Two numbers from this weekends Guardian/Observer…

The first is 25%. Damian Carrington whinges that

George Osborne demands massive cuts to windfarm subsidies
PM’s ‘greenest government ever’ claim undermined by chancellor’s move, which follows pressure from Tory MPs

Massive cuts?

The Observer has learned that George Osborne is demanding cuts of 25% in subsidies, a reduction the industry says would “kill dead” the development of wind power sites. The Treasury’s stance has put the chancellor at loggerheads with the Liberal Democrat energy secretary Ed Davey, whose party strongly supports more renewable energy.

The article doesn’t substantiate the figure — it is just attributed to ‘sources’. But wherever it came from, a 25% cut in subsidies for wind energy is not ‘massive’, given that wind farm operators enjoy generous subsidies through the Renewables Obligation (RO) scheme, which will last until at least 2027. So on top of getting the cash for the electricity they produce, onshore generators receive an additional £50/MWh, and offshore generators receive about £75, adding between 50-75% to the cost of the electricity. Wind energy lobbying group, Renewable UK — formerly the British Wind Energy Association — say this about the costs of wind energy:

The cost of generating electricity from wind has fallen dramatically over the past few years. Between 1990 and 2002, world wind energy capacity doubled every three years and with every doubling prices fell by 15%. Wind energy is competitive with new coal and new nuclear capacity, even before any environmental costs of fossil fuel and nuclear generation8 are taken into account. The average cost of generating electricity from onshore wind is now around 3-4p per kilowatt hour, competitive with new coal (2.5-4.5p) and cheaper than new nuclear (4-7p). As gas prices increase and wind power costs fall – both of which are very likely – wind becomes even more competitive, so much so that some time after 2010 wind should challenge gas as the lowest cost power source.

So if wind power is cheaper than the conventional and nuclear alternatives, why would cutting the subsidy to them, ‘”kill dead” the development of wind power sites’, according to the wind energy industry, according to Carrington? It’s just not clear. So clearly, something is missing from the story, or Carrington is struggling with his maths again.

Which brings us on to number number two…

The Observer (the Sunday Guardian) is reporting on a Greenpeace PR stunt, featuring brit-pop artist, Jarvis Cocker,

Greenpeace is preparing to launch what it hopes will be the ecological campaign of our generation, and Jarvis is the frontman of the UK part. As you may have deduced from Jarvis’s iceman get-up, this seminal campaign concerns the Arctic, which is losing ice and gaining unwanted attention. Temperatures in the region are rising faster than anywhere else on earth, causing the ice cap to melt. Scientists think the North Pole could be ice-free in summertime within 20 years.

Environmental correspondents at The Guardian and Observer get their knickers in a twist about facts and figures leaked from the government, it seems, but are quite happy to reproduce any old nonsense spouted by huge NGOs and idiot celebrities…

Jarvis has been to the Arctic. “Not that I’m a massive expert, but when I heard that they wanted to dig it up, I thought: hold on a minute – that’s not good,” he says, in his undramatic way. Back in 2008 he joined a Cape Farewell expedition to Disko Bay, north of the Arctic Circle (“And we did have a disco, too, one night,” he clarifies), with KT Tunstall and Marcus Brigstocke. Cape Farewell is a project created by artist David Buckland to set a cultural context for and response to climate change (it’s the sort of concept that leaves climate-change deniers foaming at the mouth). The main idea is to set up a partnership between cultural and scientific institutions to improve the public’s engagement with changes in the climate. Creatives who’ve got involved and visited areas affected by global warming include Jude Kelly, Yann Martel, Martha Wainwright, Ian McEwan and Gary Hume. It’s hoped that the expedition will loosely influence their work, but it’s not linear. “David doesn’t go: ‘Right. We’ve got you up here where you can’t escape – write a song’ or ‘McEwan, I want 10 pages now,'” says Jarvis.

Actually, what annoys the ‘climate deniers’ is claims such as ‘Scientists think the North Pole could be ice-free in summertime within 20 years’ — which is a highly contested claim, anyway, and which has been deferred from the present year a number of times during the lifetime of this blog. The claim is repeated yet again, with no hint of reflection on the incautious claims made about the disappearance of Arctic summer sea ice in recent years. But worse than this, the article goes on to claim that,

Of the Arctic sea ice, 75% has been lost over the past 30 years. Last year saw sea-ice levels plummet to the second-lowest since records began. It is estimated that the North Pole could be ice-free in the summer within the next 10-20 years.

And this claim has even less foundation, as Anthony Watts explains. ‘The Guardian is only off by 7.675 million square kilometers…close enough for journo work I suppose’, says Watts. It’s a good point. The Guardian’s journalists want to claim that the ‘deniers’ have got it wrong, but they don’t seem able to stop themselves making up the numbers to support their campaigning.

Speaking of such numbers-abuse, the Arctic, Damian Carrington and WattsUpWithThat… Back in September, Carrington wrote,

Last week saw the annual summer minimum of the Arctic ice cap, which has now shrunk to the lowest level satellites have ever recorded.

This was, once again, palpable nonsense, as I reported at the time. Carrington had begun his article with some emotional anthropomorphism…

Ice is the white flag being waved by our planet, under fire from the atmospheric attack being mounted by humanity. From the frosted plains of the Arctic ice pack to the cool blue caverns of the mountain glaciers, the dripping away of frozen water is the most crystal clear of all the Earth’s warning signals.

… But emotion is no substitute for checking the facts. Carrington’s claim was not supported by five out of the six measurements of Arctic sea ice. But who would want to let the facts get in the way of a good sob story?

And it is simple facts, and simplistic telling of complex stories that characterise the Guardian journalists, Greenpeaces, and the celebrity pal’s perspective. Here, for instance, is Jarvis Cocker’s attempt to explain contemporary geopolitics… (I am obliged to point out that the lyrics of this song are not ‘work safe’, and may offend some people.)

Thank God for the artist.. How would we understand the world without their sophistication, and their unique insights.

There’s nothing worse than wealthy pop stars complaining about how cruel the world is…

If Jarvis seems more flippant than your usual eco warrior it’s probably also a defence mechanism. Those with a high profile have to be prepared for some derision if they extol eco credentials while continuing to live a comfortable celebrity lifestyle. Even his Cape Farewell expedition, for which he did relatively little publicity at the time, caused one music critic to refer to him as the “Indie Sting”. “I’m sure Sting’s a lovely guy,” he says, attempting the diplomatic approach. “It’s just that nobody wants to be seen as that holier-than-thou thing. That over-earnestness is a bit of a problem with people in bands and celebrities or whatever. There is that irritating thing where people just try and give themselves a bit of extra gravitas, like: ‘I’m not just in Transformers III – I’m saving the world!’ I know it’s irritating. All I can say is I feel a bit of a personal involvement in the Arctic because I’ve been to that part of the world.”

Yep, the luxury of being able to take time off from a ‘busy’ schedule of writing crass lyrics and formulating cod theses about how ‘f*cked up the world is, man’, affords the pop-star philosopher the right to lecture the world about melting ice, and to pretend he’s not doing so. He escape the excesses of Sting’s embarrassing attempts to save the planet by swearing instead of posing with native Americans in the rain forest. But it’s just as embarrassing… Someone claiming not to be consumed with their own sense of self-importance but playing the planet-saving super-hero nonetheless.

This coolly-understated self-importance, contrived by geeky spectacles and unlikely hairstyles, is the thing that the pop star has, and that the NGO wants…

According to Sauven at Greenpeace, its new campaign will require unprecedented global public support, and we will have less than three years to come together to avoid catastrophic ecosystem destruction. “If this campaign is successful,” Sauven says, “it will be because people like Jarvis have lent their support and their ability to reach out. We urgently need this to happen globally.” It raises the question: how far is Jarvis willing to go for the planet? Might Britpop’s chronicler of contemporary life be one day remembered more for fighting off bulging-eyed Arctic plunderers than for “Common People”?

Only three years left to save the planet? You see, when the Greenpeace spokesman says it, it’s not credible because they’ve been promising that the end is nigh for decades. But lend it the credibility of a pop star… and… Well, it’s just as naff really. But that doesn’t stop the NGO attempting to borrow the cultural authority from the pop star, just as they borrow scientific authority from ‘scientists’. This is a good time to remember the words of Oasis’s Noel Gallagher, whose poetry is nonsense, but whose prose is sublime. Speaking about arch-miserabilist eco-warriors, Radiohead, Gallagher said,

“They’re middle-class boys worrying about pushing an envelope somewhere, and all that carbon footprint and all that bollocks. Every time there’s a polar bear on his tiptoes on an ice cube in the middle of the Antarctic, you know whose fault that is? Rock stars’. That’s their fault. Any time there’s food running out somewhere– ‘Let’s do a gig. That’ll sort it out. Let’s do a big fucking gig. Let’s fly everybody in from all over the world and pontificate to poor people about how they should be saving the planet.’ Go fucking kiss my ass. It’s very easy to just say, ‘We’re going to become difficult now and challenge our audience.’ I like my audience. They paid for my swimming pool. I’m not fucking challenging anybody.”

Gallagher has an understanding of his relationship with his audience, whereas the preachers from Pulp and Radiohead are uncertain of and uncomfortable with theirs. Gallagher seems content with the idea that pop and rock are about no more than enjoying life, whereas seemingly intellectual artists have traded on the idea that they have sought something deeper. It’s weird… The gig becomes an entirely different institution, in which the stage becomes a pulpit. The pop star, unhappy with the idea that his commodity is ephemeral like any other, his fame fleeting and arbitrary, and his words only salient by virtue of the effort of aggressive A&R men and record companies, seeks historical significance and is recruited by the NGO.

The Guardian, meanwhile, barely notice the real significance of the story of pop stars and Environmental NGOs collaborating while making up statistics and reinventing Mayan prophecies about the end of the world, to become part of the phenomenon. There is an unholy trinity here — the newspaper, the popstar and the NGO — each of them elevating themselves by this spectacle. They are 100% alarmists. And this 100% alarmism has nothing to do with the real state of the planet, but all to do with the fragility and arbitrary nature of their ascendency. They have extraordinary privilege, wealth and influence, yet, as Cocker points out, ‘c**ts are still running the world’. The only argument for their ascendency and roles as ambassadors for higher causes that the vacuous pop star, the vapid journalist, and the hollow NGO can offer is the portrayal of the world as a place which is terrible, and can only get worse without them. That’s what 100% alarmism is about: having nothing to offer, but being unwilling to negotiate. Hence, as the authors of culture, they invent fictions: 75% ice loss, 3 years to save the planet, and the idea that ‘something must be done, now’. The only comfort in all this is that, if the world really does end, at least it will take them with it.

