Life’s pretty exciting these days when you’re a climate researcher, a lobbyist or an environmental activist. There’s a neverending schedule of conferences on climate change around the world to attend.
It’s a shame that very little science actually goes on at these conferences. Just lots and lots of shoulder-rubbing with politicians, scientists, writers, activists and the press. Especially press, because you can never have too much publicity.
As Bob Carter reports(pdf) on three such conferences held in Australia and New Zealand:
The three conferences shared the features of widespread pre-meeting publicity, and of sponsorship by major science organisations (CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology, Royal Society of New Zealand), government departments (governments of Victoria, South Australia and New Zealand, foreign embassies (U.K., Holland), Greenhouse organisations and lobby groups (Australian Greenhouse Office, Greenpeace, World Wide Fund for Nature, Pew Center for Climate Change), and a wide range of companies and business organizations.
Press coverage before and during each meeting often gave the impression that the science of climate change was to be the focus, but in fact the conferences were dominantly concerned with greenhouse politics and governance, with a special emphasis on the development of presumed environmental-good “command and control” measures such as carbon taxes. As the organizer of the Wellington meeting noted, “This is a policy conference, not a science congress or a diplomatic negotiation”.
I present here an analysis of the face that was presented to the public by the Wellington conference, Climate Change and Governance, hereafter often called simply the climate conference. The conclusions that I draw are, however, applicable also to the Melbourne and Adelaide meetings and to others of like kind. I assess the intentions of the Wellington conference organizers, the degree to which the general and policy discussions were informed by an adequate understanding of the science of climate change, the role played by the media in informing the public, and assess the outcomes. Troublesome ethical issues emerge, the most important of which include the role in society of scientific organizations and universities, and the way in which government-employed and other scientists are today constrained in the public comment that they can make on controversial issues of the day. Another major concern is the way in which scientific results are now routinely deployed into the public domain with a clear greenhouse propaganda intent.
That’s problem with being a skeptic - I just don’t get out enough.
I note this article by Lawrence Solomon only because I, like most people, assumed that if we in Western countries were as nuclear-powered as France, then most of our problems with power generation would be solved (and if you think that carbon emission is a problem, that as well).
But I was wrong. Dead wrong.
“If France can produce 80% of its electricity with nuclear power, why can’t we?,” asks U.S. presidential candidate John McCain. Nuclear power is a cornerstone of Senator McCain’s plan to combat climate change, which he is unveiling this week.
McCain thinks he is asking a simple rhetorical question. As it turns out, he is not. His question is technical, with an answer that will surprise him and most Americans. Nuclear reactors cannot possibly meet 80% of America’s power needs — or those of any country whose power market dominates its region — because of limitations in nuclear technology. McCain needs to find another miracle energy solution, or abandon his vow to drastically cut back carbon dioxide emissions.
Unlike other forms of power generation, nuclear reactors are designed to run flat-out, 24/7 — they can’t crank up their output at times of high demand or ease up when demand slows. This limitation generally consigns nuclear power to meeting a power system’s minimum power needs — the amount of power needed in the dead of night, when most industry and most people are asleep, and the value of power is low. At other times of the day and night, when power demands rise and the price of power is high, society calls on the more flexible forms of generation — coal, gas, oil and hydro-electricity among them — to meet its additional higher-value needs.
If a country produces more nuclear power than it needs in the dead of night, it must export that low-value, off-peak power. This is what France does. It sells its nuclear surplus to its European Union neighbours, a market of 700 million people. That large market — more than 10 times France’s population — is able to soak up most of France’s surplus off-peak power.
The U.S. is not surrounded, as is France, by far more populous neighbours. Just the opposite: The U.S. dominates the North American market. If 80% of U.S. needs were met by nuclear reactors, as Senator McCain desires, America’s off-peak surplus would have no market, even if the power were given away. Countries highly reliant on nuclear power, in effect, are in turn reliant on having large non-nuclear-reliant countries as neighbours. If France’s neighbours had power systems dominated by nuclear power, they too would be trying to export off-peak power and France would have no one to whom it could offload its surplus power. In fact, even with the mammoth EU market to tap into, France must shut down some of its reactors some weekends because no one can use its surplus. In effect, France can’t even give the stuff away.Not only does France export vast quantities of its low-value power (it is the EU’s biggest exporter by far), France meanwhile must import high-value peak power from its neighbours. This arrangement is so financially ruinous that France in 2006 decided to resurrect its obsolete oil-fired power stations, one of which dates back to 1968.
