Matt Ridley's Blog

Who really discovered DNA's structure? Five people.

Tuesday 28th February marks the 70th anniversary of – in my view – the most important day in the entire history of science. On a fine Saturday morning with crocuses in flower along the Backs in Cambridge, two men saw something surprising and beautiful. The double helix structure of DNA instantly revealed why living things were different: a molecule carries self-copying messages from the past to the future, bearing instructions written in a four-letter alphabet about how to synthesise living bodies from food. In The Eagle pub that lunchtime, Francis Crick and James Watson announced to startled fellow drinkers that they had discovered the secret of life.

That all living creatures, from microbes to ministers, turn out to share the same universal genetic cipher is why this breakthrough was more momentous as well as more unexpected than any other discovery I can think of. (Newton’s gravity? Just another force. Columbus’s America? Just another continent. Darwin’s evolution? Close. Mendel’s genetics? Not as big as DNA. Einstein’s relativity? Too obscure. Heisenberg’s and Schrodinger’s quantum mechanics? Too hard to understand. Fibonacci’s double-entry book-keeping? Nice try.)

The American James Watson is now the sole survivor of the five main actors and their many colleagues whose work led to that moment. Alas at 94 he has lived in seclusion since a bad car accident three years ago left him with significant memory loss. I called him this week for a chat but he no longer recalls much about the events of 70 years ago. His tendency to shock people with provocative remarks, which maybe worked when he was the enfant terrible of science in the 1960s and the head of the Human Genome Project in the 1990s, and which enabled him to write the painfully honest best-seller The Double Helix, had tarnished his reputation in the years before the accident.

Watson came into the Cavendish Laboratory early that Saturday morning and started playing with cardboard cut-outs of four nitrogenous bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. He had been told the day before by the chemist Jerry Donohue that the textbook had misled him and his metal versions were the wrong shapes. With new cardboard shapes, he suddenly saw something electrifying: adenine bound to thymine was the same shape as guanine bound to cytosine. So it did not matter what order they were slotted into the structure of the DNA molecule, the sequence on one strand of the double helix would automatically determine the sequence on the other strand. Life copies itself. That “base-pairing” eureka moment was and is Watson’s alone.

But a hint of wrong-doing hangs over the second part of the story. Crick “sauntered in” at mid morning, took one look and spotted that the entire structure now fell into shape. For the base pairing to work, the two strands of phosphates and sugars must run in opposite directions, one up, one down, which was exactly what Crick had already realised the week before -- from work being done by a rival team at King’s College, London. Watson had seen an X-ray crystallograph, known as photograph 51, taken at King’s, that proved the point and gave crucial dimensions – if you knew how to interpret it, as Crick almost uniquely did.

Whose photograph was it? Therein lies a tangled tale. It is often said that Rosalind Franklin took that photograph, that it was all but stolen from her by Watson and Crick, who never acknowledged their debt to her. It is not so simple. Franklin’s role was vital, and was underplayed in the years after the discovery (and her early death), but the revisionism now sometimes goes too far.

The photograph was actually taken in May 1952 by Franklin’s graduate student, Raymond Gosling. It was he, working with his previous supervisor, Maurice Wilkins, who had pioneered the technique for making X-ray crystallographs of DNA fibres. To Wilkins’s surprise the project and the student had been taken from him in 1951 by the boss of the lab, Sir John Randall, and handed to Franklin, creating disastrous mistrust between them. Franklin had improved the technique considerably, but it was Gosling who prepared photograph 51. He told me so.

Given how much justified indignation nowadays surrounds the stories of senior scientists getting credit for the work of their PhD students – Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of pulsars in 1967 being the classic case – it is surprising that little fuss has ever been made on behalf of Gosling. Before he died I asked him if it rankled that he was often left out of the story. No, he said, it was “Uncle Maurice” he felt sorry for.

How had Watson seen the photograph? After the Cambridge duo made a clumsy, mistaken model in 1951, greeted with scorn by Franklin, their boss Sir Lawrence Bragg told them to stop working on DNA and leave it to the King’s lab. This was a gentlemanly concession that might not happen today. For a year Franklin and Gosling had an effective monopoly on the subject. Wilkins was excluded and various other scientists who had been inching towards the structure of DNA – William Astbury, Dorothy Hodgkin, J.D. Bernal and Sven Furberg – had for various reasons given up trying. Their Californian rival, Linus Pauling, lacked good samples of DNA and was refused a visa by the American government because of his pacifist views, so could not travel to London to see their pictures.

As 1953 began, Pauling announced he had nonetheless cracked the problem, plunging the Cambridge team into despair. But when his paper arrived in England – via Pauling’s son Peter who was sharing an office in Cambridge with Watson, Crick and Donohue at the time -- his solution was obviously wrong. Still, said Crick, it would not be long before Pauling would get on the right track. The Cambridge lab was haunted by memories of Pauling beating Bragg to a previous discovery about protein structures. Hence Watson went to London on 30th January waving Pauling’s manuscript at both Franklin (who sent him packing) and Wilkins.

Franklin had made cautious progress but had chosen not to analyse Photograph 51 so far, focusing on other images of the so called A form of DNA. She had been offered a new position at Birkbeck College to work on viruses and was writing up her DNA work before leaving King’s in March. The long suffering Gosling, about to be handed back to Wilkins like a parcel, took photograph 51 to Wilkins, who showed it to Watson, who described it to Crick, who was probably the person in the world best equipped to interpret it. The rest is history.

This is a story replete with competition, friction, misunderstanding and some sexism but it lacks anything truly unethical, let alone criminal. Four men and one woman, none of whom was perfect and who could have moved faster if they had cooperated, nonetheless stumbled on a spectacular insight about the world, culminating in a eureka moment for two of them in Cambridge 70 years ago next week. On that day I’ll crack open a bottle of bubbly and watch a kind friend’s DVD of the (disgracefully) out-of-print BBC docudrama Life Story, starring Juliet Stevenson as Franklin and Jeff Goldblum as Watson.