Yesterday, I tried to explain why pro-GM environmentalists had misconceived the perspectives of their anti-GM colleagues as simply ‘scientific illiteracy’. In particular, I was amazed that Keith Kloor had turned a central tenet of environmentalism — the precautionary principle — into a central tenet of climate scepticism. Said Kloor, in his discussion of the principle:

We also aren’t 100 percent certain when global warming is going to arrive with a vengeance, much less do we know the particulars of numerous climate impacts. Should we wait for 100 percent certainty before proceeding with efforts to reduce greenhouse gases? Somehow, I’m guessing Suzuki would say no. As would many other scientists.

That is of course the problem with the precautionary principle. In… erm… principle: it works both ways. But in practice, the application of the precautionary principle works in favour of the environmentalist’s preoccupations. It doesn’t subject the precautionary principle to the precautionary principle, but to whatever intervention is already being made — i.e. the emissions of substances into the natural environment — and says that there is no need of scientific understanding to begin to regulate that intervention. And as I pointed out yesterday, it is a fundamental of global environmental politics and treaties, such as the Rio Declaration and the UNFCCC process. It was first used in the formulation of the Montreal Protocol to limit emissions of CFCs:

The Parties to this Protocol,

Being Parties to the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer,

[…]

Determined to protect the ozone layer by taking precautionary measures to control equitably total global emissions of substances that deplete it, with the ultimate objective of their elimination on the basis of developments in scientific knowledge, taking into account technical and economic considerations and bearing in mind the developmental needs of developing countries,

[…]

Noting the precautionary measures for controlling emissions of certain chlorofluorocarbons that have already been taken at national and regional levels,

[…]

HAVE AGREED AS FOLLOWS:

Rather than being ‘scientifically illiterate’, then, anti-GM environmentalists were simply doing what environmentalists — including the newly pro-GM camp — have always done: emphasised uncertainty about what the effects of industrial processes on the environment will be in an argument for controlling that technology. They were appealing to the very same ideas that pro-GM environmentalists had long appealed to: that natural processes are fragile, and highly sensitive to change. But what the pro-GM environmentalists had forgotten is just how much their own perspectives were fixed on exactly the same ground: the precautionary principle. The environmental commentators lining up to identify themselves as pro-science and pro-GM have done nothing, over the years, to confront the rank alarmism and naked exploitation of the precautionary principle in the climate debate, and have therefore allowed the idea of fragile ecosystems and our total vulnerability to climate change to fester. Indeed, they have milked it themselves. They have only themselves to blame.

It is interesting, then, to see this incoherence manifest itself in the Telegraph’s Tom Chivers latest salvo against his comrades, taking aim at their use of the precautionary principle:

The “precautionary principle”, the idea that a new technology or policy should not be employed until we can be sure it is safe, sounds very reasonable. But as always, it’s more complicated than that. Everything we do entails not doing something else; in this case, not using nuclear, in the short term at least, means more coal, more shale gas, more fracking, to maintain energy demands (and cutting energy use would cause its own problems, of course). Is that safer? Nuclear power has risks, of course it does. But so does everything, and nuclear power has clear potential benefits. The trick is to calmly and sensibly assess those risks and benefits, not pull up the drawbridge out of misguided fear.

Environmentalism is the epitome of the politics of fear. It’s no use allowing fear to dominate the environmental debate — for decades — and then to say ‘oh, your fear is misguided’. In reality, Chivers is telling his comrades, ‘my fear is better than your fear’. Environmentalism’s incoherence manifests itself as a squabble between its adherents — a cascade of special pleading, in which the arguments they had previously deployed against ‘climate sceptics’ are turned on themselves. So it turns out that a great deal of the environmental movement really were ‘scientifically illiterate’, and ‘anti-science’, after all.

This reflects something long argued here. Shrill environmental rhetoric has been the growing thorn in its own side. The angrier and louder environmentalists have got, the more they have done to beset their own progress. The Joe Romms, 10:10 campaigns and George Monbiots of the world have done more to expose the real character of environmentalism than anything the sceptics have been able to throw at them. Greens are left fighting a rear-guard action… against themselves. It would be a comedy, if it wasn’t the case that the world was so invested in environmental policy-making. It is instead tragedy.

While we might welcome moves by some environmentalists to counsel their fellow greens about the incautious application of the… erm… precautionary principle, their attempts to remove themselves from the mess they have made do not show any evidence that they understand it, or can ever really escape it. Continuing his own attempts to reconcile the pro and anti-GM greens, Sunny Hundal betrays his irreconcilably contradicted perspective on today’s Liberal Conspiracy blog:

Why do most politically active right-wingers Conservatives and UKIPers deny climate change? It seems to me the science is irrelevant; they deny it because they hate the political implications of global warming and the cost of mitigation. They’ve convinced themselves that AGW is a far-left conspiracy to raise their taxes and change their lifestyle.

[…]

Should people concerned about the growth of nuclear weapon technology, or (hypothetically) human mutation, ignore the potential consequences? Not really. It’s the job of elected representatives to voice those concerns and ask (possibly ignorant) questions. They may even campaign to stop funding. The court of public opinion drives democracy – to ignore that opinion is dangerous. The Monsanto problem should not be dismissed away, at least not for elected representatives of the left.

So democracy is good, when its about the things Sunny Hundal wants it to be about: Monsanto, nuclear proliferation, and so on. But democracy is not so good when it asks questions about the ‘political implications of global warming’. Nobody who challenges climate change orthodoxy could be, as Sunny is, concerned about the implications for democracy. In other words, he rightly points out that political arguments are promiscuous with ‘scientific evidence’, but doesn’t notice himself hiding his own prejudices behind ‘science’, which allows him to determine that only some concerns are legitimate. Environmentalists have always hidden their political project behind science, and speculated about to what motivates other people to see things differently… The only answer they can produce is that everyone else — even their own pals — is ‘scientifically illiterate’.

Environmentalists, between them, claim to have the monopoly on science and democracy, but are promiscuous with both. ‘Democracy’ has weight when environmentalists are hiding behind ‘public opinion’, and science is invoked in spite of it. Fundamentally, it is the precautionary principle which has allowed environmentalists to vacillate. It has been used to circumvent democracy, or to say that people are not capable of understanding the issues (i.e. risk), and then used to amplify risk, no matter what ‘science says’.

Tom Chivers cannot take the precautionary principle away from his anti-nuclear comrades without depriving himself of the same. Thus he re-invents the precautionary approach as applying only to novel technologies: ‘The “precautionary principle”, the idea that a new technology or policy should not be employed until we can be sure it is safe, sounds very reasonable.’ But nuclear power has been around for nearly 60 years — only 20 years fewer than the UK’s National Grid. The precautionary principle applies to any technology, no matter how long it has been around, and presumes in favour of regulating it, notwithstanding that ‘scientific evidence’ may not be able to substantiate any claim that it is dangerous. Under the precautionary principle, a weak, theoretical risk is magnified by its potential impact. A nuclear accident can be widespread. Thus, nuclear power is regarded as certainly more ‘risky’ than conventional means. Similarly, under the precautionary approach, and under climate agreements, controls on the emissions of CO2 from industry are sought, not because any substantial evidence exists that they are harmful, but because we cannot say how harmful they will be.

Look carefully at the arguments for things such as containing global temperatures beneath 2 degrees, for instance, and it turns out that 2 degrees is not a limit detected by science, but is instead a arbitrary horizon of uncertainty. Before 2 degrees, we can be more sure of our assumptions. Beyond it, things become less certain, and theoretical risks are magnified. There may well exist very reasonable scientific measurements which show how a rising proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere will produce an increase in temperature. But then there is the difficult matter of how this relatively modest increase will be exacerbated by feedback mechanisms. And then there is another question about how much that warming will turn into effects throughout the climate, and in turn how much that will effect other natural processes before it is experienced by human society. In each leap, what counts in the policy-makers perspective is not what has been shown, but what the putative risks are. Causal chains, beginning with CO2 emissions scenarios turn into story lines, each with a measure of probability attached to them. Under the precautionary principle, policy makers are obliged to take the worst case.

And under such an obligation, the likelihood of 20-30 cm of sea level rise by 2100 becomes 10 meters. Slightly warmer nights and slightly longer summers with slightly more warmer days becomes desertification and mass extinction. Slightly milder winters with slightly more precipitation becomes floods of biblical proportions. Slightly different weather patterns become the denuding of fertile grounds, and the mass migration of hundreds of millions of people looking for shelter, water and food. To point out that this is what the precautionary principle does to ‘scientific evidence’ — even while acknowledging that climate change is a problem — is to be ‘scientifically illiterate’, or to be ‘anti-science’, or to be a ‘denier’.

So the journalists who are now rounding on anti-GM and anti-nuclear campaigners are doing so at the risk of undermining their own perspectives. I am happy to agree with them that the benefits of nuclear and GM outweigh any reasonable estimation of their risks. But they are naive about their own arguments. The sensible estimation of risks is completely confused by the precautionary principle — risk analysis without numbers — whether the issue is GM, nuclear, or climate change. That they are pulling the rug out from under their own feet should give us no cause for celebration yet: few of them are capable of reflecting on their own incoherence, and fewer still are reflecting on the implications for the absurd and far-reaching policies that have been created in order to ‘save the planet’. And the process of building supranational political institutions continues apace, as if there were nothing wrong with the precautionary principle — the fundamental of that institution building — at all.

The issue of genetically modified food crops has resurfaced. This issue has a long history, and my last attempt to compile an account of it was back in May 2009, here.

One of the things I’ve written a bit about is the differences between two parts of the environmental movement. On the one hand there are what appears to be a bunch of ‘street-level’ activists, who are involved nonetheless in large organisations like FoE and Greenpeace. And on the other are more respectable ‘establishment’ environmentalists — especially those within the government. Back in 2009, Lord May of Oxford (him again) was growing weary of street-level environmentalism, as was reported in the Guardian:

“Much of the green movement isn’t a green movement at all, it’s a political movement,” said Lord May, who is a former government chief scientific adviser and president of the Royal Society. He singled out Greenpeace as an environmental campaign group that had “transmogrified” into one with primarily an anti-globalisation stance.