Now read on
If the Kyoto Protocol was a débacle, the endless talks about successor treaties beyond 2012 have taken the whole process to new levels of absurdity.
Witness what is happening in the UK as green taxes, fuel price escalators, a slowing economy and the surging price of oil are causing the Labour Government electoral meltdown:
The government is coming under mounting pressure from hauliers and its own MPs to change its mind on measures that threaten to raise the cost of driving.
The Labour MPs say poorer motorists will suffer most from plans to increase road taxes on more polluting cars.
Road hauliers are also angry that fuel duty is set to rise by 2p this autumn.
But environment minister Joan Ruddock said that while she sympathised with motorists, the government “could not lose sight of the environment agenda”.
The MPs say they are concerned about the potential impact of a planned change in vehicle excise duty (road tax) which will see drivers paying more for more polluting cars registered since the end of 2001.
So far 35 Labour MPs have signed a motion calling on the Treasury to think again about the retrospective aspects of the policy.
They plan to warn the chancellor, when Parliament returns next week, that the government could lose votes over the issue.
This was after a disastrous by-election result in a previously safe constituency turned into a referendum on the performance of the Government (as frequently happens). The irony is that the winners on this occasion were the Conservative Party who campaigned on a “vote blue, go green” slogan promising more of the same rising tax escalators in order to save the planet.
The rest of Europe has gone solidly to the right, leaving just the UK government nominally with a centre-left, social democratic agenda. As Benny Peiser explains, this leaves the Brown government between a rock and a hard place, the rock being the Green agenda of carbon taxes and the hard place being the worsening world economy. In an op-ed for the Financial Post, Dr Peiser explains the problem:
In recent years, almost all of Europe’s social democratic parties have lost in national elections. The collapse of support for Gordon Brown and his policies reveals a general decline of Europe’s social democracy as a whole.
There are many good reasons for the deterioration of the centre-left’s political influence and power. But perhaps one of the most crucial is the abandonment of their traditional core value of progressive optimism. After all, the left used to derive large amounts of its popular appeal from a firm belief in social and technological advancement, a political philosophy of societal optimism and hope. During the last couple of decades, however, it has eagerly adopted a green ideology that has replaced its confidence in future progress with the ever more intimidating prediction of climate catastrophe and environmental disaster, culminating in calls for economic sacrifices and collective belt-tightening.
In short, Britain’s Labour Party has discarded its “progressive” principles for environmental fear-mongering and salvationist rhetoric in the expectation that voters would accept that only government control, central planning and higher taxes could prevent global disaster.
At the core of Labour’s environmental philosophy and polity-making stands the notion that people in Britain and other industrialized countries consume too much energy derived from the burning of fossil fuels. For many years, Labour has chanted the green mantra that in order to prevent disastrous climate change caused by excessive energy consumption, Britons must make personal sacrifices in their lifestyle and behaviour. No other government in the world has employed the spectre of climate catastrophe as forcefully as Britain; no other administration has saddled taxpayers with a heavier burden of green taxation.
Eighteen months ago, Labour’s David Miliband proposed the introduction of carbon “credit cards” that would be issued as part of a nationwide carbon rationing scheme. He suggested the allocation of an annual allowance for basic needs such as travel, energy or food. Two days after Labour’s disastrous defeat in the local elections, the whole scheme was hastily abandoned.
Of course it is being abandoned. The British public is now waking up to the realization that the Green hysteria is causing them more hardship now in order to produce…well nothing tangible. Global temperatures have not risen in more than ten years despite carbon dioxide rising by around 5% during that time.
What we have here is a scheme to send the economies of the Western world back at least half a century and maybe more. Can anyone imagine what it would be like?