Eco-extremism has brought Sri Lanka to its knees

My article for The Telegraph:

Sri Lanka’s collapse, from one of the fastest growing Asian economies to a political, economic and humanitarian horror show, seems to have taken everybody by surprise.

Five years ago, the World Bank was extolling “how Sri Lanka intends to transition to a more competitive and inclusive upper-middle income country”. Right up to the middle of last year, despite the impact of the pandemic, the country’s misery index (inflation plus unemployment) was low and falling. Then the misery index took off like a rocket, quintupling in a year.

What happened? There is a simple explanation, one that the BBC seems determined to downplay. In April 2021, president Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced that Sri Lanka was banning most pesticides and all synthetic fertiliser to go fully organic. Within months, the volume of tea exports had halved, cutting foreign exchange earnings. Rice yields plummeted leading to an unprecedented requirement to import rice. With the government unable to service its debt, the currency collapsed.

Speciality crop yields like cinnamon and cardamom tanked. Staple foods became infested with pests leading to widespread hunger. As Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute put it in March: “The farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing and sheer shortsightedness that produced the crisis in Sri Lanka implicates both the country’s political leadership and advocates of so-called sustainable agriculture.”

The government promised more manure, but it would take at least five times as much manure as the country produces to replace the “synthetic” nitrogen fixed from the air, and there’s not enough livestock or land to produce that much. In Glasgow for the climate summit last year, Sri Lanka’s president was still boasting that his agricultural policy was “in sync with nature”.

At the time, his organic decision was widely praised by environmentalists. Sri Lanka scored 98 out of 100 on the “ESG” – environmental, social and governance – criteria for investment.

Vandana Shiva, a feted environmentalist, said: “This decision will definitely help farmers become more prosperous.” She has been silent recently. Dr Shiva has led relentless criticism of the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which brought fertiliser and new crop varieties to south Asia, banishing famine for the first time in history even as population increased. Her (and others’) claims that traditional, organic farming could feed the world more healthily remain wildly popular among environmentalists. Sri Lanka has tested that proposition and found it wanting.

As the agricultural scientist Prof Channa Prakash of Tuskegee University in Alabama once told me: “Sure, organic agriculture is sustainable: it sustains poverty and malnutrition.” Farming was organic when millions died in famines every decade and the US prairies turned into dustbowls for lack of fertiliser to hold the soil during droughts.

But if you watch or listen to the BBC, you will hear little of this. On its website, under the headline “Sri Lanka: Why is the country in an economic crisis?”, you have to read right to the end to find a grudging admission that “When Sri Lanka’s foreign currency shortages became a serious problem in early 2021, the government tried to limit them by banning imports of chemical fertiliser. It told farmers to use locally sourced organic fertilisers instead. This led to widespread crop failure.” The Indian commentator Shakhar Gupta calls Sri Lanka’s organic conversion an episode of “mega stupidity” on a par with Mao Tse-tung’s order to persecute sparrows.

In the Netherlands, too, farmer protests are mainly about a policy of reducing the use of nitrogen fertiliser. In this country, organic farming gets publicity far out of proportion to its actual contribution: about 3 per cent of Britain’s farmland is organic.

If the world abandoned nitrogen fertiliser that was fixed in factories, the impact on human living standards would be catastrophic, but so would the impact on nature. Given that about half the nitrogen atoms in the average person’s body were fixed in an ammonia factory rather than a plant, to feed eight billion people with organic methods we would need to put more than twice as much land under the plough and the cow. That would consign most of the world’s wetlands, nature reserves and forests to oblivion.

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Matt Ridley's latest book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, co-authored with scientist Alina Chan from Harvard and MIT's Broad Institute, is now available—in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

Introducing the Fully Updated Paperback Edition of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19

The revised and expanded paperback edition of my newest book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, co-authored with the brilliant scientist Alina Chan, is now available to purchase in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. It was a privilege to help Alina write Viral, and a privilege to create this updated version with her. I hope it will play a role in shedding light on what I still consider the most important question facing the world today.

The launch of the paperback edition of Viral is different from those for my other books, for two reasons.

One is that due to the nature of the topic, this paperback has been significantly revised and expanded. Most importantly, the epilogue discusses three new developments since the publication of the hardback. The first was the discovery of a virus in a bat in Laos that is slightly more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than the virus studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The second is detailed information about how prominent western virologists, who had privately thought the virus was likely manipulated in a laboratory, began to instead tell the public that no lab-based scenario was plausible. The third is a trio of conflicting studies about whether the Huanan seafood market was the site of a natural spillover of the virus from animals to people, or just the site of a human superspreader event in December 2019.

The other reason is the media’s odd reaction to the hardcover launch. While it received praise from readers and had some impact, like giving us the opportunity to testify for Parliament, many people and institutions, from virologists to CNN to The Smithsonian, made it clear they felt threatened by Viral's subject matter. The paperback launch gives us a second opportunity to bring attention to the search for the origin of the pandemic—and the forces that don’t want us bringing attention to it.

If you haven’t read Viral yet, now is the perfect time to finally do so.

If you have read Viral (and are happy you did), please consider purchasing the paperback edition anyway, to learn about the developments since last fall, and to help draw attention to it by making the paperback launch a success.

Order Viral from Amazon.com 

Order Viral from Bookshop.org

Order Viral from Amazon.co.uk

Order Viral from Bookshop.co.uk

You can also help by discussing it with friends and on social media, and by leaving a review when you’re finished.

The world deserves to know how this all truly started, both out of justice for the millions killed and the many more affected, and to prevent the next pandemic. We hope that Viral will help make that happen, and the release of this paperback edition may be the last chance for it to do so.

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Matt Ridley's latest book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, co-authored with scientist Alina Chan from Harvard and MIT's Broad Institute, is now available—in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

A WHO pandemic pact would leave the world at China’s mercy

My article for Telegraph:

On 22 May, the World Health Organisation meets for the World Health Assembly, an annual summit to which all the world’s countries are invited – except Taiwan, which is excluded at China’s behest. On the agenda is a “pandemic accord” that would greatly expand the WHO’s powers to intervene in a country in the event of a future outbreak.

