Matt Ridley's Blog, page 22

The scandal behind the ban on neonicotinoids

An expanded version of my Wall Street Journal article on bees, pesticides and how environmental activists gamed the system:

 

To those who have engaged with environmental activists in recent years, the concept of fake news is old hat. From Greenpeace’s hundred-fold exaggeration of the oil in the Brent Spar oil platform in 1995 to Friends of the Earth’s slap-down by Britain’s Advertising Standards Agency over fracking untruths in 2017, we have grown used to being told “alternative facts” that later turn out to be wrong by those with green axes to grind. The latest episode of environmental activists playing fast and loose with the facts, however, may be their undoing. 

A pesticides ban in Europe could soon be overturned on the grounds that it was based on unreliable data. Meanwhile, revelations that one of the scientists behind the ban was also involved with a nongovernmental organization that campaigns against pesticides continue to undermine the ban’s integrity.

Two European chemical companies, Bayer and Syngenta , appeared before the European Court of Justice this week to argue that the European Union should revoke a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides. “Neonics,” as these sprays are known, were introduced in the 1990s as a safer, greener alternative.

One of the advantages of neonics is that they can be used as a seed “dressing,” so that crop plants are protected from birth and need less or no spraying later. They only affect those insects that eat the crop, not innocent bystanders.

Though green activist groups claim neonics devastate bee populations, there remains much debate over how much neonic residue gets into the pollen that bees consume. But the fact remains that there has been no “bee-pocalypse.” In Europe and North America, honeybee numbers are higher today than they were two decades ago when neonics were first introduced.

As for wild bees, again the decline before 1990 ceased or reversed around the time neonics were introduced:

An extract: "We found that extensive species richness loss and biotic homogenisation occurred before 1990, whereas these negative trends became substantially less accentuated during recent decades, being partially reversed for certain taxa (e.g. bees in Great Britain and Netherlands)."

A 2015 study in Nature found that only a tiny fraction of wild-bee species pollinate crops. These bees, which come into the most-direct contact with neonics, are thriving:

"Here we show that, while the contribution of wild bees to crop production is significant, service delivery is restricted to a limited subset of all known bee species. Across crops, years and biogeographical regions, crop-visiting wild bee communities are dominated by a small number of common species, and threatened species are rarely observed on crops."

The real danger lurks elsewhere. The French Ministry of Agriculture recently concluded that diseases (especially the varroa mite), bad beekeeping and famine are the main causes of bee mortality. Pesticides were responsible for only about 4% of mortality, and this includes organic pesticides and pesticides used in the hives by beekeepers to control for varroa mite infestations. France’s final court of appeals in civil and criminal matters would agree. In a ruling last month, the Court of Cassation found that no causal connection has been established between the neonic Imidacloprid and bee mortality.

Such findings are in stark contrast to the recommendations in the draft Bee Guidance Document (BGD), a paper prepared by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the scientific basis of the 2013 neonic ban. But the BGD’s methodology also raises many questions. It ruled out large-scale field studies and forced regulators to rely on lab studies mostly using unrealistically high doses of neonics. Acceptable field studies had to demonstrate with 95% statistical confidence that a neonic would have no more than a 7% effect on the number of bees within a hive, even though bee numbers can fluctuate by twice as much just from cold weather. Field studies were also required to cover 448 square kilometers to meet the BGD’s conditions. Each test field had to be 2 kilometers from every other test field, other crops, orchards and even wildflowers.

No one has figured out how to meet these specifications. Meanwhile, some 18 major field studies and nine review articles published over the past 10 years have overwhelmingly showed that under realistic conditions, neonics have no effect on bees at the hive level.

It’s as if the EFSA’s standard of evidence was purposely set so high as to preclude evidence of neonic safety.

David Zaruk, an investigative journalist who blogs as the Risk Monger, may have discovered how this happened. He noticed that although the EFSA working group that prepared the BGD had removed all scientists affiliated with industry-funded research during the preparatory work, it retained several activists among its five final members. One of them was Gérard Arnold, at the time also listed as the scientific coordinator at Apimondia, a beekeeper lobbying group.

When Mr. Zaruk asked the EFSA about this, he writes that the head of EFSA’s legal department agreed that if Mr. Arnold had been working with Apimondia at the same time, this would have been a serious breach of ethics. But Mr. Arnold had assured them that he was not, so the EFSA was willing to overlook an accusation that he was chairing an antipesticide working group for an NGO.

What this doesn’t explain, however, is why, after Mr. Zaruk started making his inquiries, every reference to Mr. Arnold’s work with Apimondia during his EFSA years started disappearing from the internet. When I asked Mr. Arnold about this, he said his work with Apimondia had ended before he started working with EFSA and the Apimondia website had simply been out of date. But given Mr. Arnold’s known antipesticide activism, there was still at best a conflict of interest.

Brussels entrusted a known antipesticide activist with the task of preparing what was supposed to be an objective report on the testing procedures of pesticides. Instead, the EFSA working group, which included Mr. Arnold, resulted in a ban that contradicts scientific evidence and has devastated European farmers. Growers of oilseed rape have had to cut back on their plantings and turned to spraying with older, less safe pyrethroid insecticides, which can be especially harmful to aquatic invertebrates if they get into water courses. This winter 8.3% of the total British oilseed rape crop has been lost, with farmers blaming “savage flea beetle damage”. The total cost of the neonic ban has been estimated at some €900 million ($954.1 million) a year for oilseed rape alone. It would seem incumbent on the EFSA to at least perform a thorough investigation.

The EFSA has so far resisted calls for a review and re-examination of the deeply flawed process that resulted in the ban, but the exclusion of evidence under the BGD is one of the central arguments presented to the European Court of Justice this week. The judges there may well take a more objective and science-based view.

The neonic ban is a paradigmatic case of the problems caused by Brussels’s adoption of an overzealous interpretation of the precautionary principle at the behest of environmental activists. The ban has hurt, not helped, the environment.

 

The sinister assault on free speech

 

A longer version of my Times column on free speech:

"In a free state, tongues too should be free,” wrote Erasmus 501 years ago. In truth, although Britain was often more tolerant than many countries, people have never been entirely free to speak their minds here. Blasphemy and sedition got you into trouble for centuries. There was uproar when Ken Clarke invited Oswald Mosley to address the Cambridge Union in 1961. The law has always rightly forbidden incitement to violence.

But the Speaker John Bercow’s call to “no platform” President Trump was not based on any claim that he might incite violence, and nor are many of the bans on controversial speakers that are routine at universities today. They are about the giving and taking of offence. Julie Bindel, a radical feminist, was banned from speaking at Sheffield University because she was not “LGBT friendly”.

The annual survey of free speech at universities by the website Spiked finds a truly disturbing picture. Nearly two thirds of student unions and one quarter of university administrations get a “red” rating this year, meaning they have banned and actively censored ideas on campus. Oxford’s student union banned a student magazine, called No Offence, devoted to celebrating free speech; the University of East Anglia banned a restaurant from handing out free sombreros lest it offend Mexicans. Being pro-Israel, reading The Sun newspaper or being anti-abortion can get you banned, yet none of these qualify as incitement. At just three universities do administrators and student unions ban only what is illegal.

