GMO groups indulge in.

Smaje and others like him are suspicious of the scientific bodies who they feel promote GMOs for political reasons, while they would have lot in common with those who call for radical responses to climate change because it suits the same agenda: roll back industrial society, scale back on technological fixes which are only going to make things worse: that is why nuclear is so often opposed as well, despite being an obvious low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels.

Climate change is the penance we get for hurting Gaia and living beyond our means.

The easiest and also the most prominent target for this kind of concern about how far some scientific institutions have lost the run of themselves in over-stepping the boundary between good verifiable science and Science pressed into the service of an ideology has got to be Paul Ehrlich, particularly with his recent adoption as a Fellow of the Royal Society. In fact, when reading through Kingsnorth’s bleak and anti-humanistic dirges he reminds me of noone more than Ehrlich. In other words, the charge of Scientism and fears of unaccountable Scientific institutions gaining too much power and influence is much more applicable to the ideology Kingsnorth would support- the ideology in fact that has made him- than what he fights against.

Kingsnorth was keen to equate me with Delingpole- “I’d suggest you contact the commissioning editor of Telegraph Blogs in the UK. They’d snap you up there and you could foam away in great company – James Delingpole, Brendan O’Neill, Norman Tebbitt – and with a far higher readership.” (anyone from the Telegraph reading this?!)- and accused me of getting my history from “Right-wing Think tanks”- when I was actually referring to Staudenmaier of the Institute for Social Ecology, if anything a Left-wing “Think-tank”. (Lynas also got mixed up when reviewing Delingpole’s book as I pointed out this time last year.)

Yet he and Delingpole have more in common than either of them might be comfortable with. Here is Kingsnorth on windfarms:

I notice that the greenies are now changing their tune on wind farms. Where before the bat-chomping eco crucifixes were spun as a vital part of “energy security”, they are now being repositioned as a kind of carbon-friendly bolt-on which is nice to have around and generally acts as an occasional substitute for fossil fuel when conditions are right.

And here is Delingpole:

The prospect of raping some of our last wild places in order to provide 6% of our energy – profiting large corporations in the process – is not something that anyone daring to call themselves an environmentalist should be supporting. Even if you believe that tackling climate change is such a vital issue that it should override all else, projects like this remain a drop in the ocean in any case, their negative impacts far outweighed by their benefits.

They sound so similar I think it would be entirely forgivable to get them mixed up ;)

3 Comments
by skepteco on February 24, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Environmentalism, Genetic Engineering, Renewable Energy
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by skepteco on February 24, 2013

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/kingsnorths-meltdown/

The Backlash Cuts Both Ways: Monbiot, Mann, McKibben deal with their Critics

Interesting post on Transition Culture How Tough is your Skin? discusses what do grassroots community and activist groups do when they encounter vigorous opposition to their campaigns.

Hopkins attended the Independence Day conference in Frome last November:

Groups had come together from across the UK to share their experiences of trying to stop unwanted development, new supermarkets, the cloning of their high streets and so on. There was much useful sharing of ideas, inspiration and experiences, but what surprised me was that virtually everyone reported experiencing a backlash from a local group claiming to represent the community’s ‘silent majority.’ In some cases it had been relatively civil, for others it had been a ghastly experience. So how best to cope with such attacks?

Hopkins then goes on to discuss responses he got when raising this issue with various other activists, a mixture of local food and anti-supermarket campaigners along with well-known names such as George Monbiot, Bill McKibben and Michael Mann.

(Mann’s presence in this list, as a climate scientist alongside political activists like McKibben is sure to raise some eyebrows.)

Of the latter, the more common issue seems to be email attacks and random abuse from anyone -

“It’s constant” says Monbiot, “There’s scarcely a morning when I haven’t received something unpleasant by email. Most of the time I just mark it as spam and I don’t need to see anything by that person again. Some of them are very threatening, but I figure that most of them probably live in the Mid West and don’t possess passports, so I don’t feel scared about it. None of it frightens me”.

