Matt Ridley's Blog, page 19

Principles versus rules in free trade

A Times column on free trade:

Why does the European Union raise a tariff on coffee? It has no coffee industry to protect so the sole effect is to make coffee more expensive for all Europeans. Even where there is an industry to protect, protectionism hurts far more people than it helps. Last October the EU surreptitiously quintupled the tariff on imported oranges to 16 per cent to protect Spanish citrus producers against competition from South Africa and punish the rest of us. It imposes a tax of 4.7 per cent on imported umbrellas, 15 per cent on unicycles and 16.9 per cent on sports footwear.

I find that many Twitter trolls do not even realise that the European “single market” is actually a fortress protected by high external tariff walls. Yet external tariffs are pure self-harm; they are blockades against your own ports, as the economist Ryan Bourne has pointed out. We impose sanctions on pariah regimes, restricting their imports, not to help their economies but to hurt them. The entire point of producing things is to consume things (the pattern of pay shows that we work to live rather than vice versa), so punishing consumers is perverse. As Adam Smith put it, describing the European Union in advance, “in the mercantile system the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer”.

Therefore, after Brexit, Britain should try unilateral free trade no matter what everybody else does — and even if the United States turns more protectionist. So argues a group of 16 distinguished economists, Economists for Free Trade, the first part of whose manifesto From Project Fear to Project Prosperity is published today. They calculate that unilateral free trade would benefit the British economy to the tune of £135 billion a year. One of them, Kevin Dowd of Durham University, has also written a powerful new pamphlet for the Institute of Economic Affairs entitled A trade policy for a Brexited Britain.

He argues that unlike in every other kind of negotiation, unilateral disarmament works with trade. Dismantling barriers to imports — removing sanctions against your own people — reduces the costs of the goods for consumers, reduces the costs of inputs for most producers, lowers inflation, creates employment and boosts growth.

So the best negotiating strategy is liberalise first, talk second: dare others to follow suit. As Sir Robert Peel told the House of Commons in the Corn Laws debate in 1846, the government would cease “haggling with foreign countries about reciprocal concessions, instead of taking the independent course, which we believe to be conducive to our own interests”.

Like socialism, pure free trade has probably never been tried, but unlike socialism, the closer countries get to free trade the more they thrive. Consider three examples of unilateral economic disarmament: Britain after 1846-1860, Hong Kong and Singapore today. In all three cases, economic growth was far faster than the global average. Even China unilaterally reduced its tariffs significantly (albeit not to zero) some years ago — to great effect.

Free trade is the very opposite of elitism. Its benefits accrue disproportionately to the poor; its costs to the crony-capitalist rich. However, if this is to be another Corn Laws moment — a major economy taking the plunge for unilateral free trade — then we need to think through how best to dare the world to follow us. For we will run into the problem of how to deal with other blocs’ non-tariff barriers.

The big issue today is not tariffs but standards, or regulatory rules behind the border. How do you ensure that an import is not toxic or unsafe or made with slave labour? And how do you stop such concerns becoming an excuse for barriers against imports?

Tariffs are now mostly low, except in agriculture, but non-tariff barriers, especially in services, are high. As an economy dominated by services, Britain has a strong interest in trying to lead the world into services liberalisation.

Here is where the big battle is to be fought in future between two competing approaches, says Shanker Singham of the influential Legatum Institute Special Trade Commission. One, espoused mainly in the EU, is the prescriptive, rules-based system that specifies exactly how a product or service must be produced if it is to be allowed in. In the tradition of Roman civil law, this approach essentially prescribes the method as well as the outcome. China, too, increasingly works in this way, though its regulatory regime — “global standards with a Chinese character” — is something of a regulatory black box.

Such policy is essentially agnostic about consumer welfare: it is driven by producer interests and revenue maximisation for government. Our challenge is to shift the world trading system towards a better, common-law approach, which is principles-based, outcome-focused, consumer-friendly. Because of our history and the nature of our economy, Britain can be an effective champion of this challenge.

The issue boils down to defining the word “equivalent” as something other than “identical”. For the EU, the dominant approach has been harmonisation rather than mutual recognition: things must be done the same way everywhere within the single market. But outside, mutual recognition of outcomes is gaining ground: for example, between Australia and New Zealand, there is an agreement that “your agency judged this medicine or foodstuff safe, and that’s good enough for us”. Even the EU has accepted this approach of mutual recognition with other countries, although sparingly. This has to be the way to go. To paraphrase Deng Xiaoping, it does not matter what colour the cat is, so long as it catches mice.

The World Trade Organisation does provide a mechanism for this kind of equivalent mutual recognition. In the “technical barriers to trade” (TBT) and “sanitary and phytosanitary measures” (SPS) agreements, countries should mutually recognise their systems if the overall objective (safety etc) is the same, but the technical way of getting there differs. So the EU could arguably be breaching WTO rules if it argues that equivalence requires identical regulation.

Free trade works. I live in Northumberland, and it no more makes sense to deny Northumbrians access to products and services from abroad than to deny them cars from Sunderland, whisky from Scotland or lamb from Cumbria.

As Adam Smith said, you should never “attempt to make at home what it will cost [you] more to make than to buy . . . What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

 

Why I am more sure than ever that Brexit was the right thing to do

My recent Times column on the arguments for Brexit:

 

More than a year after Britain voted to leave the European Union, I realise we who ended up on the Leave side have probably made a mistake. No, not that we should have voted the other way, but that we thought we had won the argument last year during those weeks when we lived and breathed every detail of the debate. To some extent we then stopped making the case. The Remainers didn’t.

True, they have a few new arguments to deploy, such as that Michel Barnier is a wizard negotiator who will run rings round us and that everything he says is gospel, while everything David Davis says is nonsense; even that it is now obvious that “the job can’t be done” (in Lord Heseltine’s words). The argument that leaving the European Union is not just foolish but somehow against the laws of physics, or something, seems to be growing more common. There are just too many treaties to disentangle and too many laws to rewrite, so after a few years of trying we will give up.

I happen to be reading Maya Jasanoff’s magnificent book Liberty’s Exiles on what happened to the loyalists after American independence. Much the same complexity argument was made in 1782 during the two-year negotiation to leave the British Empire: it was a “huge task [that] required deconstructing the apparatus of an empire from the bottom up”. What a shocking indictment of our civilisation if, after inventing so much automation, knowledge and wealth, it is even harder to disentangle a country from an empire today.

The most eye-catching result of last month’s YouGov poll on “Brexit extremism” was that one in five Remain voters thinks “significant damage to the British economy after leaving the European Union to be a price worth paying to teach Leave politicians and Leave voters a lesson”. Yikes. How spiteful can you get? Liam Fox was apparently not wrong when he said the media is full of people who “would rather see Britain fail than see Brexit succeed”.

