David Rose has a short article on my report for Roger Helmer MEP on the size of the UK’s green economy.

But documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal the true value of the green economy is actually between only £16.8 billion and £27.9 billion, depending on exactly how the term ‘green economy’ is defined. In other words, the official figures exaggerate the scale of the sector by up to 700 per cent.

Rose’s article is published just under James Delingpole’ article — which is also worth a read.

I’ve always thought that the government’s (current and previous) claims about the green economy were highly dubious. But they (or their staff at DECC/BIS, etc), have been very unhelpful. Last October, I asked them again for data relating to their estimates of the ‘Low Carbon and Environmental Goods and Services’ (LCEGS) market, after it had been claimed, yet again, that it was now worth £122 bn year. They refused, as they have done before, on the basis that the research is undertaken by a private company — Innovas, in the earlier reports, and K-Matrix more recently.

This is a defacto paywall protecting the government and its policies against anyone who wants to understand the basis of their decisions, but who is not sympathetic to them. It’s also a way of hiding dodgy dossiers and sexed up statistics. Indeed, BIS claimed in their responses to me that they had bought ‘off the self’ research from the companies.

But further inspection of earlier LECGS reports revealed that BERR/BIS had commissioned Innovas/K-Matrix, and had in fact worked with the company to develop the specification of the sector. So in fact, BIS had been lying. On this basis, I appealed against the two refused FOI requests, and an internal review found in my favour.

A scan through the LCEGS taxonomy — the list of markets included in the LCEGS sector — reveals that the government has been playing fast-and-loose with categories. It includes the production and distribution of a number of fossil fuels. It includes thing as daft as rubber-band powered cars. It counts activities that are actively polluting as ‘environmental services’.

The taxonomy given to me by BIS is here: IR-13-0026-Annex-A-Enviro-Sector-Taxonomy

A draft copy of my report is here: HowBigIsTheLCEGSSector_12.07.2013

There are a few typos in the draft, but I’m not near a computer to fix them now. On page 15, for example, I write,

If the sales of methane, wood, wood gas, vegetable oil, biomass and peanut oil are as substantial as the LCEGS report claims, this would be remarkable. In energy terms, it is equivalent to nearly half of the UK’s energy consumption. Thus further investigation is required.

It should say

If the sales of methane, wood, wood gas, vegetable oil, biomass and peanut oil are as substantial as the LCEGS report claims, this would be remarkable. In market terms, it is equivalent to nearly half of the UK’s spend on electricity. Thus further investigation is required.

The government’s official estimate of £120 billion is, as the report explains, completely implausible. I find a figure of around £27 billion much more likely, but it may be as low as £17bn, after we exclude the emissions-trading sector, and take out the money for green taxes and subsidies to green projects.

Of the remaining market, one question I don’t ask is how much good it does, even on its own terms. If you were going to spend £16 bn a year on making a greener economy, why not just spend it on nuclear power?

UPDATE: my FOI Internal Review request. (More to follow)

Security & Information Rights (SIR) Department for Business,Innovation& Skills

Attached documents

APPENDIX A – Ben Pile – BIS communications Correspondence in relation to Innovas/Kmatrix LCEGS reports
APPENDIX B – passages from BIS/BERR and Innovas/Kmatrix LCEGS reports
APPENDIX C – BIS Response 1
APPENDIX D – BIS response 2

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing to request an internal review of the decision not to release data that forms the basis of the ‘Low Carbon and Environmental Goods and Services’ (LCEGS) reports, published by BIS (and formerly by BERR), and produced by Innovas/K-Matrix.

The LCEGS reports estimate the size of the LCEGS sector and are produced annually. To my understanding, this involved the creation of a database consisting of two main parts: i) a hierarchy of market sectors at five different levels of detail (i.e. column headings) ; and ii) data relating to market size, and employment etc, for each sector (i.e. data).

As the correspondence I have attached explains, my concern is that the data in question has been used to inform policymaking and the promotion of certain policy options in the public debate, but that the public have been denied the benefit of knowing what the LCEGS sector consists of. The published LCEGS reports contain only the top two levels of the database in categories so broad they may well encompass almost the entire productive economy rather than, as is implied, simply the ‘green economy’. The use of these reports to inform policy decisions or to make arguments in favour of certain policy options therefore creates opacity where there should be transparency.

This is a criticism I have raised with the department, and with the author of the first LCEGS report, John Sharp, shortly after it was published in 2009. However, the department continue to publish these reports in the same way.

In November last year I made a request for information about the database itself, and about the circumstances of the database’s creation. In particular, I wanted to see the column headings for each level of detail 1 through 4, though I would like now to see the same for levels 1 through 5. I also made a request for the estimates of each market sector.

My requests for the information under the FOI act were refused. However, there is a lack of consistency in the arguments offered by BIS, which furthermore do not tally with existing information, published by BIS itself. There are also some questions about the relationship between the department and Innovas/K-Matrix which are not properly answered. In spite of my requests, is still not clear whether Innovas/K-Matrix were either commissioned to produce research or simply sold an existing product to the department, off-the-shelf.

In email Appendix A.1, on 14 November (prior to the FOI request), Matthew Barker informed me that “The Low Carbon Environmental Goods & Services (LCEGS) report was commissioned by BIS”, but that the “agreement with k-matrix does not extend to releasing the unpublished data sets”.

In view of this, I asked (email Appendix A.2) for clarity on the agreement between BIS/BERR and Innovas/K-Matrix. Specifically, I asked what in the agreement prevented the release of the data. I was also puzzled about why the department would enter into such an agreement.

I received a reply on 11 December (Appendix C), which reiterated Matthew Brown’s earlier comment, and that the data “is exempt from disclosure under section 43 (2) commercial interests and should be withheld” (Appendix C, section 3) , on the basis that it “would be likely to prejudice the commercial interests of any person” (Appendix C, section 4).

The response also pointed out that the data I had requested “is not ‘publicly funded research'” (Appendix C, section 5) and that “the company created the dataset to fill an information gap in the market”, that BIS had paid “a commercial rate to use the data” as do “multiple users from [other] sectors” .

The response went on to outline a “public interest test” (Appendix C, sections 6 through 11), the logic or meaning of which is opaque, at best only re-iterating the protection of third party commercial interests.

Seeking clarity on this new decision, I submitted a further request for information (email Appendix A.9). In particular, I explained my view that the public interest test seemed arbitrary, and that a stronger argument in favour of transparency could be made (email Appendix A.2.2). I also asked how the department knew that Innovas/K-Matrix did not want the data I had requested to be made available, amongst other questions.

I received a reply on 1 Feb (Appendix D). According to this reply, the department had contacted K-Matrix in relation to my request (Appendix D, Section 3), but that this was a courtesy and that the decision ultimately lay with the department. K-Matrix were themselves unwilling to allow me to see the information, as was revealed by the email correspondence between them and the department (Appendix E).

The response also re-iterated the department’s view that “the public interest in favour of withholding this information outweighed the public interest in its disclosure”, (Appendix D, section 3), but without explaining the process by which the public interest was weighed against any competing interest.

However, literature published by Innovas and the department jointly challenges the advice given by the department following my enquiries.

For instance, in the first edition of the report, authored by John Sharp of Innovas, the introduction states that “The authors worked solely on BERR’s instructions and for BERR purposes” (Appendix B, 1.i)”. (My emphasis). The same report goes on to explain that BERR were involved in designing the specification of the database: “This hierarchy of sector‐specific markets and activities is built up from the product market level, and then aggregated into higher level activities agreed in consultation with BERR.” (Appendix B, 1.ii). This database had been intended “To provide BERR with the detail it requires for policy and strategy development” (Appendix B, 1.iii).

Furthermore, the BIS website advises that “BIS (then BERR) commissioned Innovas/K-matrix to undertake a market assessment of the size of the UK low carbon and environmental goods and services (LCEGS) sector in 2008”. (Appendix B, 2.i).

By definition, the advice that BIS/BERR commissioned Innovas/K-Matrix to undertake research and were consulted in the design of the research contradicts the advice that the department purchased an existing off-the-shelf product from the company/companies. For example, the advice in Appendix D, section 11, argues that “…regardless of the supplier of the database the Department would merely be a licensee of the intellectual property subsisting in the database and would be subject to the requirements of the FOI Act. If the Department were to pay for the data to be publicly available the costs would be significantly higher”.

The claim that the department purchased a licence to existing intellectual property seems to be untenable. The LCEGS reports, authored by the company themselves speak about the work being commissioned by the department, and designed according to its specification. Either the information in the report or the arguments offered by the department to explain its refusal to let me see the data are false.

Moreover, it would seem that while the department intended to make data available to business and non-profit organisations, critics of government policy or anyone simply wanting to understand the department’s “policy and strategy development” would be denied the opportunity, creating a problem for the department’s claim to be ‘set[ting] data free’. “The publication of the data is part of the coalition’s commitment to set data free by publishing it in a convenient format to enable business and non-profit organisations to use it easily and at minimal cost” (Appendix D, 2.i). Evidently, the intention was to put data into the public domain that would enable the promotion of certain policies, but not data that might reveal what was in fact meant by the term ‘Low Carbon and Environmental Goods and Services’.

In spite of the department’s claim that the research in question was not publically funded, at least £125,000 has been spent by the department on producing revisions of the report, which is only “one element of the contract” (Appendix D, section 5) between the department and Innovas/K-Matrix. It would seem that this report has been useful in the promotion — if not the design — of certain policies by the department itself and other organisations such as the CBI (“The Colour of Growth” report, 2012 – http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1552876/energy_climatechangerpt_web.pdf ) and the REA (“Renewable Energy: Made in Britain” report, 2012 – http://www.r-e-a.net/resources/pdf/61/Renewable_Energy_-_Made_in_Britain_Executive_Summary.pdf). I note also that the London Mayor’s office has used the same data.

The department seems, by commissioning the work, to have effectively both created a market for the research, and marketed the company’s product and services to the wider governmental, third-sector, business associations and companies with an interest in environmental policies.

This in turn suggests that a much closer working relationship between the department and the company exists, again belying the department’s statements that an off-the-shelf product existed before it engaged the company to produce its research.

The research designed by BIS and completed by Innovas/K-Matrix has, at the very least, influenced the wider public debate. Meanwhile, claims made in that debate have been protected from scrutiny and criticism by a ‘paywall’ — the department’s claim to be protecting a third party’s intellectual property and commercial interests. In order to challenge the government’s policies, the advice that the department produces, or the arguments produced by other organisations in the wider public debate, it would be necessary to buy access to the database, and a licence to reproduce it for public consumption — something that is clearly beyond the means of most individuals and organisations.

In summary, it is clearly the case that the LCEGS sector has no meaning to anyone who lacks access to the complete list of column headings from the database, yet this research has influenced the direction of public policy. Thus, if transparent policymaking is important, there is a real public interest in releasing this part (column headings) of the research in question. I believe that the department’s ‘public interest test’ has not been reasonable, and that the department’s claim that the database is the intellectual property of Innovas/K-Matrix is at best incomplete, possibly misleading and certainly opaque. Furthermore, I believe that the responses to my requests for information have not been conducted in the spirit of the FOI Act. Finally, I believe that refusal to release data on the basis of protecting commercial interests is at best disingenuous, and raises serious questions about the use of third party research to advance policy decisions and arguments.

I would also like to draw your attention to the inclusion of my name in correspondence between the department and Innovas/K-Matrix. I believe that I am entitled to the same privacy that the department granted to individuals at the department and at the company, whose names were redacted in the correspondence between them, sent to me following my second request.

I look forward to your reply,

An outbreak of thinking has occurred at the Guardian. In response to George Monbiot’s book, Feral: Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding, Steven Poole observes that the ‘pastoral literary genre has long been a solidly bourgeois form of escapism’, and that it reflects a regressive form of politics. Poole doesn’t make too big a deal of the politics, but highlights a parallel between the hand-wringing about invasive species, and immigration. It seems Poole’s point, however, is less that this congruence has any major significance, but that it’s riddled with contradictions and inconsistency — as so much nature-worship surely is — and is a bit, well, daft.