The European Union, true to form, pushed for a legally binding pandemic “treaty” instead, but that won’t happen for two reasons: the American Senate would need a two-thirds majority to ratify it; and the Chinese government would not allow even its pet international agency to tell it what to do. But the accord would still have substantial force of international law behind it, to make governments impose domestic lockdowns, for example – despite the WHO’s own figures showing little correlation between lockdown severity and death rates.

Though some of the measures make sense, such as more sharing of vaccines with other countries, the plan skates around WHO’s errors during the Covid pandemic. It ignored Taiwan’s early alarm call, praised the Chinese government for its transparency at a time when it was denying human-to-human transmission and punishing whistleblowers, delayed declaring a health emergency, flip-flopped on masks and lockdowns and mounted a farcical Potemkin investigation into the origin of the virus. Added to its poor performance in the 2014 ebola outbreak, when for months WHO resisted calls from doctors and NGOs to declare an emergency to avoid offending member governments, this track record does not inspire confidence.

According to the meeting’s agenda, the accord would be part of six “action tracks” focused on: healthcare systems; zoonotic outbreaks; endemic tropical diseases; food safety; antimicrobial resistance; and protecting the environment. What is missing from that list? Something WHO itself and the US and other governments insist might well have been the cause of the Covid pandemic, namely a laboratory experiment gone wrong or a virus-hunting researcher infected while sampling bats in the field.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, said in July last year that it was premature to rule out a lab leak, a view echoed by the G7 summit in Cornwall. Since then if anything the evidence has grown stronger. A book published this month, Preventable by Professor Devi Sridhar, argues that a lab leak is “as likely an explanation as natural spillover and should be pursued until evidence emerges to the contrary”.

A former software developer by the name of William Gates has written a book called “How to prevent the next pandemic”. Its main message, according to one uncharitable reviewer, is that we can prevent the next pandemic by “doing all of the things that did not stop the last pandemic event, only more, faster and harder”. But even Mr Gates does allow that “regardless of how COVID started, even the remote possibility of lab-related pathogen releases should inspire governments and scientists to redouble their efforts on lab safety, creating global standards”.

Over the years laboratory accidents have resulted in deaths of researchers and others from smallpox, anthrax, SARS and other pathogens. In one case, a global epidemic of flu resulted from a mistake with an experimental vaccine in China in 1977. In recent years there was a dramatic increase in the number of coronaviruses taken from bat caves into labs for experiments, most of them in a city called Wuhan. The experiments tested how easily the viruses could be induced to infect human cells. Some scientists compared this to searching for a gas leak with a lighted match.

This pandemic began a long way from where the infected bats live but very close to the world’s leading laboratory for collecting and manipulating SARS-like coronaviruses. That, plus the continuing failure to find an animal infected with the virus in food markets or elsewhere, added to some peculiar features of the virus’s genome, has led many to conclude that a proper investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is warranted. But the institute has refused all requests to open up its 22,000-item database for international inspection even though doing so could go a long way to reassuring the world.

So you might think the World Health Assembly might have put lab safety and transparency of research on the agenda next week at the very least. But nowhere are these even mentioned. Presumably China would object. In February the WHO held the third “Covid-19 Global research and innovation forum”. In the titles of the 49 sessions, the word “origin” did not appear once. Though it has set up a committee, the WHO seems to be paying no more than lip service to its own commitment to investigating the possibility of a lab leak. Like some western scientists, it may be hoping the question of the origin of this dreadful pandemic remains unsolved lest the answer ruffle diplomatic feathers.

Here's what a pandemic accord should include, in my view: a commitment by all national governments to share the genomic data of all viruses collected in the wild and to share details of all experiments being done on potential pandemic pathogens (yes, including in biowarfare labs). Something similar happens with nuclear research and with airline accidents, so it can be done. If China’s government refuses to sign, then let’s gradually shame it into doing so. But it looks like we will have to do this outside the WHO.

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Matt Ridley's latest book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, co-authored with scientist Alina Chan from Harvard and MIT's Broad Institute, is now available—in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

The madness of our worship of wind

My article for The Daily Mail:

Take a wild guess at how much of the UK’s total primary demand for energy was supplied by wind power in 2020.

Half? 30 per cent? No, in fact, it was less than 4 per cent.

That’s right, all those vast wind farms in the North Sea, or disfiguring the hills of Wales and Scotland, give us little more than one-thirtieth of the energy we need to light and heat our homes, power our businesses or move our cars and trains. Just think what this country and its seas would look like if we relied on wind for one-third or half of our energy needs.

Last week, Government ministers were considering lowering people’s energy bills if they live close to onshore wind turbines. They’re also considering relaxing the rules so that onshore wind farms no longer need the backing of local communities and councils in order to get planning permission. This will give wind farms an easier ride through the planning process than new housing — or shale gas drilling sites.

More importantly, it means further privileging an industry that has cost a fortune, wrecked green and pleasant landscapes and made us dependent on the weather for our energy needs — and thus more wedded to natural gas as a back-up.

The wind industry has already been fattened on subsidies of more than £6billion a year (paid for out of green levies on your electricity bills), it has privileged access to the grid and is paid extra compensation when the wind blows too strongly and the grid cannot cope with the energy output.  Indeed, the way wind power has managed to get politicians and others to think it is uniquely virtuous will deserve close study by future theologians.

Its symbols, akin to a post-modern Easter crucifix, now adorn almost any document that purports to be about British energy needs, signalling ‘goodness’. Tousle-headed eco-protesters go weak at the knees when they see an industrial wind farm on wild land, while angry anti-capitalists won’t hear a word against the financial firms that back wind companies, somehow convincing themselves that this is all about re-empowering the common man.

When faced with a looming energy crisis, it’s obvious that the Government needs to act fast to secure energy self-sufficiency. But what is so special about wind? Why, to the exclusion of all else — in particular, fracking and nuclear energy — has arguably the most inefficient solution been privileged?