I, for one, am more sure now than I was on June 24, 2016 that the British people did the right thing. My one anxiety as I placed my cross on the paper was that Project Fear might be half right if only for self-fulfilling reasons, and that I might be helping to inflict severe short-term pain for slight long-term gain. Yet instead of an emergency budget and an immediate and profound shock to the economy, a loss of confidence, a drying up of inward investment, a plunge in house prices, a surge in inflation and a collapse in the stock market — all of which we were promised if we voted Leave — there has been almost unremitting good news on the economic front.

Unemployment is now lower than at any time since 1975. Employment, at 75 per cent, is the highest since records began in 1971. But the most striking data are on investment. I have lost count of the number of times I have been told that investors are pulling out of Britain. The opposite is true. Britain is currently the most popular destination in Europe for foreign direct investment, which shot up to £197 billion in 2016, compared with £33 billion in 2015, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). To those who say “That was only the vote; once we actually leave, then we’ll be proved right,” I reply: “Why did you not say so at the time?”

There is a second reason I feel more Leave-inclined than a year ago: the behaviour of the European Commission. I don’t much mind the scorn and petty point-scoring. I expected that, don’t believe a word of it and find it reassuring, not least because it lowers expectations. When you’re taking flak, you know you are over the target.

No, it’s that they clearly mind more about the budget for their bureaucracy (the “bill”) than the economic future for European citizens. We are told we must settle the officials’ demands for money for officials to spend on officials’ priorities, before we even talk about future trade arrangements between ordinary people.

Jasanoff reports that when Britain’s negotiators agreed to the terms of American independence in Paris in 1782, “many contemporaries were surprised by Britain’s generosity towards the former colonies”. The reason was that Lord Shelburne, the prime minister, wanted to try to secure the United States in Britain’s sphere of influence.

Where is the same ambition in today’s Brussels? Has there been a single speech from within the commission (rather than the continent) about how the future prosperity of all Europeans, including Britons, depends on maximising innovation, trade and trust among us? Or saying that, given the continent’s huge trade surplus with us and the huge numbers of its citizens that we have created jobs for, let alone our net contribution to the budget being the second biggest, we might deserve a little co-operation, even thanks. I know nobody in Britain who wants us to stop being friends, allies and trade partners of European countries.

The inhabitants of the commission (and the parliament) exemplify public choice theory at its finest: they mistake official self-interest for the public interest. They are interested in making sure their integrationist bureaucracy thrives, rather than looking after the economy of the continent.

True, there are Europeans making better noises, within Germany and elsewhere. Yet that only reinforces the point: if the European Union were an intergovernmental arrangement, I would be all for staying in it. It is not, as I keep pointing out to American friends who think it is some kind of economic Nato. It is an experiment in building a top-down, centralising, supranational government, with a bureaucratic surplus and a democratic deficit. Compared with most of the rest of the world it is a failure, as its economic growth rate, unemployment rate and innovation record demonstrate.

Putting aside the negotiating bluster, I am also encouraged by the fresh thinking already emerging on policy. In recent months I have had conversations about immigration policy with Australians, fishing policy with Icelanders, farm subsidies with Swiss, environmental policies with Americans and tobacco control with Canadians. These conversations no longer end in that despairing realisation that reform is impossible because it requires persuading 27 other nations and a lobby-fodder commission to come to some sort of compromise. Suddenly anything is possible.

Britain's opportunity to champion gene editing

My recent Times column on gene editing: 

Britain has an opportunity to seize on the latest breakthroughs in gene editing and pioneer new approaches in agriculture, research and medicine. We are well placed to be bold but responsible gene editors. Bolder than continental countries, looking over their shoulder to the disapproving Roman Catholic church; more responsible than China, where decisions on such matters are taken by officials with little consultation with the public; and without the divisive culture battles over moral and legal issues that so often divide the United States on matters of biology.

This is partly a matter of good regulation. Britain’s pioneering debate in the 1980s on how to regulate embryo research, allowing such work up to 14 days, drew the sting from subsequent arguments over cloning, stem cells and mitochondrial transplants. It is a compromise that has held and shown that the slope to “designer babies” is not slippery. The public is reassured. There have been no major scandals or disasters in genetic research here.

Moreover, on the medical side unlike agriculture, the European Commission has kept out of this area. Somehow, it has never managed to impose its precautionary obsession on biomedical research as it has on other areas of science. So it really is up to the British government how much it encourages or hampers genetic experiments and treatments. Britain’s decision last year to allow gene editing in human embryos, but only for research, not for germline breeding, was a world first, and went through without much public fuss.

In agriculture, the story of transgenic genetic modification of plants – the “older” technology now being partly replaced by gene editing – is also encouraging. Twenty years ago, America was relaxed about genetic modification, whereas Britain was easily panicked by the green movement into nonsensical fears of “Frankenstein foods”. Today, it is the other way around. Hotted up by green campaigners who are aware of “climate fatigue” among their donors, Americans are increasingly torn over GMOs, despite decades of safe and environmentally beneficial experience of growing of them.

Genetically modified farm animals are especially problematic, stuck in what one researcher calls “regulatory purgatory” for 20 years, and one of the last acts of the Obama administration was to toughen the regulation of gene editing in animals as well. In effect, the government funds genetic modification and gene editing of animals and then does not allow them to be used.

In this country, by contrast, absence has made the heart grow fonder. In 2012 when Rothamsted Research grew GM crops experimentally, it explained the reasons carefully and cogently to the public in a series of videos, ably assisted by the ex-protester Mark Lynas among others, and the result was a small group of protesters, some of whom were French. This year, when GM wheat was planted there, no protesters turned up at all.

Gene editing means making small changes to sequences of DNA letters so as to remove or alter the expression of genes that allow infections or code for undesirable traits. It answers many of the objections of that earlier generation of protesters. There is no introduction of foreign DNA, no “crossing the species barrier” which opponents managed to make sound so unnatural. Also, lighter regulation would prevent the technology being confined to large corporations that could cope with the regulatory burden, which protesters found objectionable.

So perhaps we have an opportunity now to do what we did with embryonic stem cells – provide a more permissive but still strict regulatory environment in agriculture than America, but still with popular support. In a Yougov poll last week, just 7% of people said they opposed gene editing altogether. As an America-based law professor tells me, “public views are evolving fairly quickly towards usage and away from restrictions”. 

Suppose Britain did decide that it wanted to encourage as much as possible of this research and application, carefully regulated according to the trait in question, rather than the method of producing it, what should it do? First, paradoxically, it should impose a strict moratorium on germ-line gene editing in people. Despite growing evidence that nobody really wants to use these technologies for “designer baby” enhancement, enough concern remains that we should draw the line for the foreseeable future here. As Lord Winston pointed out in a letter to the Times last week, there are other ways to ensure that people carrying brutal mutations can escape passing them on to their children, chiefly through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.