But the real issue is backlash from within your community, from people who feel you are not representing them or acting in their interests. “When you are putting in a huge number of volunteer hours to try and make your community a better place it really makes you wonder why you bother” was the view of Philip Revell of Sustaining Dunbar.; and Rob begins the post with reference to his own recent experiences of being under persistent public criticism for his work with Transition Towns Totnes.

The most interesting comment comes from another member of Sustaining Dunbar, who asked to meet with their most vocal critic, a fisherman opposing a planned hydro-scheme. “That was possibly the single most helpful meeting I had in terms of learning about the concerns and history of the river and the background of a previous hydropower development that the fishermen felt had had a detrimental effect on the river. It also enabled me to immediately to explain to him why this development is inherently very different to that past one, and to show him that I was taking on board that I did think he had genuine concerns”.”

The whole point of taking an activist stance of course is that it requires a certain missionary zeal, a confidence one is on the righteous path regardless of the criticisms, the need to grow a “thick skin” to tough it out and keep going.

Naturally I condemn abuse and anonymous attacks on people for their ideas. I think bullying of any kind is abhorrent and unacceptable. But being an activist means sticking your head above the parapet and so you can expect to get shot at to some extent.

(In extreme cases literally- or bombed, as happened to physicists in Mexico recently.)

Taking a strong stance on a matter of public interest, especially if it on a single-issue, black-and-white issue of Ban the dam or build the dam” will inevitably lead to some eggs being broken. Every action meets a reaction as they say, and so it is indeed crucial to talk to our fishermen and be willing to accept they may be right. Nothing is sure to get up people’s noses more than people who are arrogant or self-righteous in their certainty of the worthiness of their cause.

And I think this is what is missing from some of the stories on this discussion, because as I read through them and the accounts of the kind of attacks these activists have to deal with, I could not help but think, this is exactly the kind of thing that scientists working on genetic engineering, or nuclear power have to put up with as well.

Specifically what came to mind was the scientists at the Rothamsted Research Institute who had to contend with activists Take Back the Flour last year who came with the intention of destroying field trials of genetically engineered wheat.

The scientists were not of course “activists” taking their own, unelected action on a particular interest, but public servants doing their job.

And I was wondering how many of the eco-warriors at Rothamsted were inspired by the likes of Vandana Shiva, one of the world’s most prominent and influential anti-GE campaigners, who is being feted by Rob’s own activist group Transition Towns Totnes later this month.

Not only that but it turns out that one of the speakers at the Independence Day was Chris Smaje, whose mistaken views on genetic engineering was the subject of my last post. Much of what he had to say seem likely to have been influenced, and are certainly aligned with the lies and misinformation about the technology that Shiva uses to promote her paternalistic philosophy of keeping the poor poor: a Brahmin in Shudra clothing.

Worryingly, apart from the fisherman story, the other respondents did not seem to be over-endowed with the humility to consider they may be wrong, or at least not always unequivocally right in their missions: according to Monbiot, getting this kind of negative reaction is ” a measure of success, and if you’re not getting that response, if you’re not receiving hate mail, you’re simply not doing your job” while Hopkins veers into psychobabble by asking

It might also be worth reflecting on the different ways people react to challenging times and what they perceive as threats. In the current economic/climate/energy/social context, many people have perhaps, on some level, given up. Might it be that on one level, hostile reactions are being triggered in those who have decided there’s no point in acting by those who suggest that there still is very much a point to it?

This sounds like something out of Deep Ecology- we already know what is wrong with the world, Gaia is hurting and we are all hurting too- those who don’t agree are just expressing their anger and frustration at you by mistake.

The more opposition you get, the more right you must be. Rationalising away opposition and criticism in this way has much in common with religions and cults who must ring-fence themselves from admitting criticism could be valid: those who disagree are “deniers”.