[Malia Bouattia, president of the National Union of Students, who herself fell foul of accusations of anti-semitism, is clearly a little sensitive to the charge that she and her ilk are now portrayed as “snowflakes” who melt in any heat: “Those who seek to portray us as delicate flowers do so because they wish to preserve the freedom of expression for some, but not others.”]

The habit of curbing free speech is being imported from America, where universities have become increasingly intolerant of anything that departs from a narrow orthodoxy. A howling mob surrounded the Yale professor Nicholas Christakis in 2015 after his wife Erika had expressed little sympathy with those who wanted Hallowe’en costumes outlawed. “Universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience,” she had written. “Increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.”

The University of California at Berkeley was the site of famous protests in 1964 by the “free speech movement” — demanding the university lift a ban on political activities on campus. Last month the same university witnessed violent riots as students — successfully — sought to prevent a gay, British-born, pro-Trump conservative, Milo Yiannopoulos, from speaking at all.

The effect was to propel his book Dangerous up the bestseller lists. Like many people, I have watched some of his speeches online to see what the fuss is about. He is highly articulate, critical of Islam and rude about feminists and the left. But it’s hard to find anything that justifies the frequent charges that he is a fascist or white supremacist, let alone to the point of incitement.

[A sample of Milo's speech: “You guys have been lying to and lying about Republicans calling them racist, sexist, homophobic and all manner of other ludicrous allegations for thirty years and you deserve some of it back once in a while…Given the fact the you run academia, you run the media and you run the entertainment industry, if the worst you have to deal with is some British fag calling you a butch dyke, deal with it”.]

What is causing this intolerance? Why are so many students so keen to outlaw rather than answer opinions they disagree with? Long ago, when writing a book about the nature-nurture debate, I noticed a phenomenon that I think still goes largely unrecognised.

In controversial areas, we tend to read our allies’ accounts of an opponent’s arguments. We rarely go back to the source and see what was actually said, so we encounter only pejorative caricatures of the alternative view, straw men that are easily knocked down or hated.

In the age of social media this has grown much worse, because people live increasingly in political echo chambers. As universities and schools have largely purged their staffs of conservatives, and with Facebook and Twitter giving people mainly the views of those like them, it is little wonder that the only thing many students ever hear about conservatives is that they are racist, sexist and callous. The idea that you might support free markets because you think they create co-operation and social change would make them choke on their kale.

John Stuart Mill diagnosed what such “snowflakes” are missing, in On Liberty: “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

But there is something else going on today: Islam. One of the most surprising features of the modern world — to me at least — is the degree to which the left is making common cause with any religion, let alone one that is so dominated by socially conservative opinion and so frequently associated with discrimination against women and homosexuals. Islamophobia is as great a crime as transphobia in the student world, and a greater one than criticism of Christianity or Judaism. You can mock Mormons all you like, and make a musical out of it, but woe betide you if you mock the Koran.

Consider the case of two women who have criticised each other recently. Guess which one has been no-platformed?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born champion of women’s rights who suffered genital mutilation; escaped an arranged marriage by seeking asylum in Holland; left Islam; became a Dutch MP; and wrote a film whose director was murdered by an Islamist, the killer leaving a note pinned to his victim’s chest warning her that she would be next. She calls for an Islamic reformation.

Linda Sarsour is a hijab-wearing Muslim who defends Sharia, was one of the organisers of the Women’s March after Mr Trump’s inauguration and has since deleted a tweet in which she said she wished that she could “take away” Ms Hirsi Ali’s vagina. In reply, Ms Hirsi Ali wrote: “There’s no principle that demeans, degrades and dehumanises women more than the principle of Sharia law. Linda Sarsour is a defender of that.”

Yet it was, incredibly, Ms Hirsi Ali who in 2014 was disinvited from receiving an honorary degree by Brandeis University. The episode revealed a deliberate attempt to portray criticism of Islam as equivalent to criticism of women or minorities. Few feminists spoke up for her. “The concern,” blathered one, “is that her intervention into the issue of gender equality in Muslim societies will strengthen racism rather than weaken sexism.”

This alliance of the feminist left with Islam cannot last. Mr Trump’s crass travel ban may have breathed new life into it, but the tensions are growing and the audiences for the likes of Mr Yiannopoulos with them.

Thumb on the scale of temperature trends?

My Times column on the revelations of problems with the global surface temperature record at NOAA:

Back in December, some American scientists began copying government climate data onto independent servers in what press reports described as an attempt to safeguard it from political interference by the Trump administration. There is to be a March for Science in April whose organisers say: “It is time for people who support scientific research and evidence-based policies to take a public stand and be counted.”

Well, today they have a chance to do just that, but against their own colleagues who stand accused of doing what they claim the Trump team has done. Devastating new testimony from John Bates, a whistleblowing senior scientist at America’s main climate agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, alleges that scientists themselves have been indulging in alternative facts, fake news and policy-based evidence.

Dr Bates’s essay on the Climate Etc. website (and David Rose’s story in The Mail on Sunday) documents allegations of scientific misconduct as serious as that of the anti-vaccine campaign of Andrew Wakefield. Dr Bates’s boss, Tom Karl, a close ally of President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, published a paper in 2015, deliberately timed to influence the Paris climate jamboree. The paper was widely hailed in the media as disproving the politically inconvenient 18-year pause in global warming, whose existence had been conceded by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) two years earlier.

Dr Bates says Mr Karl based the “pausebuster” paper on a flawed land-surface data set that had not been verified or properly archived; and on a sea-surface set that corrected reliable data from buoys with unreliable data from ship intakes, which resulted in a slightly enhanced warming trend. Science magazine is considering retracting the paper. A key congressional committee says the allegations confirm some of its suspicions.

[An extract from Dr Bates's blog:

So, in every aspect of the preparation and release of the datasets leading into K15, we find Tom Karl’s thumb on the scale pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming and minimize documentation. I finally decided to document what I had found using the climate data record maturity matrix approach. I did this and sent my concerns to the NCEI Science Council in early February 2016 and asked to be added to the agenda of an upcoming meeting. I was asked to turn my concerns into a more general presentation on requirements for publishing and archiving. Some on the Science Council, particularly the younger scientists, indicated they had not known of the Science requirement to archive data and were not aware of the open data movement. They promised to begin an archive request for the K15 datasets that were not archived; however I have not been able to confirm they have been archived. I later learned that the computer used to process the software had suffered a complete failure, leading to a tongue-in-cheek joke by some who had worked on it that the failure was deliberate to ensure the result could never be replicated.]

Dr Bates is no “denier”; he was awarded a gold medal by the US government in 2014 for his climate-data work. Having now retired he writes of “flagrant manipulation of scientific integrity guidelines and scientific publication standards”, of a “rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy” and concludes: “So, in every aspect of the preparation and release of the data sets leading into [the report], we find Tom Karl’s thumb on the scale pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming and minimize documentation.”

This is more than just a routine scientific scandal. First, it comes as scientists have been accusing President Trump and other politicians of politicising science. Second, it potentially contaminates any claim that climate science has been producing unbiased results. Third, it embarrasses science journalists who have been chronicling the growing evidence of scientific misconduct in medicine, toxicology and psychology, but ignored the same about climate science because they approve of the cause, a habit known as noble-cause corruption.