The same tension between scruffy and smart greens is playing out once more in the debate about GM. A new green protest group, called ‘Take the Flour Back‘ has threatened to destroy crops. This has upset many of their smarter comrades in the green movement. ‘Don’t vote Green until they drop the anti-science zealotry’, implored the Telegraph’s Tom Chivers.

This is one of those agonised posts. I actually like the Green Party. My dad used to be, and may still be, a member. They’re well-meaning and many of them share my taste for unkempt beards. I think I put Jenny Jones as my first choice in the London mayoral elections.

But the trouble is that they’re scientifically illiterate and have what seems to be a fear of technological process. The one big thing they’ve got right, that anthropogenic climate change is a threat to human wellbeing, they seem to have got right by accident.

Today they’ve reached a possible new low. That self-same Jenny Jones, recipient of the Chivers vote, is to appear at the “Take the Flour Back” protest at Rothamstead Research, which is intending to “decontaminate” – which is to say vandalise – an ongoing experiment into genetically modified wheat. (Thanks to Mark Lynas for the heads-up.)

Mark Lynas, of course, famously and loudly renounced his anti-GM past. It ‘wasn’t a science-based rational thing’, he said. ‘It was an emotional thing and it was about the relation between humans and other living things’. But things are never as they seem. Although Lynas’s views on GM and his new-found advocacy (with Monbiot) of nuclear power, seem like progress, he hasn’t been able to meaningfully reflect on what drove his anti-GM and anti-nuclear self. As I point out here, Lynas seems to believe that he can account for his ex-views as simple scientific ignorance. But is that really all there is to the chasm between greens?

Similarly, soft-green journalist, Keith Kloor nearly asked an interesting question: ‘Is Environmentalism Anti-Science?’

Oddly enough, just like people who dismiss climate change as some sort of global scam by scientists, many anti-GMO greens have constructed a universe that suits their worldview. Many climate skeptics, for example, believe that the threat of global warming is cooked up by a UN-led cabal of scientists, whose real agenda is to impose one world fascistic or socialist government. A similar feverish perspective is held by many GMO opponents, who believe that genetic engineering is being shoved down the world’s throat by a few big corporate agricultural companies (Monsanto being the number one bogeyman). Greenpeace is especially active in developing countries, such as India and China, setting itself up as the defender of small farmers and declaring that there “is enough scientific evidence now to show that GM crops are a risk to human health.”

This is by now, a recurring theme of the climate debate: those who disagree with us have some sort of agenda or ideology which precludes their view of the science. It’s the ‘well you would say that wouldn’t you’ view of politics, which presumes that anyone with a perspective is hopelessly unable to engage with the debate. But most notably, it presupposes the sheer innocence of those wielding the argument, as though their own perspectives weren’t coloured by ‘ideology’. As Kloor unwittingly demonstrates:

You might be surprised to learn that some esteemed figures in the environmentalist pantheon–not just groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth–embrace this criteria for GMOs. Consider, for example, the highly respected David Suzuki, who, according to one survey, is the most trusted man in Canada. He has said:

Because we aren’t certain about the effects of GMOs, we must consider one of the guiding principles in science, the precautionary principle. Under this principle, if a policy or action could harm human health or the environment, we must not proceed until we know for sure what the impact will be. And it is up to those proposing the action or policy to prove that it is not harmful.

We also aren’t 100 percent certain when global warming is going to arrive with a vengeance, much less do we know the particulars of numerous climate impacts. Should we wait for 100 percent certainty before proceeding with efforts to reduce greenhouse gases? Somehow, I’m guessing Suzuki would say no. As would many other scientists.

But when it comes to GMOs, there’s an impossible-to-meet standard. Why?

I’ve been particularly interested in this question lately. In doing some catch-up reading, I came across a fascinating roundtable of views in a 2009 Seed magazine article, set up by this introduction:

Most Europeans don’t consider themselves to be anti-science or particularly technophobic. In fact, Europe’s full embrace of the scientific consensus on another environmental issue, global warming, has enabled the continent to take the clear lead on climate change, with the most ambitious emissions targets, the first carbon trading market, and the greenest urban infrastructure plans on the planet.

Europe’s scientific disconnect is more broadly true of eco-minded citizens worldwide: They laud the likes of James Hansen and Rajendra Pachauri but shrink in horror at the scientist who offers up a Bt corn plant (even though numerous studies indicate that Bt crops—by dramatically curbing pesticide use—conserve biodiversity on farms and reduce chemical-related sickness among farmers).

So why the disconnect? Why do many environmentalists trust science when it comes to climate change but not when it comes to genetic engineering?

Kloor forgets that the precautionary principle is a tenet of environmentalism and of global environmental politics. For instance, Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development:

In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.

Furthermore, this principle is woven into the substance of European politics, as is explained by a communication from the Comission:

The precautionary principle enables rapid response in the face of a possible danger to human, animal or plant health, or to protect the environment. In particular, where scientific data do not permit a complete evaluation of the risk, recourse to this principle may, for example, be used to stop distribution or order withdrawal from the market of products likely to be hazardous.

[…]

The precautionary principle is detailed in Article 191 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (EU). It aims at ensuring a higher level of environmental protection through preventative decision-taking in the case of risk. However, in practice, the scope of this principle is far wider and also covers consumer policy, European legislation concerning food and human, animal and plant health.

And article 191 of the Treaty explains:

Union policy on the environment shall aim at a high level of protection taking into account the diversity of situations in the various regions of the Union. It shall be based on the precautionary principle and on the principles that preventive action should be taken, that environmental damage should as a priority be rectified at source and that the polluter should pay.

Kloor should not be surprised then, that the precautionary principle is applied by Europe in the case of GM foods. The precautionary principle — not scientific consensus — in fact informs its policies on GM and on the climate issue. Kloor, in trying to identify opponents of GM with opponents of climate change policies, imagines that the scientific consensus has driven climate policy.

The fact that the Precautionary Principle informs international policy making is forgotten in many analyses. This error is owed, I believe to the fact that the consensus on climate change is a ‘consensus without an object’; the consensus allows anyone to say anything in its name, just so long as it supports a policy intended to stop it. The claim that ‘climate change is happening’ — i.e. the consensus position — is itself empty. Conversely, nobody really claims that ‘climate change is not happening’ — the position attributed to ‘climate sceptics’. It turns out, furthermore, that it’s quite hard to identify any meaningful consensus which is useful to policy-making. Sure climate change is happening, but to what degree, and what effects? When you ask the policymakers, invariably, they will mutter on about meters of sea level by the end of the century, melting glaciers, and hundreds of thousands of deaths a year, each of which is not just contestable, but entirely wrong, and not supported by the consensus. But let’s not be too hard on the politicians on this point; even Lord May gets it wrong.

Kloor, Lynas and Chivers want to eat their GM climate cake and sustain it. And they are not alone. In the Guardian, editor of the Liberal Conspiracy blog, Sunny Hundal attempts to defend the green movements’ anti-scientific view of GM by claiming that, ‘Though Greens sometimes get their science wrong, they’re better than most‘:

In this case I’ll agree with the scientists that many of the assertions made about the GM trial are false. The Greens should accept that, even if they remain opposed to GM foods more broadly.

But some of the criticism is unfair.First, the Conservatives and Ukip are far more scientifically illiterate than the Greens. They are actively trying to sabotage the debate on how to deal with climate change, and most deny it is even taking place.

Given that scientists are utterly failing to engage or lead the debate on climate change – why not spend more time dealing with that bigger problem than attacking Greens over small things? Our planet is dying thanks to global warming and some scientists think this GM outrage should be a top priority? Really?

Nobody who imagines that the scientific consensus is that ‘our planet is dying’ is in a position to criticise anyone for ‘scientific illiteracy’. Here’s another lovely prognostication from a Guardian journalist about biotech from a decade ago:

This is why biotechnology – whose promoters claim that it will feed the world – has been deployed to produce not food but feed: it allows farmers to switch from grains which keep people alive to the production of more lucrative crops for livestock. Within as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It cannot do both.

(H/T: James H).

Shrill cries about dying planets have been the currency of people marching with the scientific consensus on climate, and against it on GM. Whingeing about ‘scientific illiteracy’ is no good, when for decades, climate change alarmism has gone unchallenged. A ‘scientific consensus’ is not a licence to speculate wildly about the possible impacts of climate change. Yet that must be the implication of so many of the complaints about the anti-GM environmentalists from environmental commentators. They ought to be able to identify a deeper problem with environmentalism, such as with the precautionary principle, which is reproduced in international agreements and treaties. This incoherence is not owed to scientific illiteracy. It’s owed to political illiteracy.

Kloor has a post on his own blog, which begins with the words of Tim Minchin:

It goes like this: 1. You fear something. 2. You find a hypothesis to justify your fear. 3. You block stuff that doesn’t support your case.

This, says Kloor, ‘describes the process that leads anti-GMO opponents and apparently many greens to support destruction of an agricultural experiment’. He then considers the contradiction created by climate researcher, Steve Easterbrook’s stances on climate and GM. Kloor is right to explore the inconsistent arguments, but like Minchin, only finds cod explanations for them.

In the Observer, Will Hutton urges that ‘We have a duty to put our faith in science, not trample on it’, and that ‘Anti-GM campaigners would do well to remember that progress is dependent upon scientific research’.

Victorians could see that science and capitalism were engines of progress. Today, we see corporations as manipulators of science to create huge personal fortunes for a distant, antisocial elite at the top – and the public realm in which scientific advance might be discussed is dominated by media careless of objectivity.

This is a culture that generates movements such as Take Back the Flour that trust no one and it won’t change until companies are forced, or volunteer, to rejoin the society of which they are part. And until we create media that respect truth.

Hutton is nearly right. There is a cultural aversion to progress. But it has little to do with corporations and capitalism in the way he imagines. It was the ‘antisocial elite at the top’ who most embraced environmentalism, warts and all. And I include in that elite their defenders at Guardian and Observer newspapers. It was the establishment which created the idea that nature was fragile, and that corporations would plunder it with rapacious technologies. It was they, who banged on about catastrophic climate change, and the need to respond to it with powerful political institutions, including treaties which enshrined the precautionary principle. It was they who said we need to use our cars less and walk more, and to eschew the benefits of industrial society; to make do and mend, to recycle. It was them who said our desires for more would send us to hell in a handcart. It was them who changed science from something which could liberate our potential into something which contains that potential by legitimising a form of politics based on ecological risk. That was the ‘scientific consensus’, they claimed. Their lack of foresight is now manifested in the anti-GM protest movement. They have the inconvenient environmentalists they deserve.