Another difficulty with movements like Transition and Independence Day is that they pertain to bring together under one grand ideological umbrella a huge range of different issues and causes, claiming them all for their own: there is a world of difference really between calling for global action on climate change and trying to stop a supermarket in your town, and they will attract a lot of very different supporters who might not agree at all on other issues. Localisation as an economic philosophy might not be the best or only way to address something as complex as climate change for example- in fact it might be a disaster which people might rightly want to argue with.

As Linus Blomqvist, the director of the Breakthrough Institute’s Conservation and Development program comments here:

The idea that small-scale farming is the best solution for food security is very dangerous – it really is the total opposite. If everyone just grows their own food, then any local disruption will be catastrophic for those involved.

Transition also promote local wind farms, and Hopkins has written

Personally, I don’t feel that anyone has any right to object to this scheme unless they also feel that they would be able to sit down with a family from, say, Bangladesh, and tell them that their upset about a minor wind scheme in South Devon outweighs that family’s right to a future. I don’t feel that is justifiable in any sense.

Is it really any wonder he is receiving some local backlash? Maybe he should keep toughening up that ol’ skin.

2 Comments
by skepteco on February 13, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Environmentalism, Genetic Engineering, Transition Towns
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by skepteco on February 13, 2013

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/the-backlash-cuts-both-ways-monbiot-mann-mckibben-deal-with-their-critics/

In defence of Mark Lynas: Five Green Herrings and the Amish

Permaculture teacher and author Patrick Whitefield has just limked on Twitter to a blog by Chris Smaje in response to the widely discussed talk by Mark Lynas on genetic engineering.

Entitled Five Reasons Why Mark Lynas Is Wrong About GM Technology it is really five green herrings of the sort we have seen continually by GE detractors.

His first is that Lynas makes a false comparison between the “science” for climate change (AGW) and genetic engineering. Greens accept the science on the former but not the latter says Lynas, which Smaje challenges as a false comparison.

I agree that there is a false parallel here, but not for the reasons that Smaje gives. Greens don’t accept the “science of climate change” any more than they accept the science regarding the safety on GE: what they do generally is point to the agreed science that CO2 is having a warming effect, and translate this into the same pseudo-religious rhetoric that they use to discuss GE: humans are Bad, technology is not to be trusted, we are hurting Gaia and the Sky Gods will unleash retribution in the form of storms and famines.

Smaje is at least half-way correct on this issue- Science can show that AGW is real (although how much warming is actually anthropogenic is not so clear..) but “What it hasn’t shown – and what it can’t show – is what, if anything, we should do about it…” – exactly the point that climate skeptics have been making for years.

Smaje goes on to say “By contrast, nobody has ever questioned that GM is a viable, implementable technology – the question is whether we should in fact implement it, on which “the science” is equally as impotent in its ability to answer as in the case of climate change.”

This is not quite true. The anti-GE movement does indeed routinely make the argument that the actual implementation of the technology has been a complete failure. Smaje himself goes onto reference Vandemeer and the IAASTD report as examples of scientists who question the efficacy of GE.

Nonetheless, Smaje’s point is a valid one: science is good at testing specific hypotheses, such as the relative safety of a new technology, or temperature trends, but policy is not an issue for science alone. The inconsistency amongst the Greens is more that while scientists are used as authorities with regard to policy on climate change all the time, and we are told we should follow specific (or all-to-often unspecific) policy actions to deal with climate change because the science is settled, on the issue of genetic engineering- as also with nuclear power- scientist’s policy recommendations are ignored, because they are assumed to be industry shills directly or indirectly, and not to be trusted.

This is evident in Smaje’s later comment that “I accept that some people genuinely think GM does solve problems – though I suspect biotechnologists are heavily overrepresented in this particular category “- of course, biotech scientists have vested interests, in perpetuating their careers and finding and justifying their existence! Just like climate scientists, no? I mean, funny how most scientists warning about the dangers of climate change are, you know- *climate scientists* isn’t it? Even more odd, many of the most vocal proponents of small-scale organic farming are… small scale organic farmers!