[Here is an extract from a recent article about scientific fraud in the Guardian:

When it comes to fraud – or in the more neutral terms he prefers, “scientific misconduct” – Hartgerink is aware that he is venturing into sensitive territory. “It is not something people enjoy talking about,” he told me, with a weary grin. Despite its professed commitment to self-correction, science is a discipline that relies mainly on a culture of mutual trust and good faith to stay clean. Talking about its faults can feel like a kind of heresy. In 1981, when a young Al Gore led a congressional inquiry into a spate of recent cases of scientific fraud in biomedicine, the historian Daniel Kevles observed that “for Gore and for many others, fraud in the biomedical sciences was akin to pederasty among priests”.

The comparison is apt. The exposure of fraud directly threatens the special claim science has on truth, which relies on the belief that its methods are purely rational and objective. As the congressmen warned scientists during the hearings, “each and every case of fraud serves to undermine the public’s trust in the research enterprise of our nation”.

But three decades later, scientists still have only the most crude estimates of how much fraud actually exists. The current accepted standard is a 2009 study by the Stanford researcher Daniele Fanelli that collated the results of 21 previous surveys given to scientists in various fields about research misconduct. The studies, which depended entirely on scientists honestly reporting their own misconduct, concluded that about 2% of scientists had falsified data at some point in their career.

If Fanelli’s estimate is correct, it seems likely that thousands of scientists are getting away with misconduct each year. Fraud – including outright fabrication, plagiarism and self-plagiarism – accounts for the majority of retracted scientific articles. But, according to RetractionWatch, which catalogues papers that have been withdrawn from the scientific literature, only 684 were retracted in 2015, while more than 800,000 new papers were published. If even just a few of the suggested 2% of scientific fraudsters – which, relying on self-reporting, is itself probably a conservative estimate – are active in any given year, the vast majority are going totally undetected. “Reviewers and editors, other gatekeepers – they’re not looking for potential problems,” Hartgerink said.]

Colleagues of Mr Karl have been quick to dismiss the story, saying that other data sets come to similar conclusions. This is to miss the point and exacerbate the problem. If the scientific establishment reacts to allegations of lack of transparency, behind-closed-door adjustments and premature release so as to influence politicians, by saying it does not matter because it gets the “right” result, they will find it harder to convince Mr Trump that he is wrong on things such as vaccines.

Besides, this is just the latest scandal to rock climate science. The biggest was climategate in 2009, which showed scientists conspiring to ostracise sceptics, delete emails, game peer review and manipulate the presentation of data, including the truncation of a tree-ring-derived graph to disguise the fact that it seemed to show recent cooling (“hide the decline”). The scientists concerned were criticised by two rather perfunctory inquiries, but have since taken to saying they were “exonerated”.

There was the case of the paper the IPCC relied upon to show that local urban warming was not distorting global data sets, which turned out to be based partly on non-existent data from 49 Chinese weather stations; the Scandinavian lake sediment core used “upside down” to imply sudden warming; the chart showing unprecedented recent warming that turned out to depend on a single larch tree in Siberia; the southern hemisphere hockey-stick chart that had been created by the omission of inconvenient data series; the Antarctic temperature trend that turned out to depend on splicing together two weather station records.

Then there was the time when a well known climate scientist, Peter Gleick, stole the identity of a member of a think tank so he could leak confidential documents along with a fake one. Stephan Lewandowsky had to retract a paper about the psychology of climate scepticism that seemed to be full of methodological flaws and bizarre reasoning. John Cook’s paper claiming to prove that 97% of scientists were alarmed about climate change, proved to be based on methods that would have embarrassed a homeopath.

And don’t forget Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC for 13 years and often described as the “world’s top climate scientist”. He had to retract his “voodoo science” dismissal of a valid finding that contradicted claims from Dr Pachauri’s own research institute about Himalayan glaciers, which had led to a lucrative grant. That scandal resulted in a highly critical report into the IPCC by several of the world’s top science academies, which recommended among other things that the IPCC chairman stand down after one term. Dr Pachauri ignored this, kept his job and toured the world while urging others not to, before resigning over a personal scandal allegation.

I have championed science all my adult life. It is humankind’s greatest calling. That is why I deplore those who drag down its reputation by breaching its codes of conduct for political reasons, and I have no time for those excusing these enormities. They foment anti-intellectualism and play directly into the hands of people such as Mr Trump. Under the Obama administration,” says Professor Judith Curry, Dr Bates’s colleague, “I suspect that it would have been very difficult for this story to get any traction.” Yikes.

Dr Bates calls for more ethics teaching in science and for “respectful discussion of different points of view” — which we were emptily promised after climategate. It is time for the many brilliant scientists who are discovering great insights into quasars and quarks, Alzheimer’s and allergies, into neurons, fossils, telomeres and ice ages, to “take a public stand and be counted” against the politicisation of some science within their own ranks.

Post-script. Dr Bates's essay provoked a number of critical blog posts and articles trying to make out that he was wrong. Some of these took the very tack I had pointed out in my article would be counterproductive, for example Popular Science magazine tweeted: "Even if NOAA fabricated data, the evidence still supports climate change". Seriously!

Others pointed out that a subsequent study had also apparently abolished the pause. But then an even more recent one had emphatically reinstated it:

“There is this mismatch between what the climate models are producing and what the observations are showing,” says lead author John Fyfe, a climate modeller at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria, British Columbia. “We can’t ignore it.” Fyfe uses the term “slowdown” rather than “hiatus” and stresses that it does not in any way undermine global-warming theory.

In any case, the satellite data sets, which are the least adjusted, continue to show 2016's temperature as being statistically no warmer than 1998's and continue to show very slow to no warming over 19 years.

Others tried to poke holes in Dr Bates's account, but he replied with a detailed rebuttal of them.

Judith Curry's closing comment is this:

An evaluation of these claims needs to be made by the NOAA Inspector General. I’m not sure what the line of reporting is for the NOAA IG, and whether the new Undersecretary for NOAA will appoint a new IG.

Other independent organizations will also want to evaluate these claims, and NOAA should facilitate this by responding to FOIA requests.

The House Science Committee has an enduring interest in this topic and oversight responsibility.   NOAA should respond to the Committee’s request for documentation including emails. AGU and other organizations don’t like the idea of scientist emails being open to public scrutiny. Well, these are government employees and we are not talking about curiosity driven research here – at issue here is a dataset with major policy implications.

In other words, with the surface temperature data set we are in the realm of regulatory science, which has a very different playbook from academic, ‘normal’ science. While regulatory science is most often referred to in context of food and pharmaceutical sciences, it is also relevant to environmental regulations as well. The procedures developed by John Bates are absolutely essential for certifying these datasets, as well as their uncertainties, for a regulatory environment.

 

British environmental policy after Brexit

My Times column on British environmental policy:

 

Andrea Leadsom, the agriculture and environment secretary, is to set out her plans for the British countryside in two green papers: one on the environment this week and one on farming later. She should be ambitious and positive: the future, post-Brexit, could be bright and green.