I was once a fan of wind power, because it seemed to be free. But it’s not. It takes a lot of expensive machinery to extract useful power from the wind. And once turbines are up and running, they’re not reliable.

Because you cannot store electricity for any length of time without huge cost, wind farms need backing up by fossil-fuel power stations. This makes wind even more expensive.

As I write this article in still, fine spring weather, millions of tonnes of turbines stand largely idle, generating just 3 per cent of our electricity. Coal contributes 5 per cent.

As a source of energy, wind is so weak that to generate any meaningful electricity output you need three 20-tonne carbon-fibre blades — each nearly the length of a football pitch — turning a 300-tonne generator atop a gigantic steel tower set in reinforced concrete. Hundreds of these monsters are required to produce as much electricity as one small gas-powered plant. In terms of land covered, wind takes 700 times as much space to generate the same energy that one low-rise shale gas pad can.

It is not as if wind turbines are good for the environment. They kill thousands of birds and bats every year, often rare eagles on land and soaring gannets at sea. If you were even to disturb a bat when adding a conservatory, you could end up in jail. The wind turbines are also near impossible to recycle, with the rare earth metals such as neodymium that are vital for the magnets inside most of their generators coming from polluted mines in China.

Wind turbines are often built on hills to catch the breeze, meaning they inevitably intrude into natural beauty. My favourite Northumbrian view, of Bamburgh Castle and Cheviot from the Farne Islands, is now visually polluted by a giant wind farm.

But for those who live closer to them, life can be intolerable. The unresolved problem of wind turbine noise can make sleep difficult. On sunny days, the shadows of the blades create an unnerving flicker as they pass your windows. Being next to a wind farm won’t enhance your house’s value — and I doubt any reduction in your energy bill would help.

Nor is it clear that wind farms reduce emissions significantly. If the meagre 4 per cent of our energy that came from wind in 2020 had entirely displaced coal, we would have seen at least a modest cut in our emissions.

But there are three reasons why that is not what happens.

First, we need other power stations to back up the wind farms when the wind does not blow, and these plants — mostly burning gas — are inevitably less efficient when being ramped up and down to support wind’s erratic output. The wind industry promises that the more wind farms we build, the more likely we are to find there will always be a breeze somewhere. But experience shows the opposite. Last week, for instance, was virtually still everywhere; the week before was windy everywhere. A recent study published in the International Journal for Nuclear Power, looking at Germany and 17 neighbouring countries, confirmed this erratic output. Its author, physicist Thomas Linnemann, wrote: ‘Wind power from a European perspective always will require practically 100 per cent back-up systems.’

Second, wind turbines themselves are built and maintained using fossil fuels. Analysis of audited accounts suggests that many wind farms will not work for much more than 15 years before the cost of maintaining the machine eats into income and it has to be scrapped and replaced. The capital refreshment cycle for these machines is very short. A gas turbine on the other hand can easily last 30 or 40 years.

Third, the one source of energy whose economic rationale has been most damaged by wind power is zero-carbon nuclear. Nuclear plants all over the world are closing down early, or being cancelled, because they cannot pay their way in a world where bursts of almost valueless wind energy keep being dumped into the grid. Nuclear plants cannot ‘fill a gap’ when the wind drops — they’re efficient only when generating constantly. A wind-powered grid can be backed up with gas, or a nuclear grid topped up with gas, but a grid powered by wind and nuclear will not work.

Wind’s champions insist its costs are coming down and that its electricity is now cheaper than from gas or even coal. But there is a great deal of data, all pointing to industry costs (per megawatthour) not falling but rising, as economics Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University has found. Building and maintaining wind farms is about to get even more costly because of the rocketing costs of fuel and raw materials.

As for the competition, gas is currently very expensive in Britain, but it used to be cheap and it could be once more — particularly if we open up the North Sea and get fracking.

Then there’s the cost of ‘constraint payments’, which means extra compensation paid (by you, the electricity consumer) to wind farms when the grid cannot cope with their output. Some wind farms in Scotland have been paid to throw away large fractions of their energy. Since the introduction of the payments in 2010, the cost to consumers has topped a staggering £1.1bn. That’s before you consider the subsidies, which data shows have been rising for offshore wind for two decades.

When the wind industry boasts of being cheap and you challenge them to forgo subsidies, they mutter and look down at their feet. This happened at a parliamentary select committee this month: boasts of cheapness followed by protestations that subsidies must be maintained.

Something doesn’t add up. Even these costs understate the problem because they do not include the huge ‘system costs’ in reconfiguring and operating the national grid to cope with more unreliable energy if we continue our mad dash to wind power. These costs would be shared by all power sources, so wind’s competitors would pay for wind’s privileges.

Here is what Professor Hughes and Dr John Constable of the Renewable Energy Foundation said recently: ‘The assumptions which underpin the BEIS [Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy] estimates of the cost of generation for wind and solar power are fanciful, and do not withstand even cursory scrutiny; under close analysis they disintegrate and are a disgrace to the civil service and an embarrassment to ministers. They are so far from the actual costs incurred ... and recorded in audited accounts that they are not worth further consideration, except as evidence for fundamental civil service reform.’

Why is this so important? Professor Hughes explains: ‘The Government is creating a situation in which it will have no option other than to bail out failed and failing projects to ensure continuity of electricity supply. Ultimately [the losses] will fall largely on taxpayers and customers.’

For too long, wind power has been championed to the exclusion of virtually all other energy alternatives. That must end.

Thousands of words, mine included, have been written, demonstrating the deluded obsession with wind — and the huge benefits of untapped alternatives, particularly shale gas (accessed through fracking) and nuclear power. These arguments are based on reason and data. Yet the Government dismisses them with bluster and deflection, standing up instead for the wind industry.

Someone needs to start standing up for the rest of us.

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Learn more about innovation in energy and other fields by reading his 2020 book How Innovation Works.