The main medical benefits of gene editing lie elsewhere. By combining gene editing and induced pluripotent stem cells, researchers are beginning to envisage cures for a wide variety of diseases. The most promising results are with the treatment of leukaemia by harnessing the body’s own immune system to attack the cancer. As reported earlier this year, in mice with leukaemia, “edited cells vastly outperforming conventionally generated”cells.This is a really exciting breakthrough and is the greatest prize that the new technology offers. A moratorium on germline gene editing would help maintain public support such somatic gene editing. 

Second, we should give a cautious green light to some germ-line gene editing in animals. The Roslin institute’s work on making pigs resistant to disease by editing one gene is a good example of the exciting possibilities here, and gene editing may well prove to be a vital weapon in the conservation armory: engineering red squirrels to resist the parapox virus spread by greys, for example, or engineering invasive insect pests so as to suppress their populations – both easily within our grasp in the near future.

Third, in the case of plants, we should go all out for gene editing as a replacement not only for genetic modification, but for pesticides too. Gene editing so that crops are insect-resistant, and thus need no sprays, or capable of fixing their own nitrogen from the air, and thus need no fertiliser, or for enhanced nutrition (more omega-3 fatty acids, say), are all possibilities. The European Union is deliberately trying to delay deciding how to regulate this technology. The Americans, despite permitting two traits already, are now starting to promulgate stricter rules through the Food and Drug Administration. The Chinese are gung-ho but lack the depth of scientific expertise we have here. We could be the world leader in plant gene editing. Scientifically, legally, reputationally and pragmatically, we are in a great position.

 

 

 

In its energy policy, Britain keeps picking losers

My Times column on Britain's nuclear power fiasco:

 

Shortly before parliament broke up this month, there was a debate on a Lords select committee report on electricity policy that was remarkable for its hard-hitting conclusions. The speakers, and signatories of the report, included a former Labour chancellor, Tory energy secretary, Tory Scottish secretary, cabinet secretary, ambassador to the European Union and Treasury permanent secretary, as well as a bishop, an economics professor, a Labour media tycoon and a Lib Dem who was shortlisted for governor of the Bank of England.

Genuine heavyweights, in short. They were in general agreement: energy policy is a mess, decarbonisation has been pursued at the expense of affordability and, in particular, the nuclear plant at Hinkley Point C in Somerset is an expensive disaster. Their report came out before the devastating National Audit Office report on Hinkley, which said the government had “locked consumers into a risky and expensive project [and] did not consider sufficiently the risks and costs to the consumer”.

Hinkley is but the worst example of a nationalised energy policy of picking losers. The diesel fiasco is another. The wind industry, with its hefty subsidies paid from the poor to the rich to produce unreliable power, is a third. The biomass mess (high carbon, high cost and environmental damage) is a fourth.

The liberalised energy markets introduced by Nigel Lawson in 1982, embraced by the Blair government and emulated across Europe, delivered both affordability and reliability. But they were abandoned and, in the words of the Lords committee, “a succession of policy interventions has led to the creation of a complex system of subsidies and government contracts at the expense of competition. Nobody has built a power station without some form of government guarantee since 2012.”

All three parties share the blame. Labour’s Climate Change Act of 2008 made Britain the only country with mandatory decarbonisation targets, a crony-capitalist’s dream. The Lib Dems who ran the energy department for five years, latterly Ed Davey, negotiated the disastrous Hinkley contract. The Tories reviewed the decision in 2016, by which time it was clear we had managed the unique feat of finding a technology that was untested yet already obsolete. They decided to go ahead anyway, missing the chance to blame the other parties for it. As the energy analyst Peter Atherton put it, the three parties “have managed to design possibly the most expensive programme for delivering nuclear power we could have come up with”.

The chief Lib Dem mistake was to ignore the shale gas and oil revolutions under way in America and assume that fossil fuel prices would rise from already high levels. By 2011, influenced by peak-oil nonsense and lobbied by professors of “sustainability”, the department of energy and climate change was projecting that the oil price would be between $97 and $126 per barrel in 2017. Today it is about $50 a barrel, roughly half the LOWEST of the 2011 projections. Gas prices were expected to be about 76p per therm by now, whereas they are actually about HALF that: 37p.

The shale revolution is gathering pace all the time. Britain has very promising shales and could prosper and cut emissions if it joins in, so let us hope the first wells about to be drilled in Lancashire by Cuadrilla, against the determined opposition of wealthy, middle-class protesters, prove successful. (No, I don’t have a commercial interest in shale.)

This forecasting mistake is behind much of the rising cost of Hinkley. In 2015 the whole-life cost of its power was expected to be £14 billion. Now it is £50 billion. Because consumers are on the hook to pay the difference between the wholesale price of electricity and the “strike price” for Hinkley, we must hope that the project is badly delayed, because that way our children will at least spend fewer years paying inflated electricity prices.

These bad forecasts, widely criticised at the time, make all strike prices horribly expensive, for onshore and offshore wind and solar as well. Lib Dem ministers kept saying at the time that subsidies for renewables and Hinkley would protect the consumer against “volatile” gas prices. Yes, they have done so: by guaranteeing high prices. Oh for a little downward volatility!

Britain’s industrial and commercial users now have some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world, which find their way to households in cost of living and a downward pressure on wages. American industry pays about half as much for its electricity as we do, and everyone benefits. Energy prices are not just any consumer price: they determine the prosperity of the entire economy.

Well, no use crying over spilt future money. What are we to do? Here is where it could get interesting. Almost nobody wants Hinkley to go ahead, apart from the contractors who get to build it. EDF and Areva, the French owner and developer, are in trouble over the only two comparable reactors in Europe. The one at Flamanville is still to start working, many years behind schedule. The French unions want Hinkley cancelled. Lord Howell of Guildford, the former energy secretary, wisely pointed out in the Lords that the key player is China, a partner in the project. Rather than cost, the government’s excuse for revisiting Hinkley last year was partly worries about security. This was a silly worry and bad diplomacy. However, it is not clear China wants to go ahead, and subtle negotiation could tease this out. The great prize for China was regulatory approval through Britain’s gold-standard “generic design assessment” process, which could unlock foreign markets and give a green light for a Chinese-built reactor at Bradwell in Essex.

But Lord Howell says the Chinese increasingly realise that the Hinkley design is a dead end, as costs escalate and delays grow. And they know that the future for nuclear power must lie in smaller, modular units, mass-manufactured like cars rather than assembled from scratch like Egyptian pyramids. Their “Nimble Dragon” design could slot into both the Hinkley and Bradwell sites, perhaps beside the larger Hualong design.