I’m a big fan of scientific videos and visualisation generally. Here’s a wonderful recent example.

There is a hazard, here though, in taking such images at face value, as is described at length on this blog. What we see in the above video is not just the planet; we see it in timelapse, we see its colours adjusted. We see the result of many $billions of scientific research, and millions of human hours of work, without seeing the work. And the images invite us to bring all sorts of presuppositions to the image. Here’s an example:

A BBC article on the history of the ‘Earthrise’ image credits it with starting the environmental movement:

These images, along with hundreds of other still pictures taken of the whole Earth during Apollo’s nine flights to the Moon, helped to drive the momentum of a burgeoning green movement during the 1970s.

They fuelled an awareness of the vulnerability of the Earth which still resonates with us today and shapes our behaviour, as Fred Hoyle predicted it would.

…

Al Gore, […] also suggested that such live footage of the whole Earth broadcast continuously over the internet would provide a powerful modern reminder of the fragility of our home planet – in the way that those first hand snapped Apollo pictures had done all those decades earlier.

These claims are implausible for a number of reasons. Firstly, there never has been an ‘environmental movement’ in any meaningful sense. Environmental activists need to make big noises to make up for their small numbers. More fundamentally, environmentalism has always been a preoccupation of the establishment, and they had already had their imaginations captured by the environmental narrative. Nobody ever saw the Sun or Moon rise, and said, ‘my god, don’t they look fragile’. They don’t. So why would seeing the world ever make anyone believe that it looked ‘vulnerable’. Fragility, in this case, like beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder. The environmentalist projects his beliefs onto the image. And he flatters himself that an image changed his consciousness, not realising he was staring at his own prejudices.

Here’s a more recent example.

The image comes from an article on Huffington Post today. Claims the Huffpo,

The image above, from the USGS, shows all the world’s water — from bodies of water, glaciers, soil, water vapor and even living things — in a sphere with a diameter of 860 miles. The volume of the sphere would equal 332.5 million cubic miles.

The USGS explains that the sphere only appears small in relation to the entire Earth — the diameter of the sphere is a bit larger than the distance between Salt Lake City and Topeka, Kansas.

So far, so good, then. It’s an interesting graphic. Who hasn’t wondered how much water there is in the world, and how big it would be, if it were all in once place. But then right behind the science comes the politics…

The research comes as experts warn that increasing water scarcity is likely to contribute to political instability in Africa and elsewhere. John Kufuor, a former president of Ghana and current head of the Sanitation and Water for All partnership, told Bloomberg, “People migrate to find water anywhere if there’s a scarcity situation. People have fought wars to access water.”

Even the U.S. is not immune from water shortages. According to the EPA, more than 36 states are expecting “local, regional, or statewide” water shortages by 2013, “even under non-drought conditions.”

Just as it’s not plausible that the Earthrise image began a movement, it’s not plausible that this image speaks to us about the shortage of water on Earth. It’s volume is 332,500,000 cubic miles; enough for 80,000 Olympic swimming pools of the stuff for each person on the planet. So, getting worked up about its immanent shortage is not unlike getting worked up about there being ‘not enough food in the world’, when you simply haven’t gone to the supermarket.

The problem is one of just getting water to where it is needed. But this fact is omitted from the ‘scientific’ presentation, either of the entire world’s supply of water, or in analyses that there is insufficient rainfall in some region, to meet the needs of people living there. This of course, chimes with the imperatives of the ‘sustainability’ agenda — that our demand for water shouldn’t exceed its supply. Wars will follow.

But the corollary of this argument is that nature herself causes war. That looks to me like a pretty good argument for piping the stuff wherever nature didn’t intend it to be. In fact, it is a robust argument for not relying on ‘nature’ to deliver water at all. But things such as water supply appear to us as something determined ‘naturally’. Rob Lyons of Spiked-Online pointed out the danger of this fallacy, following the wettest ‘drought’ the UK has ever experienced,

The UK is not an especially dry country overall. The problem is that many of the wettest areas have relatively few people while the driest areas (particularly around London) are often densely populated. It should not be beyond the wit of planners to devise means to get the water to the right parts of the country. For example, while a national water grid would be expensive and (probably) overkill, it would be relatively easy to link the Severn – often engorged with water from the Welsh mountains – with the Thames, which flows through London. There’s even an existing canal between the two, currently undergoing restoration. Alternatively, we should just go the whole hog and build the capacity to desalinate a much larger chunk of the capital’s water needs.

But the main game in town right now is ‘demand management’, not ‘increasing supply’. We Brits, apparently, have the temerity to use more water than our European neighbours. We don’t tend to water our gardens using rainwater from a butt and we don’t flush our toilets using dishwater. (Though if Livingstone had his way, we wouldn’t flush very often at all. ‘If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down’, he told a conference in 2005.) While Livingstone’s mayoral opponent, Boris Johnson has, for all his other faults, talked up the possibilities for improving infrastructure, Johnson’s Conservative colleagues in Whitehall seem to have adopted the make-do-and-mend mindset of greens.

The claims that water shortages will lead to ‘wars in Africa’ similarly misconceive the problem of not enough money as not enough water. And science turns up to show ‘look, not enough water’. Anyone who makes claims of that order is projecting onto the world.

‘Science’ and images that look ‘scientific’, then, often belie some deeply ideological preconceptions. Such a phenomenon can turn something as great in abundance as water into something scarce. Worse, it then turns that image into a motive force. It uses images of the ‘fragile’ Earth, or the volume of water to unsettle confidence in the future, which is usually only convincing to those who already believe in it. This anxiety is in turn used to then make an argument for a solution to the problem, not in which abundance, but more scarcity is created. In other words, the illusion of scarcity is a political weapon. It demands that you eschew your ambitions, desires, or interests for the promise of mere survival. Science should be about overcoming such limits, not defining them for political ends.

I have an article up on Spiked today, about the absurdity that is the looming Rio+20 conference.

Forty years on, and those predictions of doom have not been borne out. The average life expectancy of a human has increased by 10 years, and the number of infants dying before their fifth birthday has fallen from 134 per thousand to 58. Thus, the human population has nearly doubled, and global GDP has risen threefold. There are more of us, we are healthier, wealthier and better fed. There is vast disparity between what the advocates of political environmentalism have claimed and reality. So why are world leaders set to meet next month in Rio at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development?

I’m predicting that Rio will go the way of Copenhagen… It will again expose the incoherence of environmentalism, and the self-serving agendas of those present, but will be rescued at the last moment by some kind of fudge, as was found at Durban. But perhaps I will be surprised.

Another thing I think will happen is an attempt to reinvent the environmental scare stories of yesteryear, such as population growth and resource depletion. The climate thing is looking worn out at the moment — not quite a busted flush, but climate alarmism is passé.

A lot of hand-wringing is going on about those billboards which depict individuals known for their psychopathic tendency and their comments on the environment. The use of the image of Ted Kaczynski (AKA the Unabomber) seems to have caused particular offence to those who in fact seem to be delighting in taking offence, and relishing the opportunity to demand that climate change sceptics apologise for the billboard campaign, and condemn it and the Heartland Institute, even though they had nothing to do with it.

Take for instance, the words of Keith Kloor, who seems to be offering running commentary on the affair, as though it were an unfolding event with global significance…

5/6, 9:30am EST: At his blog, Andrew Montford says the ”reverberations are going to be felt for quite a while.” Then he proceeds, Anthony Watts style, to demonstrate his partisan tendencies by devoting the rest of his post to similar guilt-by-association tactics by climate advocacy blogs. As Leo Hickman lamented on Twitter [shorthand cleaned up] to Montford, “very sad that you, too, like Watts, couldn’t resist a ‘comparison’ drive-by rather than simply condemn.” After I seconded this, Montford tweeted: “I’m trying to understand why Heartland’s actions [are] considered so much worse than the others.”

I’m trying to understand how he can’t see the difference. Heartland’s posters were part of a public advertising campaign that included a detailed explanation for why Heartland believed they were appropriate. While Heartland has discontinued the billboards, it should be noted that they have not apologized or renounced the message they conveyed.

Montford had pointed out that the Guardian had published a number of articles online, which claimed that there was a significance in Anders Breivik’s comments on climate change, and his reference to climate sceptics in his manifesto:

If Leo thinks that Helmer should dissociate himself from Heartland, then presumably he thinks that the Guardian should remove Grist from its Environment Network?

The double standards are interesting. The implication of Kloor’s criticism is that Montford must unreservedly condemn the Heartland’s campaign, as though he were somehow implicated by it. In other words, that Montford isn’t entitled to ask questions about the standards being demanded of sceptics, by the likes of the Guardian’s environmental correspondents. In other other words, Montford isn’t allowed to ask questions about the putative connection between people of a certain belief and their actions in general.

And the comments about the link between Breivik and climate change from Grist are not the Guardian’s only attempts to link climate scepticism to violence.

Just over a year ago, following Jared Lee Loughner’s attempt to murder congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Damian Carrington asked the Guardian’s online readers…

I have received a handful of threats by email and phone myself, which given my low profile is a measure of the extent of the problem. My better-known colleagues George Monbiot and Leo Hickman receive more.

So it’s clear that even in issues such as climate change there is an active fringe of people deploying violent rhetoric and hate mail against those with whom they disagree. Could that tip the balance between thought and action in the mind of an unstable individual? It’s a worryingly plausible thought.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Carrington was evidently attempting to say that climate change scepticism and violence were somehow connected. I took Carrington up on his offer. And I made my own comparison between violence and the ideology which drove it. The comments were deleted from the Guardian’s website, and my account suspended, as I explain here.

The Guardian moderator clearly objected to my own linking of Kaczynski’s environmentalism with his violence. I had argued that environmentalism’s tendency to view humans in a variously negative light must be a factor in the violence which he went on to commit. In order to do violence to humans, one must have a degraded view of humanity. It is easier to pull the trigger or plant the bomb when you believe that humans are no better — and may even be worse — than bugs and beasts. The Guardian is the most prominent publication in the UK that is attached to such a view of humans. It routinely publishes articles that speak about humans in such terms. For e.g. Monbiot:

It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.

Of course, once you take the view that the object of politics is to diminish humans in the scheme of things, you’re not necessarily committed to mass murder. But the point was to explain that a dim view of humanity must be a necessary condition for killing people. If there is a connection between ‘ideology’ and expressions of violence, as Carrington was suggesting, then Carrington ought to start looking at the anti-human ideology he and his colleagues were advancing and its possible consequences. Ideas matter.