Get out your gas masks and tin hats. We are under attack from a noxious army of doom-troopers demanding that we treat climate change as a rerun of the Second World War. In the latest move to militarise everyday life, the Environmental Audit Committee of MPs has seriously proposed energy rationing, aka “personal carbon credits”.
What next? Little (green) Hitlers patrolling the streets yelling “Put that high-energy light out!”? Or a campaign to bring back rickets? Everybody from the Prince of Wales to liberal newspapers and former Labour ministers now compares climate change to the war. Baroness Young of Old Scone, head of the Environment Agency, says this is “World War Three”. If it’s not breaking the Official Secrets Act, could somebody explain what on earth they are on about? The notion of a “war on carbon” makes even less sense than the glorious “wars” on terror/drugs/crime/whatever.
No, these evocations of the past appear political rather than practical. The aim is to create an ersatz Blitz Spirit that could bring people together behind a phoney war on global warming. Governments desperate for a unifying cause are naturally sympathetic. But they are also aware that hard-up Brits who see few bombs falling are unlikely to be too keen on making wartime sacrifices. Thus new Labour, which previously admitted it might “need to go back to rationing”, has retreated from the carbon credits proposal, fearful of further voter desertions.
What solution do the doom-troopers propose to the problem of public resistance? Let’s suspend democracy, like we did in the good old days! While one leading liberal writer insists that all the main parties must include identical austerity measures in their manifestos (not much change there then), another feminist veteran, Rosie Boycott, demands that they dump party politics altogether and form a national coalition based on Churchill’s wartime Government. Altogether now: “We will fight them in the recycling bins…”
Of course the answer to everything - an enlarged surveillance State, a public kept in a state of imaginary fear, and get this: rationing.
All those in favour of rationing? Not very many of you, if any.
If the Green Party cannot win a single seat in any place beyond a few backwater councils, why are the leading political parties trying to steal their clothing? Perhaps as the Green Green Machine grinds down to a halt, other shibboleths of the extreme-left consensus might get to be identified and junked.
Meanwhile, in London today, expect long traffic delays as a mutiny by road hauliers brings everything to a standstill:
Hundreds of lorry drivers angry at soaring fuel prices are travelling in convoy to protests in central London and along the M4 in Wales.
Hauliers say diesel prices topping 120p a litre, plus a planned 2p fuel tax rise, will drive firms “to the wall”.
Protesters are demanding an “essential user” duty rebate for HGV drivers.
It comes as Chancellor Alistair Darling prepares to meet Labour MPs concerned about plans to increase road tax on older, more polluting vehicles.
Forty-two MPs have signed a Commons motion asking the government to reconsider.
I would humbly suggest that Joan Ruddock may not last in her job much longer.
(I’ve taken out all of the stupid formatting to leave the essential claims. Persuading Piers to leave the formatting as bland as possible has been a futile exercise)
The Long Range Forecasters
Delta House, 175-177 Borough High Street. London SE1 1HR
Tel +44(0)20 7939 9946 Fax +44(0)20 7939 9901 E:piers@weatheraction.com
www.weatheraction.com or for Europe including News and now to buy WeatherAction 45day ahead weather forecasts for selected European countries via PayPal - visit our European site www.lowefo.com
For further information contact Piers Corbyn office above or +447958713320 / +447507426264
News Release for 06.00hrs UT Thurs 12 June 2008
Weather Action Long range trail forecasts for World weather extremes
Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction Long range forecasters today (June 12) - in a dramatic new move towards developing long range extreme weather forecasts for anywhere in the world - predicted that the first tropical storm of the US season will form (85% likely) around 18th June.
“We expect it to start in the Caribbean / Gulf of Mexico region and soon develop into Hurricane strength and make landfall (75% likely) or near landfall by 21 or 22 June in Florida / Southern States or possibly Cuba or (less likley) the west side of the Gulf .
“This Tropical storm will be associated with severe tornado events in central / SouthEast parts of the USA while New York /NorthEast USA are likely to be unusually cold” said Mr Corbyn. “After that we are 90% confident the storm will quickly die and the period 23 June to 5 July will be essentially storm free” he said.