Cancellation would cost some £20 billion. But if the initiative comes from Beijing it is just possible that some new arrangement could be salvaged from the certain wreckage of the EDF scheme, without seriously damaging both livelihoods and our relations with China.

Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy

A review of Tim Harford's book, Fifty things that made the modern economy.

 

In 2006 the historian David Edgerton wrote a book called The Shock of the Old in which he argued that the 20th century was not really all about space travel and atom bombs, but humdrum things such as corrugated iron and refrigeration. In this enjoyable book Tim Harford makes much the same point: “An alien engineer visiting from Alpha Centauri might suggest it would be good if the enthusiasm we had for flashy new things was equally expressed for fitting more S-bends and pouring more concrete floors.”

When people discuss innovation they usually focus on the high-tech and brand new. However, the things that made the world we know today are often fairly simple and low-tech. Container shipping, for example, has changed the world far more than molecular biology. It dramatically standardised ports, cutting the price of trade and making distance matter less.

Along with containers, the “cold chain” — which links refrigerated ships to refrigerated trucks to refrigerated shops — was vital to rearranging our food habits and preventing waste. The bar code helped supermarkets to triumph over corner shops (Harford tells us that its first use at a checkout was in 1974 at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, when a ten-pack of 50 sticks of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit was scanned). Flat-pack furniture — yes, Ikea’s founder gets the credit — has also had profound effects on the way we live. The gramophone destroyed the livelihoods of second-rate singers and began the trend towards winner-takes-all megastars.

Then there are passports. In the 19th century they were on the brink of being phased out. Abolishing them in France in 1860, Napoleon III called them “an embarrassment and an obstacle to the peaceable citizen”. Then along came the First World War and ever since passports have become more and more officious in defining who can travel where. The very size and form of passports, as booklets, was decided in 1921 and has changed little since.

The social implications of innovations take time to emerge. Lifts — or at least reliable elevator brakes — made skyscrapers possible and rearranged cities. TV dinners, more than washing machines, freed women from domestic drudgery. (“Before the washing machine we didn’t wash clothes very often . . . We were willing to stink but we weren’t ready to starve,” says Harford.) The Pill caused women to invest in education and train for high-powered careers much more than before. Willis Carrier’s invention of air conditioning in 1902 made hot places habitable and glass buildings practical. Human productivity peaks between 18C and 21C.

And then there are the old-fashioned software innovations: things such as double-entry book-keeping, a Venetian invention; public-key cryptography; and even management consulting. In 1922 James McKinsey invented the forward-looking budget, which sets goals, broken down department by department. These are what Harford calls “ideas about ideas”. Innovation is not just about tools; it’s about rules too.

Through his Radio 4 programme More or Less, Harford is one of the finest broadcasters of today: he is witty and clever and he does his homework. He is Britain’s answer to the Freakonomics folk and brings much-needed numerical sanity to a madly innumerate world.

This book is based on a radio series, which explains its list-like nature: 50 very short essays on different topics, each introduced with a little human story. It’s a formula that could get wearing, and indeed the anecdotes are sometimes a bit contrived. For example, the invention of radar in the 1930s is introduced by the story of an African flower trader in the 2010s whose employment was interrupted by the eruption of an Icelandic volcano.

On the whole, though, it works well. Books of short chapters are a delight in this frenetic age, and I read these while waiting for meals to cook and in between meetings. Best of all, the book is constantly surprising. It brims with innovations I didn’t know about, as well as ones I thought I knew about but did not.

The chapter on the compiler is especially intriguing. In the early 1950s the mathematician Grace Hopper was working for the Remington Rand corporation. She realised that subroutines — reusable bits of code — could be written in everyday language so that programming a computer could become a matter of using simple instructions in English, rather than numbers or symbols.

It seems such an obvious way to go, but it went against the grain of the computer industry’s high priests. Rebuffed by her boss, she experimented in her spare time, and her compiler evolved into one of the first programming languages, COBOL. Computers have since gone in the direction that Hopper knew made sense: “Freeing up programmer brainpower to think about concepts and algorithms, not switches and wires,” as Harford puts it.

Nonetheless, Hopper faced a struggle to get the idea adopted, as so many innovators did. Harford knows very well that the heroic genius inventor is a largely mythical beast and that most innovation happens gradually, cumulatively and collectively. He writes: “The truth is that even for a single invention it’s often hard to pin down a single person who was responsible — and it’s even harder to find a eureka moment when the idea all came together.”

My biggest quibble with Harford’s book is that he leaves this point largely unexplored, perhaps because telling the tale of the inventor is too good a way of bringing each story to life. The fact that almost every single innovation brings a trail of disappointed rivals in its wake, furiously demanding that they deserve the patent or the prize, sheds light on the curious phenomenon of simultaneous invention.

Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filed for a patent on the telephone on the same day in 1876. No fewer than 23 people can lay claim to having independently invented the lightbulb in the 1870s. The search engine was bound to have been perfected in the 1990s even if the Google founders had never existed.

It is a baffling paradox that great inventors are dispensable in a way that great artists are not — yet innovation is a rare thing that happens in only a few parts of the world at any time. If Einstein had not existed then Hendrik Lorentz would have discovered relativity, but there would be no Hamlet without Shakespeare and no Mona Lisa without Leonardo. So why did so much innovation happen in China at one time, Italy at another, America at another? This might make a good theme for Harford’s next book.

Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy by Tim Harford, Little Brown, 343pp, £18.99

Mini-revolutions
The Billy bookcase Ikea makes one every three seconds and there are about 60 million in the world — one for every 100 people.

Lifts China installs 700,000 every year. In 1743 Louis XV installed a secret one to pay visits to his mistress.

TV dinners In 1965 women spent four hours a day doing household chores. Thanks to TV dinners and other domestic innovations it’s down to 45 minutes (lazy men manage a paltry 15 minutes).

Concrete China used more in 2011-13 than the US did in the entire 20th century.

Plastic It’s a blessing and a curse: according to one estimate, by 2050 the plastic in the sea will weigh more than the fish.

Management consulting James McKinsey’s 1922 book Budgetary Control effectively invented the art. Today the world’s consulting firms charge their clients $125 billion a year.

Paper It’s on the way out: in 2013 the world hit peak paper and demand has declined since for the first time.

A state broadcaster is an anachronism

My Times column on the BBC: 

The revelation that disc jockeys and football presenters are paid millions for topping and tailing segments of rehashed music or rebroadcast football, especially if they are male, will almost certainly lead to more pay inflation at the BBC — to correct the gender imbalance. Here’s another gender imbalance: television licence fee evasion accounted for 36 per cent of all prosecutions of women in 2015 and 6 per cent of men.

