Matt Ridley's Blog, page 31

Punctured pessimists

Fox News has dug up some remarkable botched
predictions about the environment. Most are familar but three were
new to me:

 

2. "[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect
would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia
with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots…[By
1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a
continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic
on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down
computers." Michael Oppenheimer, published in "Dead Heat," St. Martin's Press,
1990.

Woops

4. "Using computer models, researchers
concluded that global warming would raise average annual
temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010."
Associated Press, May 15, 1989.

 

Woops

7. "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom
will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by
some 70 million hungry people ... If I were a gambler, I would take
even money that England will not exist in the year
2000."Paul Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology,
September 1971.

Amazingly, Ehrlich defends his prediction.

"When you predict the future, you get things
wrong," Ehrlich admitted, but "how wrong is another question. I
would have lost if I had had taken the bet. However, if you look
closely at England, what can I tell you? They're having all kinds
of problems, just like everybody else."

Here is a sample of our ``all sorts of problems' in Britain,
compared with 1971:

GDP per capita has roughly doubled in real terms

child mortality is down by three-quarters

lifespan is up by eight years

obesity is a bigger problem than hunger

four times as many people go to university

people take seven times as many foreign holidays

twice as many people have a car

otters and ospreys are far more numerous

air pollution is much decreased

beaches and rivers are cleaner

the internet exists

 

New cousins

The big news of the day, indeed of the year, is that we
now know, almost for sure, that central Asian hominins 50,000 years
ago were not Neanderthals, but a different species, the Denisovans,
as distantly related to Neanderthals as they were to us. A genome
extracted from a little finger found in the Denisova cave (above)
in the Altai mountains of south-western Siberia seems to say so as does a morphologically
distinct tooth.

But that is not the biggets surprise. Astonishingly, Melanesian
people from Papua New Guinea have a 5% ancestral contribution from
these Denisovans to their genomes. The implication: as Africans
spread around the Indian ocean 50,000 years ago, they did some
cross-breeding with Asian native hominins, who were of this
hitherto unknown species that lived in Siberia (and presumably
further south as well).

Holy Mackerel, what an incredible historical tool DNA sequencing
is! Truly there is scripture in it.

I don't have time to explore this remarkable story and its
implications today, because of holidays and snow, but I
recommend John Hawks's analysis, of which this is an
extract:

Well, it's obviously very exciting, but I
find it very difficult to talk about these Pleistocene populations
without falling into bad habits.

Our common ancestry as humans goes back to
the Early and Middle Pleistocene. The (now multiple) Neandertal
genomes and the Denisova genome share genes with some people and
not others because of this common ancestry.

In addition, some living people
carry even more genes from Neandertals because they
have an appreciable fraction of Neandertal ancestry. That makes it
nonsensical to talk about "Neandertals and the ancestors of modern
humans". Neandertals are among the ancestors
of modern humans.

Just so with Denisova. It's nonsensical to
talk about a three-way split between Neandertals, Denisova and
modern humans. We can talk about a population model with a clade
separating an ancestral Neandertal-Denisova population from
contemporary Africans.

I have to remind myself again and again when
I talk to people about these issues that "modern human ancestors"
is not a group that excludes these Pleistocene people.

Were they capable of exchange?

How new words and new genes are coined

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall
Street Journal, with added links:

Don't look for the soul in the language of DNA

Back in the genomic bronze age-the 1990s-scientists used to
think that there would prove to be lots of unique human genes found
in no other animal. They assumed that different species would have
many different genes. One of the big shocks of sequencing genomes
was not just the humiliating news that human beings have the same
number of genes as a mouse, but that we have the same genes, give
or take a handful.

This humiliation deepened recently when David Knowles and Aoife McLysaght at Trinity
College, Dublin, tracked down, at last, some uniquely human genes:
just three of them. They estimate that there are, altogether,
probably no more than 18 of this wholly unique kind-out of 22,568
genes in total. Over the span of our history, human beings seem to
have acquired a brand-new gene only every third of a million
years.

The three that Drs. Knowles and McLysaght identified lie in
stretches of DNA that are gobbledegook in chimpanzees, gorillas,
gibbons and macaques, so the chances are they have sprung to life
as protein-coding sequences in human beings uniquely. (A gene is
the digital recipe for making a protein molecule.)

The functions of these three genes are not yet known (since they
don't exist in mice, experiments are tricky), though one seems to
be slightly more active in people with a form of leukemia. They are
small and simple genes, however-unlikely candidates to hold the
recipe for the human soul.