What irks Monbiot about the insatiable hunger for lebensraum of “invasive species” is, finally, just that they will make everything duller to the eyes of naturalist aesthetes. “There is a danger,” he writes, “that ecosystems everywhere come to contain a similar set of species, making the world a blander and less surprising place.” Indeed, the spark of his desire for “rewilding” is, as he readily confesses in his intellectually generous and disarmingly enthusiastic book, that it would bring him more aesthetic pleasure. He came to the idea in the first place because he felt “ecologically bored”. What could, on the other hand, be less boring than seeing the sabre-toothed tiger roaming the streets of Shoreditch, the hippo snoozing outside the Hippodrome?

Monbiot, on cue, is livid at having been compared to racists. ‘I love nature. For this I am called bourgeois, romantic – even fascist‘, he complains. But to be fair to his critics, Monbiot did discover his ‘bourgeois inner self‘ only last Christmas. This leaves him trying only to defend himself against the charge of romantic fascism.

But there is a strange tension in this defence. On the one hand, Monbiot wants to hold with the aesthetic view of nature…

I see a love for the diversity and richness of nature as an aesthetic and cultural impulse identical to the love of art. It is a form of culture as refined and intense as any other, yet those who profess it tend to be regarded as nerds, not connoisseurs (that’s true snobbery for you). Poole and people like him position themselves among the philistines – those who see no value in the wonders with which others are enchanted.

… but on the other, Monbiot is saving the planet…

So those of us whose love of the natural world is a source of constant joy and constant despair, who wish to immerse ourselves in nature as others immerse themselves in art, who try to defend the marvels that enthrall us, find ourselves labelled – from the Mail to the Guardian – as romantics, escapists and fascists. That, I suppose, is the price of confronting the power of money.

… from the power of money.

So George’s aesthetic preferences are given global, and political signifiance by nothing more than his emotional attachment to an idealised account of nature. Whether or not that counts as ‘fascism’ depends on how far he is willing to defend this notion of a wild nature. He doesn’t say. But it’s certainly Romantic, nonetheless, with just one exception — Monbiot’s appeal to science.

Comparing those who describe [invasive species] to racists is the intellectual equivalent of stating that evolution through natural selection is a coded attack on the welfare state, or that the first law of thermodynamics was hatched by green campaigners intent on conserving energy. It is to see the words but not to understand the science they describe. This fallacy – mistaking scientific findings for cultural concepts – was deliciously ripped apart by Alan Sokal’s satirical paper Transgressing the Boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity.

It is something of an irony that Monbiot would admit that his aesthetic preferences for nature is equivalent to a love of art, but then invoke Sokal’s criticism of those who conflate scientific and cultural ‘concepts’. The nature Monbiot witnesses is scientific fact, he protests. The further irony being that biological determinists like Monbiot, are bound to reproduce the excesses of postmodernism in perfect mirror image. All culture is, on the biological perspective, nothing more than the expression of some gene or other. After all, it is environmentalists like him that want to impose a political order, seemingly determined by science, over all culture, including, of course, money.

I find it hard to let the problem of invasive species ruin my sleep. They are, in reality a problem for some government department or association of people whose lives it may affect — most likely farmers. They are not front page news. They are a fact of life in a world in which geography matters less, as does the ‘balance’ of nature, if it ever even existed. They’re a side effect of the most incredible period in history: the expansion of transport and technology — things that make Monbiot’s indulgence of the natural world possible. Without them, he’d find nature, as ‘red in tooth and claw’, and his life, ‘nasty brutish and short’.

Someone else with a comprehensively daft view of the world is Stephen Emmott. Geoff Chambers did a good job of debunking Emmott here a while back, and has continued at his own blog with some more posts following the media’s thirst for his Oxford-University-accredited doomsaying.

As many have observed, Emmott’s prophecy shouldn’t cause much concern outside padded cells. It’s tempting to say that it’s sufficiently nutty for the Guardian to have realised it. Indeed, The Guardian have reproduced Chris Goodall’s fairly comprehensive criticism of it, from his Carbon Commentary blog. Says Goodall:

Stephen Emmott’s book on global ecological challenges is attracting much attention. The work is extremely short – perhaps about 15,000 words – and is in the form of notes that provide terse commentary on a series of graphs. It is little more than a Powerpoint presentation turned into a slim paperback. Although any attempt to increase mankind’s alarm at the threat from climate change is welcome, Emmott’s book is error-strewn, full of careless exaggeration and weak on basic science. Its reliance on random facts pulled from the internet is truly shocking and it will harm the cause of environmental protection. As might be expected, the best sceptic bloggers are already deconstructing its excesses line-by-line.

This blog is in its seventh year of line-by-line deconstructions of the excesses of environmental alarmism. They have all been unpicked. The only thing that seems new in the climate debate is that it is now the case that some environmentalists seem to be taking their less cautious colleagues to task. But the value of this new reflectivity amongst the environmentalists is limited. They want to sustain their cake and eat it:

Things are indeed pretty bad. The steps to address climate change are lamentably slow and ineffectual. Biodiversity is in sharp decline in some parts of the world. Water supplies are becoming tighter in many countries. The pressures on global forests are declining but still acute in some places. Air quality is appalling in big cities in Asia and quite bad in major Western capitals. But we don’t help solve these problems by exaggerating their seriousness and picking up gobbets of data from dodgy sources we found on the web.

It’s as though these were new problems. It’s as if no human had ever thought about water shortage or air pollution. These problems have solutions. Where they have been experienced in other parts of the word, they have been remedied without the need for restraint. And in spite of Goodall’s call for arguments to be constructed from more reliable provenance, there is no interrogation of environmentalism’s concepts, such as ‘biodiversity’ — as nebulous and pseudo-scientific an idea as has ever been conceived of.

Elsewhere in the Guardian’s digital pages, the ‘Political Science’ blog is running a series of pieces this week on the precautionary principle. It started on Monday, with professor of science and technology policy at the University of Sussex, Andy Stirling defending the idea, which is a stellar example of how paying people to think often ends up with no more a positive result than leading a horse to water. (And perhaps flogging it later on).

But, in the end, the picture is quite optimistic. Far from the pessimistic caricature, precaution actually celebrates the full depth and potential for human agency in knowledge and innovation. Blinkered risk assessment ignores both positive and negative implications of uncertainty. Though politically inconvenient for some, precaution simply acknowledges this scope and choice. So, while mistaken rhetorical rejections of precaution add further poison to current political tensions around technology, precaution itself offers an antidote – one that is in the best traditions of rationality. By upholding both scientific rigour and democratic accountability under uncertainty, precaution offers a means to help reconcile these increasingly sundered Enlightenment cultures.

This is followed by Tracy Brown of Sense About Science, with a more compelling argument that The Precautionary Principle is a Blunt Instrument:

However simple we might wish managing uncertainty about the future to be, it’s not. The precautionary principle misleads us into thinking it is. Its advocates arm-wave about complexity and the unknown future, but they are producing a response that implies the exact opposite. In place of informed, real-world choices that include the potential implications of both doing something and not doing it, we have simplistic bans, precaution’s monotonous answer to every challenge.

But like Goodall’s reply to Emmott, this too fails to interrogate the context in which the precautionary principle has developed:

A world of over seven billion people faces some pretty complex questions about the trade-offs involved in producing food, using resources, reducing disease and achieving the societies and environments in which we want to live. […] In agriculture, energy and so much more we need big changes, even if some people do want to stop the world and get off. Realistically, to make these changes needs an approach to innovation that is permissive and watchful – that is, one that takes more responsibility – rather than banning and assuming you’ve done good, which is the real hubris here.

Why is a world of seven billion people (or more) understood to face bigger, more and more complex challenges than a world of just six, five, four or three billion people? In spite of the growth in our populations, there are far fewer people struggling to survive (hence there are so many more people), and there are more than ever people whose day-to-day challenges consist of no more than ‘where can I plug my iPod in?’. It is increasingly the case that there is less and less need for global institutions to oversee the production of food and resources. Yet the idea that there is ever more need dominates debates. There’s little point in challenging the precautionary principle without taking a critical view of its context and the issues to which it has been applied. After all, the idea is not new, yet achieved more purchase as a basis for new global, environmental political institutions was being sought. Coincidence?

Speaking of new global institutions seeking a legitimising basis, Roger Pielke Jr. Tweets…

Apparently, this proposal by scientists to stand above governments in an “Earth League” is not a spoof –> https://t.co/tB7dsmWeLu

The link takes us to the following document:

The Earth League
Towards a Global Research & Assessment Alliance

Humankind has become a quasi-geological force on Planet Earth. Our species is the most successful ever, still growing in numbers and absorbing more and more natural resources for its industrial metabolism, which is largely based on fossil fuels and other dwindling stocks. As a consequence, societies around the world are currently witnessing severe crises that call for a “Great Transformation” toward sustainability. Climate change might be understood as just one manifestation of the emerging complex problem or as a driver. Many other challenges such as the distortion of ecosystem services, the loss of biodiversity, the degradation of land, sprawling urbanization, worsening water scarcity, the disturbances in terrestrial and marine food chains or the ubiquitous pollution of all environmental systems have to be taken into consideration.

It seems the convenors of The Earth League (Da daa daaa!) believe that there is not a sufficient global organisation to direct research into the natural world, or, more precisely, the effects of human society (aka ‘our species’) on it. A more concise account of what The Earth League (Da Daa Daaa!) aims to be is given at the Imperial College website:

Imperial welcomed the inaugural meeting of the Earth League, a voluntary alliance of scientists addressing earth science and sustainability challenges

The inaugural meeting of the Earth League, a voluntary alliance of leading scientists and institutions addressing earth science and sustainability challenges, took place at Imperial College London yesterday, 7 February 2013.

The world should, by now, be used to pompous, self-regarding planet-savers convening meetings. And it should be bored of them. Some familiar themes emerge…

This international group of prominent scientists from world class research institutions will work together to respond to some of the most pressing issues faced by humankind, as a consequence of climate change, depletion of natural resources, land degradation and water scarcity.

By coming together in a self-organized alliance, the Earth League members will be a united voice in the global dialogue on planetary issues.

League members will meet annually to discuss a key earth science and sustainability issue in depth, using their combined expertise to assess the various solutions available. The findings from these discussions will be used to initiate new research activities or communicate new knowledge to high-level decision makers.

[…]

At the official launch at Imperial College London the League called for a step change in sustainable living, arguing that truly transformational strategies would be needed to overcome the climate crisis and the many other pressing issues facing humankind today.

Because there has never been a global meeting of global scientists to discuss global issues of global sustainability before.

And not with these people, either…

• Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College, London, UK (Sir Brian Hoskins);Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil (Carlos Nobre)
• Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, London, UK (Lord Nicholas Stern)

Because the world has not heard enough from the likes of Sir Brian Hoskins and Lord Nicholas Stern, there needs to be another talking shop, where these bureaucrats-posing-as-scientists can, like Emmott, and like Monbiot, and pretty much like their new critics (their erstwhile comrades) carry on doomsaying.

I watched the entire debate — if it was a debate — on the Government’s Energy Market Reform Bill (EMR) in the House of Lords today.

For a chamber that is populated by people who are appointed on the basis of merit, replacing the feudal system, it was a very disappointing experience. It’s not simply that I disagreed with many of the comments; the problem is with their total mediocrity. Nigel Lawson and Matt Ridley made good arguments, but the putative ‘rebuttals’, were all of the kind we’re so used to hearing: the deference to the scientific consensus, and the litany of climate catastrophes that await us. The latter invariably consists of cobbled-together factoids. And the former, as ever, allows someone with very little brain power to marshal ignorance against a better-informed argument.

That much is old news. We’re used to that. But one theme came up often in the arguments in favour of the Bill that I hadn’t given too much thought to before: the apparent need to create ‘investor confidence’ in the renewable energy sector.

Hansard isn’t up yet, so I can’t refer to any of these arguments directly. (I imagine they’re still struggling to decipher Lord Prescott’s speech). But here are some comments made outside the house:

Lord Deban:

in order to secure maximum economic benefit for the UK, it is crucial that the Government gives certainty to investors by legislating to chart a clear course well beyond 2020. Only then will we be able to insure against the risk of much higher future energy prices; enhance Britain’s energy sovereignty; and protect ourselves against dangerous climate change.”

