All posts tagged Mark Lynas

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
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by skepteco on March 6, 2013

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

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/

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
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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/

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/

Nuclear Power, Capitalism and Marxist woo

UPDATE 07-09-12:More on the professional Greenpeace fraud Arnie Gundersen here

I seem to have spent half the summer debating the topics I usually engage with here on Facebook, a new departure for me, which has not left a lot of time for blogging so I might summarize some of them here.

Much of these debates are with the usual New Age/Collapse/Dark Greens on the usual topics: anti-technology, humans are bad, we’re all doomed, computers (and Facebook!) are great but apart from that we should retreat to self-reliant “resilient” local communities and knit our own windmills from organic home-spun hemp. Often these debates end up being thinly disguised anti-captialist (Apple and Microsoft exempt) rants with an (un-) healthy dose of Gaia worship thrown in.

After posting this link to an article by Wiliam Tucker- author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Energy Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Energy Odyssey- I was recently drawn into a debate with a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist who cut straight to the chase: capitalism is the cause of all environmental problems, starting with Fukishima. In support of this position I was sent this link from Democracy Now! featuring a short report from from the Japanese Parliment showing that “A Japanese parliamentary inquiry has concluded last year’s nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was “a profoundly man-made disaster — that could and should have been foreseen and prevented.” This was presented to me as “empirical evidence” that, since it was a “man-made” error, and Japan is a captialist country, accidents like Fukishima are “the logical result of the coupling of economic and political power” in capitalist societies.

That’s an interesting take, because as far I as can see Fukishima was the result of a Tsunami which killed 30,000 people, and this Marxist posturing- just like the anti-nuke Greens reaction which has lead to a massive increase in coal consumption in both Japan and Germany-- looks to me like jumping on a political/ideological band-wagon and riding roughshod over the victims’ graves.
(more…)

22 Comments
by skepteco on August 17, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Environmentalism, Marxism, Nuclear, Technology
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Posted by skepteco on August 17, 2012

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/nuclear-power-capitalism-and-marxist-woo/

Why the Dark Greens should throw off their guilt and Grow Up

Update 11-08-12: Latest interview with Patrick Moore here- he also quotes Hunter as calling for an ideology for environmentalism to succeed; Moore concludes (n climate change) “I fear the irrational policies of extreme environmentalists far more that a warmer climate on this relatively cold planet”.

Simple science made me a Greenpeace drop-out.

-Patrick Moore, Confessions of a Greenpeace Drop-out (2011).

Paul Kingsnorth wrote a piece for the Guardian’s Comment is Free a week or so ago called The new environmentalism: where men must act ‘as gods’ to save the planet

Kingsnorth is a “Dark Green” and he critiques the rise of what he calls the “neo-environmentalists”, who I wrote about about in April here.

After lamenting the failure of traditional greens “to prevent the global industrial machine from continuing to destroy wild nature and replace it with human culture” Kingsnorth goes onto compare the rise of the neo-environmentalists with the neo-liberals of the early 1970s:

Like the neoliberals, the neo-environmentalists are attempting to break through the lines of an old orthodoxy which is visibly exhausted and confused. Like the neoliberals, they speak the language of money and power. Like the neoliberals, they cluster around a few key thinktanks: then, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Cato Institute and the Adam Smith Institute; now, the Breakthrough Institute, the Long Now Foundation and the Copenhagen Consensus. Like the neoliberals, they think they have radical solutions.

Neo-environmentalism is a progressive, business-friendly, postmodern take on the environmental dilemma. It dismisses traditional green thinking, with its emphasis on limits and transforming societal values, as naive. New technologies, global capitalism and western-style development are not the problem but the solution. The future lies in enthusiastically embracing biotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear power, nanotechnology, geo-engineering and anything else new and complex that annoys Greenpeace.