Smaje accepts that GE is probably safe but links to a fine Green Herring on an activist site to sow the seed of doubt that “maybe we shouldn’t be too hasty”.

The “OMFG Viral Genes!!” story is just the latest anti-GMO meme to be doing the rounds. It is complete bunk, and the failure of Smaje to recognise this does rather bring into question his scientific understanding of the issue.

He also links to other Green Herrings, such as the super-weeds issue: but weed resistance is not an issue only of GE, and have been with us since the 1970s at least. As with so many objections to GE, the arguments apply to farming in general, including often organic farming, not just GE. (more…)

50 Comments
by skepteco on February 10, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Environmentalism, Food and Farming, Genetic Engineering, Organics
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by skepteco on February 10, 2013

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/in-defence-of-mark-lynas-5-green-herrings-and-the-amish/

Green for Me Talk for UCC Enviro Soc

I had an enjoyable evening at the Green for Me event at UCC Environmental Society on Tuesday where I gave a talk along with Dan Boyle of the Green Party and well-known biologist and TV/radio presenter Eanna ni Lamhna as part of their Green Week.

The theme given us for our talks was “My Reasons for Being Green.”

Eanna spoke first, but I had already got into a discussion with her about population as soon as she came into the lecture hall, pointing out that birth rates are declining everywhere, and hurriedly added in a few graphs to prove my point; her own graph was I felt somewhat misleading in that it showed only the dramatic population expansion of the past hundred years, without any context or explanation that this phase finished some 20 years ago.

Update: As Patrick Hayes writes here in response to David Attenborough’s recent Malthusian remarks, even sub-Saharan Africa has seen a massive drop in birthrates:

But as Slate has observed, it’s not just the most developed nations: ‘From 1960 to 2009, Mexico’s fertility rate tumbled from 7.3 live births per woman to 2.4, India’s dropped from six to 2.5, and Brazil’s fell from 6.15 to 1.9. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, where the average birthrate remains a relatively blistering 4.66, fertility is projected to fall below replacement level by the 2070s.’

All of which is bad news for Attenborough and his Malthusian ilk, as it reveals that what lurks behind their doom-mongering is prejudice rather than fact. That becomes increasingly evident when you hear headline-generating comments, such as those Attenborough made recently to the Radio Times: ‘We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves – and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case.’

Too many people in Ethiopia? This is a country which, according to the World Bank, has a mere 83 people per square kilometre. This is the same as Serbia, and there aren’t mass starvations there. At 196 people per square kilometre, Switzerland has a far higher population density than Ethopia, but people aren’t starving there. Nor in Japan, where there are 350 people per square kilometre, or the Netherlands, which has 493 people per square kilometre.

She then went on to talk about climate change and supported the issues around this with two more rather misleading slides, one of polar bears and one of deserts. Polar bears are of course the poster child of climate change and have been used to very good propaganda effects since before Al Gore; but the reality seems very different- many polar bear populations are increasing, they seem remarkably adaptable to declining sea ice.
A much greater threat to bears in the Arctic than global warming is hunting.

So bears polar bears are probably an eye-catching but bad example of the effects of climate change- so far at least. Similarly, desertification also is more complex than just laying it at the feet of CO2 emissions- de-forestsation from human activity being another obvious cause, with underlying poverty often being the problem.

Eanna then wnet onto talk about renewable energy- “we have very little renewable energy- and yet the wind blows all the time!” Yes, it’s a no-brainer: humans, especially Irish humans in a country that has been hailed as the Saudi Arabia of wind- choose to use Polar-Bear murdering fossil fuels when they could just switch to clean wind.

Unfortunately, one of the major draw-backs with wind is that it does not in fact blow all the time even in Ireland, as anyone who has lived off-grid with wind-power as I have done in the past will tell you: plenty of calm still “soft” days Ireland where you get effectively no power from wind, no matter how many turbines you might have.