Michael Fallon:

EMR will provide certainty to investors with long-term electricity price stability in low carbon generation

Ed Davey:

CfDs are designed to boost investment in low carbon technologies, including renewables, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), and potentially nuclear, by providing certainty to revenue streams, encouraging investment and finance

The government’s thinking appears to be that creating ‘certainty’ — i.e. eliminating risk — for investors will make them rush to put their money into the UK’s energy infrastructure.

But hold on a minute. When was ‘investment’ ever conceived of as a risk free opportunity?

I thought the deal with capitalism was that those who are fortunate enough to have surplus capital risk it for the possibility of a return. The idea is that you make decisions about what to invest on, based on your own knowledge, or someone else’s knowledge of a market.

When you take out a pension plan, for instance, you’re sometimes asked to state your attitude to risk. Risk and potential yield correlate. But note that, even with a low-risk pension, you’re not being sold certainty.

So what does this say about the Energy Market Reform Bill?

In what sense is it ‘reforming’ a market, when you promise investors that you will eliminate risk? In fact, in what sense is it a ‘market’ at all, if there is no risk? No risk, no competition, no market.

What the government seem to be proposing with the EMR is something more like a loan.

Moreover, some of the arguments for this ‘reform’ include the suggestion that big energy suppliers should be forced to announce their prices up to two years in advance, so that a more competitive retail market, and smaller scale producers can emerge. That can only push prices up. thereby benefiting the ‘investors’ — a surprising number of whom turned out to be speaking in the House of Lords today.

Spiked have published my article on Lewandowsky’s three anti-sceptic papers.

Read more at http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13716/

This essay was written for Spiked-Online, and will be published on Spiked at some point.

As the influence of environmental thinking has increased its hold over the political establishment, the failure to win the public support that might create the basis for decisive action to save the planet has also increasingly been blamed on climate sceptics operating on the internet. On this view, bloggers have thwarted international and domestic action to prevent climate change. Accordingly, the nature of the blogosphere and the workings of the minds of climate sceptics have become the focus of academic research, just as the mechanics of the climate system have been the subject of climate scientists. But this attempt to form a pathological view of a complex debate says much more about the researchers than the objects of their study.

A recent study by academic psychologist, Stephan Lewandowsky at the University of Western Australia aimed to identify climate change sceptics’ tendency towards conspiracy theories. According to Lewandowsky’s paper published in Psychological Science, links were placed on climate blogs, inviting readers to take part in a survey that measured each respondents’ political orientation, attitude to climate change science, and adherence to popular conspiracy theories such as those about the deaths of JFK, Martin Luther King and Diana, the 911 attacks, aliens in Roswell, and the 1969 moon landing. Hence, the title of the paper “NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science“, which claimed to find a correlation between belief in the principle of a free-market, rejection of climate change science and ‘conspiracy ideation’.

However, in spite of the title of the paper linking the idea that the moon landings were faked with scepticism of climate science, just 10 of 1145 respondents either ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ with the statement ‘The Apollo moon landings never happened and were staged in a Hollywood film studio’. Of those 10, six of them either ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ with statements representing the scientific consensus on climate change. Of the remaining four who disagreed with the climate consensus, two ‘strongly agreed’ with every conspiracy theory, another agreed either ‘strongly’ or ‘very strongly’ with each of the 14 conspiracy theories listed in survey. The single remaining climate sceptic either genuinely believed that the moon landings were faked, or was another person seeking to game the survey’s results with a more sophisticated approach than his colleagues’.

A title that better reflected the survey’s results, then, might have been NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (Climate) Science is Real. But the problems with the study don’t stop with the researcher’s haste to give his work a compelling name.

The paper, now known as LOG12, was published on Lewandowsky’s website last July, well ahead of its publication in the journal Psychological Science in March. In spite of not yet having been published,  a ‘pre-press’ version drew a great deal of attention from people across the climate debate. For environmentalists it was proof that their counterparts were textbook nut-jobs. For sceptics, it was a poorly-conceived and improperly-executed smear job with only superficial academic credibility. The paper was circulated by the green media and blogosphere and taken apart by sceptics on the web.

Many problems with the paper emerged. The authors had claimed to have asked the operators of blogs popular with people at different ends of the climate debate to invite their readers to take part in the survey. As the research admits, none of the sceptic blogs responded, leading to the criticism that sceptics had not in fact been asked to participate. More fatally for the paper, it seemed that the researchers had let slip their intention to link climate scepticism with a tendency to produce conspiracy theories, and some blog commenters openly discussed their intentions to respond as sceptics to influence the outcome. Even worse, the paper drew criticism from Lewandowsky’s own colleagues.

Lewandowsky amplified these problems by refusing to answer questions about the survey, choosing instead to write a series of blog posts attacking his critics who were trying to understand his method and analysis. Through the acrimony, it emerged that Lewandowsky had anticipated that as he was well known for his own hostility to climate scepticism, sceptical bloggers would not be willing to participate in his survey. In order to overcome the problem, he asked the University’s ethics committee for permission to send the invitation from other researchers. However, though these emails were found, they had been ignored by the blog owners as the kind of spam bloggers often get, and were discarded, meaning that, nonetheless, sceptics hadn’t really been invited to participate.

Consequently, only 127 people that could be described as sceptics of climate science responded to the survey against the 1018 respondents that Lewandowsky categorises as ‘pro-science’. This should strike us immediately as a ridiculous starting point for an investigation. We would not survey the users of a Star Wars fan website to find out why some people don’t like science fiction movies. Nonetheless, from just 127 suspect responses, Lewandowsky proceeded to make statements about the phenomenon of climate scepticism.

But worse than Lewandowsky’s approach to gathering data is his method for analysing it. Whereas most surveys give results than can be understood fairly simply — eight out of ten cats prefer… — Lewandowsky’s approach was more complicated than his task warranted. And whereas we might expect significant differences between different groups of people to show up when their responses to questions are averaged, in fact few differences between the groups emerge when the data from the surveys is analysed through simpler methods than those deployed by Lewandowsky.

For instance, if we divide the respondents into ‘sceptics’ and ‘warmists’ on the basis of their assent to/dissent from the statement, ‘I believe that burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric temperature to some measurable degree’, and then compare those groups’ assent to/dissent from popular conspiracy theories, we get the following result:

As this table demonstrates, the average (and on this test, it must be noted, fairly militant) sceptic is not much more prone towards conspiracy theories than his putatively ‘pro-science’ counterpart. In fact, the ‘warmist’ is more likely (though only just) to buy into conspiracy theories relating to the 911 and Oklahoma attacks and the assassination of Martin Luther King. Both groups are broadly inclined away from conspiracy theories, with the exception being the only positive assent to the conspiracy theory that — ‘The claim that the climate is changing due to emissions from fossil fuels is a hoax perpetrated by corrupt scientists who wish to spend more taxpayer money on climate research’.

Similarly, a graph showing sceptics’ attitudes to consensus science reveals that not much separates the two groups.

As we can see, and as we might expect, sceptics and warmists only really disagree on matters relating to climate science.

The third variable that Lewandowsky sought to relate to sceptics’ attitude to climate science and conspiracy theories was their views on the economy. (In some of these statements, the scoring was reversed, so that 1 = agreement, 4 = disagreement, denoted by ‘R’.) Here we see slightly more disagreement.

However, this part of the survey asks questions that, in the main, in fact ask the respondent to prioritise the economy versus the environment, rather than to express his views on the economy independently of his views on the environment. This is a problem for Lewandowsky’s subsequent claim that a person’s views on the economy can ‘predict’ his view on the environment. Yet nonetheless, the survey results simply do not suggest that a big difference exists between sceptics and warmists. The average sceptic is, after all, with a score of 2.51, precisely undecided about whether or not ‘I support the free market system but not at the expense of the environmental quality’. Meanwhile, if these statements really reflect opposite ends of some kind of eco-economic axis, we would expect people who are ‘pro-science’ (i.e. ‘warmists’) to dissent more strongly from the statement ‘Free and unregulated markets pose important threats to sustainable development’.

Across these three groups of statements, there is very little disagreement on much other than on the environment. Yet Lewandowsky claimed that ‘Rejection of climate science was strongly associated with endorsement of a laissez-faire view of unregulated free markets‘, and that ‘A second variable that was associated with rejection of climate science as well as other scientific propositions was conspiracist ideation‘.

It seems fairly obvious that Lewandowsky was at best mistaken. The data simply do not support his conclusions. His claims differ remarkably from what the difference between an averaged profile of a ‘sceptic’ and his counterpart look like.

What produced Lewandowsky’s result is a statistical technique called structural-equation modelling (SEM). SEM is a complex process used mainly in the social and behavioural sciences to test and explore assumptions about relationships in observational data. Though this may be an appropriate tool in some cases, its usefulness to the job of shedding light on what people think about complex political and scientific issues is debateable, and may in fact reveal more about Lewandowsky than sceptics. First, there is the problem of Lewandowsky’s assumptions: he confuses categories of economic and environmental ideas; he fails to test for conspiracy theories that might be more coincident with environmentalism than the ones he chose, (for example the idea that climate scepticism is a phenomenon produced by covert PR operations, paid for by fossil fuel companies); and he fails to achieve a robust definition of climate scepticism. Second, a much more simple method — averaging — show that, no matter what the slight statistical tendency of sceptics is, on aggregate, there is no clear line dividing lunatic sceptics from the enlightened climate scientists and their disciples. The more complex method, though, has the virtue of being a larger fig leaf for Lewandowsky’s bad faith.

This would not have been Lewandowsky’s only experiment with statistics-abuse. In June last year, using what he called ‘simple mathematics’, but which in fact depended on Bayesian statistical methods, he made a series of extraordinary claims, concluding that, ‘greater uncertainty about the evolution of the climate should give us even greater cause for concern‘, that ‘greater uncertainty means that things could be worse than we thought’ and that ‘greater uncertainty means that the expected damages from climate change will necessarily be greater than anticipated’. This astonishing claim barely needs unpacking to demonstrate as so much nonsense cloaked in mathematical jargon.

This should raise questions about exactly what it is that Lewandowsky is trying to achieve through the use of dubious statistical methods, and his attempt to understand the minds of climate sceptics: is the point to advance understanding and knowledge, or is it a strategic move in a political battle that there can be no doubt he has taken a stand in.

But to suggest that either bad faith or incompetence has driven Lewandowsky would be, on his view, a conspiracy theory. This was his claim in a subsequent paper published in March by open access journal, Frontiers in Personality Science and Individual Differences, in which Lewandowsky and colleagues attempted to draw conclusions about responses from the climate sceptic blogosphere to his previous paper, LOG12.

In the paper, Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation, Lewandowsky claimed to, ‘identify and trace the hypotheses that emerged in response to LOG12 and that questioned the validity of the paper’s conclusions. Using established criteria to identify conspiracist ideation, we show that many of the hypotheses exhibited conspiratorial content and counterfactual thinking.’

This involved compiling a database of the criticisms made against the first paper and categorising them. For example, one such comment posted by Richard Betts at the Bishop Hill website run by author of the Hockey Stick Illusion, Andrew Montford read as follows:

The thing I don’t understand is, why didn’t they just make a post on sceptic blogs themselves, rather than approaching blog owners. They could have posted as a Discussion topic here at Bishop Hill without even asking the host, and I very much doubt that [Montford] would have removed it. Climate Audit also has very light-touch moderation and I doubt whether Steve McIntyre would have removed such an unsolicited post. Same probably goes for many of the sceptic blogs, in my experience. So it does appear to that they didn’t try very hard to solicit views from the climate sceptic community.

This comment was put into a table with about 110 others that Lewandowsky et al reckoned to be evidence that their authors ‘Espouse conspiracy theories’. Each of the comments were put under different category of ‘conspiracy theory’, such as ‘didn’t email deniers’, ‘Warmists faked data’, and ‘Emailed warmists before deniers’. However, this raises the problem, much as with the previous study, in the way categories are defined before they are tabulated and analysed.