Are there any arguments left for funding one broadcaster through a compulsory and regressive poll tax? The original argument was that broadcasting was a natural monopoly and the airwaves a limited space. Well, that’s long gone. In the digital world, I can watch or listen to one of many thousands of channels through cable, satellite or the internet.

Then, for a while, I was at least partly persuaded by the fact that there were no advertisements interrupting BBC shows, unlike on commercial channels. But that no longer holds for two reasons: first, technology has led to subscription services with no interrupting commercials, like Netflix; second, the BBC runs endless ads itself. I get heartily sick of the repetitious commercials on Radio 4. True, they are all adverts for its own programmes — trailers — but that makes them even more annoying. If the BBC were running commercials for other people’s shows, at least it would be earning a bit of money to cut the licence fee.

After that, we were told the BBC makes the best programmes thanks to its secure funding stream. It certainly makes some good ones, but in the era of The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Killing and The Crown, it does not excel. Even the natural history unit, which is consistently excellent, now has to look over its shoulders at rivals. The best natural history show I have seen in recent years was Wild Ireland: The Edge of the World, made by an independent production company, Crossing the Line, and sold around the world.

Then we were told that the BBC is an innovator. We will grant it Civilisation, Bake Off and (Strictly) Come Dancing, but so it should be with a £4 billion annual licence fee. More often the BBC is a follower. It followed pirate radio into pop music, Sky into rolling news and ITV and Channel 4 into reality television. From Candid Camera to Gogglebox, it is rarely a pioneer.

Or we are told that the BBC makes films and programmes that nobody else would make, but that’s not true any more: in a digital, multi-channel world it is easier for independent programme-makers to exploit the “long tail” of rare interests and tastes, finding sufficient markets around the world for obscure types of highbrow arts or lowbrow tat.

Yes, but without the BBC, Britain’s talented film-makers, radio broadcasters and musicians would get no chance and we would be overwhelmed with American imports. Really? In book writing and print journalism Britain punches well above its weight in the English-speaking world. James Corden, Simon Cowell and Jeremy Clarkson seem to have done all right as exports. As for Chris Evans and Gary Lineker, if they really could earn as much in the private sector, then they should do so.

But what about the BBC’s valuable impartiality in news and current affairs, drawing the nation together and setting a gold standard for unbiased reporting? You have to be joking. True, it gave Blairites as hard a time as Thatcherites — but nearly always using arguments from the left, not the right. You just don’t hear John Humphrys say: why not leave it to the market, minister, and cut taxes? (And Nick Clegg seems to have a permanent studio to himself.)

The claim to a lack of bias is in fact slightly sinister. There is no such thing: every broadcasting decision and angle on a news story is a choice. On Brexit, the BBC is relentlessly one-sided, not just in its choice of interviewees and the treatment it gives them, but in the commissioning of authored pieces. According to News-watch, listeners to the Today programme’s business coverage were three times as likely to hear a negative as a positive voice on Brexit in the six months after the referendum.

On behalf of a group of Labour, Conservative and other politicians, the Ukip peer Lord Pearson has been repeatedly asking the BBC’s director-general, Lord Hall, for a single example of a programme that explored the upside of Brexit — even a fictional film to balance things like the ludicrous Great European Disaster Movie, broadcast by the BBC in 2015. After months of asking, as Lord Pearson put it in a letter to Lord Hall: “We are still waiting for you to send us the transcript of a programme which has looked with enthusiasm at any of Brexit’s opportunities since 23rd June (see attached correspondence). We have dozens of transcripts of programmes which promote its possible pitfalls.”

Likewise on other issues, the BBC’s impartiality is a joke. It got into bed with the green movement on climate change. It even hired lawyers to try to keep secret the guest list of the seminar in 2006 with what it called “the best scientific experts” where it decided to stop being impartial on the subject. When the list came out anyway, these turned out to be mostly activists, not experts. It largely ignored an independent report in 2014 that it had commissioned, which found its countryside coverage was far too reliant on the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

These are my personal beefs, true, and kind Times readers sometimes remind me that they disagree with them. But we pay for the BBC or go to jail; not so The Times. And the BBC is a near-monopoly of a kind that it would regard as intolerable in the private sector: some 70 per cent of people get their broadcast news from the corporation.

It is a curious historical fact that the BBC was founded in effect to limit free speech. The British establishment reacted with alarm when, in June 1920, Guglielmo Marconi made the first, private radio broadcast. Radio was put under the monopoly control first of the General Post Office and then, from 1926, the BBC. Later, commercial companies such as Marconi, the Daily Mail, HMV and EMI were dying to plunge into TV, as others were doing in America, but in Britain it was decreed that the state alone would inform and entertain us. The BBC was meant from the start to control what we hear and direct what we think.

 

How the electric car revolution could backfire

My recent column for The Times on the arithmetic behind electric cars:

 

The British government is under pressure to follow France and Volvo in promising to set a date by which to ban diesel and petrol engines in cars and replace them with electric motors. It should resist the temptation, not because the ambition is wrong but because coercion could backfire.

The electric motor is older than the internal combustion engine by about half a century. Since taking over factories from the steam piston engine at the end of the 19th century, it has become ubiquitous. Twinned with its opposite number, the turbine (which turns work into electricity, rather than vice versa), it drives machines in factories, opens doors, raises lifts, prepares food, brushes teeth and washes plates.

These are fantastic motors and we should be using even more of them, especially in personal transport. They are quiet and clean at the point of use, so could have transformative effects on the quality of life of those living near roads and in urban areas. In the future they could even fly planes.

But if it is to be cordless, an electric drive must carry a heavy battery. Using lithium atoms, among the lightest there are, has helped to make batteries lighter, but they are still bulky, slow to charge and liable to explode if charged too fast. Imagine the congestion at charging stations if every car was electric.

Building an electric car generates considerably more carbon dioxide than creating a comparable petrol model because so much energy is required for the mining and processing of lithium, nickel and other materials for the battery. The battery accounts for more than half the cradle-to-grave emissions created by an electric car. Fuelling that car from a coal-fired grid like China’s or India’s makes the emissions even worse.

With Europe’s mix of generating capacity — less coal, more gas, more wind and more nuclear — an electric vehicle does emit less carbon dioxide over its lifetime than a comparable petrol or diesel vehicle, but not by a large margin. As one study concluded: “We find that electric vehicles powered by the European electricity mix reduce [global warming potential] by 26 per cent to 30 per cent relative to gasoline . . . and 17 per cent to 21 per cent relative to diesel.”

Then there is the question of where the extra electricity is to come from. In recent years we have struggled to build enough power stations for existing users, let alone adding all cars and heating too, for that is the plan. Britain’s cars travel about 250 billion miles a year. Assuming the use of very small Nissan Leaf-style vehicles, that mileage would add an extra 16 per cent of demand to our existing electricity grid.