What is the countryside for? For most of human history, its job was to provide food, fuel, fibre and building material. Today, we get most of those things from factories supplied by comparatively tiny quarries or wells. Only food still needs a vast acreage, but even that is a lot less vast than it was. The area of land required to produce a given quantity of food is now just a third of what it was in 1960, thanks to technology.

This explains why we are finding it ever easier to feed the world despite a growing population. Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University in New York estimates that we will need less land — by an area bigger than India — to feed the nine billion people of 2050 than we need to feed seven billion today. We will be releasing a huge acreage from the plough.

Indeed, if hydroponic indoor farming takes off, farming’s footprint will shrink still faster. In Japan there is a single shed inside which robots will soon be harvesting 30,000 lettuces a day, grown under LED lights without pesticides and with minimal use of water and power. That’s more from one acre than a lettuce farm of 300 acres normally produces.

In other words, we will not need so much of the countryside for growing food in the future. Sure, there will be parts of the British countryside that can compete with world farmers for many years to come, especially if freed from the way the common agricultural policy hooks farmers on welfare, making them reluctant to innovate or retire, and inflating costs in the industry. A Lincolnshire farm currently holds the world record wheat yield.

So for the rest of the countryside, we can let nature thrive again for the first time since the Ice Age. Here Ms Leadsom may be tempted to listen to the rewilding folk, who speak of vast forests teeming with lynx and bear, beaver and wolf. I hope she takes their arguments with a pinch of salt. That sort of rewilding would produce less biodiversity, not more. It is the patchwork of different habitats maintained by human beings that maximises the diversity of our wildlife. There are species that depend on arable farming, or grazing, or forestry clearings or a bit of each. Plus, people too want to earn a living in the countryside, or to walk in it and see a view, neither of which would be possible in a wild forest.

We will need more land for houses, roads and other forms of development, but that is little threat to biodiversity for three reasons. First, less than 2.5 per cent of England and just 1 per cent of Britain is built on [about 10% of England is urban, but only 25% of urban land is built on, according to the National Ecosystem Assessment]. Second, urban wildlife is thriving. Towns and cities are now exporting surplus peregrine falcons, hedgehogs and foxes to the countryside rather than vice versa. And third, as Owen Paterson MP, one of Ms Leadsom’s predecessors, urged in a paper presented at All Souls College, Oxford, last weekend, we should follow 25 other countries and adopt offsetting: forcing developers to create suitable habitat elsewhere if they destroy it, with the highest costs for the most precious habitats.

But there is a rewilding that does work: managed rewilding. Much of the Scottish Highlands has been abandoned by the oat and sheep farmers who once encroached on the heather hills. Some is now forest, but most is the wild bog and moor that hikers like best. Deer stalking on the big estates keeps the landscape in a fit state for walkers, so both activities flourish. The same is true in the North Pennines, where curlews, golden plover and black grouse thrive thanks to game keepers, and grouse shooting supports the economies of the dales while preserving a semi-natural habitat.

In the Lake District, the priority is landscape not biodiversity. The hills of Cumbria look lovely but, overgrazed by sheep and overrun by crows and foxes, they are impoverished in bird life — the Lake District’s last pair of eagles died out for lack of food. Paying farmers to look after the stone walls and keep the hills grazed — in the same way that Swiss farmers are paid to keep the high meadows grazed — will be more popular than letting Helvellyn and Skiddaw disappear beneath gorse, bracken and hawthorn.

As for woodland, good conservation means management, not neglect. Thinning, clearing and coppicing create the mosaic of habitats that nightingales and speckled wood butterflies love. Invasive species such as rhododendron and grey squirrels need controlling. However, far too much of Britain’s ancient woodland has been replaced over the years by plantations of alien species designed for pulp markets that never come about — the Forestry Commission being the worst offender.

Even on lowland farms, the richest biodiversity is produced by active management: grazing the downs for large blue butterflies, planting the seed crops for yellowhammers and partridges, killing the foxes and crows that would otherwise prevent lapwings rearing any chicks. Philip Merricks, who successfully encourages lapwings on his land in Kent, points out that most farms and nature reserves fail to reach the 0.7 chicks per breeding pair a year that lapwings need to sustain their populations. We need to subsidise environmental schemes on farms, but pay by results, not intentions.

As for the environmentalist organisations, the ones that work closest with nature know they must actively manage nature reserves. The ones that trouser hefty fees from developers to survey bats and newts and generate hefty reports that nobody reads should be weaned off, and the ones that simply lobby and sue and fund-raise on the back of fibs should be stood up to. Given a chance they would design environment policies that produced few peewits but big budgets for conferences.

Post-Brexit environment policy should be one of gardening: managing for a diversity of outcomes in different places. Productive farms here, deep forests there, wild moorlands elsewhere. Freed from the one-size-fits-all shackles of the EU, we should localise our policies, and host as many habitats and species as the climate will support.

 

Britain's industrial strategy

My Times column on the Industrial Strategy:

Theresa May’s “modern industrial strategy”, launched today, must avoid the ignominious fate of its predecessors. One by one they failed. Diagnosis of Britain’s problems is not difficult; treatment is harder. How can a government close the productivity gap, improve our low investment levels, heal the north-south divide, overcome our habitual pattern of inventing but not exploiting new ideas, and create an economy that “works for everyone”?

I do not presume to know all the answers, but I trust that the prime minister and Greg Clark, her business secretary, have begun by learning a lesson from the history of industrial strategies, Labour and Conservative: top-down solutions will not work; bottom-up ones might.

Clement Attlee’s government of 1945 nationalised the commanding heights of the economy. The result was bloated and inefficient industries serving producers rather than consumers. Harold Macmillan’s government set up the National Economic Development Council. It was abolished in the 1990s after many years of irrelevance. Harold Wilson’s government wrote a National Plan to capitalise on the “white heat of the technological revolution”. Its legacy was subsidy-guzzling giants like British Leyland.

Edward Heath’s government promoted regional growth through tax incentives and development grants, but ended up subsidising coal, steel and motorcycle manufacture. James Callaghan’s government had the National Enterprise Board, which spent a fortune propping up moribund businesses.

Eventually, the pattern was noticed — an influential Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlet of the time was entitled “Picking Losers” — and Margaret Thatcher’s government rejected the idea of an industrial strategy. The Major and Blair governments largely continued this approach, not least because European Union laws ruled out state aid.

The lessons from abroad are no different. Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry was widely credited with midwifing the country’s success in the 1960s-1980s. Yet it was nothing like as interventionist as some said, with low production costs and reduced trade barriers being more important. South Korea’s economic boom coincided with reduced intervention in industry and the freeing up of exchange rates and labour markets. India’s and Latin America’s import-substitution strategies were disastrous: producing stagnant monopolies, rather than national champions.

Winner-picking has a poor track record in technology as well as in business. France’s Minitel terminals looked like a triumph in the 1990s, but the system closed altogether in 2012. America panicked about keeping memory-chip manufacture onshore, while software and social media boomed unaided by the state. The EU’s attempt to create a rival high-definition television standard in 1995 through an industry consortium came to nothing. Remember how interactive television, telecommuting villages and virtual reality were going to be our economic saviours at various times? Mr Clark should be wary lest electric and autonomous vehicles turn into similar dead-ends.