If Betts’s comment is evidence of climate sceptics doing ‘conspiracy theory ideation’, then the test for it is set very low indeed — the comment was a straightforward criticism of Lewandowsky’s attempt to gather data, not speculation about why he had taken such liberties. Saying that Lewandowsky’s attempts to get responses from sceptics was inadequate is nothing like saying that the CIA killed Martin Luther King. Bogus categories and a seemingly objective method allowed Lewandowsky’s prejudices to prevail — a statistical technique serving as a fig leaf, again.

Even more unfortunate for Lewandowsky, however, the comment in question did not belong to a climate change sceptic at all. Richard Betts is a climate scientist, an IPCC lead author, and head of climate impacts research at the UK Meteorological Office.

The fact that Lewandowsky could put Betts into a category of ‘climate sceptic’, and his comment into a category of ‘conspiracy theory’ should be an object lesson about letting prejudice influence research for those seeking to understand and explain the climate debate. Lewandowsky’s confusion is owed to the fact of Betts’s very different and unusual approach to overcoming the climate debate: actually having the debate. Betts was able to criticise Lewandowsky after taking the opinions and discussion between climate sceptics seriously, rather than by taking it for granted that they were wrong.

Lewandowsky worked from his prejudice — that all sceptics are, a priori, wrong. His objective was to expose the ‘motivated reasoning’ that lies behind climate scepticism. But in doing so, he managed only to expose his own bad faith. This raises serious questions, not only about the categories and perceptions of ‘climate scepticism’ that dominate the language of anti-scepticism, but also broader questions about how such naked politicking can be passed off as academic research.

Across three papers based on the same data (a third appearing in the journal, Nature Climate Change), Lewandowsky, either unwittingly or deliberately allowed his prejudices to form the basis from which his study proceeded. On his view, climate scepticism is a ‘rejection of climate science’, which sits in contrast to ‘pro science’ opinion. But debunking this claim is easy. We can find climate scientists who give lower estimates of climate’s sensitivity to CO2 whose arguments are better grounded in science than any number of eco-warriors whose arguments are irrational, emotional, and lack any sense of proportion. One can either believe or disbelieve in the idea of anthropogenic climate change independently of science.

Second, Lewandowsky wanted to claim that this rejection of science is ‘motivated reasoning’ — that something else prefigures in the minds of sceptics, that causes them to reject climate science. This too, is easily countered, not just with a more straightforward analysis of Lewandowsky’s own data, which shows otherwise, but also by questioning this conception of ‘motivated reasoning’ itself.

All reasoning is, to a greater or lesser extent, ‘motivated’ — why would we reason, were it not as a means to some ends or other? However, the implication of Lewandowsky’s claim is that those who believe in climate change have transcended such human faults. Yet we can see that a great deal of presupposition and ‘ideology’ exists prior to the science in the arguments put forward in the debate about the environment. As I have argued previously on Spiked, in order to make the claim that climate change is dangerous, many environmentalists have to presuppose that society’s sensitivity to climate is equivalent to climate’s sensitivity to CO2 — a highly deterministic claim which is not borne out by history, let alone has any grounding in science, and which necessarily precludes the possibility of development mediating the vulnerability of society to climate.

Environmentalism’s presuppositions prefigure much more in Lewandowsky’s analyses than anything he can identify working in the minds of sceptics. This calls into question the ability of psychology to offer insight into the climate debate. For instance, much is made of the scientific consensus on climate change by researchers hoping to understand the phenomenon of climate scepticism, for example by asking whether or not respondents agree or disagree with positions that are assumed to represent the consensus position. However, this method is highly sensitive to the researcher’s ability to accurately represent the consensus, and to elicit from the respondent an accurate picture of his opinion. But as we have already seen, psychologists can quite easily put climate scientists into the category of climate sceptics. Researchers with misconceived ideas about what the science pertains to at best measures the public’s agreement with their own misconceptions. Unfortunately for Lewandowsky and others engaged in the same attempts to form an understanding of climate scepticism from the psychological perspective, the objects of their study may well have a much better understanding of climate science and its problems than they possess. In this way, complex arguments and nuances are lost in the researcher’s desire to reduce multi-dimensional arguments into categories of right and wrong, good and bad, pro-science and anti-science.

Thus, the consensus on climate science is removed from its scientific context, and becomes a consensus without an object: it can mean whatever climate change psychologists want it to mean. Research into the public understanding of science, where that science has implications for public policy, becomes a vehicle for researchers to manifest their own prejudices as policy.

So what might appear at first pass as an inconsequential squabble on the internet between an arrogant researcher and recalcitrant bloggers in fact has significance for the debate about science’s role in public life. How was it that such shoddy, prejudiced, and partial research passed the seemingly objective tests of peer-review, and that such errors of category, method and analysis were nonetheless deemed worthy of publication by editors of scientific publications?

The answer here is twofold. First, there is the insidiousness of the objectless consensus: the mythology of the climate debate precedes the climate debate. The idea of there being scientists on the one hand, opposed by irrational sceptics on the other has been established so concretely that few editors, peer-reviewers or journalists even bother to ask questions about the content of the consensus, much less about how it is contradicted by the substance of climate sceptics’ arguments. Climate change orthodoxy allowed Lewandowsky’s work to go unchallenged by the checks and balances we might expect to catch out, or at least, criticise, such bare-faced framing of the debate.

Second, there is the political utility of the scientific consensus. The desire for policies to have a grounding in science is ubiquitous amongst a class of ‘policymakers’ (PKA politicians) and institutional science. Research such as Lewandowsky’s would not be significant, were it not for the (wrong) belief that climate scepticism’s influence over public opinion is the chief impediment to climate policies. For instance, in February, Parliament’s Science and Technology Select Committee called for submissions to an inquiry into the public’s understanding of climate change, following a report that had advised that ‘should scepticism continue to increase, democratic governments are likely to find it harder to convince voters to support costly environmental policies aimed at mitigation of, or adaptation to, climate change.’

In the era of ‘evidence-based policy-making’, public opinion is an afterthought rather than the measure of a democratic mandate. Only once a political consensus has been achieved between political parties do today’s ‘policymakers’ seek ways of convincing the public that their policies are a good idea. The extent of this upside-down form of politics is revealed by one of the questions asked by the select committee: ‘Does the Government have sufficient expertise in social and behavioural sciences to understand the relationship between public understanding of climate science and the feasibility of relevant public policies?‘

The academy increasingly replaces the ballot box in public affairs. And in particular, the science academy. On the face of it, it looks like a good idea. Expertise, is of course, almost always better placed to answer technical questions than is the man-on-the-street. But when the man-on-the-street becomes the object of the ‘social and behavioural sciences’, which are, in turn, employed to elicit his obedience, politics undergoes a radical transformation.

Material and social scientists have not been forthcoming in their criticism of the growing compact between the academy and the state. Indeed it much better serves those who we might expect to be the best critics of power to serve it instead. Lewandowsky, who has now moved from Australia to be the Chair in Cognitive Psychology in the School of Experimental Psychology, at the University of Bristol, has been given the Royal Society’s Wolfson Research Merit Award — a scheme designed ‘for outstanding scientists who would benefit from a five year salary enhancement to help recruit them to or retain them in the UK’. Says the university:

‘Professor Lewandowsky receives the award for his project entitled ‘The (mis)information revolution: information seeking and knowledge transmission’, which addresses how people navigate the blizzard of information with which we are faced on a daily basis, not all of which is accurate or truthful. The project emphasises how people update their memories and under what conditions they are able to discount information that turns out to be false. The project also examines how people interact with, and influence, each other to understand how information spreads through a society.’

Lewandowsky is well placed to speak about filling the public sphere with information ‘not all of which is accurate or truthful’. But what contribution to either science, or society has he really made that is worthy of such an award? And why would the Royal Society be so keen to chuck £tens of thousands at what can be called at best, cod psychology? If this award reflects the Royal Society’s priorities, it says a great deal about them.

As I’ve reported previously on Spiked, the Royal Society has sought an ever expanding role in policy-making, mostly in environmental matters. In particular, the academy published the results of a two year study into population and the environment last year, which coincided with their award to another researcher notable for his failures — population environmentalist and neo-malthusian doomsayer, Paul Ehrlich. It would seem that the closer the Royal Society get to policy-making, the more distance is put between itself and science. In spite of the failures of Ehrlich and Lewandowsky, their claims still have political utility.

It follows that the science academy’s growing desire for influence in the public sphere causes it to seek evidence that the public aren’t capable of managing their own affairs without it. The premise of a technocracy is, after all, the inadequacies of democracy. Thus we see in the Apocalyptic rants of the likes of Paul Ehrlich FRS and Lewandowsky the beneficiary of their generosity not simply claims about the material world, but claims about the shortcomings of human faculties. Between them, these men paint a picture, from the psychology of the individual, through to the functioning of the planet’s natural processes, in which humanity simply cannot help but steer a course for catastrophe without their intervention.

To point this out, though — to point to the problems with the science, or to ask questions about the political assumptions and consequences of these arguments — is to seem to be ‘anti-science’, or to betray a mindset that is preoccupied with conspiracy theories. To point out that the science is, in fact, groundless and speculative crap, and that it is intended, not to advance knowledge, but to serve a political function is to seem to stand out as a denier of science.

Scientists such as Lewandowsky are better at self-justification than scientific research. Rather than being an investigation into the workings of the material world, Lewandosky’s ‘research’ — a poorly executed and error-prone online survey, seen through dodgy statistical methods and bogus categories — is a naked attempt to explain why people dare challenge scientific authority. But there are good reasons for challenging it. Science has turned its gaze on the public as politicians have sought to remedy their diminishing public support by recruiting the academy. It is not a coincidence that the scientific agenda increasingly reflects the prejudices and problems of elite politics.

This would be an anti-science conspiracy theory if it were a claim that Lewandowsky and the Royal Society were engaged in science proper, and were aware of what they were doing. But what Lewandowsky reveals is the consequence of confusing science as a process — a method — and science as an institution. A shonky web survey is given respectability by its author’s professorship and tenure at a university, by peer-review, and by publication. The institutional apparatus of science allowed prejudice and politics to be passed off as objective study. Criticism of the survey — i.e. about the research’s adherence to (or departure from) the scientific method —  was defended on the basis that it challenged, not the scientific argument (i.e. science as a process), but scientific authority (i.e institutional science).

A culture of intransigence has developed in the shadow of the compact between politics and science, which can be seen in the Lewandowsky affair in microcosm. Lewandowsky’s work unwittingly demonstrates that what is passed off as peer-reviewed and published ‘science’, even in today’s world, is no more scientific than the worst ramblings of the least qualified and nuttiest climate change denier on the internet. It looks like science, certainly, but the product only survives a superficial inspection. The only difference being the institutional muscle that Lewandowsky has access to, but which unhinged climate change deniers do not. The object of the Professor’s study is really his own refusal to debate with his lessers.

The consequence of this should be alarming to everyone who takes an interest in the climate and other scientific debates, no matter what their view on climate change. Lewandowsky demonstrates that the academic institutions do not produce dialogue that has any more merit than the petty exchanges — flame wars –that the internet is famous for. Dressing political arguments up in scientific terminology risks the value of science being lost to society — its potential squandered for an edge in a political fight. After all, if Lewandowsky’s work is representative of the quality of scientific research in general and the standards the academy expects of academics, what does that say about climate science and the quality of the scientific consensus on climate change? If the scientific argument about the link between anthropogenic CO2 and climate change is only as good as Lewandowsky’s claim that ‘Rejection of climate science [is] strongly associated with endorsement of a laissez-faire view of unregulated free markets’, then perhaps climate sceptics should be taken more seriously.

Opinions in the climate debate are typically given weight according to the qualification of the pundit to speak. One such victim of this idea that only the anointed may speak on matters climate-related for instance, asks “Ben Pile: Qualified Pundit or Bullshit Artist“.

In spite of the question, however, I rarely venture an opinion on climate science — this blog and most of my work in fact relates to politics, policies, and the ideas that underpin the response to what is claimed to be climate science. The point being that what is claimed to be climate science often isn’t, and one doesn’t need to be a climate scientist to recognise it.