If we want the new capacity to be low carbon — and since we cannot seem to get our act together on nuclear, and solar works poorly at this latitude, especially in winter — then how many wind turbines would be needed to generate that much extra electricity? Roughly 10,000 onshore or 5,000 offshore, requiring a subsidy of at least £2 billion, more than double the size of our existing windfarm estate. Yikes.

Meanwhile, the idea of using electric vehicles to balance the grid, allowing us to dump spare juice into them when the wind blows and take it out when it does not, is, according to Ofgem, pie in the sky, at least until autonomous vehicles arrive and cars can go scurrying off to central charging points after dropping you at home, which is some way off.

Finally, remember that — globally at least — 40 per cent of road transport fuel is used by lorries, not cars, so electrifying all cars still leaves a big chunk to tackle. In short, electric cars are a great technology but almost trivial as a climate policy. They’re attractive for other reasons.

To achieve a major transition in the economy, such as to electric transport, you could force the issue with a legal deadline, challenging the engineers to solve the practical problems and incentivising businesses to leave their comfort zone and abandon existing technologies.

Without a government ban it might never happen. But that sort of hothouse growth risks entrenching an immature technology, preventing a better one from coming along.

Here is a cautionary tale illustrating the latter point. Ten years ago Gordon Brown, then chancellor, and Hilary Benn, environment secretary, announced that ahead of an EU timetable Britain would forcibly phase out incandescent light bulbs in favour of compact fluorescent (CFL) ones, promising that this would “help tackle climate change, and also cut household bills”. By sending free CFL bulbs to most households and requiring retailers to sell only the new bulbs, this cost the country almost £3 billion.

Slow to warm up, tending to flicker, with a much shorter lifetime than expected and dangerous to dispose of, CFL bulbs were less popular with consumers than with manufacturers, who tooled up to produce them. Now, just ten years later, nobody wants CFL bulbs, thanks to the dramatic fall in price of the next technology: more efficient, better quality and safer LED lights. The government backed the wrong technology. Fortunately, in that case, changing course won’t be very hard, though the waste of £3 billion is a miserable thought. It would be much worse if we picked the wrong battery technology for electric vehicles.

Tesla’s decision to build a “Gigafactory” to make lithium-ion batteries may establish a new standard for battery technology for a generation, at the risk of pinching off research into potentially better designs for batteries. Or Tesla may find itself with an obsolete system if one of those other technologies suddenly achieves a breakthrough.

Perhaps we should leave this to the market. The great merit of private enterprise is that it reduces the cost of learning by putting a limit to the extent of the hazard of any particular adventure. One company gambles, and takes a hit, but the harm is limited and the lesson is learnt by everyone.

A ministerially mandated nationwide failure would be costly in itself and could delay the wider use of a genuinely promising development in personal transport. Don’t let the state screw this up.

 

The deep divergence in African genomes

My column in the Times on recent sensational discoveries relating to human evolution in Africa:

News is dominated by sudden things — bombs, fires, election results — and so gradual news sometimes get left out. The past month has seen three discoveries in Africa that radically change our understanding of a crucial phase in human evolution. For those interested in the common history of all humanity, this should really be among the biggest news of the year.

The first of these discoveries is genetic. Swedish and South African scientists have made the origin of us — modern human beings — an even more mind-bogglingly gradual phenomenon than we used to think. Here is what they found. A skeleton of a boy who died 2,000 years ago at a place called Ballito Bay has yielded a good sample of preserved DNA. He was a Khoe-San, that is to say an indigenous native of southern Africa of the kind once called “bushmen”, who still live in the Kalahari desert.

But unlike all today’s Khoe-San he had no DNA from black Africans or white Europeans in him. Neither had yet arrived in southern Africa. So comparing the Ballito boy’s DNA to all modern people’s DNA made it possible to calculate when we last shared a common ancestor with him.

The date was a big surprise: more than 260,000 years ago. That is to say, 2,600 centuries, ten times as long ago as the extinction of the Neanderthals in Europe, and halfway back to the split between human beings and the ancestors of Neanderthals. Surprisingly, the Ballito Boy’s people appear to have had little or no genetic contact with other African people as recently as 2,000 years ago, but they have had considerable gene mixing since.

So, until they experienced recent hybridisation, the Khoe-San people of southern Africa had been more distantly related to the rest of us than we had thought by a long way. Yet they are still recognisably human. There is no way anybody would describe them as “sub-human”, intellectually, linguistically, adaptively. They are just people.

 

This throws all our ideas about the “human revolution” into the air. Until a few years ago, anthropologists were talking of a “great leap forward” in human evolution around 50,000 to 100,000 years ago when tools suddenly became much more sophisticated, and were speculating about this being the moment that language or consciousness crystallised. It has been clear for a while that this was too Eurocentric; African tool kits had begun to change much earlier in a mysterious technology known as the Middle Stone Age.

Another discovery also announced this month seems to confirm that early human beings living in Morocco around 300,000 years ago were showing anatomical “modernisation” much earlier than we thought. So one possibility is that people throughout Africa were changing in parallel, rather than one small tribe becoming “modern human beings” and taking over the continent and later the world, as had been the assumption. Put the two discoveries together and you can conclude that as far apart as South Africa and Morocco, people experienced both growing culture and more modern anatomy.

It is certainly possible that culture was the horse and genetics the cart, not vice versa. That is to say, once human beings reached a certain level of culture, they created selection pressure to change their genes to make things like the development of language and imagination easier. So it could happen in parallel in different lineages. This phenomenon is known as “gene-culture co-evolution” or “niche construction”.

In passing, these findings reinforce my view that genetic differences in intelligence among human races today really do not matter. Human civilisation is a collaborative achievement, not a product of individual intelligence or innate capacity. It came about because we networked our brains, not because we improved them. We had very primitive lives for a quarter of a million years despite having modern IQs. There may be a lesson here for artificial intelligence.

However, the story may not be quite so simple. Other genetic evidence suggests that the initial effective population size of the modern humans in Africa was small, which is not compatible with a large population occupying most of a continent. “Ghost genes” in modern Africans testify to hybrids with now-extinct kinds of African hominid — similar to what happened between Africans and Neanderthals (as well as Asian hominids called Denisovans) when the former spilt out of Africa and into Eurasia at around the same time. As the anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin tells me, these “ghost” populations had to have been living somewhere.

Hawks and his colleagues have made another startling discovery. The fossils of a far more distantly related species of hominid called Homo naledi, which retained a small brain and a chimp-like jaw, have been discovered recently in a South African cave. But instead of being millions of years old, such fossils have now been dated — in yet another announcement this spring — at (you guessed it) between 236,000 and 335,000 years old.