But ideas only matter to the Guardians of the planet when the ideas under examination are not their own. Never mind the connection between ideology and violence, then, what is behind the double standards?

The Heartland Institute seems to have become something of a bogeyman for green hacks. However the HI remains a tiny organisation. Time was when journalists like Kloor, Carrington and Hickman would rant about Exxon and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, though the evidence linking energy companies to think tanks was — and still is — scant.

The trouble for journalists who campaign on green issues is in explaining why the world does not respond to their doomsaying, and rush out to get behind the cause. It’s a paradox, in their view, that they can be so convinced while the public remains at best divided on the issue, and at worst, completely indifferent to the possibility of Thermageddon. The only way it can be explained is by connecting the public’s indifference to any organised attempt to intervene in the public sphere.

This means amplifying any operation, no matter how small or poorly-funded, to the extent that it becomes an organisation with global reach, and control over the public’s perception of climate change. In other words, in order to sustain this view, it is necessary to abandon any sense of proportion. Furthermore, it is necessary to forget the extent of the institutional effort in the other direction: the enormous collaboration between national governments, supranational political organisations, NGOs, corporations and, of course, self-regarding hacks.

I am not all that bothered, either way, by the Heartland’s campaign. It’s not the way I would choose to intervene in the debate. It’s not all that offensive to point out that Kaczynski’s environmentalism and his violent campaign were not coincident, though any power that the argument has is lost by turning it into a slogan on a billboard. Those of us who are not involved have nothing to explain, apologise for, condemn or distance ourselves from, to the individuals who are making a song and dance about this affair, principally for their own, transparently ‘partisan’ ends.

Back in October 2010, I wrote an article for Spiked,

It is no coincidence that, as it was preparing to moderate its statements on climate change, the Society has been seeking to intervene in the debate about population. In July this year, it announced that it would be ‘undertaking a major study to investigate how population variables will affect and be affected by economies, environments, societies and cultures’.

Climate change has served as the encompassing environmental narrative. It was used to connect the human and natural worlds, and to provide a basis for many political institutions that, without a climate crisis, would simply lack legitimacy. The forcefulness with which claims about climate change were presented and their abstract nature made climate-centric politics ever less plausible. However, if players in the climate debate are beginning to sense the exhaustion of the climate issue, they are able simply to slide into the population debate.

The perspectives of environmentalism do not begin with science, but with the anti-human and unscientific premise of our dependence on the natural world. This outlook goes unchallenged because of a perception that environmentalism is a pragmatic solution to purely scientifically-defined problems, and a belief that it can be answered in purely scientific terms. This encourages a sense of passivity, a sense of ‘leave it to the experts’.

A longer version of the argument is on this blog, here.

Shortly after the Royal Society announced it was to revise its advice on climate change, it announced [PDF]:

The Royal Society is undertaking a major study to investigate how population variables will affect and be affected by economies, environments, societies and cultures over the next forty years and beyond. The aims of the study are to provide policy guidance to decision makers and inform interested members of the public based on a dispassionate assessment of the best available evidence. The scope of the study will be global but it will explicitly acknowledge regional variations in population dynamics and the impact of policy interventions. We aim to complete the project by early 2012.

The timing is no accident. The character of the public discussion of environmental issues is changing. While it is welcome that there has been a marginally more sober reflection on the climate, there is little to celebrate. The scientific academy has sensed that it in today’s world, it wields political power. As the call for evidencesuggests, the Royal Society has already decided that population is a problem, and the size of the population ought to be managed by political power, not by the individuals it consists of.

We invite feedback on the following questions.  [… ]

1. What scientific evidence is available to show how fertility, mortality, migration, ageing and urbanisation will affect or be affected by population levels and rates of change, at both regional and global levels, over the next forty years and beyond?
2. How fertility, mortality, migration, ageing and urbanisation are influenced by and influence environments, economies, societies and cultures?
3. What are the strengths and weaknesses of different population modelling methodologies?
4. What are the key interconnections among population change, environments, economies, societies and cultures? How do these relate to any of the examples listed in the second bullet point of the terms of reference above?
5. What are the key linkages among population, technology and consumption.
6. What are the best (or worst) examples of how policy has been effective in managing population changes?
7. What other issues should our study addresses?

The implication of these question is the same idea that operated at the core of the RS’s climate perspective. The idea of our dependence on ecosystems is still the premise of its neomalthusianism. The climate story emphasised the damage that climate change would do to these systems, resulting in calamity. A weaker form of the same climate story serves as an adjunct to the population story. Neomalthusians can now acknowledge the uncertainty of the climate science, but make the claim that the degree to which climate change is certain is a function of population. The more people, the greater the possibility that climate change is a problem. Climate change has been the principal narrative which connected human society to the natural world, but now population has become the ‘master’ issue. It connects fears about biodiversity, climate change, resource-depletion, pollution, and so on. We can jump up and down with joy when climate science is shown to have been exaggerated by politicians, or is embarrassed by the excesses of a researcher. But it won’t have been the result of attempts to understand the phenomenon of environmentalism, and environmentalists will simply regroup under the population issue, as we predicted they would.

The Royal Society has finally published its report on population, ‘People and planet‘.

This project was a major study investigating the links between global population and consumption, and the implications for a finite planet.

The final report People and the Planet was published on 26 April 2012.

Rapid and widespread changes in the world’s human population, coupled with unprecedented levels of consumption present profound challenges to human health and wellbeing, and the natural environment.

The combination of these factors is likely to have far reaching and long-lasting consequences for our finite planet and will impact on future generations as well as our own. These impacts raise serious concerns and challenge us to consider the relationship between people and the planet. It is not surprising then, that debates about population have tended to inspire controversy.

This report is offered, not as a definitive statement on these complex topics, but as an overview of the impacts of human population and consumption on the planet. It raises questions about how best to seize the opportunities that changes in population could bring – and how to avoid the most harmful impacts.

The aims of the study were to provide policy guidance to decision makers and inform interested members of the public based on a dispassionate assessment of the best available evidence. The scope of the study was global. It explicitly acknowledged regional variations in population dynamics, and the inequality that exists in consumption patterns around the world.

The report concludes with several key recommendations:

1. The international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today. This will require focused efforts in key policy areas including economic development, education, family planning and health.
2. The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels through: dramatic improvements in resource use efficiency, including: reducing waste; investment in sustainable resources, technologies and infrastructures; and systematically decoupling economic activity from environmental impact.
Reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership and financial commitment, both nationally and internationally. This is needed to continue the downward trajectory of fertility rates, especially in countries where the unmet need for contraception is high.
3. Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues. Demographic changes, and the influences on them, should be factored into economic and environmental debate and planning at international meetings, such as the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development and subsequent meetings.

So when did inequality, poverty, reproductive rights, and the issue of what levels of material wealth people should be entitled to become matters of ‘science’?

(It’s a rhetorical question).

As discussed previously — follow the links to the articles above — the Royal Society’s sideways step from climate alarmism to Malthusianism is also a step backwards. Before climate change became the dominant narrative of political environmentalism, the principle issues were ‘limits to growth’ and ‘the population bomb’. Those vehicles failed to give the environmentalists’ political project the profile it needed. Malthusianism was, in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, too easily rebutted. And in the dark days of the cold war, we seemed to have bigger problems to face. The end of the cold war arrived, and the brief era of optimism ended with climate change. It filled the nuclear-winter-shaped hole. But now there is widespread acknowledgement that climate change has been over-stated, the institutions which have sought to attach themselves to the issue have had to find a new story. And the new story is an old story. The Royal Society’s report is not at all ashamed of its origins in the work of Malthus…

The relationship between population growth and economic development has long been debated. Malthus in the 18th century was interested in the economic effects of rapid population growth and the relationship with the capacity of the earth to sustain it. These concerns resurfaced in the middle of the 20th century when it became clear that an era of unprecedented, rapid increase in the populations of the developing countries had started. Since Malthus, other authors have highlighted the potentially negative impact of continued population growth (eg Coale and Hoover 1958; Ehrlich 1968, 2008; Turner 2009) while others have argued that technological advance and institutional development could counter negative effects of rapid population growth on development (Kuznets 1967; Boserup 1981; Simon 1981). It is clear from this debate that economic development and the demographic transition are linked in complicated and reciprocal ways, and that different challenges and opportunities are presented at different stages of the transition.

In terms of the effect of population factors on economic growth the common view is that rapidly increasing populations have a negative effect on economic growth and employment, due to declines in natural resources and other forms of capital per head. The nature of the relationship between population growth and economic growth will depend on the rate of population growth; a slow population growth rate, of say 1% per annum might have an advantage over a negative growth rate, whilst higher growth rates, of say 2% or more, are unlikely to have a positive impact on economic growth. The rate of capital accumulation is also important; without major accumulation of capital per capita, no major economy has or is likely to make the low-to middle-income transition. Though not sufficient, capital accumulation for growth is absolutely essential to economic growth (Turner 2009).

It can be no coincidence then, that Paul Ehrlich was made a fellow of the Royal Society last week. The Royal Society has embraced Malthus, just as it has embraced the malthusian.

And in doing so, the Royal Society abandons its claim to be a scientific authority. It has embraced a particular ideology… a nasty, anti-human perspective on the world. It can no longer say Nullius in Verba (on the word of no one). It’s perspective is no longer fixed on the material world. The object of its ‘science’ is now the human world, and control over it.

And it took just minutes after the publication of the report for the environmental alarmists to seize the opportunity.

Earth faces a century of disasters, report warns
Economic and environmental catastrophes unavoidable unless rich countries cut consumption and global population stabilises

It’s John Vadal, in the Guardian, of course.

World population needs to be stabilised quickly and high consumption in rich countries rapidly reduced to avoid “a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills”, warns a major report from the Royal Society.

Contraception must be offered to all women who want it and consumption cut to reduce inequality, says the study published on Thursday, which was chaired by Nobel prize-winning biologist Sir John Sulston.

The assessment of humanity’s prospects in the next 100 years, which has taken 21 months to complete, argues strongly that to achieve long and healthy lives for all 9 billion people expected to be living in 2050, the twin issues of population and consumption must pushed to the top of political and economic agendas. Both issues have been largely ignored by politicians and played down by environment and development groups for 20 years, the report says.

[…]

The authors declined to put a figure on sustainable population, saying it depended on lifestyle choices and consumption. But they warned that without urgent action humanity would be in deep trouble. “The pressure on a finite planet will make us radically change human activity”, said Pretty.