Over at Bishop Hill, Andrew Montford has posted a video that would be hilarious if it wasn’t quite so tragic: the sight of climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt, refusing to debate with Roy Spencer on the John Stossel show. One does not need to be a climate scientist to recognise that there is a problem with climate scientists refusing to engage in debate. You don’t need to have a science qualification at all to know that there is something wrong with intransigence. It’s even more tragic, since Schmidt was given the “EarthSky Science Communicator of the Year” award last year. It seems that ‘communication’ isn’t a two way street.

But the logic of ‘communication’ without dialogue aside, here’s the video.

Here is the exchange which I found particularly interesting:

Stossel: Assuming this is true, why is it necessarily a problem? Warmer might be better. More people die from cold than warmth.

Schmidt: We have built a society, an agricultural system, and cities and everything that we do based on assumptions that basically the climate is not gonna change. The fact that we have so much infrastructure right near the shore is because we didn’t expect the sea level to rise. The damage that we had from Hurricane Sandy was increased because sea level has increased by ten to twelve inches in this area over the last hundred years.

Schmidt’s profile page at Real Climate lists his background as follows:

He received a BA (Hons) in Mathematics from Oxford University, a PhD in Applied Mathematics from University College London and was a NOAA Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Global Change Research.

So, let’s make our slightly facetious point first — i.e. in the spirit of those who demand we only speak about what our qualifications entitle us to speak of.

Even advanced degrees in applied mathematics do not qualify anyone to speak about what assumptions on which society is founded are. But what a degree from Oxford might demonstrate is that, in fact, the assumptions that society is founded on are fairly enduring. I grew up there. Two things are obvious to anyone who spent any time there with their eyes open:

1. Some of the buildings are very old indeed.
2. It floods a lot.

In fact, the city is clearly shaped by the flood plains that surround it, and cut through it. People have always known that rivers rise and and fall. Occasionally, the plains are insufficient, and houses in newer parts of town are flooded. But this is a problem caused, in the most part, by land and water management, rather than a radically different climate than those that the founders of Oxford City experienced.

So the — slightly facetious — point is, although Schmidt may well be well qualified to speak about climate systems, from a mathematical perspective, is he at all qualified to speak about the wider implications of climate?

This question does not imply that Gavin shouldn’t take an interest in the wider effects or ‘impacts’ of climate, or speak about them. It’s just to say that the logic of demanding that those who want to speak about climate change have qualifications in climate science in fact excludes climate scientists from making statements about society, and the bases on which it has been built.

This leads us to a more serious question. How does Schmidt know that we have ‘a society, an agricultural system, and cities and everything that we do based on assumptions that basically the climate is not gonna change’? Whose assumption is it? When was it made?

In fact, as I’ve argued a lot on these pages, it’s the presupposition of environmentalism, not the assumption of society. It is only on the environmentalist’s perspective that the environment exists in stasis, such that change to it are catastrophic.

His comments on Hurricane Sandy are revealing here. He notes the sea level rise over the 20th Century, only some of which can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change, if at all.

(image from wikipedia.)

Sea level rise is a problem that society would have to contend with, with our without global warming. Though it is a problem, with or without global warming, that as the ice2sea project reveals today, has been over stated. According to the research:

The ice2sea projections based on simulations of physical processes suggest lower overall contributions from melting ice to sea-level rise than many studies published since AR4. […] To explore these remaining uncertainties, ice2sea has used a less-formal approach of an “expert elicitation.” This method concluded that there is a less than 1-in-20 risk of the contribution of ice sheets to global sea-level rise exceeding 84cm by 2100.

Nonetheless, the alarmist press were ready to spin the good news into bad:

There is a 5 per cent chance sea level rise could go up by 84cm due to melting ice.

Said Louise Gray, the Telegraph’s Environmental Correspondent, apparently forgetting that ‘less that 1-in-20’ is less than ‘a five percent chance’. The same inability to use numbers prompted Gray’s headline:

Sea levels around Britain could rise by more than one metre (3ft) due to climate change, according to a new assessment of melting ice sheets and glaciers, causing floods in London and other coastal towns.

Only slightly less daft is Fiona Harvey in the Guardian:

Sea-level rises could send floods driven by storm surges over London’s Thames Barrier regularly by the end of the century, if nothing is done to bolster the UK’s flood defences, scientists warned on Tuesday.

But it turns out that the barrier, which was originally only intended to last until 2030, on the basis of up to 8mm sea level rise a year — much more than what we have seen since the construction of the barrier in the early 1980s — and will be replaced in 2070. In fact, the Guardian pointed these facts out in 2007 — here — so it is remarkable to see Harvey, six years later, revealing that the Thames Barrier may well be past it’s use-by date nearly a century after its construction. Journalists just don’t like good news.

The point of this, in relation to Schmidt’s claims about an assumption of a static environment is that it simply isn’t true. The concern that prompted the design of the Thames Barrier was a number of floods in the 1950s that caused hundreds of deaths in London. In the 1960s, the plans were drawn up, and construction began in the 1970s, and completed in the 1980s.

In 1968, Roger Cooke MP told the House of Commons in an appeal for the funds for the Thames Barrier:

Professor Bondi’s full report on the London flood barrier proves that the risk is real even if the floods were only a foot or so above the 1953 level. Why do we think that the risk of this surge is considerably greater than it was even a few years ago? First, geologists and geographers tell us that the South-East of England is sinking at the rate of between 7 and 12 inches every century. Therefore, even since 1953 the South-East has sunk an inch or so.

So the idea of a stable environment was not an assumption of planners nearly half a century ago. The Victorians, a hundred years earlier, were no less ignorant of the changes around them…

In 1879, an act was passed by Parliament mandating the construction of river walls and other floods defences.

So what is unusual about London, since the 1950s, is its lack of flooding. In spite of geological effects, and the consequences of settling next to tidal waters, which, contrary to Schmidt’s claims were understood to a greater or lesser extent, Londoners have been safer in the second half of the 20th Century than the first. And they are safer precisely because nobody assumed that things would remain the same.

There has never been an assumption that the environment will remain the same. The interactions of land and water causing problems for society feature regularly in recorded history. Similarly, agricultural productivity, in the same era, increased as we developed means to decrease our dependence on natural processes. Far from being premised on the idea of a stable climate, urban, agricultural and industrial development is premised on the idea that a better life can be be found by distancing and protecting ourselves from the elements and their whim. We work in offices, factories, studios, schools and hospitals, rather than toil in fields. We are less dependant on, and and less vulnerable to changes in the environment.

The idea of a stable world, and our dependency on it belongs to the environmentalist. It is a political idea, but which is passed off as ‘science’ in order to mandate the construction of political institutions. I came across the most explicit declaration of this I have ever seen yesterday. In the FT, the paper’s chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, bemoaning the concentration of atmospheric CO2 reaching 400ppm opined:

Most people believe today that a low-carbon economy would be one of universal privation. They will never accept such a situation. This is true both of the people of high-income countries, who want to retain what they have, and the people of the rest of the world, who want to enjoy what the people of high-income countries now have. A necessary, albeit not sufficient condition, then, is a politically sellable vision of a prosperous low-carbon economy. That is not what people now see. Substantial resources must be invested in the technologies that would credibly deliver such a future.

Yet that is not all. If such an opportunity does appear more credible, institutions must also be developed that can deliver it.

Neither the technological nor the institutional conditions exist at present. In their absence, there is no political will to do anything real about the process driving our experiment with the climate. Yes, there is talk and wringing of hands. But there is, predictably, no effective action. If that is to change, we must start by offering humanity a far better future. Fear of distant horror is not enough.

This blog has argued that, whether or not the climate is changing, there is no need for special political institutions, or special forms of politics (i.e. environmentalism) to cope with the problems of the environment and changes within it. Rather, the ‘need’ for such institutions belongs not to the population in general, but to the political establishment. Changes to the environment did not cause the politicians of 1878 or 1963 to call for the creation of new political institutions, though the evidence of a changing environment was stark: the deaths of hundreds and hundreds of people, the loss of and damage to property, and the obstruction of day to day life. To the Victorians and the MPs of the 1960s, changes in the environment were simply engineering problems. Now changes to the environment are seen as problems caused by mankind himself — as though events like the destruction of Pompeii really could be explained by the decadence of the city’s population angering the gods, requiring that political institutions be created to ensure obedience.

Schmidt seems oblivious to the criticisms that can be made against his wondering from theoretical climate science, into total speculation about society and its functioning, and its dependence on the natural environment. He wants climate science to be able to make statements about how society works, and relates to the natural environment, and should be organised and regulated. This desire should be a clue that there is more going on in climate ‘science’ than simply science.

Worse than his obliviousness is his refusal to engage in debate about it. At least we can see in the Hansard, in the 1870s and 1960s, that debate about our relationship with the natural environment, based on the actual experience of actual people (rather than computer simulations) was allowed, was a response to people’s actual needs, and was acted on.

Perhaps the ‘sellable’ institution that Wolf is searching for, then, but the name of which escapes him, is democracy. Meanwhile, Schmidt’s silly game of musical chairs is perhaps the most acute demonstration of why environmentalism has failed: it won’t stand up for itself. It can’t stand up for any other reason than to walk away from debate. The assumption of a stable environment is defended from criticism by brute ignorance.

The death of Margaret Thatcher has brought all sorts of history back under the microscope. But often, such retrospectives become revision, revealing much more about the viewer in the present than the facts of the past. Much of this is less than dignified. Thatcher’s critics today, for instance blame her for seemingly turning some kind of social democratic utopia into a living hell. But Britain in the 1970s was dominated by deep economic crises, industrial disputes, and an encompassing geopolitical conflict. As Brendan O’Neill points out, today’s (and indeed many of yesterday’s) critics and fans of Thatcher and Thatcherism credit her with too much and the people who voted for her with too little.

Throughout the 80s, as chunks of Britain’s working-class voters abandoned the decrepit Labour Party and annoyed the hell out of the bien pensant classes by being vulgarly materialistic, it became fashionable to argue that these plebs must have been brainwashed by that mistress of might.

One such revision caught my ear this weekend. On BBC Radio 4’s iPM programme (I.e. the Saturday evening news for those not familiar with it) a feature on Thatcher’s environmentalism claimed that one of her most famous maxims — there’s no such thing as society — was inspired by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, famous at the time for his book, The Selfish Gene, but more recently for his militant atheism. Here is the section, as broadcast. (A transcript of the section is available here).

But how true is this? To what extent was Thatcher influenced by the ecological perspective?

Controversy about what Thatcher meant by ‘there’s no such thing as society’ persists. Her actual words, in an interview for Women’s Own magazine are recorded at  http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689 but the important points are:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!” […] and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation […]. “

Thatcher’s point, it seems fair to say, is rather more subtle than has been claimed by those who have taken ‘no such thing as society’ out of context. What her words sounded like to many on the left was ‘every man for himself’, and ‘sod the rest of you’, but one doesn’t need to be a Thatcherite to agree with her that reciprocity is a necessary condition, or possibly even a definition of ‘society’ — that ‘society’ cannot be taken for granted. What critics of Thatcher might have said, was that if life on the dole really was better than life working, then there’s a real problem with wages, rather than the dole. Unfortunately for them, they chose and continue to choose to make the cheap points. Unfortunately for her, unemployment and inflation continued to be problem for much of her time in office, and beyond, and the welfare bill rose.

So far, however, this discussion seems to have little to do with political ecology. Yet on iPM, it was Ian Swinglands view that,

“Thatcher eschewed the idea of society because of a high table dinner at Magdalen College at Oxford. Richard Dawkins convinced her there was no such thing as society, just individuals. I, as a lowly researcher said she should emphasise environment in her administration, which was missing at the time”.

My girlfriend had just won a first prize fellowship at Magdalen. And as a result, I was invited to the Judge Randolph dinner in March of 1978, only eighteen months after Richard Dawkins had published The Selfish Gene. And I was close to Thatcher and I know Richard Dawkins was there. John Cribbs I think was there. A lot of us who came from the Zoology Department in Oxford. And she was heard to say that society is the building block for the future.

And immediately, many zoologists, lowly post-doctoral researchers like me said society doesn’t exist, and this was joined by a mighty chorus from those more senior than I. And this put her back and she challenged why we were saying it. And that brought us to essentially the argument from the evolutionary ecologists which indeed did prove that individuals mattered more than society.