As Shanghai locks down, China is facing its greatest Covid crisis yet

My article for Spectator:

The coronavirus is spreading through Hong Kong, Shenzhen and other cities in China like a bush fire; tens of millions of Chinese have been ordered to stay at home yet again. Shanghai, a city of 26 million souls, has been split in two. Those on the eastern side of the Huangpu River will be locked down until Friday, their west bank neighbours from the start of April.  

It won’t work. Like a new Mercedes, the BA.2 model of the omicron variant of the Sars-CoV-2 virus is faster, quieter and 30 per cent more prolific. There is no chance of stopping it with lockdowns, mass testing or social distancing – even in Xi Jinping’s China.

The only remedy is vaccination, which won’t stop infection but will moderate the symptoms enough to save a lot of lives, as it has done here. But, having invented its own second-rate vaccines and then failed to get them into the arms of many of the oldest and most vulnerable people, the Chinese government is now almost certainly facing a big rise in deaths. Omicron may be milder than delta, but it can still kill the old and ill – as we have seen in Hong Kong, where the Covid death rate, per capita, has already risen to almost twice the level Britain saw at its peak.

Might the same fate be about to befall China? It’s a horrendous prospect: if its Covid death-rate ends up at even a third of the European average it would amount to about a million souls, up from just 4,600 now. That’s why western governments should be ready to share the lessons we have learned from the past two years to save as many Chinese lives as possible. Let’s also offer millions of doses of vaccines as fast as we can.

Two years ago, China’s lockdown strategy was being held up as the model to follow by scientists who toured BBC studios giving interviews without serious challenge. We heard plenty from Sage members like Professor Susan Michie and Professor Neil Ferguson. Dr Michie, a card-carrying member of the Communist party of Britain, wrote early in the pandemic that: ‘China has a socialist collective system (whatever criticisms people may have), not an individualistic, consumer-oriented, profit-driven society badly damaged by 20 years of failed neo-liberal economic policies.’ When not attending zero-Covid rallies as a keynote speaker, Dr Michie officially advised the government on ‘behavioural compliance’ – a policy that turned out to be all stick and no carrot.

Prof Ferguson later said that the ‘effective policy’ in China – locking down entire communities in their homes – opened his eyes. ‘It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could. If China had not done it, the year would have been very different.’ We also saw Beijing-style agitprop used by the UK government with Sage advising that: ‘The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.’ The fear campaign began.

Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet and recipient of a Friendship Award from the Chinese government, went on Chinese television early in the pandemic to say: ‘I think we have a great deal to thank China for, about the way that it handled the outbreak.’ Chinese state TV then posted his interview as an advertisement on Facebook. It bought a lot of ads on Facebook in March 2020, which ran with no disclaimers.

Then there’s the World Health Organisation. On 24 February 2020 it told the world that: ‘China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures [i.e. lockdown] to contain transmission of the Covid-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response.’ Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the WHO, had visited China in January 2020 and congratulated the regime in even more fulsome terms: ‘In many ways, China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response. It’s not an exaggeration.’

What does he say now that we know the Chinese government was punishing those who spoke about the disease and ordering scientists to publish nothing without state approval? Those who were quick to praise China’s strategy at the time seem in no rush to revisit the lockdown logic that they pushed as absolute truth at the time.

And what about those who praised China’s supposed openness? Peter Daszak, a British-born US virologist, orchestrated a letter to the Lancet in February 2020 signed by Sir Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust. ‘We have watched as the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China, in particular, have worked diligently and effectively to rapidly identify the pathogen behind this outbreak, put in place significant measures to reduce its impact and share their results transparently with the global health community. This effort has been remarkable.’

What does Sir Jeremy have to say now, given that we know Wuhan scientists had in fact changed the name of the most closely related virus, resulting in a two-month delay before anybody in the West realised that it had come from a bat at a site where three people had died of a mysterious pneumonia eight years before? Transparency?

When Britain locked down, most people – myself included – were supportive, thinking we’d flatten the curve and stop the NHS from being overwhelmed. But as Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University argues in his book The Year the World Went Mad, it is now clear that locking down entire populations failed to eliminate the virus quickly. Once China had been negligent enough to allow it to travel to the rest of the world, elimination was impossible. Other strategies were necessary.

The academics who praised China at the start would argue that they did so because lessons needed to be learned fast. The same is true now, which is why their silence matters. We know that in the crucial early weeks, the Chinese government refused to listen to alarm bells rung by medics in Wuhan. Until 20 January 2020 it insisted that the disease could only be caught from animals, even as healthcare workers were catching it from patients. It allowed a banquet for 40,000 families to go ahead in Wuhan on 18 January, missing the chance to eliminate the virus.

If the virus returns to China in a more transmissible form, the innocent citizens of that country will deserve our help and sympathy. Their rulers less so. One thing is for sure: there will be no public inquiry in China.

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The universal appeal of the African savanna

My article for Spectator:

My wife and I were lucky to escape for a long-delayed birdwatching holiday in Kenya over Christmas. To have been warm, sunlit and free while so many in Britain were not won’t endear me to most readers, I realise. Nairobi was rife with Covid and Christmas cancellations devastated the tourism industry. So we had the extraordinary Elephant Watch Camp run by Saba Douglas-Hamilton in the Samburu National Reserve almost to ourselves. Baboons and vervet monkeys wandered freely through the camp, and in the night the river flash-flooded after a storm in the hills to the west, but the tents were safe. Elephants were everywhere, feasting on fresh vegetation after a long drought. My old friend Chris Thouless, director of research for Save the Elephants, explained that throughout Kenya elephant numbers are up, poaching is down and the biggest problem is increasing conflict with farmers and herders. Ingeniously, they have found you can deter elephants from raiding a maize farm by hanging beehives from wires around the fields. Elephants are scared of the aggressive African honey bee.

Francis Lenyakopiro, a Samburu warrior who acted as our guide, proved as knowledgeable about ecology as anybody I have met, but also very talented at singing traditional songs (wearing traditional Samburu dress with a touch of Douglas tartan) round a fire as the sun sank behind the hills. I will not forget his quiet voice, almost a whisper, at a picnic: ‘I don’t want to interrupt your lunch, but we are being watched by a lioness.’