Even a super-grid covering the whole of Europe would not solve the problem- there is really quite dramatic indetermittency issues Europe-wide as well. For this reason, wind can never on its own replace fossil fuels or nuclear, and as another graph of Eanna’s showed quite well, renewables currently only supply a tiny percentage of energy- for well-understood reasons that are more to do with the laws of physics and cost than anything else.

More controversially, Eanna then went onto discuss waste, asking why dont we have have incinerators- a local hot-potato. “You can’t even mention them- they are considered as bad as GMOs!” The last time I had seen Eanna was at the potato day last year in Skibbereen, where she had had done an admirable job of myth-busting about the GE potato trials that started last year.

She then commented that at the protest meetings on incinerators she had been to, at the break about a third of the protestors went out to smoke!

Eanna finished her entertaining talk by admonishing us to eat only food that is in season and plant trees to help combat climate change.

I was up next, and began by staking out my credentials as a back-to-the-lander. While preparing the presentation I had in fact dug up photos of a commune I had lived in in the 1980s on the Welsh borders.

This is a photo of the Earthworm Housing Co-op from 1990, possibly when I was still actually living there.Brings back memories- many of which make me cringe!

854064249_021ca8daae_m

I then discussed my involvement with the Peak Oil movement, and how my views had changed as time went on and the expected collapse failed to materialise, and the new energy story became one of the Golden Age of Gas.

I then used Stewart Brand’s Four Environmental Heresies to frame my new perspective on “Being Green.”

-population growth stablising and the world is not over-populated;
-cities are green
-nukes are green
-genetic engineering is green

I then gave a brief explanation of the Environmental Transition- the idea that environmentalism is a product of wealth and industrial growth rather than a reaction to it, and told the story from Shellenberger and Nordhaus’ book Breakthrough about the fires on the Cuyahoga River:cuyahoga_fire650

In June 22nd 1969 Time Magazine showed this photo of burning oil on Cuyahoga River with the caption
“The Price of Optimism” and it became emblematic of start of the US Environmental Movement.

The problem was, the photo was not from the 1969 fire, which has burned out in half-an-hour before the Time photographer could get there- but from an earlier and much more severe fire from 1952. In fact, there had been fires on the Cuyahoga river for a hundred years, some of them burning for days and causing loss of life: but the society had not yet reached a level of wealth and development- which would support universities with Environmental Societies- until much later. Poor people are not generally environmentalists- they have more expressing concerns, but once society has a critical mass of relatively affluent educated people with time on their hands, then industry is compelled to clean up its act.

I concluded my presentation with a quotation from Daniel Botkin’s book The Moon in the Nautilus Shell.:

Our perspective, ironically in this scientific age, depends on ancient myths and deeply buried beliefs. To gain a new view, one necessary to deal with global environmental problems, we must break free of old assumptions and myths about nature and ourselves while building on the scientific and technical advances of the past.

Dan Boyle followed me and began by expressing surprise to find himself having to defend the broad thrust of the environmental movement from the past few decades. He began by emphasising his agreement that Luddism is false, and that greens depend upon science and technology;

but seemed to struggle to hide some exasperation at my reference to Lomborg: “It is NOT the case that you burn your hydrocarbons and then clean up afterwards”- rather missing the point about the environmental transition, because of course that is precisely what the greens have been doing, otherwise we would never have embarked on industrialisation in the first place: the greens would have stopped us!

Dan’s main points seemed to be a bunch of Green Herrings: the supposed rallying cries of “bigger faster more” are the problem; untrield technology is dangerous and we should proceed with greater caution;
while his reference to dangers of the “chemical soup” used in frakking, and from “cross-contamination” from genetic engineering belie his claim to environmentalism being underpinned by science. Not to mention his suggestion that we can have “smaller and more efficient” wind turbines- surely not? To become more efficient, wind turbines can only do one thing: get bigger, due to well-understood laws of physics concerning wind-speed increasing to the square of the altitude/height and rotor span’s ability to collect the diffuse wind energy from a given space.