Swingland proudly announces that zoologists disproved the existence of society, helping Thatcher to formulate Thatcherism at a dinner. This is a curious and extravagant claim, not least because it seems to have no relation to Thatcher’s comments or actions about society. Moreover, Thatcher’s argument is about relationships between people — reciprocity — and in particular, benefits, not about ecology. What can biological scientists really tell you about the rights and wrongs of welfare?

More importantly, how can an ecologist make a claim, from the biological sciences, that ‘society doesn’t exist’? ‘Society’ is not an object of the biological sciences. Moreover, it is not true that Thatcher ‘eschewed society’: she simply didn’t think it could be taken for granted. This is odd indeed: natural scientists making claims about the social world, and taking credit for the development of political ideas, which weren’t actually made.

It might be that the professor of zoology is a world-class expert in moth-counting and badger-spotting. However, zoologists rarely develop a deep understanding of or insight into the political or social world by mere dint of their native field of study. Indeed, they frequently labour under the misapprehension that it is possible to see the human world in the terms of zoology or ecology.

They are wrong. If ecologists really did demonstrate that there was no such thing as society (in the literal sense) one reason for this claim might be the inadequacies of ecology and ecologists’ hubris, rather than the power of this scientific perspective.

I have argued in the past that there’s no such thing as ecosystem. What are the boundaries of an ecosystem? There are none, so in what sense can there be said to be ecosystems at all? What gets determined to be an ‘ecosystem’ depends on what aspects of that ecosystem one focuses attention on. But any ecosystem is part of something larger, and may consist of many exchanges that are beyond the scope or sense of any study. Perhaps worse, ecology seems either to be premised on the idea that these systems tends towards ‘self-correction’, or that ‘balance’ is an ’emergent property’ of these complex systems. Yet such mechanisms have never been identified in situ and even less so at scale. It seems that in spite of ecology’s limited potential as a material science, it nonetheless has proven itself very useful in the political sphere. Ecologists may have something useful to say about fields, and the management of certain areas of land, but their sights are set on ‘planet management’.

Is this what appealed to Thatcher?

Swingland’s misunderstanding of what Thatcher said is matched by a misunderstanding of what his fellow diner, Richard Dawkins said. Contrary to Swingland’s claim, Dawkins had worked from George C Williams’s ideas, to overturn the prevailing view that selection works at the level of species, groups, and individuals. Dawkins did not say that there were only individuals. Instead, Dawkins emphasised a gene-centric view of evolution — that genes, not individuals or groups of individuals compete.

However, these confused ideas, in contradiction against themselves and against reality did seem to reflect, if not influence political thinking at the time, just as they do today. Not, as Swingland claims, directly to encourage Thatcher to take the political establishment towards environmentalism, or to take a different view of the individual, but in a deeper sense.

The implication of the zoologists’ and ecologists’ environmental determinism and Dawkins’ genetic determinism took agency away from people. Genes, rather than the self, were the decisive agents that drove the behaviour of individuals and groups. People merely exist as the half way point between the gene and the environment. Indeed, the gene is, on this view, a description of the environment as much as it is a description of the organism. Thus the idea forms that changes to the environment represent maladaptation of the individual organism: ecological niches shift, leaving the world’s population ‘homeless’ in an ecological sense.

The idea of genes, rather than individuals ‘having’ agency was extended into the social world by Dawkins himself in The Selfish Gene, and then more so by thinkers that followed. Ideas, suggested Dawkins, could be thought of as analogous to genes: they could be copied, but copied unfaithfully, leading to the possibility of mutation. Thus, the idea that evolution occurred at the level of the gene, not at the level of the individual has a metaphysical analogy: ideas do the ‘thinking’, and people’s minds are merely the vehicles for those ideas. Some even suggested that the sense of self — of subjective experience — was itself a product of ‘memes’ (mental analogues of ‘genes’) developing a strategy to better aid their propagation.

This narrow and hollow version of humanity was explored in Adam Curtis’s series of films, The Trap: Whatever Happened to Our Dream of Freedom. In this section of the film, Curtis demonstrates that the notion of individuals being driven by mechanical forces has a political, rather than scientific antecedent, which Dawkins, rather than being the discoverer of, merely reifies.

It would be too much to say that this strange, anti-human metaphysics can be seen being brought to every political decision that has been made since the Selfish Gene was published. But we can see this idea gaining influence across many areas of public life since long before 1970s.

So although Thatcherism has been understood to celebrate the individual over society, in fact what emerges over the era of Thatcherism (and Major, Blair, Brown and now Cameron, of course) is a very much reduced understanding of the individual. This has found its epitome in the policies of recent governments that have been discussed on this blog. In particular, the early Blair government conceived of a ‘Quality of Life Barometer’, which would measure things that were considered to be essential to a sense of wellbeing, including the amount of birdsong people were exposed to. The coalition government have gone further, developing a ‘Happiness Index‘. More sinisterly, the government have created a ‘behaviour insights team‘, which aims to find ways to elicit the cooperation of the public with the government’s policies — a strategy known as ‘nudge’. On this view of people, the relationship between state and individuals is transformed, fully in accordance with the idea of people as actors driven by mechanical forces, rather than by reason and an understanding of their own interests.

So the paradox of the ‘individualism’ is that it depends on a degraded sense of the ‘individual’. It is not the enlightenment concept of the individual that dominates in the post-Thatcher Britain. It is instead an object that needs to be managed by benevolent authorities. We are not ‘individuals’ in the sense that we can decide what to eat, drink or take, or know how to behave or manage the other risks we are exposed to. Concomitantly, therefore, this transformation of the individual, and of the relationship between the state and individual undermines the basis of democratic governance. If people aren’t even capable of making decisions about their own emotional lives, how might they be able to vote the right way on matters as important as climate change and other ecological crises?

Thatcher is then credited with kicking off the climate issue. A barely coherent Roger Harrabin claims:

Well Mrs. Thatcher had an absolutely remarkable effect on the environmental movement, and how the environment is perceived in the wider public. I think it was the fact that a Prime Minister always adds legitimacy to what they say, the role adds legitimacy, the fact that she herself was a research chemist, and the fact that she was coming from the libertarian right at a time when the environment movement was dominated by, I suppose you might say the soft-green-left, lent a massive weight to two speeches that she gave, which I think a lot of people will may have forgotten. One of them was to the Royal Society, both at the back end of the eighties, these, one of them to the United Nations. They were absolutely extraordinary blistering environmental speeches, warning of the prospect of irretrievable damage to the atmosphere, the oceans and the Earth itself. And if you speak to the people who were running Friends of the Earth at the time, they will say their membership profile changed. You suddenly noticed the environment appearing on the front pages of the newspapers instead of the inside pages, and the front pages of serious papers, leading the BBC, which it hadn’t tended to do before. It was absolutely extraordinary galvanising speeches. Now the policy often didn’t match up with the speeches. And later on she recanted in a major way, saying that climate change was some sort of leftist plot to redistribute global wealth, which, it’s easy to see it that way. But the effect she had on society in general and on institutions and their change was very very profound.

This, of course, pertains to Thatcher’s 1988 speech to the Royal Society. But rather than kick-starting the climate change issue internationally, the content of the speech reveals a different story:

The Government espouses the concept of sustainable economic development.  Stable prosperity can be achieved throughout the world provided the environment is nurtured and safeguarded. Protecting this balance of nature is therefore one of the great challenges of the late Twentieth Century and one in which I am sure your advice will be repeatedly sought.

The concept of ‘sustainable economic development’ was brought to the global agenda a year previously, by another female Prime Minister — of Norway at the time — Gro Harlem Brundtland. Brundtland was commissioned by the UN to establish the World Commission on Environment and Development, and to produce a report on both matters. The implication — the working assumption — is, as per the claims of ecologists describe above, is that development occurs at the expense of the environment, or disturbs its ‘balance’.

Brundtland’s report, ‘Our Common Future’, thus set out the scheme for ‘sustainable’ development and the global institutional apparatus and relationships necessary to achieve it. The report and its consequences have been the subject of much discussion on this blog, the most important parts of which are: that establishing supranational political authorities and agencies deprives domestic politics of democratic processes; that the report proposes new relationships between international agencies, ‘civil society’ or NGOs, and national governments, expanding the role of NGOs on the global stage; that ‘sustainability’ is in fact toxic and hostile to development; and that the desire for supranational political organisations preceded the need for them being identified by ‘science’ and is owed in the main part to domestic political crises, in particular those experienced by the West.

It was Brundtland, then, who did much more than Thatcher to expand the roles and profiles of environmental and development NGOs, bringing them and their issues to the world stage. Brundtland had set a place for them at the international table. Contra Harrabin’s somewhat UK-centric view of things, these international processes had been going on since at least the early 1970s, in the aftermath of the Club of Rome and the Ehrlich’s dire prognostications. And as has also been noted here previously, the emergence of climate change as the dominant issue occurred precisely because the failure of those prognostications to provide the basis for the political compact sought by Brundtland: fears about acid rain, ozone depletion, peak resources and over-population turned out to either be non-existent or otherwise too easy to solve. A more encompassing crisis was needed.

Harrabin claims that ‘Maggie Thatcher did try and at least put environment on the map’, but it was already well established. Public opinion, which Harrabin cites, as I’ve argued here, was immaterial to the ascendency of the environmental issue, because the point of establishing international political institutions is to facilitate politics in spite of it. Green NGOs are not pressure groups in the fashion of grassroots organisations formed in the public; they are, by design, part of the establishment. They may have looked like unruly anarchists, but they were drawn from the highest strata (which is perhaps one reason why it was harder for policemen to hit them over the head with truncheons than it was to mete out the same to miners and hippies), and they were funded and encouraged by supragovernmental organisations. Moreover, whereas Harrabin claimed that Thatcher’s emphasis on environment, which was ‘ dominated by, I suppose you might say the soft-green-left’, ‘may have run completely counter to her libertarian approach’, the environmental movement of the 1980s could not be so described. Much of the left was in fact hostile to environmentalism, and was dominated by trade disputes. In fact, early thinking on the environment was precisely right wing. The first incarnation of the UK Green Party, formerly Ecology, formerly PEOPLE, had been established by a group of Conservatives, who had been moved by the thinking of Paul Ehrlich, who was himself a member of the GOP. From the same cloth, Garret Hardin’s influential essay, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ argued for the privatisation of all land and natural resources as the best way to protect them from over-exploitation by ‘free riders’.

It’s interesting to note Hardin’s and Ehrlich’s use of mathematics to hide political claims. Whereas ideas about the rights and wrongs of private property had been discussed in terms of principles, and relations between people, this new political idea looked instead at the exchanges between society and the natural environment in a zero-sum game — thinking which of course inspired Dawkins to a greater or lesser extent. In Hardin’s mathematical description of the natural world, its inhabitants –‘people’, but of a kind not credited with faculties of reason beyond those which inclined them to become ‘free riders’ — could not use shared resources without over-exploiting them. The political right’s flirtation with environmentalism represents the hollowing out of its moral argument. Ditto the nominative left, following its comprehensive collapse in the 1990s. It was numbers which now ruled.

Thatcher was not the author of contemporary political environmentalism in the UK. Nor was she the author of the international climate change agenda. Though she no doubt played her part, in reality these phenomena were produced by political necessity — it is politicians, not people, who blindly respond to their environments. By the time Thatcher had been persuaded to make statements about the environment, had been conceived of as the basis for global political dialogue and had been on the international agenda for decades. She was simply doing what was determined by that agenda: her ‘government espouse[d] the concept of sustainable economic development’.

And neither Thatcher, nor Dawkins, nor the Ecologists at the High Table of the Formal Dinner at Magdalen College authored the strange, mathematical models of the environment and the twisted fiction of the individual as automata. Those ideas had existed for well over a decade, and were born out of the peculiarities of the cold war. But they did do a lot to make those ideas real.