There is at present (June 13th) no forecast for any US Tropical Storms on the USA official hurricane and weather service Service sites. This is the 5th of WeatherAction’s trial forecasts of extreme weather events in the USA this year. The success rate (for three major blizzards and a spell of severe tornadoes) is 4/4 so far*.
Mr Corbyn currently also has an active summer period forecast for exceptional torrential downpours and floods in Britain at the end of June / start of July which will disrupt Wimbledon tennis and Glastonbury festival (see below)
These trial forecasts are created using WeatherAction’s revolutionary Solar Weather Technique which uses predictable aspects of particle and magnetic affects from the Sun to make forecasts of certain extreme events in various parts of the world. At this stage they are not intended to forecast all extreme events (as do the full forecasts for Europe and Britain) - only a selected few. The forecasts are available to customers months ahead and made public one to four weeks ahead of events.
The expected success rate at the present level of research is about 6 successful for every one which is unsuccessful. For an ongoing monitor of the WeatherAction (SWT24e) extreme June-December 2008 forecast world trials and latest news visit Weather Action’s world extreme events forecast link on www.lowefo.com .
Two forecasts have been made so far this (N hemisphere) summer - the USA Tropical storm forecast above and the British end-June/start July deluge forecast below which was carried in The Sun on 4th June (page 18).
Weather Action June 2008 Forecast Media summary Statement (Available 3rd June2008 at 00:00hrs)
Exceptional Deluges likely to hit Glastonbury and Wimbledon
Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction Long range forecasters today (June 3rd) warned that WeatherAction’s June forecast is predicting exceptional deluges, thunder and floods around the end of June and start of July and specifically that ‘Glastonbury festival & Wimbledon Tennis are likely to be hit by exceptional deluges of torrential rain’. This warning has a high (85%) confidence and is part of WeatherAction’s full forecast for this June which spells out the timing and region detail of weather through the month. Piers said “We are again experiencing stark changes and extreme weather events all over the world triggered by the high sensitivity of magnetic and particle links between the sun and Earth during this general period of transition between an odd solar cycle - 23 - and even cycle 24″.
Fuller information via www.weatheraction.com
The June issue of WeatherAction forecast bulletin carries an article on the latest development in the challenge to the UN Climate Committee (IPCC) by ‘the gang of 4′ scientists
For latest visit www.weatheraction.com for report: “No response from UN Climate Committee to challenge by ‘gang of 4′ scientists. Is UN split? ”
Thank you
So there you have it. I do not endorse Piers’ predictions because I don’t know what his method is - nobody but Piers does, although they are claimed to be derived from observations of the Sun.
I simply copy them here and we’ll see over the course of the Hurricane Season how accurate they are.
Just a note to myself about the urban myth that lemmings commit suicide when their population outstrips the food supply.
Incredibly, in the Disney film that showed this alleged mass suicide, it turns out that the lemmings were thrown off the cliff by members of the film crew.
Compare and contrast Wikipedia’s biographies of famous people with those done by professionals.
Today’s biography: Campaigning journalist Paul Foot, as written up in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Foot, Paul Mackintosh (1937–2004), journalist, was born on 8 November 1937 in Haifa, Palestine, the son of Hugh Mackintosh Foot (1907–1990), later Baron Caradon, governor of Jamaica and Cyprus, and at the time an administrative officer in the Palestinian government, and his wife, (Florence) Sylvia (d. 1985), daughter of Arthur White Millar Tod, director of the Steam Navigation Company of Baghdad. The Foots were a famous west-country family deeply rooted in radical Liberal tradition; Paul’s grandfather Isaac Foot was a Liberal MP and Methodist. Three of Foot’s uncles were politicians. Michael Foot became leader of the Labour Party, Dingle Foot was solicitor-general under Harold Wilson, and John Foot was a Liberal life peer (as Baron Foot). Paul was educated at Shrewsbury School, which was to provide the founding spirits of the satirical magazine Private Eye, Christopher Booker, Willie Rushton, and Foot’s lifelong friend Richard Ingrams. ‘At Shrewsbury I was on Ingrams’ coat tails’, recalled Foot, who freely admitted to hero worship (Thompson, 43–4). National service followed and when, in 1958, at the end of his stint as a subaltern, he went to University College, Oxford, to read jurisprudence the first person he came across was Ingrams.