“The planet has sufficient resources to sustain 9 billion, but we can only ensure a sustainable future for all if we address grossly unequal levels of consumption. Fairly redistributing the lion’s share of the earth’s resources consumed by the richest 10% would bring development so that infant mortality rates are reduced, many more people are educated and women are empowered to determine their family size – all of which will bring down birth rates”, said an Oxfam spokeswoman.

There are perfectly good arguments for equality, for access to contraception, and for many other things which offer the possibility — albeit contested — of improving the lives of humans. But not in this report. Not in Vidal’s articles in the Guardian. And not from Oxfam, either. None of these organisations and individuals can make an argument for anything progressive while they pretend that it is ‘science’ which is speaking, and not them. Science has nothing to say about the rights and wrongs of inequality, the rights of women, and the material entitlements of people. And only a fool could think that science could make such an argument. The plight of poor people, and people who live without the freedom to determine their own future are not the concern of people who hide their politics behind ‘science’. In their narrative, the Royal Society make instrumental use of the poor, to make a political argument for their own ends. Just as Malthus did.

Green ain’t what it used to be. Once upon a time, all you had to do as a politician was strap yourself into a sandwichboard and proclaim that the End is Nigh, and your minions would deliver you a standing ovation and the press would celebrate you as a planet-saving super hero. But times are hard for today’s establishment environmentalists. And it’s must be even harder for the zealous green hacks who were swept up in the moment.

The Guardian’s Damian Carrington is an interesting phenomenon. I’ve yet to see him pen anything which isn’t — to use the technical term — bullshit. He, like many other environmental hacks, claim to be on the side of science and reason. But when science and reason contradict him, he’ll ignore it. He’ll take an outlier statistic on Arctic Ice, for instance, and claim that it is a harbinger of doom, no matter what other statistics tell him. And when whining that fossil fuel companies get more subsidies than renewable energy companies, he’ll conveniently recast lower VAT rates as ‘subsidy’, and forget to work out what the subsidies are, in equivalent terms. Waaah! Waaah! Waah! It’s not FAAAAAAAAIRRRRR! seems to be the thrust of Carrington’s inner narrative, which leaks out onto the pages of the Guardian.

And so it is today with his whinge that the Prime Minister isn’t bowing and scraping to the environmental diktats issued in the Guardian.

It is an extraordinary betrayal and abject failure of leadership. Cameron pledged to lead the “greenest government ever” and was elected with photogenic huskies and a “vote blue, go green slogan”. But after two years in No 10, he has given no speech dedicated to the issue at the heart of his Tory decontamination strategy.

In fact, David Cameron was not elected. And neither were his party. He had to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. That’s not the same as being ‘elected’.

Carrington seems to believe that the PM is failing to deliver his promise to embrace the climate issue. But what Carrington doesn’t seem to realise is that the promise wasn’t sufficient to win the election for Cameron. Nor did it do much for the campaign of the junior party in the coalition.

And it’s not as if the government has abandoned its climate and energy policies. The coalition created an extraordinary system of benefits to renewable forms of energy, including the absurdly high tariffs for solar PV. And its renewable energy programme continues, untroubled by criticism.

Carrington continues…

The speech on Thursday, at a clean energy ministerial (CEM) in London and attended by energy ministers from the world’s 23 biggest economies, was set to break that silence, as I reported on 4 April. In a government document I have obtained, the event is described as “PM keynote speech to CEM participants”. Cameron’s contribution will now be five minutes of introductory remarks to a roundtable, followed by a Q&A with the ministers.

Carrington’s concern then, is that Cameron won’t be making a big speech at a meeting of energy ministers. Boo hoo.

Perhaps this is an attempt to embarrass the PM into giving a speech, as a kind of gesture. But what would it signify? Would it make the Guardian environmental team any happier? It seems unlikely.

Carrington wails…

Why does Cameron’s U-turn matter? Because a section of the Conservative party, led by chancellor George Osborne have been openly hostile to green initiatives, talking of “putting our country out of business” and burdening businesses “with endless social and environmental goals”.

The reality is the polar opposite. The green economy already contributes 7% of GDP and employs 900,000 people in the UK, more than teaching. Moreover, it is that rarity in these austere times: a growing sector in which the UK has a competitive advantage. The coalition has brought forward a series of good policies, from the green investment bank to the green deal, yet the investors who will fund the nation’s transition to a clean, sustainable green economy desperately need wholehearted backing from the top of government.

The claim that the ‘green economy’ contributed 7% of GDP and employs 900,000 people is completely implausible. Even the report from the Renewable Energy association published today and discussed the previous post only claims that 139,000 people work in the green sector — and that is likely to be a huge overstatement anyway, and forgets that each of those jobs is heavily subsidised. Carrington inflates the figure six times.

Moreover, this claim seems to portray the treasury and Osborne as simply being pig-headed about the green sector. No doubt there is plenty to criticise them for, but the idea that they would give up on a profitable sector of the economy — rather than one which demands a great deal of subsidy and regulatory interventions and complex international political manoeuvring and which doesn’t enjoy widespread public support — is simply absurd. Carrington seems to be suggesting that Osborbe and the treasury don’t like the green sector simply because it is green.

And with such a tendency to invent statistics (or at least to not treat statistics with due caution), it is hardly a surprise that the PM is seeking to distance himself from the green agenda. Here is a brilliant satire, which is from the USA, but which no doubt reflects reality in the UK too.

This sketch from the West Wing reflects the incoherence of the environmental movement and it’s tendency to pull itself apart, to produce in-fighting and to fail to settle on anything. Ultimately, nothing will please it. That incoherence is now firmly established in the UK’s climate and energy policies. Like Carrington, the special interests line up to bitch and crow, but cannot ever agree, cannot find meaningful support outside the establishment, and cannot tell the difference between failing to to assert their own will and the end of the world. Like the distribution of sweets (candy, to my readers from the USA) amongst toddlers, there is no possible outcome which does not leave each of the parties feeling ripped off, because none of the parties have the faintest understanding about the concept of quantity. All they can see is stuff they want but do not possess. It’s not FAAAAAAAAAIRRRR! WAAAAAAAAAAAAH! WAAAAAAAH!. Even after the toddlers have stuffed their faces, more and more and yet more (subsidies and other special favours) is demanded until sheer exhaustion provokes the final, epic tantrum.

It’s been a funny old day…

As mentioned in the previous post, in answer to the  launch of the UK’s National Oppostion to Windfarms (NOW), the UK’s wind energy lobbying outfit, Renewable UK (formerly the British Wind Energy Association hastily arranged for a survey of public opinion regarding wind energy. The results of the poll are published online.

1. To what extent are you in favour of or opposed to the use of wind power in the UK?

Strongly in favour of: 28%
Tend to favour: 38%
Neither favour or oppose: 22%
Tend to oppose: 5%
Strongly opposed to: 3%
Don’t know: 4%

2. To what extent do you find the look of wind farms on the landscape
acceptable or not? Please give your answer on a scale of 1-10 where 1
means completely unacceptable and 10 means it’s completely acceptable.

1. Completely unacceptable: 6%
2. 2%
3. 5%
4. 4%
5. 12%
6. 9%
7. 16%
8. 15%
9. 6%
10. Completely acceptable 20%
Don’t know 4%

I’ve had a few pointless discussions with the pollsters, Ipsos Mori throughout the day. They say their client doesn’t want to show the raw data from the survey.

Polling is a curious thing. It is not clear whether pollsters aim to measure or make public opinion, or perhaps just to flatter whoever pays them. No doubt they like to think of themselves as objective, but too often, the prejudices of the polls authors — if not the commissioners — are plastered all over the poll. Loaded questions and shallow analysis, as we discovered after an Ipsos Mori poll way back in 2007.

Today, there were two more polls on precisely the same subject, this time from Yougov, who were somewhat more forthcoming. The first poll, for Friends of the Earth, asked this question first…

It has been suggested that the government should introduce legislation to make energy companies reduce their use of foreign gas and coal and increase the power they get from Britain’s wind, sun, waves and tides. Supporters say that this would make Britain less reliant on foreign sources of gas and coal, and make energy supply and prices more stable. Opponents say that this would require too much public investment, and there are more important things to spend money on at the moment. To what extent would you support or oppose this policy?

Well, it’s a slightly more honest question than Ipsos-Mori’s.

Here are the results…

Strongly support 33%
Tend to support 52%
Tend to oppose 11%
Strongly oppose 4%

It does look bad for critics of renewable energy. It would seem that 85% of the UK population were in favour of more support for renewable energy. But the second question in the poll reveals a little bit more…

Approximately a quarter of Britain’s current power stations are coming to the end of their expected operational lifespan, and new power stations will need to be built in the next ten years to replace them. Compared to now, which ONE, if any, of the following types of energy source would you MOST like to see being used more in 10 years time?

Coal 3%
Gas 2%
Nuclear 22%
Wind 17%
Solar 21%
Wave/ tidal 26%
Don’t know 9%
Other 1%

Now this is a surprising figure, mainly because it would seem that there is quite widespread hope for nuclear. In fact, there is more support for nuclear than wind or solar. It puts a different light on Ipsos Mori’s claim that 66% of people want to see more wind power. Of course, it doesn’t say that 66% of people don’t want to see more support for wind power. But what it does say is that polls don’t say as much as people who commission polls claim that they say.  A more interesting survey might ask the public how much support they believed wind and other renewables already received, and what they thought the appropriate level of support ought to be. It might well turn out that people wanted to see more support for wind power, but weren’t aware of just how much wind energy costs, alongside it’s other problems — such as what to do when that pesky wind isn’t blowing. We might want to ask the public if they would accept smart meters in their homes, which would turn off appliances when there isn’t sufficient wind. That is, after all, the plan.

Then there is the poll for Scottish Renewables. 1041 Scots were told…

Scotland currently uses a mix of coal, oil, gas, nuclear and renewable energy to power and heat our homes and businesses. Renewable energy sources include onshore and offshore wind, hydro, bioenergy, wave and tidal energy.