This might seem to leave a small hook upon which philosophers
could hang the uniqueness of the human race. But we have long known
that our uniqueness lies in the order and combination of our genes,
not in the ingredients themselves. DNA is not only like a language;
it is a language, a linear sequence of recombinable
digital characters of infinite variety.

There are close parallels between DNA and a language like
English. Just as evolution uses the same 22,000 genes in a
different order to make a rhinoceros or a rabbit, so Shakespeare
used many of the same 18,000 words in each of his plays. The 10
most common words in "Othello" and "King Lear" are the same (I,
and, the, to, you, of, my, that, a, in), yet the plays are very
different. The English language, like the human genome, contains
very few brand new words that were invented recently from
scratch.

Most new English words arise by different means: by borrowing
from foreign languages (Schadenfreude, pajama); by recombining
existing words (blogosphere, download); or by the addition of
second meanings to existing words (green, mouse).

All of these habits are common in the genome, too. Lateral gene
transfer brings genes from one species into another, especially
among bacteria (less often among mammals like us). This is just
like borrowing a foreign word. Genes recombine by fusing in whole
or in part, by a process known as exon shuffling (exons are the
separate stretches of code that are used to make one protein in
split genes). This is just like recombining existing words. And
genes often duplicate themselves and then diverge into different
functions, just as old words acquire new meanings.

About 800 million years ago, a gene for a simple pigment protein enabling
worm-like creatures to see was duplicated, and the daughter genes
diverged to give the different proteins used in the rods and cones
of the eye. About 500 million years ago, in a lamprey-like fish,
the gene used in cones duplicated and diverged again to give us
blue versus yellow color vision. About 30 million years ago, in a
tree-climbing primate, the yellow gene duplicated and diverged
again to give us green-red color vision.

Genes also die out, just as words do. When they are still
recognizable but no longer in use, they are called pseudogenes. The
word "theatrophone" is a forgotten linguistic pseudogene, and the
word "minidisc" is becoming one. The words "trebuchet" and
"cenotaph" are examples of extinct words that sprang back to
life-something that pseudogenes sometimes do as well.

Cancer, chemicals, Carson and smoking

Rachel Carson, in her hugely influential book Silent Spring, wrote that she expected an
epidemic of cancer caused by chemicals in the environment,
especially DDT, indeed she thought it had already begun in the
early 1960s:

``No longer are exposures to dangerous
chemicals occupational alone; they have entered the environment of
everyone-even of children as yet unborn. It is hardly surprising,
therefore, that we are now aware of an alarming increase in
malignant disease.

The increase itself is no mere matter
of subjective impressions. The monthly report of the Office of
Vital Statistics for July 1959 states that malignant growths,
including those of the lymphatic and blood-forming tissues,
accounted for 15 per cent of the deaths in 1958 compared with only
4 per cent in 1900. Judging by the present incidence of the
disease, the American Cancer Society estimates that 45,000,000
Americans now living will eventually develop cancer. This means
that malignant disease will strike two out of three families. The
situation with respect to children is even more deeply disturbing.
A quarter century ago, cancer in children was considered a medical
rarity. Today, more American school children die of cancer than
from any other disease. So serious has this situation become that
Boston has established the first hospital in the United States
devoted exclusively to the treatment of children with cancer.
Twelve per cent of all deaths in children between the ages of one
and fourteen are caused by cancer. Large numbers of malignant
tumors are discovered clinically in children under the age of five,
but it is an even grimmer fact that significant numbers of such
growths are present at or before birth. Dr. W. C. Hueper of the
National Cancer Institute, a foremost authority on environmental
cancer, has suggested that congenital cancers and cancers in
infants may be related to the action of cancer-producing agents to
which the mother has been exposed during pregnancy and which
penetrate the placenta to act on the rapidly developing fetal
tissues.''

Carson was wrong about this. Not only has DDT proved not to be a
carcinogen, but the cancer epidemic caused by exposure of the
general public to chemicals has wholly failed to materialise. Study
after study has found that there is no increase in cancer incidence
or death in the general population, when corrected for age, to be
explained by man-made chemicals. Those, like Paul Ehrlich, who
confidently predicted that the lifespan of Americans would fall to
42 years by the end of the twentieth century thanks to such cancer
epidemics, were proved badly wrong.

Here are the charts of cancer deaths for men and women, adjusted
for age, in the United States since the 1930s.