In the late 1950s Oxford University’s premier magazine, Isis, had been taken over by the ‘new left’ under the editorship of Dennis Potter, later to become one of Britain’s most accomplished television playwrights. Foot, who had not yet made the journey from his family’s traditional Liberal beliefs to the far left, invited him to speak to the University Liberal Club, of which he was president. Potter’s speech was remarkable for the observation that when he saw a Rolls-Royce he spat at it (Ingrams, My Friend Footy, 22). Foot’s radical juices began to race and, together with Ingrams, they took over Parson’s Pleasure magazine. It did not last long and was reborn, with the help of Rushton, Booker, and John Wells, as Mesopotamia. This was the embryonic Private Eye. Foot went on to be a short-lived editor of Isis but the magazine was banned by the university proctors after he introduced critical reviews of lectures. He attacked the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and resigned when Isis’s owners decided to apologize. In his last term he became president of the Oxford Union, where he honed his considerable oratorical powers, as well as fulfilling half his father’s bidding, contained in a telegram that greeted his arrival in Oxford: ‘Get a first and be president of the Union’ (ibid., 12). A life of protest and campaigning against injustice and intolerance had begun.
Now compare with Wikipedia’s biography of Paul Foot :
Paul Mackintosh Foot (8 November 1937 in Palestine – 18 July 2004 at Stansted Airport) was a British investigative journalist, political campaigner, author, and long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He was the son of Hugh Foot (who was the last Governor of Cyprus and, as Lord Caradon, was the UK Ambassador at the United Nations from 1964 to 1970). He was the nephew of Michael Foot, former leader of the Labour Party, and was educated at Shrewsbury School and at University College, Oxford.
Education
Contemporaries at Shrewsbury included Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and several other friends who would later become involved in Private Eye.
Anthony Chenevix-Trench was his Housemaster at Shrewsbury between 1950 and 1955, a time when corporal punishment in all schools was commonplace. In adult life, Foot exposed the ritual beatings that Chevenix-Trench had given. As Nick Cohen wrote in Foot’s obituary in The Observer:
“ Even by the standards of England’s public schools, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, his housemaster at Shrewsbury, was a flagellomaniac. Foot recalled: ‘He would offer his culprit an alternative: four strokes with the cane, which hurt; or six with the strap, with trousers down, which didn’t. Sensible boys always chose the strap, despite the humiliation, and Trench, quite unable to control his glee, led the way to an upstairs room, which he locked, before hauling down the miscreant’s trousers, lying him face down on a couch and lashing out with a belt.[1] ” Exposing him in Private Eye was one of Foot’s happiest days in journalism. He received hundreds of congratulatory letters from the child abuser’s old pupils, many of whom were then prominent in British life.
After his national service in Jamaica, Foot was reunited with Ingrams at Oxford and wrote for Isis, one of the student publications at the University.
Read both biographies and then tell me which is the better, fuller account with more information about the person, a better writing style and which one is filled with trivia.
Time to read: 15 minutes.
GO!
Just a note about something I enjoyed reading.
From Slate magazine
Just as you were slammed as a Japan-basher, you’ve been called a denialist (and worse) for your climate-change views. Do you think that stands as another example of how the media stifle debate?
The truth is, we live in an age of astonishing conformity. I grew up in the 1950s, supposedly the heyday of conformity, but there was much more freedom of opinion back then. And as a result, you knew that your neighbors might hold different views from you on politics or religion. Today, the notion that men of good will can disagree has disappeared. Can you imagine! Today, if I disagree with you, you conclude there is something wrong with me. This is a childish, parochial view. And of course stupefyingly intolerant. It’s truly anti-American. Much of it can be laid at the feet of the environmental movement, which has unfortunately frequently been led by ill-educated and intolerant spokespersons—often with no more than a high-school education, sometimes not even that. Or they are lawyers trained to win at any cost and to say anything about their opponents to win. But you find the same intolerant tone around considerations of defense, taxation, free markets, universal medical care, and so on. There’s plenty of zealotry to go around. And it’s hardly new in human history.