And then they were asked to what extent they supported the following statement:

I support the continuing development of wind power as part of a mix of renewable and conventional forms of electricity generation:

And the public said:

Strongly agree 39%
Tend to agree 33%
Neither agree nor disagree 11%
Tend to disagree 8%
Strongly disagree 7%
Don’t know 3%

Again — and aside from the obvious cueing in the question — the question is meaningless. One can ‘strongly agree’ with the statement that ‘I support the continuing development of wind power as part of a mix of renewable and conventional forms of electricity generation’, but think that the ‘continued development’ may just mean a small percentage of total capacity being provided by wind. It doesn’t actually test the individuals commitment to any meaningful quantity. The survey does, however, attempt to test the individual’s commitment to renewable energy:

I support the target of generating 30 per cent of Scotland’s energy needs from a mix of renewable energy by 2020:

Strongly agree 42%
Tend to agree 35%
Neither agree nor disagree 12%
Tend to disagree 4%
Strongly disagree 4%
Don’t know 3%

But it still doesn’t test the individual’s knowledge of renewable energy. And it doesn’t ask him or her to say how much more money they’re willing to spend on their bills to ‘save the planet’.

Some interesting comments on this point emerged from the analysis of the polls.

Today Friends of the Earth is using St George’s Day to launch a new Clean British Energy campaign that calls on the Prime Minister to use his speech at the Clean Energy Ministerial on Thursday to demonstrate his backing for low carbon energy.

The group claims increasing the UK’s reliance on domestic renewable sources would not only help decarbonise the energy sector, but would also enhance energy security and create new green jobs. Government figures show just under £4bn of investment in renewables over the last year yielded nearly 14,000 new jobs.

“The public has given a clear vote of confidence to clean British energy from our wind, sun and sea – it makes no sense for the government to pursue an unwanted, costly dash for gas that’s causing our fuel bills to rocket,” said Craig Bennett, Friends of the Earth’s director of policy and campaigns.

Excuse me? vote? Nobody voted for anything. And the polls didn’t ask the public for their views on the alleged ‘dash for gas’. They weren’t asked about fracking. And they weren’t asked about what they thought would be providing backup for wind farms. It wasn’t explained to them that increased reliance on renewable energy sources means having to provide backup. There was no public debate, preceding the poll, allowing the respondents to check the facts and figures for themselves. To say that the poll represents a ‘vote’ is a somewhat arrogant interpretation of the poll.

But let’s not be bitter about it. The fact must be that critics of the emphasis on renewable energy have not done as well to convince the public that renewable energy isn’t what Renewable UK and Friends of the Earth claim it is. Of course we haven’t: critics do not have the resources to establish professional lobbying firms, to hire PR experts and polling organisations. And critics of the government’s policies do not enjoy the ears and favours of the government and the large energy companies.

And on that point… A Yougov poll earlier this year found that…

Recent research from a report by YouGov SixthSense has found that over eight in ten (84%) UK consumers agree that energy suppliers maximise profits at the expense of customers. And over half of consumers (59%) agree with the statement ‘energy suppliers treat people with contempt’.

Perhaps the public just haven’t yet made the link between energy policies and energy prices. Give them time.

One organisation trying their best to deny that link is another renewable energy lobbying group, the Renewable Energy Association (REA). The REA is publishing a report today, excitingly called, Renewable energy: made in Britain. Jobs, turnover and policy framework by technology (2012 assessment). According to the REA’s press release:

New research by the REA and Innovas reveals that the UK’s £12.5 billion renewables industry supports 110,000 jobs across supply chain, and could support 400,000 by 2020

Hmmm. I’m sure I’d heard of a similar claim being made before…

Just three years ago, I wrote in an article for the Register:

Good news emerged from the recent Low Carbon Summit hosted by bailed-out £10bn loss-making bank, RBS. Peter Mandelson got covered in custard, and the government announced a new industrial strategy.

Apparently 400,000 new “environmental sector” jobs will be created by 2017, according to Gordon Brown, who reckoned 1.3 million people would by then be working in “green” jobs. According to Mandelson, “The huge industrial revolution that is unfolding in converting our economy to low carbon is going to present huge business and employment opportunities.”

The claims are slightly different… 400,000 jobs were predicted for 2017 in 2009. Now the claim is for 400,000 jobs by 2020. And the curious thing is, it’s the same firm of analysts who produced both claims. Innovas provided the REA with the data (ho ho ho) from which they project the 400,000 jobs claim. And they provided the (then) Labour government with the same analysis. And as I pointed out back in 2009, the only reason for the growth in the green sector then was the increasing subsidies available to it. In one sector, the promised growth of 25,000 jobs came at the cost of an estimated £30 billion needed to make it conform to new environmental regulations. That’s not growth: it’s not a spontaneous development of a new industry, the possibility of which has been created by some new technology. It is instead merely the transfer of money, created by laws.

There is yet more of this kind of doublethink, just in the press release…

Our analysis shows that meeting our renewable energy targets would displace fossil fuels with a value of £11 billion in 2020 (£60 billion cumulatively to 2020). Failure to meet our targets would see most of this money leave the UK economy through imports of oil, gas and coal – money better invested in supporting domestic growth in domestic jobs. […]

The report exposes the portrayal of renewable energy as being excessively subsidised in comparison with other energy sources as utterly wrong. Analysis from the International Energy Agency shows that globally renewables receive just one sixth of the subsidy of fossil fuels, while analysis from Ofgem and the Committee on Climate Change reveals that renewable energy policies have only added a fraction to energy bills compared to increases caused by spiking wholesale gas prices.

The possibility of an emerging gas sector in the UK doesn’t seem to have been considered by REA’s report. And if they are so worried about exporting cash from the UK economy, how might they explain all the money spent on renewable energy hardware, such as wind turbines, which are manufactured overseas? Indeed, the core substance of the REA’s report (they were kind enough to let me have an advance copy) is an analysis of each sector’s size, number of employees, turnover, the size of the global market, and the value of each sector’s exports. But no mention of the value of imports, which must surely be subtracted from the balance. Here for instance, is a table of the stats offered in the REA’s report, for a few of the sectors covered.

The UK’s exports to the global wind power sector are a measly £500 million, compared to its domestic market of £4.1 billion. It’s almost inconceivable that most of that market doesn’t substantially reflect a similar ratio. And those 31,400 jobs… Given that the wind sector was subsidised, just through the ROC’s scheme, to the tune of £609.6 million that same year, we can calculate that each job was subsidised to the tune of £19,414.18. That is a problem that the REA simply do not have an answer to. The growth in the sector can only be called ‘growth’ if, in the meantime, can find the £19,414 for each of the existing 31,400 employees in the sector, and the same for each job in the sector that REA and Innovas claim will be created between now and 2020.

This innumeracy is carried forward in the comments about the subsidies enjoyed by the fossil fuel industry. It may well be true that, in absolute terms, the conventional fuel sector enjoys more subsidies than the renewable sector. But when the subsidies for each are compared in terms of a unit of energy, a very different picture emerges. As I have pointed out previously,

in 2008, the world produced fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas, peat) equivalent to 10,065 million tonnes of oil (Mtoe), but only 90.2Mtoe of energy from renewables (geothermal, solar, electricity and heat, wind). So although renewables only enjoyed a tenth (or so) of the subsides that fossil fuels received, fossil fuels accounted for 112 times as much energy. In other words, on a Mtoe basis, the renewable sector received nearly 13 times as much subsidisation as the fossil fuel sector.

Moreover, in the UK, the ‘subsidies’ that REA claim are given to the fossil fuel sector, are in face simply lower rates of VAT (which apply to green energy too). Thus they aren’t subsidies at all. The same cannot be said of the kind of benefits that renewables enjoy.

It’s only by statistical sleight of hand that the REA can make it’s claims. And worse, the statistical analysis on which it depends is hidden behind non-disclosure agreements and claims to be ‘commercially sensitive’. I tried, back in 2009 to have a look at Innovas’s data, but they refused to let me see it in any depth. The REA’s analysis isn’t worth a penny. It has been sold a dud — the same dud that the UK government bought in 2009.

And on to another report. Greenpeace has commissioned Bloomberg New Energy Finance to produce a report ‘on the generation investments of the Big 6 utilities’. There is nothing at all interesting in the report. But there is something very interesting in the press release accompanying it.

Shocking new analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance for Greenpeace, shows that most of the Big Six energy utilities haven’t been investing money from customer bills in a way that brings energy prices under control and secures a clean energy supply for the UK.

The government’s independent advisors, the Committee on Climate Change, and the energy regulator Ofgem have both pointed the finger squarely at the rising cost of gas as being by far the biggest contributor to increased bills over the last eight years.

Ofgem found that of the £150 increase in the average dual fuel bill between March 2011 and March 2012, £100 was due to the rising wholesale cost of energy, largely driven by the increased price of gas.

We’ve already shown how gas prices (as well as pay for the energy company bosses) have rocketed over the last decade.

This worrying trend is set to continue. The chief executive of Ofgem recently argued that gas could be increasingly expensive to import as countries around the world compete for supplies.

This means higher bills for everyone, unless we can reduce our vulnerability by cutting our dependence on gas.

It also means higher emissions. The government’s climate advisers recently wrote to the energy secretary warning that a new ‘dash for gas’ puts at risk our ability to achieve the carbon emission cuts set out under the Climate Change Act.

But lobbyists for the gas industry want to make us even more reliant on burning gas for power generation.

The new research by Bloomberg has found that since 2006, £13 billion has been spent by the Big Six energy utilities on 14GW of new electricity generating infrastructure, and over half of this has been new gas plant.

Greenpeace ignore the effect of policy on the investment decisions made by the big energy firms. First, there is the fact that gas is the balancing partner of choice for wind, because only gas-fired power stations can ramp their output up and down to match demand. Second, several of the UK’s coal-fired power stations are due to be retired early, thanks to the effect of cold winters (oh, for as much global warming as there is irony!) causing these installations to exhaust their emissions permits faster than anticipated. And third, relatively moderate voices in the UK energy sector such as energy economist at Oxford University, Professor Dieter Helm and CEO of the National Grid have argued that gas is essential to the UK’s continuing to produce electricity while meeting its (ridiculous) climate change targets. It’s no use blaming fracking lobbyists, nobody seriously believes that you can take coal, oil and gas (and nuclear) out of the mix, and have a functioning economy.

There are two things going on here. First, NGOs like Greenpeace have campaigned long and hard against cheaper energy. Cheap energy is anathema to environmentalists. Now that campaign has turned into material reality, Greenpeace are trying to distance themselves from it, to pretend that higher prices have been caused by energy companies profit-seeking, not by the policies they have sought. Second, there is a material possibility of abundant and cheap natural gas production in the UK. And the words ‘shale gas’ and ‘fracking’ are conspicuous across all these reports and surveys by their absence. They don’t dare even utter them. Their claims about renewable energy providing jobs, by protecting the UK from volatility in the global market would shatter if the global market began to respond to shale gas discoveries. The UK’s energy policies are themselves resting on the hope that fossil fuel prices will rise into the 2020s and beyond. If they do not, then the UK will be left with a legacy of commitments to expensive policies, subsidies and infrastructure.