It is true that heavy defence spending at Stanford University laid the groundwork for Silicon Valley and that funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency spawned what became the internet, but both were unintended by-products of Cold War cash. In the latter case, the government sat on its invention for three decades until it was effectively privatised in the 1990s with explosive results. Until 1989 the government forbade the use of what was then called the Arpanet for private or commercial purposes.

 

Arguably the strongest element of our industrial strategy is the decision to leave the EU. The mere act of voting to leave has lowered our overvalued exchange rate, to the benefit of the manufacturing north. Once we are out we will be free to find our comparative advantages in the world without the distorting effect of an external tariff barrier, and free to innovate without the overzealous distortion of the precautionary principle. In digital, financial technology and biotech, Britain is bursting with start-ups ready to expand.

So what should a modern industrial strategy contain? The government cannot avoid having a transport strategy, because decisions about runways, railways and roads are nationalised. So I trust that infrastructure — physical and digital — will feature strongly in today’s announcement. The unpredictable future success stories will all need it. We have already learnt that technical education is to feature, and a brave but necessary third element would be regionalisation — allowing different rules in different places: a free-trade zone on Teesside, for example.

Beyond that I hope Mrs May has the courage to “be negative”: to have a strategy of getting government out of the way of entrepreneurs, by removing the barriers to innovation, simplifying the tax system and streamlining the planning system. Remember what Adam Smith said: “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”

One final history lesson. David Cameron’s government had a very dirigiste industrial policy, carried over from Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, in its approach to energy. The Cameron government continued to subsidise wind and solar power, on the assumption that gas prices could only rise, and that renewables would soon be competitive. Both assumptions proved false: gas is very cheap and renewables are still comparatively expensive.

Since 2002 we have added about £20 billion to electricity bills in order to pay for renewable subsidies. One third of that will have hit domestic bills directly, and the other two thirds indirectly through the cost of living and a downward pressure on rates of employment and wages. This is regressive, affecting low-income households more. Indeed, since it is mainly high-income households that invest in renewable energy development funds, put solar panels on their roofs and build wind farms on their land, the policy is actually robbing the poor to feed the rich.

Productivity is one of Britain’s problems, but in the vital energy sector policies are making things worse not better by forcing in technologies such as wind and solar that are of low productivity and whose intermittency harms the overall productivity of the electricity sector. That is dangerous. If we learn anything from the Industrial Revolution it is that improvements in energy sector productivity are the elixir of growth, while a massively over-capitalised system of low productivity, like the one we are now building, will lead to national poverty.

 

How Brexit is different from Trumpit

My Times column on Brexit, Trump and free trade:

 

In the week that Theresa May reveals the trajectory of Brexit and Donald Trump enters the White House, these two “revolutions” are once again linked by coincidence of timing. For much of the rest of the world, and even in the minds of many people in Britain, the result of last June’s referendum and the outcome of last November’s presidential election are part of the same phenomenon: a revolt against globalisation by a forgotten, provincial, working class.

I think this is misleading. While it is true that both revolutions saw the intellectual and financial elites given a bloody nose by the forgotten provinces, nonetheless Brexit and Trumpit have crucial differences. For a start, one was an unprecedented constitutional earthquake that resulted in the installation of a thoroughly normal prime minister. The other was a constitutionally routine democratic transfer of power that installed a highly unconventional president.

And while many voters in both countries wanted to see immigration better controlled, racism was a fairly minor factor in Brexit. About a third of Asians voted Leave and, according to Tim Shipman’s book All Out War, Muslims for Britain played a big part in turning out “the ethnic minority vote in droves with calls for free trade with countries of origin and a fairer immigration policy”.

The biggest difference is with respect to trade. There is nothing protectionist about the case for Brexit. To the extent that there are differences between remainers and leavers about trade, they are about whether we can achieve tariff-free trade with Europe, not about whether we want it.

As far as trade with the rest of the world is concerned, all the rhetoric on the Leave side was in favour of more free trade with the world: escaping from under the EU external tariff to be free to import cheaper food from Africa, re-establishing free trade with New Zealand and Australia, doing free-trade deals with America and Canada, selling more whisky to India and more insurance to China.

There may be somebody out there who voted Leave because he wanted more tariffs and less trade, but he cannot have been paying much attention. This is in sharp contrast with Trump voters, many of whom are indeed exercised by the hope and promise of protectionism. They want tariffs on Chinese imports, punishments for firms that move jobs from Michigan to Mexico, the cancellation of transpacific and transatlantic free trade deals, and more.

 

In this, they are in a long American tradition, going right back to the Tariff of 1828 designed to protect the economy against cheap British imports, continuing through the time of Theodore Roosevelt, who spoke of the “pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade”, and right up to the protectionist rhetoric of Robert Taft in 1952 and Dick Gephardt in 1988. The nadir came when Congress reacted to the Wall Street crash of 1929 by passing the catastrophic Smoot-Hawley tariff act, which set off a spiral of retaliatory tariffs around the world that deepened the depression and encouraged Germany and Japan to think in terms of conquest rather than trade.

Britain, by contrast, has nearly always been the world’s most fervent advocate of free trade, persuaded by Adam Smith and David Ricardo that tariffs hurt the poor, and convinced by Richard Cobden and Robert Peel to repeal the corn laws and then dare the world to dismantle tariffs for the sake of peace and prosperity. Brexit sits squarely in this tradition, being a revolt against remaining a member of a customs union protected by a high external tariff.

I was in Mexico just after Donald Trump was elected president. My Mexican friends were unhappy, understandably: the country stands to suffer most from Trumponomics. They asked me what I thought about Brexit and I started saying that it was a wonderful opportunity not just for Britain, but for its current and future trading partners, including Mexico. They assumed I was joking. I insisted I wasn’t. No, no, no, they said, slapping their thighs, this British humour is going too far. Brexit is like Trump, so how could I like Brexit? It took me some time to convince them I was serious, and I certainly did not persuade them I was right.

After foreign correspondents from around the world lazily portrayed the Leave campaign in the referendum almost entirely in terms of an argument for isolationism, we have a job to do persuading the world that we are in fact rejoining it. So for that reason as well as others the government would do well to emphasise the differences between Brexit and Trumpit.

There are signs that No 10 needs reminding of this point. In an article last weekend, the prime minister said that last June the British people “did not simply vote to withdraw from the European Union; they voted to change the way our country works — and the people for whom it works — for ever”. Hmm. One of the prime minister’s chief lieutenants is an admirer of Joe Chamberlain, the politician whose principled but misguided imperialism came closest to turning Britain into a protectionist country.

This is especially pertinent in the case of the industrial strategy now in preparation. To the extent that this identifies growth opportunities, recognises regional differences, clears obstacles from new technologies and stimulates new research, it could be good. To the extent that it props up old industries, protects inefficient businesses from competition, gives in to crony lobbying and tries to pick winners or subsidise losers, it will be a disaster.