In the discussion and questions afterwards I was challenged quite strongly on nuclear waste issues, and general “Pandora’s Box” concerns about whether naughty humans should really be trusted with technology.

Dan Boyle made the very good point that at a meeting he had attended recently in the midlands concerning the proposed giant wind farm there, anti-wind activists used the same rhetoric and alarmism used by the anti-nuclear lobby, even including the threat of radiation- from wind turbines!

A popular theme seemed to be that rather than constantly striving for more energy sources, we should just use less. “Let’s turn out the lights then!” I said looking up to the ceiling at the dozens of lights that were probably consuming more energy that evening than I would at home in a year. My personal experience of living off the grid was apparently not persuasive however, and when I pointed out that there are still a couple of billion people without electricity at all in the world, I was told, “They can just use the Gravity Light!”

“Would you use one?”

“Well, it would be great for an outdoor light or something.”

Indeed it would, and for those without electric lights of any kind, this remarkable invention will surely be a wonderful boon. But for those who think that we can or will do anything other than make cosmetic changes in our energy usage, that “powerdown” can in some way substitute for cheap reliable electricity supply, should contemplate what life might be like if one or two gravity lights is all you ever have as a light supply, for the rest of your lives, ie without development.

Several people came up to me afterwards and thanked me for a thought-provoking perspective, while others took a more conventional green- perspective, concerned more about a presumed loss of contact with Nature, the virtues of the simple life and the insanity of endless growth rather than addressing the concerns of the poor. “We are all too greedy in this country!” proclaimed Eanna at one point.

But as Colin McInnes shows in this award-winning essay, growth is not just a matter of extraction and consumption, but is also about complexity:

While innovation-driven growth has delivered immense improvements to the human condition, it is also the means through which human needs can be gradually decoupled from the environment. Growth emerges from productivity, doing more with less. For example, new additive manufacturing technologies, so-called ‘3D printers’, look set partly to replace the wasteful subtractive manufacturing of machine tools. In contrast, in coming down from our oil high, as advocated by {Richard} Heinberg, we could regress to using whale oil for lighting, as was the case prior to commercial oil production. But this hardly constitutes progress, economic or environmental….

The real worry of Heinberg’s vision of a post-growth world is his straight-faced assertion that ‘there should be [an] increasing requirement for local production and manual labour’. This chilling claim is more Year Zero than zero growth. A return to carbohydrate-fuelled manual labour may be appealing to Heinberg and others as a means of powering down our lives and reconnecting with the land. But he shouldn’t expect a long queue of volunteers.

Maybe not- but he could well expect a long line of green ideologues who have forgotten that their green ideas are only possible because of the benefits brought by the very techno-industrialism that they campaign against.

6 Comments
by skepteco on February 7, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Eco-Pragmatism, Environmentalism, Fracking, Genetic Engineering, Nuclear, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy, Technology
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by skepteco on February 7, 2013

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/green-for-me-talk-for-ucc-enviro-soc/

Rape of the Earth

Mark Lynas, once famous for throwing a pie in the face of Bjorn Lomborg while crying “Pies not lies!” has made the headlines and kept the twittersphere a-boiling for much of the past 10 days with this amazing talk detailing his conversion from dark-green eco-vandal to neo-green pro-GE eco-pragmatist.

Dubbed as one of the greatest environmental mea culpa’s ever, and possibly a game-changer in the public debate on genetic engineering, Lynas bravely throws up his hands to say that rarest of things in the context of such a high-profile and contentious issue: I was wrong. Not just a little bit, but completely and diametrically wrong:

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

Lynas says that the anti-GE movement he helped to start “was the most successful campaign I have ever been involved with” but that

This was also explicitly an anti-science movement. We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the Frankenstein food tag – this absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends. What we didn’t realise at the time was that the real Frankenstein’s monster was not GM technology, but our reaction against it.