The emphasis on “limits” is naive: utilising natural resources is not a zero-sum game, where there is small, finite amount of stuff and a growing population leading to a smaller slice of the pie to go round- “resources” are indeed in effect created- the raw materials of the earth only become “resources” once we have devised technology to utilise them, and this technology continually improves, as can be seen with the impact of shale gas for example;

and the aspiration to ” transforming societal values” is nothing short of authoritarian: whose values are we supposed to adopt? why are they any preferable?

Meanwhile Kingsnorth fails completely to address the obvious reason why Kyoto and Copenhagen-style responses to climate change cannot work: if you are rich you might think GDP is negotiable; but try telling that to the rest of the world.

In mentioning Greenpeace, Kingsnorth would have done well to quote its co-founder Patrick Moore who left the deep-green organisation in 1986 on account of irreconcilable ideological divisions with the rest of the group. (more…)

1 Comment
by skepteco on August 7, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Eco-Pragmatism, Environmentalism, Population, Technology
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Posted by skepteco on August 7, 2012

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/why-the-dark-greens-should-throw-off-their-guilt-and-grow-up/

The Perils of Prediction

A couple of weeks ago The Royal Society published a major new report called People and the Planet(pdf),which has drawn a lot of criticism for its apparent commitment to outdated “Limits to Growth” type thinking.

Who can know the future?

As Tim Worstall points out, while there is much to merit in the nuanced analysis of the main report, in the actual discussions of what we should do about both consumption and population,

it appears that we really are running out of “reserves” and that we should hand out condoms to all and sundry. That last isn’t all that surprising, as Jonathan Porritt is part of the team and he’s incapable of saying anything else on the subject.

Indeed, Porritt is not of course a scientist at all, more an activist, and his presence here which does in itself raise serious questions about the integrity of the study, if it means that the science is being mixed up with ideological interpretations and policy recommendations.

Similarly, Mark Lynas argues

Whilst using a lot of dark language about increasing numbers of humans globally, the report nowhere acknowledges that the current median level of total worldwide fertility has fallen dramatically from 5.6 in the 1970s to only 2.4 today. In other words we are already close to natural replacement levels in terms of total fertility – the reason that the absolute population will continue to grow to 9 billion or more is that more children are living long enough have their own children. To my mind a reduction in infant mortality and an increase in life expectancy are self-evidently good and desirable – and their impact on world population levels should be celebrated, not bemoaned.

Lynas goes onto to explain that the main failing of neo-Malthussianism is that it assumes resource consumption is a “zero-sum game”- that there is a finite pie to be shared by an expanding population, with only one possible outcome- not enough pie to go around. While this might be true in an absolute sense, it ignores technological developments which allow economic growth – “qualitative” rather than just “quantitative” growth to continue even as per capita, and ultimately even total impacts may plateau and even decline.

Chris Goodall at Carbon Commentary picks up on this theme by arguing that more resource consumption and growth need not necessarily result in greater impact. He uses the example of waste and rubbish:

Waste production per person in the UK peaked at around 520 kg a year in the year to March 2002. The latest two quarters figures are fifteen per cent below that level. The latest quarterly figures suggest a figure of about 443 kg. The decline from year to year isn’t smooth but is probably getting steeper.

As societies get richer, they become smarter, more eco-conscious and generally have a tendency to clean up our act. Goodall wryly continues

In contrast to what the Royal Society says, growth may be good for the environment. We waste less and are prepared to devote more cash to ecological protection. Technology improvements mean things last longer and use fewer physical resources to make. Regretfully, I have to say that the world’s most prestigious scientific institution should spend more time checking its facts.

(more…)

18 Comments
by skepteco on May 23, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Collapse/Die-off, Peak Oil
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Posted by skepteco on May 23, 2012

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/the-perils-of-prediction/

Watermelons: The Greens, the Commies and the Nazis

Mark Lynas has written a review of acerbic Telegraph blogger James Delingpole’s book Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children’s Future.