The one that stands out, of course, is lung cancer. The rapid
increase in lung cancer (boosted surely changing diagnosis in the
early years) was caused by the increase in smoking, of course.
Almost nobody now challenges that. But they did once. Indeed, one
of the most vociferous opponents of the theory that smoking causes
lung cancer was none other than Carson's mentor, William
Hueper.

So obsessed was Hueper with his notion that pesticides and other
synthetic chemicals were causing an epidemic of cancer and that
industry was covering this up, that he bitterly opposed the
suggestion that smoking take any blame - as an industry plot.

Here he is writing a paper called Lung Cancers and their Causes
in 1955 in CA, a cancer journal for clinicians 
http://caonline.amcancersoc.org/cgi/content/abstract/5/3/95:

1. The total epidemiological, clinical,
pathological, and experimentalevidence on hand clearly indicates
that not a single but severalif not numerous industrial or
industry-related atmospheric pollutantsare to a great part
responsible for the causation of lung cancer.

2.While the available data do not permit any
definite statementas to the relative importance of the various
recognized respiratorycarcinogens in the production of lung cancers
in the generalpopulation, they nevertheless unmistakingly suggest
that cigarettesmoking is not a major factor in the causation of
lung cancernor had it a predominant role in the remarkable increase
ofthese tumors during recent decades.

3. In view of the fact thatnot only a great
deal of the existing circumstantial epidemiologicalevidence but
also pratically the entire factual and conclusiveevidence available
on exogenous respiratory carcinogens areeither of occupational
origin or point to industry-related factors,it would be most unwise
at this time to base future preventivemeasures of lung-cancer
hazards mainly on the cigarette theoryand to concentrate the
immediate epidemiological and experimentalefforts on this evidently
overpropagandized and insufficientlydocumented concept.

When environmentalists want to attack a sceptic these days, they
quite frequently accuse him or her of being the kind of person who
would have defended the tobacco lobby - in some cases with
justification. So it is ironic to find that possibly the most
iconic and original text of the entire environmental movement,
Silent Spring, was built on the work of a fervent tobacco defender.
Hueper is quoted frequently throughout Carson's book.

By the way, in my book I say that Rachel Carson `expected DDT
"to cause practically 100 per cent of the human population to be
wiped out from a cancer epidemic in one generation"'. This is
inaccurate: I slipped up. I relied on an article in a magazine called Front Page in
July 2003 for this quotation, and unusually I did not check it with
Carson's original text. Alerted by a reader, Ed Darrell (thanks!) I
have now checked Carson's Silent Spring, and while Carson strongly
implies that she does indeed expect a major mortality from cancer
caused by DDT, what she actually wrote is the following:

In the springof 1961 an
epidemic of liver cancer appeared among rainbow trout
in many federal, state, and private hatcheries. Trout in both
eastern and western parts of the United States were affected; in
some areas practically 100 per cent of the trout over three years
of age developed cancer. ...The story of
the trout is important for many reasons, but chiefly
as an example of what can happen when a potent carcinogen is
introduced into the environment of any species. Dr. Hueper has
described this epidemic as a serious warning that greatly increased
attention must be given to controlling the number and variety of
environmental carcinogens. 'If such preventive measures are not
taken,' says Dr. Hueper, 'the stage will be set at a progressive
rate for the future occurrence of a similar disaster to the human
population.'

My book criticises Carson and her followers for their
exaggerated pessimism which led to the phasing out of DDT as an
anti-mosquito weapon and hence led directly to the resurgence of
malaria. This is a story that has been well told in many places and
deserves to be better known. But I find many of DDT's defenders
then go on to make a claim that I do not believe is correct, namely
that DDT had no impact on birds, and that the story that it led to
the thinning of eggshells in birds at the end of long food chains,
such as falcons and pelicans (and also damaged the reproduction of
predatory mammals such as otters), is false. I simply do not accept
that. The evidence of bioaccumulation in fat, of eggshell thinning
and of DDT's role in the decline of raptors and other predatory
birds in the 1960s seems to me fairly strong, though not overhwelming. The
ending of indiscriminate and widespread spraying of DDT is probably
a good thing.

It is, fortunately, very easy to use DDT against malarial
mosquitoes without poisoning birds. The solution is to use it
sparingly on the inside walls of houses, where anopheline
mosquitoes rest during the day. This targets the pest while not
allowing the pesticide to contaminate the food chain in nearby
ecosystems. The best of both worlds.