So as we push back the date of modern human beings, we pull forward the date of the extinction of other kinds of hominid. When already culturally advanced, we shared the African savannah with a small-brained ape-man that was much more closely related to us than chimpanzees are, but was a quite different species.

So who made the Middle Stone Age tools, which are found all over the continent but vary from region to region? Almost certainly several different archaic lineages contributed, as well as the particular species or race that was on the way to turning into modern human beings. Perhaps even Homo naledi made some of them.

The truth probably lies somewhere between two extremes, one of which has distinct species of early human living all over Africa, interbreeding not very much and with only one on the way to modernity; the other has frequent hybridisation between populations in different parts of the continent, both genetically and culturally.

Either way, something was stirring in Africa that would lead eventually to iPhones and nuclear weapons, Beethoven and the Beatles. And it was stirring much earlier than we had thought, almost a third of a million years ago. It is hard to get your mind around just how gradual the emergence of modern human beings was. We are talking of 10,000 generations. Now that’s long term.

The Sixth Genesis: a man-made, mass-speciation event

My review of Chris Thomas's fine book, Inheritors of the Earth:

 

If human beings were to vanish from the Earth, what would their effect on wildlife have been? A rash of extinctions, a lot of mixing up so that wallabies and parakeets live in England and rabbits and sparrows in Australia, but also — according to Chris Thomas — an eventual doubling in the number of species on the planet: a “sixth genesis”, as he calls it in reference to the five previous times that biodiversity has expanded rapidly after a mass extinction. We are causing a mass speciation.

At a local scale diversity has increased a lot: “The number of species living in virtually every country or island has already increased during the period of human influence, and numbers continue to increase.” The fauna and flora of Britain are much richer today than 10,000 years ago as a result of farming, towns, gardening, climate change and the deliberate introduction of exotic species. Thomas finds the same to be true in tropical forests in Cameroon, Costa Rica and Brazil: the net effect of some human disturbance can be more biodiversity.

You can resent some of the exotic species (I do) but you should pause to recognise that in terms of the functioning of ecosystems, there has been mostly improvement. In an extreme case, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic rock with a few ferns on its summit. It is now a semi-green island capturing more moisture from the wind, thanks to a deliberate effort, begun by Charles Darwin, to enrich its ecosystem.

Professor Thomas, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist from York University, has produced an immensely significant book. It is fluently written, carefully thought through, ruthlessly argued, neatly illustrated with case studies — and shockingly contrarian. He shows the upside for wildlife in the Anthropocene. He does not deny that human beings also cause problems for wildlife, far from it, but he does think we have almost entirely overlooked the gains for wildlife that our presence is also creating.

I have for some time been thinking that while human beings have caused many species extinctions, they must also be causing many speciations. I have not quite had the courage to say so, for fear of being accused by the green thought police of going too far. While watching sparrows on a recent trip to Hawaii, it occurred to me that, though they were little different from the ones I see in London, they must, through isolation, be on the way to becoming a new species of sparrow. Just as a flock of Asian rosefinches shipwrecked on one of the Hawaiian islands six million years ago have turned into scores of species of honeycreeper, half of which are now sadly extinct.

Thomas has the courage I lack. He begins his book with sparrows, as it happens. Sparrows are not native to Britain at all. They spread from central Asia with people, the first of many birds to exploit the urban habitat. In Italy they hybridised with Spanish sparrows to produce a new true-breeding species, the Italian sparrow, already almost reproductively isolated from its parent species. Add one to the list of bird species. Sparrows are persecuted in America for stealing nest sites from native bluebirds, but protected and encouraged in Britain, where a short-lived (and now reversed) decline in the 1980s and 1990s led to concern that we might lose them. This contradictory attitude makes no sense: they are man-assisted exotics in both places.

Thomas documents the way new species are evolving. There is an ex-Australian cricket on a Hawaiian island that has fallen silent in the past few decades because of a mutation. This has been caused by the predation of a parasitic fly from North America that hunts down its mating call. And there is a species of fly that eats hawthorn berries, some of whose members have switched to eating apples. They are evolving towards a distinct species, together with their three species of parasite wasp — turning four species into eight.

The old idea that evolution happens only very slowly is being cast aside. “The biological processes of evolutionary divergence and speciation have not been broken in the Anthropocene. They have gone into overdrive. We have created a global archipelago, a species generator.”

And then there is hybridisation. In America a blueberry fly and a snowberry fly, separate species, have hybridised to form a honeysuckle fly to eat non-native honeysuckle, itself a hybrid of various Asian species. In the city of York, growing on a roundabout, there is a unique species of flower called Yorkwort, recently rescued from extinction by using saved seeds. But Yorkwort was only born as a species in 1979 when the railways allowed Oxford ragwort — itself a natural hybrid from Mount Etna, collected by a botanist in the 18th century — to spread around the country and hybridise with groundsel in, for some reason, York.

“More new plant species have come into hybrid existence in Britain in the last 300 years than are listed as having died out in the whole of Europe,” writes Thomas. If you are sniffy about hybrids, remember you probably are one: all people with any non-African ancestry have genes from Neanderthals (Europeans) or Denisovans (Asians) in them.

Thomas’s argument is that “humans must adapt and help direct change, rather than attempt to preserve the world in aspic”. Nature is much more dynamic than we generally admit. Species move about, become rare, become common again. In time and space nature is constantly on the move. In Ice Age deposits in Britain you find frequent remains of a dung beetle species today known only from the high Tibetan plateau — how did that happen? The Monterey pine is barely clinging on to a few tiny refuges on the California coast, but is the mainstay of a vast timber industry in New Zealand, Chile, Australia and elsewhere. Blue gums from Australia are found throughout California, thickets of Chinese palms blanket the shores of Lake Maggiore in the Alps and Himalayan balsam invades British river valleys.

It is only here that I begin to part company with Thomas. While he accepts that the eradication of rats from South Georgia, to save the seabirds, was a good thing, he is not convinced that New Zealand should, let alone could, eradicate its mammals — none of which is native — for the sake of its birds. Just let them evolve instead. He is right that not all non-natives are bad, but in conceding that human beings should actively manage the process of natural change, he should perhaps look on pest eradication more favourably as an example of just such management.

For instance, I cannot stand idly by and watch three species disappear from my farm, all as a result of American invasive species: the water vole (eradicated by mink); the native crayfish (eradicated by signal crayfish); and the red squirrel (being eradicated by grey squirrels). So I trap mink, signal crayfish and grey squirrels whenever possible. It may be a futile, Sisyphean task for the moment, but in the long run new genetic techniques may make it easier. Invasive species are by far the greatest cause of local and global extinction, not habitat loss or hunting.