In the same way, Roger Harrabin and Ian Swingland rewrote the history of Thatcherism, political ecology, and the climate issue. But it was a history they have no grasp of, much less clear sight on. Even the academic who was there at the time, and the reporter who has been covering the issue for nearly as long can not get the facts straight. Accordingly, they tell the story backwards, from the present: environmentalism is at odds with conservative thinking; that Thatcher proposed ‘there is no such thing as society’ and invented individualism; that such individualism is apart from, and opposed to global political environmentalism rather than essential to its thinking; and that climate change politics began in Magdalen College in 1978. Contemporary mythology is rewritten as ‘history’: the myth of humans as machines, dependent on a fragile natural world were expedient to the academy and the political establishment in the -60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and ’00s just as the myth of Thatcherism is handy to the environmental correspondent in 2013. Myths that seem to explain the world in reality only give temporary comfort to those who feel disoriented by it. After all, it wasn’t until the wobbly end of Thatcher’s administration that she sought to identify with the environmental message, much as it was wobbly conservatives who had their own green epiphany as the sixties drew to a close, and the wobbly left went green in the 1990s.

This has been the hardest thing for environmentalists and environmental commentators to understand. Right and left produced their own variants of ‘green’, and both demand that big, supranational organisations fill the void. And then both got upset that the functions of those organisations better meeting the purposes of the other. And instead of looking for deeper historical reasons for environmentalism’s ascendency, many green journalists prefer to work from the idea that scientists identified a problem, to which politicians have responded — some for, some against, divided on rigid lines. But as the short BBC piece on Thatcher and environmentalism reveals, there are no straight lines in the environmental debate, and the scientists and politicians were as confused about science and politics then as they are today.

It is possible that Richard Dawkins did tell Thatcher that he and his colleagues had proved that society didn’t exist and that the individual was the agent in world, though it would seem to contradict his own work. It is also possible that Thatcher took the inspiration for her late environmentalism from the ecologists in 1978, though it took her a decade to do anything about it. Better accounts of what happened exist. The hubris of ecologists, the diminished concept of the individual, the supranational apparatus and political malaise was established long before the ecologists’ self-regarding dinner party had served up its starters.

Environmental activism is most noted for ‘direct action’ — behaviour that has two fundamental characteristics. 1. It is highly visible. 2. It is disruptive to the operations of some activity or other.

Direct action is necessary, I have argued, because the environmental movement isn’t a movement at all. If the environmental movement were able to mobilise large numbers of people, it would be able to assert itself without recourse to high profile, camera-friendly stunts.

Another tendency of direct activists is their claim to impunity. They say their actions are legitimised by the greater good they will serve.

Famously, Jim Hansen gave evidence at a trial of environmental protesters who had tried to shut down operations at the Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station. The judge at the trial agreed that the activists’ actions had the ‘highest possible motives‘, and spared them a jail sentence.

This appeal for immunity from the law has again been claimed by protesters in the ‘No Dash for Gas‘ (NDG) campaign. Their webpage explains their recent attempt to save the planet…

Early on Monday 29th October, sixteen people scaled the chimneys of West Burton gas-fired power station, shutting it down and halting further construction. West Burton is one of the first of up to 20 new gas-fired power stations the Government has planned.

The new ‘dash for gas’ will leave us dependent on a highly polluting and increasingly expensive fossil fuel for decades to come. It would make even our modest carbon reduction targets impossible to hit, and cause household energy bills to soar even further. While energy companies profit, our chances of a secure and sustainable future are slipping away.

People who follow the debate will understand the problem here. Most households are facing higher and rising energy bills. Environmentalists have tried to argue that meeting carbon emissions and renewable energy targets will reduce bills, create employment and save the planet. None of these claims are true. The degree of risk faced by the planet is over-stated. And creating more labour-intensive energy through less efficient methods can only make energy more expensive. Green NGOs have, through their lobbying, created an environment which is hostile to the replacement of energy infrastructure — be it nuclear, gas, coal or oil. And governments and political parties who have been unable or unwilling to challenge them and have sought ‘green’ alternatives and heavy, top-down policies which have comprehensively failed. Thus, the UK’s energy infrastructure has atrophied, leading to the situation we now find ourselves in — political uncertainty has created a problem of uncertainty for investment, and energy companies have been able to demand more and more. Environmentalism has created an entirely new kind of ‘insecure and unsustainable’ situation and given higher and higher profits to energy companies. Most people recognise that the priorities that have driven the current and previous governments’ energy policies are responsible for the higher prices they now face.

Even if that’s too bold a claim, it is clearly the case that environmental activists have been unable to mobilise public opinion. Thus, the NDG was forced to campaign through direct action, reinventing its claim to be acting ‘in the greater good’ on the way:

This action is therefore in defence of the global commons, which are under sustained attack by polluting fossil fuel companies. We are here to challenge corporate power and the rush to further ingrain an energy system that puts short term profits of the few, above the collective needs of the many.

NDG presume to act in ‘the collective needs of the many’, but have no mandate from the many to act on their behalf. Anyone can claim to be acting on behalf of the many, for the greater good. But very few can demonstrate that they actually are. NDG act in spite of the many’s indifference to their campaign.

The operators of the site that was the target of NDGs action, EDF, are now persuing the group for £5 million in a civil action. Says the company:

The court case of 20 February was a criminal case and the protesters were brought to court to face charges following their arrest by police at the West Burton gas power station. It was not an action involving EDF Energy.

EDF Energy supports the right to lawful protest and respects differing points of view. However, the consequences of this illegal activity put lives at risk, caused considerable disruption to the site during its construction, and considerable financial losses. It also delayed the completion of the new power station – part of a massive investment in the UK’s energy supply which will provide enough electricity for 1.5m homes. It is important that those considering this kind of action understand that they may face consequences through civil action for the damage, cost and disruption they cause.

This has led to predictable howls of protest from protesters and their supporters. The unlikely sounding Zion Lights proclaims in the Huffington Post that ‘what EDF are attempting to hold to ransom is the British freedom to protest’. Monbiot, in full conspiracy-theory mode warned that ‘The energy giant is part of a global strategy by corporations to stifle democracy’. “When protest stops, politics sclerotises: it becomes a conversation between different factions of the elite”, he said. This blog has been arguing much the same thing for years now. Parents of one of the NDG protesters, Russ and Barbara Fauset have launched an online petition to persuade EDF to drop the action.

EDF are suing Claire and her fellow activists for £5 million. We feel this is totally unfair. The company says that they have to take the consequences for their actions. EDF’s business is to make money, not safeguard the planet for generations to come; theirs is a short term, expedient enterprise. It’s heartbreaking to think that Claire and her friends are being punished for putting themselves at risk for the good of humanity.

England celebrates its right to peaceful protest. The abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage are but two issues which have only come about through this means. We should be applauding and rewarding the group for their actions rather than allowing a multi-national organisation to put them in debt, possibly for the rest of their lives for a sum, which to EDF is a mere drop in the ocean, but well over a lifetime’s income for them.

But does the ‘right to protest’ really extend to criminal damage, and the unlawful closing down of essential infrastructure? Does democracy really depend on people being able to shut down power stations? And can the NDG campaign really be compared to campaigns to abolish slavery and establish universal suffrage?

Democracy surely doesn’t mean treating anyone with a half-baked claim to be acting ‘in the needs of the many’ as though they were above the law. (And NB, you don’t see climate sceptics closing down wind farms). The right to protest — or more accurately, acting out on narcissistic fantasies about saving the planet — is not endangered by EDF’s civil action any more than it was endangered by the criminal law applying to any action, be it part of a political campaign, or simply mindless vandalism.

But what about the comparison to other civil rights struggles?

The first problem for the NDG campaigners is that they have no real grievance of their own. They can’t claim to being treated like slaves, denied the vote, or otherwise discriminated against on the basis of their race. Their protest is about the way energy is produced and the effects they claim it will cause. If they were really worried about democracy, they would of course be complaining that the basis of the government’s energy policies — environmentalism — had not been tested by the democratic process, and that climate sceptics are routinely excluded from the public debate. It’s a debate that activists do all that they can to avoid. Democracy has been an impediment to environmentalism.

Lacking ground for a real claim to be a contemporary civil right struggle, and having only a flimsy argument about the greater good, a bigger problem for the NDG group is that individuals in the movements they compare themselves to didn’t plead for special treatment. When Suffragettes found themselves in prison, their complaint was that they were being treated as ordinary criminals rather than as political prisoners. When Nelson Mandela eschewed peaceful protest in favour of sabotage — of power stations amongst other things — he did not expect to be let off because his actions to bring about the end of apartheid were justified. Indeed, he is reported to have refused a deal offering him early release on the condition of his renouncing violence. Prison was itself a weapon against injustice. Mandela later reflected:

In a way I had never quite comprehended before, I realized the role I could play in court and the possibilities before me as a defendant. I was the symbol of justice in the court of the oppressor, the representative of the great ideals of freedom, fairness and democracy in a society that dishonoured those virtues. I realized then and there that I could carry on the fight even in the fortress of the enemy.

None of the above is an argument that direct action — nor even sabotage or violence — is wrong or right. I don’t make that claim, because I can imagine situations where such things are a means to ending an insufferable situation of violence and oppression. The argument here is that the protesters flatter themselves with allusions to past struggles to achieve civil rights and political freedom, and their claim to be acting in the common interest right now. But anti-apartheid, anti-slavery campaigns, and campaigns for universal suffrage really do involve large numbers of people and their political freedoms, and freedom from oppression.

More importantly, Suffragettes and anti-apartheid campaigners took their decisions knowing that the likely consequence would be their imprisonment, or worse, torture and death.

The protesters want to claim immunity from criminal and civil prosecution on the basis that their actions serve a greater good. But this greater good does not exist, or at least has not been demonstrated. Even if it did, however — even if their actions could be compared to the civil rights movements of the past — it would still be no basis on which to let them off. In fact, if these protesters had the courage of their convictions, they would surely have to accept the decision of a court.

The point of disruptive protest is to say to the status quo that prison — or whatever — is worth suffering to end the injustice in question. Protest, in the form of demonstration, meanwhile, is a simple demonstration of weight of numbers. The expectation of impunity is a demonstration that the direct action was not executed in anticipation of prosecution. Thinking that you’re going to get away with it is not a defence, and it is not a demonstration of bravery, much less a demonstration of the belief that the status-quo is pitched against an oppressed section of society, as was the case with the suffragettes, black people, and slaves. Direct action means nothing if it does not mean accepting the possibility of punishment.

Finally, it’s also worth remembering that activist organisations — even those who routinely trash crops, scale parliament and power stations and runways to achieve their aims by disruption — have more clout in the UK, EU and UN policy-making processes than the UK public. They are invited to negotiations by politicians. They are funded by governments. Their approval and advice is sought.

That’s not oppression.

A few weeks back, I took a look at the Friends of the Earth campaign that links Samsung to environmental destruction in Indonesia. FoE wanted to mobilise public opinion, using the standard method of generating consumer guilt with shocking images of poor people and lush landscapes denuded of trees. The message is simple: you did that, by buying a smartphone.

But the tin used in Samsung’s smartphones amounted to no more than 95 tonnes of hundreds of thousands of tonnes produced annually. The emphasis on smartphones was a strategy, though was presented as something of significance.

FoE currently have another campaign running — the Bee Cause — which aims to protect Britain’s bee population. FoE want the public to sign their petition, the wording of which is as follows:

Dear David Cameron,

Britain’s bees are under threat. Yet we need bees. They’re important to our food supply, economy and quality of life.

Along with thousands of others, I’ve joined The Bee Cause to help protect Britain’s bees.

But the Government needs to act too. Please adopt a National Bee Action Plan to ensure that the way we farm our food and plan our towns and cities gets bees back on track. The Government must also have the right experts in place to protect our most threatened species.

Yours sincerely,

Who doesn’t love the humble bumble? And who wouldn’t want to sign up to to protect the fluffiest of insects? But what would it mean to sign this petition, to demand the Prime Minister protects the bees?

It’s not apparent what the aim of the Bee Cause actually is. For that, one needs to look more deeply at the FoE’s campaign literature. And no environmental campaign is complete without two important elements: 1. Demanding that something be more heavily regulated or banned. 2. Claiming that the campaign is sanctioned in some way by science.