 

Genetics is good for you

My Times column is on the risks of genetic
research and therapy:

Fifteen years after the first sequencing of the
human genome, the genetic engineering of human beings is getting
closer. Will that mean designer babies and the rich winning life’s
lotteries from the start? And will we ever stop this slither down
the slippery slope to playing God? My answers are: no, and I hope
not. Despite dire predictions, almost nothing but good has come
from genetic technology so far, and we’ve proved that we don’t slip
down such slopes: we tread carefully.

The current excitement is over gene editing. A precise way of
doing this, called CRISPR-cas9, is all the rage among the
white-coated pipette-users. Last week, Britain’s five leading
medical research bodies (one of which, I should declare, counts me
as a fellow, the Academy of Medical Sciences) issued a joint
statement supporting the careful use of the new technique on human
cells for research and possibly therapy. They even recognised that
there might one day be a justifiable demand to use the new
technique on embryos in such a way that the changes would be
inherited.

We have had bio-ethical worries about six times in the past four
decades. First, in the mid-1970s, the discovery of how to do
genetic engineering in bacteria led to agonised debates about the
risks of biological warfare and accidents. Scientists themselves
imposed a moratorium and held a conference to devise rules. Today
the technique is routinely used, has virtually never been misused,
and has saved or improved the lives of millions: diabetics, for
example, use human insulin made by bacteria genetically engineered
to include human genes. It turned out better than feared.

Second, in the late-1970s, the discovery of how to fertilise
human eggs in test tubes led to equally agonised debates about what
this might do to human reproduction — such as allowing people to
seek out highly prized human specimens to father or mother their
children. In fact, the technology is used not to help people have
other people’s babies, but to help them have their own. It has
largely cured a wretched disease — infertility — and made millions
happy. It turned out better than feared.

Third, in the 1990s scientists began to modify the genes of
plants. Opponents raised the prospect of horrifying risks to our
food and the environment. Yet trillions of genetically modified
meals have now been eaten by animals and people with zero health
problems. GM crops have cut insecticide use, raised yields and
delivered healthier foods. Today’s scandal is not the harm GM crops
have done, but the suffering they have not been permitted to
alleviate, thanks to irrational opposition. Even if you are still
worried, you must concede that so far it has turned out better than
feared.

Fourth, around the millennium, scientists developed techniques
to clone mammals and some of us found ourselves on talk shows
discussing when vain plutocrats would duplicate themselves or their
pets, and at what risk to morality. In fact, cloning has proved
helpful in only a very few laboratory settings, but aside from one
or two pretty harmless pet-cloning episodes, has not been used at
all for frivolous purposes. It turned out better than feared.

Fifth, scientists sequenced the human genome, identified
disease-causing mutations and began to offer pre-implantation
genetic diagnosis to avoid bringing people into the world with
conditions such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease. Critics
worried that people would use the technique to make designer babies
who were good at the piano or maths. Yet demand for such positive
selection has proved minimal, partly because identifying specific
genes for specific traits is hard — and misreads the way genomes
work — and partly because, again, it turns out that people want
children like themselves, not paragons. Besides, good education is
still a far better way of giving a child an advantage. It turned
out better than feared.

Sixth, scientists discovered how to use viruses to insert new
genes into living tissues to cure certain fatal diseases —
so-called gene therapy. Early trials in human beings using
retroviruses triggered cancer and were abandoned. But safer
lentivirus gene therapy has now proved capable of saving lives, such
as those of immune-deficient babies, and is being used in more than
700 different trials. It turned out better than feared.

The score so far is six-nil to the optimists, then. Diabetics,
IVF children, bees in GM crops, parents who carry cystic fibrosis
or Huntington’s disease, babies with severe combined immune
deficiency — all have benefited. It has been feasible to use
genetic techniques for biological warfare and designer babies for
decades now; and it has not happened.

As the reaction to early gene therapy failures illustrate, the
slopes are not slippery. We advance very carefully down them,
retreating if necessary and re-evaluating the issues at every
stage. People want to use these techniques to cure diseases, not to
do eugenics. Genetic knowledge has not undermined morality or
respect for human life. All this does not, of course, prove that
future techniques will not be abused, but it must count for
something.

The latest gene-editing technique is generating attention
because it is so much more precise and effective than previous ways
of altering genes. Its first use will probably be in gene therapy —
extracting T cells from a cancer patient, editing the cells’ genes
to fight the cancer and re-injecting them — but even this is a long
way off. Work on germ-line genes is even further away. Some
scientists are calling for a moratorium on even the experimental
use of CRISPR-cas9 on embryos until we have discussed all the
ethical implications.

That would be a mistake. As genetically modified plants have
shown, moratoriums are blunt instruments — easy to impose and
difficult to lift when it turns out they are doing more harm than
good, especially in the age of social media.