At Borana Lodge in the Laikipia highlands, where we watched elephants, rhinos, waterbuck and kudu, as well as a bounty of birds, from the veranda of our bedroom, our guide Lawrence Ngugi shared insights into the lives of animals from the cooperative breeding of wattled starlings to the tendency of black rhinos to get aggressive after eating the steroid-rich bark of the candelabra tree. In a relationship that may be millions of years old, the honeyguide bird leads people — and honey badgers — to wild bees’ nests with a special call. It expects to be rewarded with wax when the nest is smoked out. If you fail to reward the bird, it will lead you to a buffalo next time, which Lawrence thinks is a myth, but is not sure it is worth the risk of finding out.

The names of African birds may soon be decolonised. Verreaux’s eagle, a huge black predator that swept past as we picnicked one day in a gorge, was named by and for an enthusiastic 19th-century French taxidermist who, together with his brother, attended the funeral of a tribal warrior in what is now Botswana in 1831, then secretly disinterred the body and stuffed him as a museum exhibit in Paris. The poor bloke’s body was repatriated from Barcelona in 2000 and cremated in Gaborone.

Borana Conservancy is a private venture, started by the Dyer family and backed by philanthropists, that turned a huge cattle ranch into a wildlife reserve, teeming with elephant, rhino and antelopes galore, and supporting local communities. On Christmas morning, about 60 of us gathered on Pride Rock, the gravity-defying ledge copied by Disney for The Lion King, to sing Christmas carols, watched by a giraffe and three bemused buffalo. A white-backed vulture showed up during ‘Silent Night’, presumably hoping the rock would topple under our combined weight.

People recreate the African savanna at every opportunity. In Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a character points out that there’s nothing natural about English parkland: it’s ‘Capability Brown doing Claude who was doing Virgil’. But as the ecologist Gordon Orians argues they were all doing the Africa savanna, a preference for which lies deep inside our psyches. Looking out over Borana’s gentle, grassy hills with spreading trees, distant water and herds of impala, I might be in a London park. Except for the lion roars at night on Christmas Eve.

What is natural? When white people first came here in the late 19th century they found a land almost empty of people but full of game (except elephants, which had been wiped out by Arab ivory traders). We now know this was because smallpox had devastated the people, and rinderpest the cattle.

Chris Thouless told me that it was nearby that the talented artist-scientist Jonathan Kingdon discovered a bizarre fact. A stripy animal called the crested rat was known to be poisonous to dogs if caught. Kingdon worked out that the rat chewed on the bark of the same tree the Waliangulu used to make poison arrows, then spat into a fold in its fur.

One of Kenya’s biggest exports is cut flowers, its biggest market is Russia and the busiest week is leading up to Valentine’s Day. The pandemic needs to end by then.

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The hair shirt eco-elite don’t want pain-free fusion power

My article for The Telegraph:

Fusion energy is coming. Last week’s announcement of a significant energy yield from the Joint European Torus in Oxfordshire is just a milestone on the path but all the signs are that there’s probably going to be reliable fusion power on tap some time in the next decade thanks to breakthroughs in superconductivity.

Also, private money is pouring into fusion, which has forced the public projects to speed up, as it did with genomics. It would be a foolish person who repeated Ernest Rutherford’s clanger of 1933 about nuclear fission: “Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of the atom is talking moonshine.”

True, there is every chance we will make a mess of the opportunity by adopting an extreme precautionary approach to regulation. In the case of nuclear (fission) power, we bound it into such a straitjacket of cumbersome rules that we ended up making it a lot more expensive, slightly less safe and incapable of even trying new designs that might bring down the price and drive the safety even higher. Innovation should have rendered both Chernobyl and Fukushima redundant long before they blew up, and Hinkley is going to be grotesquely, needlessly costly. If we make a similar unforced error with fusion, forget it.

But fusion is very different from fission, producing vastly less radioactive material and almost no long-term waste. It cannot melt down or blow up. So regulating it is simpler: treat it like any other industrial facility and set up the regulation to give quick decisions, be flexible and focus on the safe outcome not the process of getting there. If we do that, we might have a great opportunity, because Britain is already a leader in fusion.

So it’s worth casting our minds forward to how the world might look if small power stations start making huge quantities of energy from tiny quantities of water (the source of deuterium) and lithium (the source of tritium). We could heat our homes and power our cars with cheap electricity. We could synthesise fuel for planes and rockets. We could speed up productivity through automation. We could desalinate seawater. We could suck carbon dioxide out of the air, achieving net zero painlessly. We could rewild all wind and solar farms. Above all, we could tell the eco-killjoys who preach that our use of energy is not just a problem but a sin to get lost.

And therein lies the problem, because they will fight us every step of the way, inventing ludicrous objections to fusion. Remember, for the eco-elite, hair-shirt asceticism is a feature not a bug. Giving ordinary people unlimited energy would horrify these high priests. What they love about climate change is the excuse it gives them to disapprove of people having fun. Imagine the scowl on Greta’s face when we tell her electricity is going to be abundant, cheap, reliable and low-carbon. It’s shooting their fox.

Notice too how it would make a mockery of the urgent rush to net zero today. The BBC’s Jon Amos delivered a predictable sermon on this theme this week following the fusion announcement: “Fusion is not a solution to get us to 2050 net zero. This is a solution to power society in the second half of this century.”

He’s got it backwards: if fusion does come after 2050, why spend trillions and force people into austerity in the rush to net zero by 2050 instead of say 2070? We are hurrying to shut down coal, gas and nuclear prematurely with no reliable replacement. Looking back that might prove to have been very foolish.

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Plains of plenty

My article for The Critic:

When I was ten years old, in 1968, my parents took me and two of my sisters on a safari through Kenya and Tanzania. Having lived there when they first married in the 1950s, they wanted us to see the wildlife before it was all gone. Newly independent Kenya, its population booming, would soon have few lions or elephants left. This was not intended as a political criticism, it was just that there was unlikely to be room for such luxuries in a poor nation striving to feed its expanding population.