The media might stand as a corrective, cool and a bit detached, showing by example how to approach information and controversy. Instead, the media has clearly caught the fever of our intolerant times. Formerly, news people would never openly state their allegiance; young reporters understood it was poor form, and a senior person would carry the caution born of the experience that at least some of what one believes in the course of one’s life turns out to be wrong. But it’s a new era. Now, media reporters are proud to pound the table and declare their advocacy. Since so few of them have any training in science, they don’t really know what they are pounding about, when it comes to global warming. They couldn’t tell you even in general terms how the global mean temperature is calculated, for example. But it doesn’t matter anyway. They just want to declare they believe what “everyone” believes. Who values such a news source?
I want a news service that tells me what no one knows, but is true nonetheless. That’s what I would value.
Second, the media narrows the expression of viewpoints to an extraordinary degree. We’ve already discussed the small population of talking heads on cable shows. At the same time, the interest aroused by figures like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul occurred because, in my view, the American public had never heard people talk that way. Similarly, the Rev. Wright is espousing views that are hardly rare, but people react with shock and awe. People should take it as a sign that something is wrong—the media isn’t giving them the full story. By a long shot.
I always enjoy reading Michael Crichton when he talks about current events or culture. I find his novels latterly, to be ever more contrived in plot and character that they’re nearly unreadable.
I enjoyed immensely “The Andromeda Strain” and one he wrote under a pseudonym called “A Case of Need” (which is about abortion). “Jurassic Park” was also, incredibly, better than the film.
But latterly his thrillers seem much less interesting than his marginal notes or epilogues. I just wish he’d write or collect a book of his essays.
I received this in the mailbox from Encyclopedia Britannica
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A Sample of Encyclopædia Britannica’s Distinguished Contributors
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Sigmund Freud The term psychoanalysis does not appear (or at least is not indexed) in the Encyclopædia Britannica until well into the 20th century. The first treatment of psychoanalysis as a subject unto itself appeared in the Thirteenth Edition, written by leading authority Sigmund Freud. Read “Psychoanalysis” by Sigmund Freud |
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Harry Houdini Even a superficial reading of “Conjuring” by American magician Harry Houdini conveys the inescapable conclusion that the magician’s view of the topic was focused on two matters. The first was the debunking of the then-fashionable spiritualists; the second was the greatness of Houdini. Read “Conjuring” by Harry Houdini |
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Lillian Gish The contribution of silent film star Lillian Gish appeared in 1929. By the time it was replaced in 1939, Hollywood was in full swing and exposition of this sort probably sounded somewhat quaint. Read “Motion Pictures: A Universal Language” by Lillian Gish |
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T.E. Lawrence For the Fourteenth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, wrote on the subject of guerrilla warfare. The element of personal experience that pervades the article is unusual in an encyclopedia but must have been the chief reason this particular author was sought out. Read “Guerilla” by T.E. Lawrence |
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Marie Curie Marie Curie, who was twice awarded the Nobel Prize, contributed this article on radium to the Thirteenth Edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. Writing in the third person, she modestly described her involvement in a discovery that would have a significant influence on subsequent research in nuclear physics and chemistry. Read “Radium” by Marie Curie | Watch a video documentary on Marie Curie |
| Orville Wright This fraternal biography may well be unique in the history of Britannica. It appeared in the first printing of the Fourteenth Edition (1929). It was revised several times, first in 1950, two years after Orville’s death, and the last time in 1969 by Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith, who subsequently wrote the biography of both brothers that appeared in the Fifteenth Edition (1974). The first mention of the Wright brothers in Britannica was in the Twelfth Edition (1922). Read “Wilbur Wright” by Orville Wright | Watch a video documentary on the Wright Brothers |
Today, we rely on the men and women of Britannica’s Editorial Board of Advisors—the Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners, the leading scholars, writers, artists, public servants, and activists who are at the top of their fields |
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Can you imagine Sigmund Freud writing and defending Psychoanalysis on Wikipedia? Or Orville Wright being allowed to control a biography of his brother without Wikipediots screaming about “Conflict of Interest” and WP:OWN?