As an aside… Here is celebrity Dragon investor, Deborah Meaden, letting the fracking cat out of the energy policy bag. I am surprised to discover that it is possible for idiots to turn themselves into multi-millionaires. But then, free money from subsidies is a great way to get rich, if you’re already rich.

Finally… The flip. Amidst all the reports that have been rushed out this week, as part of a counter-offensive against anti-windfarm campaigners and to influence EU-wide policy-making going on in London this week — all of which is premised in one way or another on alarmism — James Lovelock, author of the Gaia Hypothesis, has changed his mind somewhat.

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.

Lovelock’s book was the first book about the environment I ever read. I was barely ten or eleven years old. I doubt I understood much of it. But what was possible to understand was the alarming message it told. The article about Lovelock’s re-consideration contains the following passage which I think is most revealing.

Keya Chatterjee, international climate policy director of environmental campaign group WWF-US, said in a statement that it was “hard not to get overwhelmed and be defeatist” about the challenges facing the planet, but suggested alarmist talk did not help persuade people to act to reduce climate change. “While the problem is becoming increasingly urgent, we’ve found that focusing on the most dire predictions does not resonate with the public, governments, or business. People tend to shut off when a problem does not seem solvable,” she said. “And that’s not the case with climate change because we can still avoid its worst impacts. We know that we already have all of the technologies needed to slow climate change down. We only lack the political will to go up against vested interests,” she added.

Lacking any faculty of self-reflection whatsoever, it looks like it will take a while for the likes of Chatterjee to understand Lovelock’s new argument. And the point will be lost on her that far from not resonating with ‘governments or business’, alarmism appealed immensely, which is why we now see such intransigence from business lobbying firms and the government, served by international NGOs. She’s right about one thing, though, the public weren’t interested in the panic-mongering (only ten year old boys were). And with such a compact between government, business, and NGOs, what the public really thinks, isn’t important.

Today sees the launch of the UK’s National Oppostion to Windfarms (NOW). The launch of a group of citizens, working autonomously and without support from political parties or big business is usually the sort of thing Guardian ‘journalists’ like to celebrate. But Leo Hickman — the newspapers ‘ethical’ specialist — instead serves up a bit of a hatchet job.

The Guardian has seen emails exchanged between Nawag members sent over the past few months discussing the planning for Now. One exchange was about a suitable anthem for the group. Jerusalem and Blowin’ in the Wind featured as favourites, but one member suggests alternative lyrics for the Dad’s Army theme tune, Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler? including a reference to the recently installed energy secretary Ed Davey: “Who do you think you are kidding Mr Davey/If you think this country’s done/We are the Now Group/We will stop your little game/No more wind turbines/That blight our hills and planes.”

Hickman, who likes to lecture others about ‘ethics’ — especially ‘journalistic ethics’, and the ‘ethics’ of leaking emails from UEA — doesn’t seem to mind intruding on email discussions between individuals who campaign in their spare time, from their own pockets, and in their own front rooms and village halls. And what did he discover? Oh! The unmitigated evil! What a scoop! Clearly a plot by criminal masterminds!

Er… No… A discussion about which song best represents them. No trivia is too petty for the Guardian. We saw your emails, ner nerr ner nerrr nerr.

Moving upmarket a bit, Businessgreen — which claims to be a ‘web site offering companies the latest news and best-practice advice on how to become more environmentally responsible, while still growing the all-important bottom line‘ but which is more concerned with whining about subsidy cuts than offering news and advice — reports verbatim on Renewable UK’s response to the creation of the new group. Renewable UK, of course, are the re-branded British Wind Energy Association, which is to say they represent the interests of the wind industry. Is there any reason to think that Big Wind are any nicer than Big Oil?

The wind energy industry has today hit back at the launch of a national anti-wind farm group with the release of a major new survey showing that over two-thirds of people are broadly in favour of wind farms. The survey of more than 1,000 people, carried out by Ipsos MORI on behalf of trade group RenewableUK, found 67 per cent of respondents are in favour of using wind power in the UK, with 28 per cent “strongly in favour”.

Ipsos-Mori have not published the results of their survey yet. I rang them, to see if I could get a look at the report, since the Guardian had also covered it, and Renewable UK had put out a press release announcing the findings of the survey. Nobody could take my call, so I left my number. I later got a call back from a press officer who believed I was calling from an anti-wind farm campaign. It’s true that I think wind turbines are silly… Very silly. And it’s also true that I’ve written and spoken about wind energy being a symptom of incoherent and weird politics — I’m speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival about wind energy — but I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a ‘wind farm campaigner’. This is just about the only post on this blog that I can think of which is about wind energy — amongst nearly 500 posts.

I wanted to know, however, what it means to be ‘in favour of using wind power’. Wind power might be very good at some things — pumping water, or providing energy in remote locations, beyond the reach of the grid. I don’t even object to wind on aesthetic grounds — What concerns me are policies, politics and economics, and their influence over choices of technique. And so I wanted to know to what extent people are ‘in favour of wind power’ — would they be in favour if it meant a doubling of electricity bills? Very few people are interested in how electricity is produced — they are interested in things like climate change, because they think all the polar bears will die; or they are interested because their electricity bills have risen. Those issues lead to concern about how electricity is produced. We will have to wait to see what Ipsos Mori discovered. Meanwhile, I’m not taking Rewnable UK’s claims at face value, and I don’t think it means anything to say that N% of people are ‘in favour of wind power’. Indeed, the person from Ipsos-Mori was able to confirm that the survey didn’t go to any depth about the strength of support for wind energy policies. So it means no more to say that people are ‘in favour of wind energy’ than it means to say that people are in favour of anything: strength of commitment is not measured by asking ‘do you like X’?

So much for the survey. I find it curious that such a powerful organisation as Renewable UK should be worried about a group of civilians that they organise opinion polls to be published to coincide with the launch of the campaign, and recruit their pals in the media to pen hatchet jobs and puff pieces. The Businessgreen article continues…

However, in a detailed rebuttal RenewableUK accuses the group of using partial and non peer-reviewed research to back up its claims, while noting that a host of wildlife and conservation groups, such as Friends of the Earth and the RSPB, support well located wind farms.

The trade group categorically rejects charges wind power is too costly and has little economic benefit, arguing that the sector direcly employs over 10,000 people while independent studies have shown onshore wind farms are now “slightly more expensive than conventional plant with an expectation of increasing competitiveness”.

These statistics caught my eye. 10,000 people working in the wind sector? It seems an extremely high number for such little output. Indeed, according to Renewable UK, who publish data on wind energy installations throughout the UK, there are 339 on and offshore wind farms in the UK, with a total capacity of 6587 megawatts. If we assume that their combined load factor (the ratio of the capacity to the output) of 0.25, the net capacity of the entire UK fleet is 1647MW. And so if there really are 10,000 employees in the wind energy sector, each employee produces a capacity of just 165 kilowatts — enough for about 16 electric showers. This calls for a comparison with conventional electricity production.

According to it’s 2008 annual report and accounts [PDF],

Drax is a power generation business operating principally in the commodity markets of power, coal, biomass and carbon. We purchase coal, biomass and carbon allowances from both UK and international suppliers. We currently generate around 7%of theUK’s electricity and trade power in the electricitywholesalemarket of Great Britain.

Using statistics from Renewable UK and the Drax Group’s report, I created this table…

Green cells are known, yellow cells are calculated from the others, and pinkish cells are assumptions.

The results are stark. The Drax group produces 7% of the UK’s energy, but has just 712 employees. Thus, it takes just 100 people to produce 1% of the UK’s electricity. The 10,000 personnel seemingly working for the entire wind power sector are roughly the same in number as would be necessary to operate the entire UK’s generating capacity, were it all like Drax’s.

The entire wind energy sector has 14 times as many employees, but only produces just over a third as much as the Drax group. If we’re only counting jobs, it may well be true that the wind sector is a big employer. But on that basis, we might as well simply just pay people to say that they work, but give them meaningless tasks to fulfil: set one group digging holes, and another to fill them in again. If we assume that energy sector workers are paid the same, within and outside the wind sector, each megawatt hour produced by the wind sector costs £49.65 in salary, but the Drax group produces the same energy for just £1.44.

The figures begin to look different when we add the cost of fuel for the Drax group’s operations. 2008 was a year of high energy prices, which is the reason for choosing it as the measure. But still, wind energy comes out as significantly more expensive. And that is before we add the costs of subsidies.

Renewable Obligations Certificates to the value of (approx.) £694 million were given to wind farm operators in the year 2010-11. Adding that figure to the total means that each MWH of wind energy now costs £97.77 — three times the cost of the energy produced by the Drax group.

Of course, this is not a fully equipped, like-for-like comparison, but is not presented as one. There will be some jobs in the wind sector which are in the manufacture of widgets, gizmos, and so on. But then, why are they included in Renewable UK’s analysis of jobs in the renewable sector? And the fact that Renewable UK offers this analysis to make the case for continued government support, across the EU and the world, should not be forgotten. It is now possible to get a rough idea of how the wind sector is able to have such a huge workforce, and why energy operators are keen to expand their renewable energy investments.

This is how Renewable UK say the employment in the sector breaks down [PDF]:

Renewable UK depend on continued preferential treatment from government to sustain their members’ interests. The problem for those companies is that there has not been a public debate about energy policy in the UK. Only polling companies ever ask the public what they think, and they only ever ask questions which elicit meaningless answers, rather than demonstrate a no-regrets commitment to any given policy. The strength of public support for green energy has not been tested where it counts: at the ballot box. Few politicians have been brave enough — so far — to ask questions about the direction of UK energy policy. That democratic failure is now beginning to be manifested as material problems experienced by real people, and political friction within the UK, and across the EU.

Renewable UK are terrified that a spontaneous movement of people will deprive them of the uncontested favour that they have enjoyed from the current and previous government. They are worried that the voices of thousands of individuals from across the UK — without substantial resources — will form a single voice, which will inevitably attract the attention of politicians and the media. They are worried about what the continuation of their undignified PR campaigns will look like, when people realise it’s a case of big energy companies versus ordinary people, with genuine grievances. It’s a simple mathematical matter: the more people who find themselves unhappy with energy policies and rising prices, the more people will lend their support. And the more people there are, the harder it will be to mock comments from stolen emails, and to dismiss their concerns as unfounded.