Theresa May will be making a mistake if she thinks Sunderland and Detroit have the same priorities. One is an export-dependent city with one of the most efficient car plants in the world; the other is fixated on the threat to its home market from foreign competition. It is becoming clearer by the day that the biggest problem for the North of England has been an overvalued exchange rate, driven by our capital-attracting capital. Just by voting to leave, we have improved the terms of trade for the north.

When the history of this decade comes to be written, we may conclude that in voting to leave the European Union as it drifts towards the economic and political rocks, Britain has averted rather than experienced a populist revolution and the election of a demagogue. We have prevented the installation of a British Trump, or — for that matter — Farage.

Nationalising British higher education is a mistake

My Times column on UK university policy:

The government’s higher education bill will run a gauntlet of opposition starting today in the House of Lords, where many members are chancellors, fellows or other panjandrums of the grander universities. Some criticisms will be self-serving and wrong: the bill has good features. But in one central respect, critics are right. This is nationalisation. The bureaucrats of the Department for Education have long wanted to get more control of universities and this bill finally grants their wish.

Britain has some of the world’s best universities, second only to America. The chief reason is that they have been almost as autonomous as the great private universities of the Ivy League. This is for three historical reasons. First, thanks to the Bill of Rights of 1689, they escaped the centralised control that continental universities experienced from first the church and then the Napoleonic or Bismarckian state.

Second, in 1919 when they faced financial ruin and were rescued by the government, British universities were nonetheless allowed an unusual degree of self-government: public money normally brings far more central control. Third, the fees revolution has brought at least some consumer pressure to bear. The OECD says fees have made British universities successful without damaging social justice.

The key problem the bill sets out to solve is the closed-shop nature of the higher-education sector, which is indeed an issue. A cartel of institutions, paying their vice-chancellors huge salaries, is generally untroubled by competition from upstart new entrants. The plate-glass novelties in the 1960s were supposed to introduce a wave of radical experimentation. Instead they aped the older institutions, faithfully copying their faults as well as virtues.

The incumbents often behave badly towards new entrants. For instance, the London College of International Business Studies has become a good higher-education institution with a degree top-up programme validated by a Swiss university. But it has searched in vain for a British university to validate its degree programmes since 2011. In one case it completed a successful Quality Assurance Agency review only to be jilted at the altar by a newly appointed pro-vice-chancellor. Le Cordon Bleu, the world’s leading culinary institute, offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in other countries, but cannot do so here.

These are just two examples; I don’t rest my case on them, but they are illustrative of the many institutions that would invigorate the higher-education sector if allowed in; it is mostly snobbery that keeps them out. The Ucas system inevitably directs students towards members of the cartel.

Yet the Department for Education has chosen to gloss what is in effect a power grab as a liberal move. The new system of registration will be the first time the DfE has regulated the entire higher education sector, whether or not an institution receives public funding. The new Office for Students (which will surely soon be known as Ofstud) was described by Lord Waldegrave — mixing Hindu and Judaic metaphors as only a fellow of All Souls can — as a centralised behemoth of a regulator in a juggernaut of a bill. It will be able to abolish any university: Cambridge, say. Seriously. At present these powers would doubtless be in safe hands; but do we really want such a hostage to fortune lurking on the statute books? As Baroness Wolf points out, just having that power will enable the quango to put pressure on an institution.

The justification for central control is that if we are to let new entrants into higher education, then we must have the power to abolish fake universities. We don’t want Trump U here. But mission creep is inevitable. Ofstud will evolve, as Ofsted did in schools. Just as the principal anxiety in a head teacher’s life is the Ofsted inspection, and how to game it, so vice-chancellors will obsess about gaming the new Teaching Excellence Framework.

 

It already happens with the Research Excellence Framework. Universities begin planning for the next REF as soon as the last one is finished, and while some of this planning is desirable — pressing low-quality researchers to do better or leave — academics are often seconded to work almost full-time for several years on the REF. As Lord Hennessy put it at the second reading of the bill, academics already spend too much time on the plumbing, rather than the poetry, of scholarship. And much of this plumbing isn’t even connected to anything as useful as a drain or a water supply. It’s plumbing for plumbing’s sake.

This reform will not address the deeper problems afflicting higher education, which are intellectual rather than administrative. It may make them worse. Yes, new entrants will ginger things up in some areas; and yes, it is right to recognise good teaching as well as good research, but Ofstud’s invention is unlikely to help students identify where brilliant courses taught by inspired professors lie concealed within generally mediocre universities. As Ofsted shows, certification tends to obscure differences between institutions.

Moreover, the bigger problem is that universities are losing touch with real life, as they did (except in Scotland) in the 18th century. They have pockets of genius, especially in the hard sciences, but they are also inflexible, navel-gazing, self-serving, not politically diverse and antithetical to free speech. Many creative thinkers are now not in universities.

University bosses regularly cave in to “snowflake” student demands for “no-platforming”, “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” against “micro-aggressions” (such as teaching Plato). Ranking universities on their attitudes to free speech is not in Ofstud’s remit; rather, with it measuring “student satisfaction”, the problem may get worse. Two years after the bloody attack on free speech on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, both Bristol and Manchester universities’ student unions have forbidden the satirical magazine from being sold on campus, lest it fail the “safe-space” policy. So much for “Je suis Charlie”.

Nor will Ofstud do anything to combat the ideological purging of universities, chronicled by Professor Jonathan Haidt of New York University, founder of the Heterodox Academy. He says that as recently as 1996 in psychology departments left-wing/progressive professors outnumbered those with right-wing/libertarian views by four to one. Today the ratio is 17 to one. “Very few people know just how radically the professoriate has changed in the last 20 years,” he said in a recent lecture. “Undergraduates are exposed to less political diversity than any other generation, except in the 18th century when universities were divinity schools.”

A century of Marxism-Leninism

My Times column on the year that marks the centenary of the Russian revolution:

 

Human beings can be remarkably dense. The practice of bloodletting, as a medical treatment, persisted despite centuries of abundant evidence that it did more harm than good. The practice of communism, or political bloodletting as it should perhaps be known, whose centenary in the Bolshevik revolution is reached this year, likewise needs no more tests. It does more harm than good every time. Nationalised, planned, one-party rule benefits nobody, let alone the poor.

The diseases that Marxism-Leninism was intended to treat, poverty and inequality, were ancient scourges just beginning to fade, even in Russia. Higher living standards were starting to reach ordinary people, rather than just the feudal elite, for the first time. Radicals had long seen government as the problem, not the solution: that to enrich the masses required liberating people from kings and priests.

Along came Karl Marx with essentially the opposite suggestion: a powerful state creating wealth, distributed from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, as a result of which classes would disappear and with them, eventually, the state itself.

The progressive left rather suddenly fell in love with the idea of expanding, rather than limiting, state power. It was in such a good cause. Unfortunately, the wealth never materialised and the state, far from withering way, became tyrannical.

Russia’s Bolsheviks, seizing power in a coup after the fall of the tsar, set a pattern that would be repeated again and again during the following century. A communist party takes power on behalf of the people, outlaws all other parties, holds no elections and after a sanguineous power struggle is soon dominated by one man. Famine results from the destruction of incentives inherent in the collectivisation of agriculture. Millions die. The nationalisation of all commerce and the cessation of most foreign trade result in shortages of consumer goods.