The National Bee Action Plan should set out how the UK Government will achieve a quantifiable reduction in the use of pesticides, including encouraging alternative pest control methods. It should commit to improving the assessment of pesticides’ impacts on bees, and to suspending the use of those pesticides thought to be linked to bee deaths until fully independent reviews prove they’re not contributing to bee decline.

The science comes courtesy of Tom D. Breeze, Stuart P.M. Roberts and Simon G. Potts at University of Reading Centre for Agri-Environment Research, who were commissioned by FoE.

But at least one researcher has pointed out that there are problems with the emphasis environmental campaigners are putting on pesticides. Lynn Dicks from the University of Cambridge wrote in Nature this week that,

There is no doubt that the proposed restriction on the use of these neonicotinoids on nectar- and pollen-rich crops such as oilseed rape will reduce a potentially serious risk to bees. It seems a crucial step towards reversing or halting observed declines in bees and other flower-feeders. But that is not enough for some environmental campaigners, who have framed the problem as one of the very survival of an unspecified number of bee species. Two and a half million people have signed an online petition telling EU decision-makers: “If you act urgently with precaution now, we could save bees from extinction.”

The assertion that a ban on neonicotinoids in Europe will save bees from extinction is absurd. There are bee species around the world in genuine danger of extinction, such as the once-common rusty-patched bumblebee in the United States, which has vanished from 87% of its historic range since the early 1990s. Diseases, rather than pesticides, are suspected of driving that decline. And although there have been dramatic falls in the numbers of managed honey bee Apis mellifera colonies in some countries, it remains a widespread and common bee, not in imminent danger of extinction.

Well-meaning exaggeration is common. The Guardian, a pro-environ­ment British newspaper, mangled my parliamentary evidence on moths and beetles to claim that three-quarters of all UK pollinator species, including bees, were in severe decline.

Dicks is speaking about Avaaz.org’s petition, similar, but perhaps more determined than FoE’s. The text of their petition reads:

To EU decision-makers: We call on you to immediately ban the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. The catastrophic demise of bee colonies could put our whole food chain in danger. If you act urgently with precaution now, we could save bees from extinction.

Now the campaign has acheived 2.5 million virtual signatures, and the site proudly proclaims:

Our voices were heard! After we delivered the petition, the European Commission recommended suspending 3 deadly poisons! But some countries and pesticide companies could try to block it before the final vote. Let’s build the buzz to get a full ban on all bee killing pesticides!

The Guardian, which Dicks also mentions has a whole section on Bees. It’s contribution to the campaign to save the bee is mostly penned by Damian Carrington – the Guardian’s ‘head of environment’. Carrington, as he is inclined to, ‘mangled’ Dicks’s research, fingering pesticides as the cause of bee problems over a number of articles.

EU proposes to ban insecticides linked to bee decline
Three neonicotinoids, the world’s most widely used insecticides would be forbidden across the continent for two years

Insecticide ‘unacceptable’ danger to bees, report finds
Campaigners say the conclusion by the European Food Safety Authority is a ‘death knell’ for neonicotinoid pesticides

Insecticide regulators ignoring risk to bees, say MPs
A parliamentary inquiry has uncovered evidence that links widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides to decline in bees

Evidence of pesticide harm to bees is now overwhelming
Yet more top-quality research shows current regulation is woefully inadequate in protecting the creatures that pollinate much of our food

The silence of the bees: government refuses to act on pesticide evidence
Extrapolating scientific data appears to be fine if policy-makers like where it leads – such as a badger cull – but is abhorrent if they don’t, as with bees

But the evidence Dicks gave to Parliament is summarised:

1. Wild bees and other pollinating insects are known to be declining in the UK and elsewhere in response to multiple interacting pressures, including the use of pesticides.

2. There is an urgent need for data on the actual exposure of wild pollinators to neonicotinoids or combinations of pesticides in their natural environment.

3. The Defra project (PS2371) that is supposed to fill this knowledge gap seems unlikely to. I cannot scrutinise the methods, but as described it is a small case study with a potential methodological flaw.

4. Recent evidence on the sub-lethal effects of field-realistic levels of neonicotinoids on bumblebees shows that serious implications for bumblebee colonies are possible.

5. No similar evidence has been published for solitary bees or other flower-feeding insects.

6. There is a lack of transparency in the pesticide regulatory system. The details of studies supporting the regulatory assessment are inaccessible.

7. There are many alternative farm management measures to enhance the natural pest control service provided in farmed ecosystems. My team at Cambridge are compiling a synopsis of scientific evidence on the effectiveness of these.

In other words, Dicks is far more circumspect than Carrington. The main difference is one between saying that there is sufficient scientific evidence to call for an outright ban on the one hand, and on the other calling for more evidence. But then Dicks herself makes a curious claim:

As a scientist involved in this debate, I find this misinformation deeply frustrating. Yet I also see that lies and exaggeration on both sides are a necessary part of the democratic process to trigger rapid policy change. It is simply impossible to interest millions of members of the public, or the farming press, with carefully reasoned explanations. And politicians respond to public opinion much more readily than they respond to science.

This is a fairly explicit justification of environmental alarmism: it is a legitimate and necessary strategy. But it also begs the question. If the premise of ‘rapid policy change’ is ‘science’, then any exaggeration of the science deprives the policy of its basis in science. As is ever the case with environmentalism, a feckless public is fingered as the agent responsible for both inertia and the low quality of public debate. And yet it is researchers, politicians and journalists who act in concert. Dicks continues:

There is a precedent here. The 1987 Montreal Protocol that banned chloro­fluorocarbons to protect the ozone layer is commonly held up as a shining example of a rapid policy response to emerging science. Yet it was agreed against a backdrop of wild stories of millions of extra cases of cancer and industry warnings that it would cost the US economy billions of dollars.

Is this a good precedent? And was it really true that the Montreal Protocol was a response to public pressure? As this blog has argued, public opinion and supranational environmental agencies move in spite of each other. In other words, things like the Montreal Protocol happen precisely because national governments cannot mobilise public opinion, or rather, form fully-functioning democratic mandates. It’s much easy to take your licence from panet-saving super-panels than from the hoi polloi. Dicks herself recognises the problem:

There is a risk, of course, that rapidly made, responsive policy changes will not turn out to be the most intelligent ones. We saw this in the European biofuels policy, which set a target of 10% renewable content in transport fuels by 2020, despite evidence at the time that this was not the best way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions using renewable energy.

It would be hard to think of any EU directive which wasn’t as equally counter-productive, if not self-destructive. The EU’s Large Combustion Plant Directive, for instance, is causing a 16GW energy gap to emerge in the UK. To close the gap, it would be necessary to speed up the rate of wind farm building by 6000%, and cost billions in subsidies. Britain will be going the way of Germany: facing a much increased risk of power cuts, multiplication of energy bills, 100s of billions in subsidies and related problems throughout the economy. These failures will join the European Emissions Trading System and the emissions reductions targets, and the more general failure of the EU to influence global policy, leaving it in an island of expensive energy and redundant technology. But I digress…

This risk means that communicating the science itself directly to appropriate decision- makers remains extremely important. Scientists must not be turned off by the rhetoric, but motivated by it. We should engage with the debate throughout. It is important to get as near to the decision-makers as possible, providing clear and well-referenced information with an independent voice.

The problem should be immediately apparent. Researchers are not independent. The researchers at Reading, for instance, were commissioned by FoE. I, like many people, have no time — and perhaps not the expertise — to look into theirs or Dicks’s claims. Nor do we have the money to commission research. And FoE and other organisations are themselves funded by the European Union precisely to lobby MEPs. FoE staff are seconded into government departments — in the case of Bryony Worthington, a short stint at FoE, then DEFRA was all it took to make her a member of the House of Lords. Similarly, researchers are increasingly sought to provide the evidence base for policy which appears in many cases to have been decided before the research even begins. Policy-based evidence-making is only the half of it. As this blog has pointed out, environmentalism is a political idea, which a great deal of seemingly scientific research takes its premises from.

It gets worse:

You can’t switch off the lies and exaggeration. But don’t worry about them. When I saw the exaggerated pollinator-decline claim attributed to me in The Guardian I did not seek to correct it, because the correct information, with references, will go into a forthcoming parliamentary-committee report. Unlike stories in the press, that report will definitely be read by officials who advise the politicians who, for the United Kingdom at least, make the final decision. And because of such reports, and a recent risk assessment from the European Food Safety Authority, we can be fairly sure that the decision on whether to restrict neonicotinoid use in Europe will not be made on the basis of avoiding 20% yield losses in crops, or saving the world’s bees from extinction.

Dicks can sleep easily at night, perhaps, knowing that she did what she could to best inform the UK’s policy-makers. But higher courts makes the decision: the European Commission and the EU Parliament. And at least one of those bodies seems to have reacted to the demands of NGOs, rather than to the counsel of scientists. As Carrington reported at the end of last month,

Insecticides linked to serious harm in bees could be banned from use on flowering crops in Europe as early as July, under proposals set out by the European commission on Thursday, branded “hugely significant” by environmentalists. The move marks remarkably rapid action after evidence has mounted in recent months that the pesticides are contributing to the decline in insects that pollinate a third of all food.

This doesn’t seem to have proceeded on the basis of clear and independent science, but on the basis of incestuous relationships between the environmental movement, researchers and technological bureaucracies. I don’t claim any expertise in bees here. What I am aware of, however, is a growing tendency of politicians at all levels of government to be easily moved by flimsy, alarmist tales of ecological decline on the scantiest evidence — which is often nothing more than speculation. There is also a tendency of NGOs seeking to assert themselves politically, on the same groundless claims, and by mobilising the public on similarly wildly exaggerated claims — the FoE’s campaign against Samsung, for example. I’m also aware that, in spite of the claims that the world’s bee population is in precipitous decline, this is still possible:

If it were really the case that bees were dropping out of the sky, how is it possible to buy a third of a kilo of honey for £0.99(US$1.51)? When I asked on Twitter, I had a number of interesting replies:

Because most honey is mostly fake. Even when it says it’s real.

cos it’s probably not proper honey

Because fake honey is being sold.

You can buy cheap “honey” because it may not be “honey” you’re buying

My tweet had been a reply to Richard Dawkins, who had claimed:

Bees are more important for our economy than most people can imagine. Bee survival is dangerously threatened by poisons http://bit.ly/WMX3zN

And on Dawkins’s own site to which the tweet linked:

Quietly, globally, billions of bees are dying, threatening our crops and food. But in 48 hours the European Union could move to ban the most poisonous pesticides, and pave the way to a global ban that would save bees from extinction.

It seems obvious that the extent of bee decline and our dependence on bees has been overstated. This over-sensitivity to trends that may or may not have any truth to them seems to be environmental ‘ideology’ in motion. And it’s from this presupposed idea of imminent, inevitable collapse of the systems which we purportedly depend that this ‘ideology’ turns into political power.

Lynn Dicks may well think this necessary — that we remain in a state of anxiety and ignorance in order to make decisions possible. But this isn’t a healthy form of politics. What it really speaks to is the disengagement of the public from elite politics — a state of affairs that scientists such as Dicks services and sustains, rather than criticises and sheds any light on. It’s not enough simply to have an arrangement between policy-makers and scientists, in which the latter supply the former with ‘independent’ advice. As we can see, too much interferes with that communication, and there is good evidence that suggests that seemingly independent researchers are as vulnerable to the hype, alarmism, and misleading ideas about the natural world and society as the feckless public. Dicks should have challenged the Guardian, and Avaaz, and FoE. That is, of course, what democracy means. It’s no good pretending that ‘good science’ and independent research can happen without it.

As pointed out over at Bishop Hill, Nigel Lawson was the subject of some comments made by Royal Society president, Paul Nurse at his lecture at the University of Melbourne recently.

I have written a lot about the Royal Society, its campaigns, and the angry and doom-laden words of its presidents. It seems obvious that these presidents have real difficulty understanding the debate they want to comment on. But what seems more obvious is that they cannot listen (or read) to any other argument. That must be the case because they cannot reproduce their critics arguments at all faithfully. Bad faith, then, seems to be the cause of the hostility.

But I’m already bored of writing something about it that will surely be as ignored as everything else I’ve written about the Royal Society. I thought it might be more fun to try a different approach.