Lynas slates the book- which he confesses he was unable to finish- as

a schoolboy vision, deluded and naive, of a topsy-turvy world in which the Royal Society and other august scientific bodies are peopled by “liars, cheats and frauds”, while the little guy surfing the internet (Delingpole himself) who courageously disbelieves the white-coated “expert” elite is always right in the end.

He goes onto say “I lost count of the number of comparisons to Nazis: environmentalists are Nazis, scientists are Nazis, UN officials are Nazis, and we must fight them on the beaches and never surrender to their dastardly intellectualism and cunning, elitist plans.”

Like Lynas, I read the book on my Kindle, which makes it very easy to count the number of times “Nazis” are mentioned: 34 it seems; but most of them are not, as Lynas claims, Delingpole comparing environmentalists or scientists to Nazis; in fact, the first reference makes quite the reverse point, that it is climate skeptics who are frequently referred to as “Deniers” -a phrase Lynas himself uses routinely without a thought- and by comparison therefore to Nazis, guilty of a presumed future holocaust caused by climate change.
Delingpole accuses climate activists of using tactics common in all areas of politics of “closing down the debate” :

Worried about immigration? You’re a racist. Want your kids to get a good education? You’re an elitist. Suspect all the fuss about AGW might be a little overdone? You’re just the kind of scummy Nazi-sympathizing revisionist who thinks Hitler didn’t murder six million Jews… The term “denier”, it goes without saying, was designed explicitly to provoke comparisons with Holocaust Denial. Shortly after Climategate, I took part in a debate with George Monbiot. When I put this point to him he—funnily enough—denied he was making any such connection. So I gently reminded him of a Guardian article he’d written in 2006: “Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and unacceptable as Holocaust denial.”

Most of the other references to Nazis are also not accusing Greens or climate scientists of being Nazis, but are references to actual Nazis from the Third Reich, some of whom did indeed share much with various hews of modern day greens:

For understandable reasons, modern greens have sought to distance themselves from the Nazis. But as the authors of the essay collection How Green Were The Nazis? argue, this won’t quite wash: The green policies of the Nazis were more than a mere episode or aberration in environmental history at large. They point to larger meanings and demonstrate with brutal clarity that conservationism and environmentalism are not and have never been value-free or inherently benign enterprises. Precisely. Nazi Germany did not represent some grotesque perversion of green values; rather it represented their purest, most honest form of practical expression. If—as the modern green movement does and the Nazis did—you want to create a depopulated, almost “Garden of Eden” world where small numbers of chosen people live in a state of rustic, deindustrialized, organic bliss, then clearly the two key questions you must ask are “Which people?” and “How?”

That many contemporary Green ideals were given some of their earliest and fullest expression under Nazi Germany is corroborated by the historical work of Peter Staudenmaier, whose book Ecofascism Revisited I reviewed in the last post.

Later on in the book Delingpole does make an explicit comparison, telling us about how an editor once compained to him about his apparent angry obsession with climate change:

I think the post he particularly objected to was entitled: “Why do I call them Eco Nazis? Because they are Eco Nazis.” It drew on research by Mark Musser in American Thinker, showing that one of the pioneers of apocalyptic global warming theory was an Austrian Nazi called Günther Schwab. This tied in with a discussion I had about the German Green Party with Dr. Benny Peiser, one of its early members. “Many of our most enthusiastic members were Nazis,” Dr. Peiser told me. (Peiser now runs the skeptical Global Warming Policy Foundation based in the UK.) Given the deep ecological leanings of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels documented in Chapter 9, this should hardly come as any surprise.

As Staudenmaier’s co-author Janet Biehl also shows, figures like Rudolph Bahro kept the mystical-Nazi Green ideology flame burning in recent times and also played a significant role in the formation of the contemporary German Green party. The Nazi influence on today’s green movement should not be taken lightly.

Does Delingpole overstate his case as Lynas claims, by drifting into unsubstantiated conspiracy theory concerning the UN, Agenda 21, and global warming?

Perhaps. But a lot of what he says is hard to completely discount. Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas and yes humans probably are warming the atmosphere, and yes the climate change we are experiencing now may be much faster than previous changes, and we should take the threat seriously and do something about it.