The leader becomes paranoid and kills a lot of people, especially independently minded ones, in purges. More are imprisoned without trial or charge. A secret police grows powerful. The regime destroys free speech, but is excused and praised by left-leaning sympathisers in western democracies. Living standards stagnate or fall, except for those of the elite, who live a privileged existence. Many people try to flee.

Communism was not unique in ruling through violence. Fascism, founded by an ardent socialist, Benito Mussolini, and German National Socialism, pursuing racial rather than class-based collectivism, were at least as bad, though they ended up killing fewer — not for lack of trying.

But from this distance they are all manifestations of the same phenomenon: centrally planned dictatorship justified as popular rule. Hitler’s bombers over London in 1940 burnt Soviet fuel.

In 1949 China repeated the Russian experiment with the same result. Mao Zedong managed to kill even more people, probably 45 million in the four years of the Great Leap Forward, through forced collectivisation and selling food to Russia in exchange for nuclear technology. When that did not work and he began to lose his grip on power he embarked on a purge of the entire country, called the Cultural Revolution, plunging his people into abject poverty while himself living like an emperor.

In 1959 Cuba tried Marxism-Leninism with a similar outcome: 5,000 people executed, an unknown number imprisoned for dissent and tens of thousands dead after trying to escape on makeshift rafts. Cuba’s GDP per capita was about the same as South Korea’s in 1959. Today South Korea’s is five times higher.

In 1962 Burma followed suit when Ne Win seized power and set out to create a “socialist state”. He introduced one-party rule, nationalised business and isolated the country from world trade, while imprisoning and executing perceived rivals. He impoverished the country while its neighbours prospered.

In 1974, it was Benin’s turn for the purges and oppression. The economy stagnated for a quarter of a century. Elsewhere in Africa, the Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe also tried communism, Robert Mugabe having come to power (lest we forget) as an enthusiastic Marxist-Leninist.

East Germany had to build a wall to stop people escaping. Vietnam, like Cuba, sent thousands to sea in leaky boats. Cambodia deserves special mention for the thoroughness with which it stuck to Marx’s plan of “sweeping aside” the bourgeoisie. As head of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot enslaved the entire population on collective farms, his thugs clubbing or starving any who showed less than total obedience, so that from 1975 to 1979 approximately 1.7 million people were killed.

North Korea managed to turn communism into a feudal dynasty of unparalleled paranoia, which not only executes supposed dissidents in unusually gruesome ways but managed to starve millions of its citizens during the 1990s, a time when the rest of the world was feeding itself ever more abundantly.

Oil-rich Venezuela has ruined itself through socialism, creating shortages of loo paper and soap. It’s been said that if they tried communism in the Sahara there would soon be a shortage of sand.

Those communist countries that discovered economic growth, notably Vietnam and China after Mao, did so by abandoning nationalisation of the means of production, the very core of the Marxist prescription. They were exceptions that proved the rule.

Need I go on? Communism has killed on average a million people a year for a century, far more than any other ism, let alone what Marxists call “capitalism”, and the rest of us call freedom.

And yet in large chunks of the media and the Labour Party, including the troika of Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Seumas Milne, Marxism is still excused and admired while free enterprise is despised.

The first communists meant well. Their crime was to bet the farm on an untried idea and then, when it failed (as Lenin’s half-hearted New Economic Policy conceded), to be pig-headedly insensitive to the negative empirical data coming back from the experiment.

Like bloodletting medics, they elevated a principle into a dogma, with no regard to human suffering, in spite of overwhelming evidence.

 

Britain's brilliant biologists

My Times column on Britain's strong track record in the life sciences:

 

Mitochondrial replacement therapy (misleadingly termed three-parent babies) is to be permitted by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. I’m glad. The scientists who have developed the technique, Sir Doug Turnbull, Mary Herbert and others, are friends; the work has been done partly on the premises of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle, of which I am honorary president; I took part in the parliamentary debate last year on whether it was ethical and safe; and I have met some of the families suffering from the dreadful diseases it could cure. So I have emotional skin in the game.

I also feel a twinge of old-fashioned national pride. Yet again, Britain is pioneering a biomedical innovation. For a country with only 1 per cent of the world’s population, it is notable how many of the great discoveries and inventions in life science have happened here. That’s not nearly as true in physics or chemistry. Or philosophy, music, painting and literature.

In vitro fertilisation itself was invented in Manchester in 1978 by Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe; the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, is British. About five million couples worldwide have now had the happy experience of overcoming infertility thanks to something that started here. Other reproductive breakthroughs also happened in Britain. Cloning of frogs was invented in Cambridge by Sir John Gurdon in the late 1950s; cloning of mammals (Dolly the sheep) was invented in Edinburgh by Sir Ian Wilmut in the 1990s.

The next most widely used biological gift to society is also a wholly British invention. DNA fingerprinting, which has convicted countless criminals and, more importantly, exonerated countless wrongly charged people, was invented in Leicester by Sir Alec Jeffreys. He first used it to help the local police clear the name of a man accused of rape and murder, and then in 1988 to convict a different man, Colin Pitchfork, for the same crime.

The list of British bio-firsts includes: tumour suppressor genes; the cell cycle; programmed cell death; monoclonal antibodies; the Krebs cycle; penicillin; Sir Ronald Ross and the role of mosquitoes in malaria; Edward Jenner and vaccination; Robert Hooke and the cell; William Harvey and the circulation of the blood.

And, of course, the twin summits of biology that tower above all such foothills: natural selection (Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace) and the structure of DNA (James Watson and Francis Crick). The vital technologies for sequencing both DNA and proteins were invented in Cambridge by Fred Sanger. When the human genome was sequenced, and we became the first species to read our own recipe in three billion years, the biggest single contribution — about 40 per cent of the work — was done at Britain’s Sanger Institute.

Of course, we missed out on many other discoveries: those of Louis Pasteur, Gregor Mendel, Oswald Avery and many more. America invented genetic engineering in the 1970s. The new CRISPR gene-editing technology is a Japanese-Dutch-Russian-American-French-Chinese invention, without a Brit in sight. Notice too that some of those who made great discoveries here were not British. Some, like Sir Hans Krebs, were refugees from Nazi Germany.

My point is not jingoism, but that we should strive to understand why one foggy island has contributed so much to the life sciences so we can make sure it continues. It may be to do with our tradition of empiricism. In biology you make progress by examining nature with an open mind, not by theorising abstractly.

Perhaps, too, British society and the Anglican church were unusually tolerant of the paganism that biology spawns. Think of the thousands of clergymen carefully recording the natural history of their parishes for decades: Gilbert White is just the best known; Darwin’s mentor John Stevens Henslow was another. Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1681), wife of the regicide Colonel Hutchinson, wrote a complete verse translation of Lucretius’s atheistic and naturalistic poem De Rerum Natura. Richard Dawkins is very British.

It is hard to imagine IVF or mitochondrial replacement being pursued so enthusiastically in Catholic countries even today. Opposition to mitochondrial therapy in parliament was largely from Catholics and we were deluged with emails from some place in Rome. Americans have been unable to reach the pragmatic compromise on reproductive technologies that Dame Mary Warnock gave us here — and 40 per cent refuse to accept evolution.