Thomas briefly blames the extinction of harlequin frogs in Central America partly on climate change before correcting himself later to agree that the cause was a fungus spread around the world from Africa, partly in pregnancy-testing kits. He is far more balanced than most academics on the topic of global warming, conceding, for example, that “the basic expectation of a warmer and slightly wetter world is that the diversity of many – and perhaps most – regions in the world will increase”.

This is certainly true in Britain, where more warm-loving species are arriving than cold-loving species are leaving. Oddly, he omits any mention of global greening, the phenomenon by which the global vegetation has grown greener over 33 years by the equivalent of a continent twice the size of the United States, 70 per cent of the cause of which is extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That surely rates a mention in a book celebrating the gains from man-made interference with nature.

When he writes that “it is difficult to understand why any particular moment in the continuous passage of time should have special significance”, this surely applies to climate change too. The world was much warmer than today in times past and much colder at others. The rate of change was much faster at the end of the last Ice Age.

We think of human beings as unnatural, as separate from nature, and a “separation myth” permeates our writing about the natural world, but it is nonsense. Thomas writes: “We may not be happy about some of the changes that are taking place as a consequence of our existence, but they are still natural.” We caused many extinctions, especially of large mammals and birds, when we were hunter-gatherers fully embedded in natural ecosystems. Wherever human beings appeared 50,000 years ago, there followed a disappearance of mammoths and rhinos, of diprotodons and giant kangaroos, of moas and rocs, of giant elks and great auks. Modern technology is not the problem: we caused twice as many extinctions of birds and mammals before 1700 as we have caused since.

The default position in tackling the environment, says Thomas, is “to treat change as negative”, to act “as if nature is an Old Master, a great painting that must be kept just as it is”. This is wrong. The changes we see around us, including those wrought by us, are not necessarily for the better or worse. They are just different. It is time, he says, for the conservation and environmental movement to “put aside doom-laden rhetoric . . . shed its self-imposed restraints and fear of change and go on the offensive”.

Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction by Chris Thomas, Allen Lane, 320pp, £20

 

Bootleggers and baptists in conservation

My Times column on conservation and the British countryside:

 

Even Michael Gove’s enemies concede he is good at tackling vested interests. Even his friends concede he has a knack for making enemies in the process. In his new job as secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, if he is to achieve anything, he may have to do a lot of both. So here’s a field guide to the vested interests he will encounter in the countryside.

Bruce Yandle, the American economist, once coined a phrase to explain why the disastrous policy of prohibition became law in the United States between 1920 and 1933: “Bootleggers and Baptists”. A very effective coalition developed between high-minded, high-profile moral campaigners and low-mind, low-profile smuggling profiteers to push for the outlawing of alcohol. The result was legislation that was good for bootleggers and Baptists but bad for society as a whole.

As Mr Yandle put it: “Baptists lower the costs of favour-seeking for the bootleggers, because politicians can pose as being motivated purely by the public interest even while they promote the interests of well-funded businesses”.

This coalition is alive and well in the farming and environmental world. Bootlegger car makers got politicians to give tax breaks to diesel cars on the Baptist grounds that they produce less carbon dioxide, with the result that we have worse air pollution than we would have had. Baptist greens preach about the imminent dangers of climate change, enabling their bootlegger chums in the renewable-energy industry to trouser vast subsidies for ruining landscapes and killing eagles while reducing emissions very little, if at all. Politicians fall for it.

Farmers nobly say they are feeding a hungry world and protecting the countryside from ruin, while actually defending a subsidy system that deters innovation, gives them a retirement income and pushes up the price of land.

In other words, Mr Gove will not have to learn the difference between the lesser whitethroat and the spotted flycatcher to do well in his new job, but he will have to spot the vested bootleggers hiding behind the green Baptists. He will be familiar with the problem from his time as education secretary, where he took on the teachers and civil servants on the grounds that they were sometimes serving their own interests more than those of their clients — children.

The civil servants in Defra are almost entirely in thrall to whatever the big environmental pressure groups say, in a fine case of regulatory capture or Parkinson’s law: greens lobby for regulations, which civil servants need bigger budgets to administer, and the monitoring of which can be outsourced back to the same greens.

Try telling an environmental bureaucrat that you think his or her priorities or methods are wrong and prepare to be denounced on moral — not practical — grounds by their allies in organisations with very big budgets. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the World Wide Fund For Nature are huge multinationals these days with a combined annual budget of more than a billion dollars, a big chunk of which is spent on lobbying, suing and public relations — rather than practical conservation.

Yet some green priorities are wrong and somebody needs to say so. The current obsession of the environmental pressure groups, shared by the civil servants and quangocrats, is that there must be no “watering down” of environmental designations after Brexit. That is to say, the alphabet soup of “special protected areas”, “marine conservation zones”, “Ramsar sites”, “sites of special scientific interest”, “areas of outstanding natural beauty” and so forth must not be lost, even though some of them derive from European legislation.

Nor should they be lost. But the risk of that is zero. What actually happens inside those zones and in the rest of the countryside to encourage nature to thrive is of far greater importance. And today the environmental bureaucracy and the green lobbyists with which it is allied are more obsessed with attending conferences, producing reports and monitoring compliance than with taking practical, active measures to conserve species. Too many wear suits and not enough wear boots.

Let me give you a specific example. The curlew is one of Britain’s most iconic birds, its haunting call synonymous with a Pennine dawn in spring. These islands host 25 per cent of the world’s population but in Ireland their numbers are now down by 90 per cent, while in southern England they have all but vanished as a breeding species, and even in uplands such as the Lake District and Wales they are becoming worryingly scarce. Of the world’s eight species of curlew, two have almost certainly gone extinct.

Fortunately, curlews are thriving in the North Pennines. Earlier this spring I spent several dawns watching birds in a Durham dale and the bubbling song of hundreds of curlews was continuous. This success is not because of legislation or the designation of the area as a nature reserve. It is because of grouse shooting, a self-financed form of conservation that protects and manages the habitat that curlews like and controls the predators that eat their eggs and chicks — chiefly crows, foxes and stoats.

The result is a landscape from which those subsidised bootlegger blights of the uplands — wind farms, non-native blocks of forestry and overgrazing — have been excluded, allowing curlews to thrive along with golden plovers, merlins, lapwings, ring ouzels, redshanks, black grouse and short-eared owls, all of which I saw in my dawn vigil last month.

Mr Gove should demand that environmental policies are judged by their results, not their intentions. In fisheries, air pollution, tackling invasive species, reforming farm subsidies, wildlife conservation, badgers, landscape protection, genetically modified food and pesticides, what counts is not the size of the budget going in, the moral motive behind it, or the number of committees overseeing it — but whether it gets results. That should be the watchword of the new Defra secretary.