Me neither.
Perhaps we’d even have Slimvirgin (aka Sarah McEwan aka Linda Mack) accusing Orville of multiple violations of WP:NPOV and not writing in Good Faith…it might even have been fun to put Marie Curie in front of the ArbCom.
This is one of a number of posts dealing with the fundamental concepts explored by Nigel Lawson in a previous post.
Organic food, so beloved of eco-conscious mums at the behest of their propagandized children, is heading for a big crash as household budgets are squeezed. This article from James Delingpole is one of a number of articles I’ve noticed recently that fail to tilt at the green windmills and simply tell the real economics of food like it is
Despite the claims of bodies like the Soil Association, there has never exactly been a mountain of evidence that organic food is any better for you - or indeed for the world.
That famous research “proving” that organic milk was richer in Omega-3 than the ordinary stuff, for example, turned out to be skewed. It compared the produce of an organic herd lovingly outdoor-reared in lush pastureland, with the produce from non-organic cows (non-organic? They’re still ruddy animals, aren’t they?) which had been kept mostly indoors and fed on dry food.
Nor is it clear that organic saves the environment. A biochemist at Edinburgh University, Anthony Trewavas, has shown that organic uses more energy per tonne of food produced because the yields are lower. Also, because it requires more land - roughly twice as much as conventionally grown food - it means there is less available to be left unfarmed for biodiversity.
As for the oft-cited claim that organic food stops you ingesting tons of deadly cancer-causing pesticides - this got short shrift from Sir John Krebs of the Food Standards Agency. He wrote in Nature magazine: “A single cup of coffee contains natural carcinogens equal to at least a year’s worth of carcinogenic synthetic residues in the diet.”
Quite. But who is going to believe mere scientists saying something that is palpably true? John Krebs must have links to an evil capitalist plot somehow (you know, the Usual Suspects).
So if organic food isn’t saving Junior from carcinogens, or the world from soil erosion and eco-Armageddon, what is it for?
Good Question:
… the organic craze was never really about hard science or pragmatism. It was about nostalgia for an idealised rural past where man lived in harmony with nature. As the American author Michael Pollan put it in his investigation of the US food industry, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, organic “gratifies some of our deepest, oldest longings, not merely for a safe food, but for a connection to the earth”
Its about deeply held religious beliefs about the righteousness of a simpler life, and its held by people who have never lived such a life and would run a country marathon from it if they tried it for more than a week. Especially the soccer moms of the middle classes who think that growing your own herbs is a part of saving the planet.
This is the followup to the earlier article about ABC’s extraordinary “Planet Slayer” propaganda for kids.
Apparently a Liberal senator is none too pleased with ABC’s fascinating exploding pig carbon calculator:
THE ABC has been forced to justify portraying the average Australian as an exploding greenhouse pig with slime oozing out of its mouth.
Managing director Mark Scott also found himself defending claims that Geraldine Doogue was a grovelling sycophant and Professor Schpinkee’s diagnosis on when to die, as senators grilled him over the ABC’s perceived bias during budget estimates.
Victorian Liberal senator Mitch Fifield was outraged by an ABC science website, Planet Slayer, which he said demonised loggers, meat eaters and farmers who grew GM crops.
The website also features Professor Schpinkee’s greenhouse calculator, which assesses how users’ carbon dioxide production compares to the “Average Aussie greenhouse pig” and estimates at what age the user should die so they don’t use more than their fair share of resources. Too many emissions, caused by gas-guzzling cars, big houses and racked-up plane miles, causes a cartoon pig to blow up.
“Sure, there’s a bit of inner goth in all of us, but this may be taking things too far,” Senator Fifield said.
Mr Scott said the website was deliberately irreverent and was designed to appeal to children. But he said the ABC would look at the content on the site.
That’s a relief. The crisis is over now that ABC are looking at the content.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to get in touch with my “inner goth” - I never realised I had one.
Bad Behavior has blocked 29 access attempts in the last 7 days.