But Climategate really does show evidence of unscrupulous and bad science, or at the very least some level of “virtuous corruption”; the main policy responses of international treaties and carbon trading have been far too open to corruption and gaming the system, and doomed to failure given that the poor of the world aspire to western standards of living and there is currently no effective alternative to fossil fuels for billions of people to bring themselves out of poverty. The image of fossil fuel companies representing the Devil incarnate, and of our supposed “addiction” to oil is absurd given that we all need this energy to heat and light our homes.

“Data is dispensable for Delingpole” says Lynas “- that’s for the hated elite with their clipboards, computer models and lab coats. We should rely instead on ideology-based assertion, simple common sense and the ever-trusty anecdote. The “medieval warm period”, now agreed by palaeoclimatologists to have been a minor regional phenomenon, is resurrected by repetition of the hoary old tale of grapes being grown in England and Norse colonies being established in Greenland. (Both of these happened but hardly count as defining proxy markers for higher world temperatures.”

This may well be so; but should we trust that very small coterie of climate scientists who so carefully engaged in gate-keeping to keep contrary papers from passing peer review? The status of the Medieval Warm Period and the Hockey Stick continues to be the subject of uncertainty and controversy. Judith Curry writes:

It is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data in figures shown IPCC AR3 and AR4, and the 1999 WMO document. Not only is this misleading, but it is dishonest (I agree with Muller on this one).

Richard Muller, Director of the Berkeley Earth Project, discusses “hide the decline” and “vehemently refers to this as ‘dishonest,’ and says ‘you are not allowed to do this,’ and further states that he intends not to read further papers by these authors.”

Bishop Hill commented on an apparent change of emphases in Phil Jones’ statements on the MWP here. Recently Jones has said:

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

This issue may be a case of insufficient data to be sure. But regardless of the real state of climate science, the whole subject has been politicized and used to suit the agenda of those who share at least some of the more misanthropic and controlling elements bequeathed the greens by the Nazis.

Consider the case of IPCC chair Pachauri and how his own ideological views may be having a strong influence on climate policy, as Donna LaFramboise explains:

Prior to becoming head of the IPCC, Pachauri’s support for climate action didn’t rest on objective evidence. Rather, he regarded a global emissions treaty as a useful mechanism – as one more way in which his fantasy of introducing a new ethic to govern human behaviour might be realized.

Climate change has been all too often presented in apocalyptic tones, its dangers exaggerated in the propaganda of Al Gore and activist groups like Greenpeace, and presented as so many other environmental issues have been presented, to satisfy what Nordhaus and Shellenberger call “revenge fantasies”: the modern world, technology and hubris of human progress is Evil. Our consumption of scarce resources is unsustainable. We are destroying Nature and it is all Our Fault. Soon the Mother will strike back, with floods, tempests and droughts.

Lynas correctly points out that there is plenty of things wrong with elements in the environmental movement, which is largely anti-nuclear, despite nuclear power being the obvious choice for low-carbon base-load energy.

In other words, some are “watermelons”. I believe that capitalism and democracy sometimes need defending from the more deluded greens, and the environmental movement as a whole is far too much a creature of the political left.

I do wonder however, absent the anti-GE, anti-nuclear, back-to-the-land scythe-wielding hippies- what would be left in any recognizable form of the environmental movement at all? Is not the drive for renewables before the technology is mature just as deluded as a romantic yearning for the pastoral life?

Lynas I feel is too harsh on Delingpole, but I’m hardly surprised. Watermelons is indeed a witty and entertaining read, and not without insight. Lynas told me on Twitter that it could in theory have been an interesting book, but that Delingpole was just not the man to have written it. One might just as easily say that, given Delingpole’s style, he is the only one who could have.

14 Comments
by skepteco on February 16, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Nuclear
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by skepteco on February 16, 2012

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/watermelons-the-greens-the-commies-and-the-nazis/

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