The first of the game reserves we visited, the Masai Mara, with its abundant big game and beautiful birds, left an indelible impression on my young mind. It helped turn me into a bird watcher and then a biologist. This winter, 53 years later, I returned to the Mara for the first time. To say that my parents’ pessimism was unjustified is to understate the matter — vastly. The grassy plains either side of the Mara river are as rich as ever in zebra, topi, eland, wildebeest, waterbuck, gazelles, impala, giraffe and buffalo.

There are plenty of elephants and — the poaching threat having faded at least for now — they are breeding like rabbits. Rhinos are increasing again and in 2020 not a single one was lost to poachers in all of Kenya.

We watched a herd of more than a hundred hippos splashing about in the river and chasing crocodiles. Lions, leopards, hyenas, jackals, baboons, mongeese, hyraxes, oribi, reedbuck, bushbuck — we saw them all. Every third tree seemed to have an eagle on it, not to mention vultures, harriers, kites and buzzards. Huge flocks of swallows and martins of several different species feasted on the insects disturbed by buffalo or cars. The Garden of Eden, with all its abundance, would have looked like a municipal park by contrast.

I consulted the book we had with us in 1968 — John Williams’s Guide to the Game Reserves of East Africa, which had been published the previous year. Its description of the Mara, and its list of species to be seen there was exactly right even today. This does seem to be at odds with the claims of those who insist that nature is everywhere in terminal decline, or in worsening crisis. Conservation does work. The hard work of those who set up, protect and manage such reserves is betrayed by apocalyptic talk.

The connectedness of ecosystems was another lesson the Mara teaches. This small corner of the vast Serengeti plain alone supports the winter feeding of millions of Eurasian migrant birds, let alone resident African species. If it vanished under the plough or the cow, the effect would be global. Ecologically, the richness of these lands has to be seen to be believed.

But can it last? We saw cattle grazing well inside the reserve, the herders unable to resist the abundant grass after overgrazing their own lands. We heard how a Masai man, however well educated, still counts cattle and goats as the measure of wealth that matters. We flew over the Mau forest, where the Mara river comes from, and saw the thinning of the trees, the spread of cultivated fields and the speckled rashes of goats and cattle among the woods. Kenya’s population is more than five times as large as it was in 1968.

Climate change has affected this region imperceptibly if at all. Among climatologists there is no agreement that there is a discernible trend in rainfall, up or down. According to one wildlife expert I consulted, frequent reports of droughts in parts of Kenya say more about the impact of overgrazing than about rainfall amounts: they are man-made droughts, as he put it.

It’s pressure of people on habitat, not any slight upward trend in temperature, that affects wildlife here, although invasive species also play a part, as they do everywhere. For example, the whistling thorn tree, which builds swollen chambers to house ants that protect the tree against browsing animals, is disappearing, because the big-headed ant from South America is killing off the native ants.

The pandemic has dealt a shock to Kenya’s tourist industry, with two years of lean bookings and frequent cancellations. That means that the delicate balance between wildlife being an asset and being a liability is disturbed. Lions and zebras cannot pay their way if nobody comes to see them. Throughout Africa the pressure to farm the land that is devoted to wildlife is not getting any less.

Wilson Naitoi (left), who acted as our guide for four days, became a good friend. Wilson won Mara Guide of the Year a few years ago and the prize was a trip to see the gorillas in Uganda. With a college diploma and a wicked sense of humour he is as well educated a naturalist as any I have met. But his home has no electricity; he and his wife fetch water from the river each day. The eldest of his five children was, aged 15, in charge of his precious cattle herd while he was away at work.

Yet I found myself confident that the Mara will survive. Kenya’s birth rate has halved since 1950 to 3.4 children per woman, as infant mortality plummets: it’s a demographic fact that when kids stop dying, parents plan smaller families. And although the country’s total population is still growing fast, its rural population has now been shrinking for 20 years as people move to the cities to find paid work.

The expansion and subdivision of subsistence farms at the expense of wild habitats has at last begun to slow. The temptation for Masai children to leave for urban employment will increasingly eclipse the temptation to stay and expand the family cattle herd. And for those who do stay, tourism will increasingly outbid farming as a career, as it has for Wilson.

The richer a country gets, the more it values wild landscapes and their animals. The statistics prove that economic development is the friend not the enemy of conservation. Kenya has much poverty still, but its economy is growing like a beanstalk: GDP growth has averaged 5.7 per cent in the last five years. More and more of the tourists in the Mara are wealthy Kenyans from the booming economy of Nairobi and the central highlands. The ten or more cars that converged on a cheetah we saw eating a young warthog — an audience it wholly ignored — were mostly full of African tourists.

Yes, there will be an element of artificiality about the relationship between the Masai and the tourists. As a hotel housekeeper our friend Alfred wore a crisply ironed uniform at work; jeans and a T-shirt when I saw him off duty; and full Masai warrior dress for the evening dance ceremony put on once a week for hotel guests. But how does that differ from, say, the Braemar Games?

In the short term, at least, the biggest problem faced by conservationists in this part of Africa is not too few but too many elephants. Conflict between people and elephants is growing as much because of the accelerating population explosion of the latter as the decelerating one of the former. An elephant is a wonder to me; to somebody whose shamba (crop field) it destroys, it is a costly menace.

As a premier game reserve, the Mara is always going to attract tourists. Its productive soil, grassy plains and permanent water mean that it will be a honeypot for game and so for visitors. What about areas with less elegant scenery, thicker bush and fewer animals? Here there is one way to get wildlife to pay its way that Kenya has eschewed and its neighbour Tanzania has not: trophy hunting.