These things have a tendency to be self-fulfilling, but can British bio-triumphs really continue? I think so. In recent weeks I have been briefed on two British breakthroughs that could be of enormous significance. I am sure there are others.

One is a potential solution to the crisis of antimicrobial resistance, which is killing 700,000 people a year worldwide, and has been the subject of international debate. A start-up called Matoke Holdings has a product called Surgihoney, whose trick is to generate reactive oxygen (the same chemistry as in many disinfectants) but slowly, continuously and in the right place.

Early results with Surgihoney and other delivery mechanisms show that this can be effective against bacteria in circumstances where antibiotics don’t work well: recurrent sinusitis, chronic respiratory conditions, cystic fibrosis, chronic wounds and burns, surgical prophylaxis and recurrent urinary infection caused by multi-resistant bugs. A doctor friend and expert on antimicrobial resistance, Matthew Dryden, who has tested it, calls it a potential game changer.

The other breakthrough, called N-Fix, comes from a company called Azotic Technologies, which has commercialised an invention by Ted Cocking at Nottingham university. The company claims that it is the “most important breakthrough in agriculture since the 1890s”. A bacterium discovered in sugar cane that is capable of fixing nitrogen directly from the air has now been persuaded to live inside the cells of many crops. Early results show that it increases yields dramatically, either replacing or enhancing the effect of synthetic fertiliser. For example, in maize, N-Fix achieves the same yield with only 25 per cent of the fertiliser application. It thereby holds the promise of helping poor farmers as much as rich ones, of reducing the land needed to feed the world, and of cutting pollution from fertiliser run-off.

Life science mostly generates good news. There is no field of human endeavour in which discoveries are so one-sidedly beneficial. The efforts of doomsters to find threat, risk and pain in genetics, and life sciences generally, have been for the most part a dismal failure. (Eugenics was based on outdated, pre-Mendelian misunderstandings of genetics and heredity.) And a surprising amount of it happens right here.

The cost of climate change policies: over £300 billion

My Times column on the high cost of Britain's climate change policies:

We now know from three different sources that Britain’s climate and energy policy is not just too expensive but has also been dishonestly presented. Peter Lilley MP, an unusually numerate former cabinet minister, has written a devastating new report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, published today, on the costs of Britain’s Climate Change Act 2008. It reveals “at best economic illiteracy and at worst deliberate deception” by government.

It comes as the National Audit Office has rapped the government’s knuckles for “a lack of transparency [that] has undermined accountability to parliament and consumers” in its energy policy. And a non-executive director of the former Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), Tom Kelly, found a systemic underestimation of the costs of the policy as well as “weaknesses in the original governance arrangements that were not rectified over time, a lack of transparency and a tendency to groupthink.” No wonder DECC sat on the Kelly report for a year before releasing it.

Mr Lilley calculates, and this is a conservative estimate, that the Climate Change Act will have cost over £300 billion by 2030. That is a gigantic sum subtracted from the earnings of Britons. Worse, this spending has to be forced by law, which implies that there are other productive investments to which it could be put. Indeed, this spending will be largely wasted even in its own terms: Mr Lilley points out that the dash for gas, as well as the recession, cut emissions, while the rush to renewables has merely driven some abroad.

 

Worse, Mr Lilley finds that government sources have concealed and downplayed the cost of climate policies. For example, official figures understate the “system” costs of intermittent renewables, such as the need to subsidise fossil fuels in a grid where they are only needed as backup. The government also assumed — wrongly — that fossil fuel prices could only rise, making green subsidies look less costly. Instead they have fallen sharply.

And even the £300 billion estimate omits the cost of biofuels in transport; ignores Britain’s share of the European Union budget, at least 20 per cent of which is spent on “climate-related projects and policies”; includes nothing for international development (though Dfid will spend at least £25 billion by 2030); and excludes the cost of having made British industry less competitive.

When Ed Davey, then energy secretary, wrote about “the impact of all the government’s energy and climate change policies [on] household bills” it turns out he was referring only to the direct costs on individuals’ energy bills and had omitted the two thirds of the cost that falls on businesses’ bills, which pass them on to consumers in higher costs for goods and services. If a supermarket pays more for the electricity to run its refrigerators, it charges more for milk. Challenged on this by Mr Lilley, Mr Davey argued, bizarrely, that many businesses are owned by foreigners, as if that made a difference.

More breathtaking still, Mr Lilley shows that the government has been trying to pass off a cost as a benefit. Both Mr Davey and Chris Huhne, his predecessor, argued that the cost of climate policy could be set against notional energy savings from more efficient appliances and better insulation, which people would buy because of higher energy bills, thus supposedly generating a net saving.

However, improvement in energy efficiency would be desirable even if there were no concern about emissions, or indeed no emissions; and besides, a gain in energy efficiency usually increases the use of energy — a phenomenon known as the Jevons paradox. If they have more fuel-efficient engines, people make more journeys.

So, we have an energy policy that has imposed huge costs on the economy, failed to reduce emissions significantly and was either dishonestly or incompetently presented. That Liberal Democrats were in charge of energy policy for five years and that it was all in a noble cause — ostensibly saving the planet — may partly explain but not excuse this. Yet this does not explain the reluctance of Conservative ministers to revise these policies radically after the end of the coalition.

And where were the watchdogs that are supposed to keep an eye on this policy and check it for effectiveness? The committee on climate change (CCC) was set up by the 2008 act to ensure “a balanced response to the risks of dangerous climate change” (says its website). Yet it has wholly failed to insist on a climate policy whose costs are significantly below the best estimates of the harms of climate change, known technically as the social cost of carbon.

In a lecture in 2013 soon after he became chairman of the CCC, Lord Deben, the former Conservative minister John Gummer, said of climate change that, “the likelihood is almost certain, the scale would certainly be enormous, the effect would be devastating, and the insurance is remarkably cheap.” But we know this is nonsense: the costs, as Mr Lilley’s study shows, are enormous in themselves, and are actually greater than even the higher-end estimates of damage from climate change. Nobody pays insurance premiums greater than the largest likely loss.

Mr Lilley was pilloried for being one of three Conservative MPs who voted against the Climate Change Act in 2008, so perhaps he has an axe to grind. So do I, as somebody with a commercial interest in coal mining and who thinks that the risks of climate change, though real, have been exaggerated. I have never objected to a cost-effective climate protection policy and would be delighted to see all the subsidies and imposts replaced by a simple carbon tax well below the social cost of carbon so as to encourage low-carbon innovation, not punish people for doing what at present they can’t avoid, namely using carbon-based energy sources.

But even on true believers’ own terms — indeed, especially on those terms — the Climate Change Act has been disastrous. In devising its climate-dominated energy policy, government has proceeded as if cost was no object. That is economically irrational, morally wrong and politically foolish. It has needlessly put climate policy on a collision course with public opinion. It is no accident that Donald Trump went from advocating strong climate action to embracing scepticism when he decided to run for president. For rust-belt Americans, just-about-managing Britons, not to mention similar constituencies in Germany, Japan and elsewhere, this is an obvious example of an elite policy that is unfair, costly and futile.