(more…)

21 Comments
by skepteco on January 11, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Collapse/Die-off, Deep Ecology, Eco-Pragmatism, Environmentalism, Food and Farming, Genetic Engineering, Technology
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by skepteco on January 11, 2013

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/rape-of-the-earth/

Science and the Greens

A couple of recent posts continued with the theme I have been writing about in my last few posts, the awkward relationship between environmentalism and science.

Adam Corner and Alice Bell, writing for the New Left Project pick up on the Genetic Engineering/Nuclear issues that have been highlighted so effectively by “Chernobyl-Death-deniers” Mark Lynas and George Monbiot, but appear to add little to the debate, making the usual abstract remarks about the power context in which science takes place, while apparently unaware of the power-context within which environmentalism has emerged.

They stray into dubious territory right from the start when claiming that the Greens have always had a strong affinity with science, and that Green activism is actually rooted in science, evoking Rachel Carson and Julian Huxley:

Like the biologist Julian Huxley’s role in the founding of the WWF the year before, Silent Spring is endemic of the way science’s ability to look carefully at the natural world alerts us to the negative impacts humans have had on  it. To borrow a phrase from sociologist Steven Yearley, there is “elective affinity” between science and the greens, though as Yearley himself would be keen to stress, this doesn’t mean it’s a simple relationship.

Although Carson was right about some things, and played an important role in raising awareness about environmental impacts of farming, she over-egged the pudding and exaggerated on many issues, going well beyond the evidence, and these exaggerations arguably were responsible for chemophobia and radiophobia and the legacy of general alarmism and disregard for the facts -the very subject under discussion.

Julian Huxely is also surely a very bad example, since he was a champion of the then-fashionable “science” of eugenics and set the tone for much environmental thinking since with his concern about over-population, a political stance that is traditionally associated with the Right, not the Left. (For reading on this, see Fred Pearce, PeopleQuake 2010.) (more…)

16 Comments
by skepteco on November 9, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Eco-Pragmatism, Environmentalism, Fracking, Genetic Engineering, Renewable Energy
Tagged , , ,

Posted by skepteco on November 9, 2012

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/science-and-the-greens/

Vandana Shiva admits: There is No Terminator

A few weeks ago I wrote The Truth About the Terminator questioning the dubious but influential and oft-repeated claims that Monsanto’s Terminator seeds are widely used and lead directly to widespread farmer suicides in India. Yesterday it was brought to my attention that Vandana Shiva, High Priestess of the anti-GE “keep the poor poor and hungry” movement has in fact admitted in her own publication the Navdanya “Seed Kit” that so called “Terminator” technology- properly GURT or Gene Use Restriction Technology – has never been used in a commercial crop:

Terminator Seeds

Terminator seeds are genetically modified to kill their own embryos, making them sterile at harvest. This means that if farmers save the seeds of these plants at harvest for future crops, the next generation of plants will not grow. Farmers would thus need to buy new seeds every year.

After studying these seeds, molecular biologists warned of the possibility of terminator seeds spreading to surrounding food crops or to the natural environment—the gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans. Since 2001 there has been a de facto worldwide moratorium on the use of terminator technology. {Emphasis added}

Note that she repeats the lie from her 2000 book Stolen Harvest that sterile seeds could spread sterility…through seeds. So we have a situation whereby a whole movement made up of organic farmers and permaculturalists (as well as others like “alternative health” practitioners, who we should not expect too much of anyway) who one might expect to know something about the basic facts of life such as how baby plants are made, believe this, and other nonsense about GE technology, and campaign vigorously for complete bans on the technology as a result, even on occasion going so far as to pull crops up and oppose scientific trials on the basis of a non-existent threat from a non-existent trait.

This curious phenomenon is something to take deep inside and meditate on for a while. There is nowt so queer as folk, as my mother says.

7 Comments
by skepteco on October 16, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Food and Farming, Genetic Engineering, Permaculture
Tagged , ,

Posted by skepteco on October 16, 2012

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/vandana-shiva-admits-there-is-no-terminator/

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