The problem with tourists who shoot with cameras is that only the very best reserves attract them. Tourists who shoot with rifles pay more and spread out more, which means that they can support the conservation of much larger areas. The vast, flat tracts of dry, dense thorn scrub that cover much of Africa will always struggle to attract photographic tourists, but they can support buffalo and lions, which — through the fees generated by western hunters and passed on to local communities — can be more lucrative than goats. It’s just another (and comparatively humane) form of predation, after all.

The British government’s impending ban on the import of hunting trophies is a big mistake. It will inevitably mean some areas of southern Africa reverting from herds of wildlife to herds of cattle and goats. Overgrazing will follow as sure as night follows day, and then the birds will thin out too (though Kenya, which allows no hunting, will be unaffected). It’s a delicate question that applies also to the grouse moors of northern England, where curlews also thrive: are we a spectator or a participant in the ecosystem? Audience or predator with skin in the game? Ideally both: one in some areas, the other in other areas.

A memory I will treasure: one early morning we came upon four young male lions resting by a bush. A herd of nearly 100 elephants with lots of small calves was feeding slowly towards them. Anticipating some kind of clash, Wilson positioned our vehicle so that we could watch what happened. As the two species became aware of each other, the elephants began trumpeting and flapping their ears to scare away the lions. The four brother lions reluctantly decided to slink away.

Our vehicle — with no doors or windows — was in the way and they passed within ten feet of us. Yet to them we were neither prey not predator. They and the elephants never “broke the fourth wall”, as actors say, by looking at us. We were there but we did not affect what happened. After five million years of killing and being killed by lions and elephants, that is a spectacular place for our species to have arrived at.

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How Putin spent millions spreading fake news about fracking

My article for The Sun:

When Lorraine Allanson spoke up in favour of drilling for shale gas in her part of North Yorkshire, activists cut off her internet, called her a “whore” and linked her to a fake crime number. “Shouting, abuse, public defecation, intimidation, hijacking lorries to stop deliveries, blocking the village street, this was the locals’ daily experience,” she wrote in her book My Story.

The wave of noisy protests against shale gas in Lancashire and Yorkshire in recent years looked like a grassroots movement. It was anything but.

It was peopled by a middle class rent-a-crowd, ramped up by misleading scare stories from Friends of the Earth, amplified by the BBC and The Guardian, funded by wealthy hedge-fund billionaires and welcomed by incumbent energy firms worried by the prospect of new competition for renewables, nuclear or offshore gas.

All this suited Vladimir Putin’s regime, because banning shale kept the gas underground and left us more dependent on Russia for our energy supplies.

Unlike Germany, the UK gets most of its gas from Norway and Qatar, but an increasing amount comes directly from Russia. And the refusal of Europe to frack helped drive up the gas price everywhere.

Not content with letting the radical Greens do this work for him, Mr Putin decided to give them a helping hand. Alarmed by the fall in the gas price that America’s shale revolution promised, he told a global economic conference in 2013 that “black stuff comes out of the tap” when you frack near people’s homes, an absurd claim that not even Friends of the Earth would dare make.

Scores of stories

Russian support for anti-fracking campaigns over the past decade took the form of public comments from the Kremlin’s cronies, a blizzard of scare stories on the Russia Today TV channel, some overt political lobbying by the country’s Gazprom and Russian money almost certainly finding its way into the coffers of environmental pressure groups.

In 2011 Gazprom, a firm with a mixed environmental record, claimed wrongly: “The production of shale gas is associated with significant environmental risks, in particular the hazard of surface and underground water contamination with chemicals.”

Alexander Medvedev, the general director of Gazprom Export, said fracking would never work in Europe. But just in case it did, he added in a speech in Brussels that the Russian state was “ready to wage its war on shale”.

In just six months Russia Today ran scores of anti-shale stories, with headlines like:

“Wrecking the Earth: Fracking has grave radiation risks few talk about”, “Fracking fluid linked to fish die-off”, “US fracking wells annually produce 280bn gallons of toxic waste water destroying environment”, “We say no to shale gas”, “Fracking nightmare”, “Fracking chemicals disrupt human hormone functions, study claims”, “Living near fracking sites increases infant birth defects”, “Hundreds gather for anti-fracking march in Manchester”.

One ludicrous story went even further, claiming frackers were “the moral equivalent of paedophiles”. Russian social media amplified every alarm, fanning the flames of concern.

Behind the scenes Russian interests lobbied hard for bans on shale gas. Bulgaria rushed through a ban in 2012 under pressure from the socialist party and Bulgaria’s gas company, Overgas, which gets almost all its gas from Gazprom. The ban followed some small protests featuring several leading members of the Soviet-era secret police.

In Germany, Gazprom Germania lobbied the Bundestag and the key ministries for a ban on shale gas, as did German energy companies with large Russian investors. Here, Lord Truscott, married to a Russian colonel’s daughter, made several interventions in the House of Lords to criticise shale gas as vice chair of the short-lived All-Party Parliamentary Group on Shale Gas Regulation and Planning — an anti-shale lobby front.

In America, a congressional inquiry concluded that two environmental foundations in San Francisco, the Sea Change Foundation and Energy Foundation, were “pass-through” conduits to anti-fracking campaigns channelling huge donations made in jurisdictions that allowed anonymity such as Bermuda.

Covert payments

There they appeared to share connections with Russian investors.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington DC, published a report that concluded: “Russian-supported consultancies in Europe may be helping some of the environ-mental groups opposed to hydraulic fracturing”.

In 2014, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary-general of Nato and former Prime Minister of Denmark, told the Chatham House think tank: “I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations — environmental organisations working against shale gas — to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.”

National Review, a US magazine, concluded in 2015: “Russia has ramped up covert payments to environmental groups in the West. By supporting well-intentioned environmentalists with hard cash (often without their knowledge), Russian intelligence gains Western mouthpieces to petition Western audiences in its favour.”

The Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies in Belgium published a report in 2016 which concluded that “the Russian government has therefore invested €82million in NGOs whose job is to persuade EU governments to stop shale gas exploration”.

Much of the support for the anti-fracking movement was still homegrown. But it did Putin’s dirty work for him.

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