Experiments produce knowledge to inform debates. A good example
is the recent debate on mitochondrial donation, a technique
developed in the laboratory before being licensed for use in
patients, where it may soon prevent dreadful degenerative diseases.
When the ethical debate on its use happened, seven years’ worth of
experimental results were on hand to answer many of the questions
raised. A moratorium would have meant debating in ignorance.

We should always tread carefully, but we should take comfort
from the truly remarkable track record of genetic technologies in
alleviating more human suffering than we dared to hope, and
encouraging fewer bad outcomes than we feared.

Demography does not explain the migration crisis

My Times column on African demography and the
migration crisis:

Even the most compassionate of European liberals
must wonder at times whether this year’s migration crisis is just
the beginning of a 21st- century surge of poor people that will
overwhelm the rich countries of our continent. With African
populations growing fastest, are we glimpsing a future in which the
scenes we saw on the Macedonian border, or on Kos or in the seas
around Sicily last week will seem tame?

I don’t think so. The current migration crisis is being driven
by war and oppression, not demography. Almost two thirds of the
migrants reaching Europe by boat this year are from three small countries: Syria,
Afghanistan and Eritrea. These are not even densely populated
countries: their combined populations come to less than England’s,
let alone Britain’s, and none of them is in the top 20 for
population growth rates.

Well then, perhaps that is even more ominous. If these three
relatively small countries can cause such turmoil, imagine what
would happen if say the more populous countries in Africa fell into
similar chaos. Today Africa’s population (north and sub-Saharan) is about 50 per cent larger than Europe’s (East
and West). By 2050, when — according to United Nations estimates —
Africa’s population will have more than doubled from 1.1 billion to
about 2.4 billion people and Europe’s will have shrunk from 740
million to about 709 million, there will be more than three
Africans for every European.

Actually, demography is a poor predictor of migration. Nowhere
in the world are people leaving countries specifically because of
population growth or density. The population density of Germany is five times as high as that of Afghanistan
or Eritrea: unlike water, people often move up population
gradients. Tiny Eritrea, with only five million people, is a hell-hole for purely political reasons.
It has a totalitarian government that tries to make North Korea and
the old East Germany look tame: it conscripts every 17-year-old
into lifelong and total service of the state. No wonder 3 per cent
of its people have already left.

It is equally obvious why people are clamouring to leave Syria
and Afghanistan: violence is driving them out, not shortage of
food, space, or water, let alone climate change or anything else.
(Notoriously, in 2005 the UN Environment Programme forecast 50 million climate-change refugees by
2010.)

So it is simply not the case that migration of Africans (or
Asians) will be driven by their ever-increasing numbers. Ethiopia,
next-door to Eritrea, is the second most populous country in
Africa, with higher population density than Eritrea, and 90 million
people. But its government is only mildly authoritarian, its
economic growth rate is an astonishing 8-12 per cent over the past
five years and people are not clamouring to leave.

Geographically speaking, Africa is an enormous continent. You can fit China, India, the United States,
Mexico, Europe and Japan inside it, and still have space left over.
When it has a population of 2.4 billion in 2050, it will still have
fewer people than the 4 billion who live in those places today. Of
the 50 least densely populated countries in the world, 16 are in Africa. The continent is far from
overflowing.

As for feeding this multitude, much of Africa can grow fabulous
crops several times a year. Without access to synthetic fertilizer,
yields have lagged behind Asia, but they are starting to catch up
and when they do, Africa will easily be able to feed 2.4 billion
people and export a surplus. Already, despite fast-growing
populations, famine is gone from Africa, except where mad and bad
regimes cause it.

With the death tolls from HIV-Aids and malaria falling rapidly,
the continent is currently experiencing a plunge in child
mortality, which in turn is encouraging birth rates to fall: when
people expect their children to live, they have fewer of them. The
birth rate in Kenya has halved in the past 40 years. It is called
the demographic transition, and it happened here more than a
century ago.

Africa’s population growth will slow during this century. The
richer it gets the more that growth rate will slow. But there are
already easily enough Africans to overwhelm Europe’s capacity to
cope if they all come here, so there is nothing especially alarming
about the idea of a larger future population in Africa. The problem
isn’t demography.

No, what drives migration is violence, perpetrated these days
either by dictatorial regimes, or by religious extremists, rarely
by other causes.

In Syria, of course, both causes have combined to deadly effect.
The global Sunni-Shia civil war, the war of militant Islamists
against Christians, the kidnapping of women and children by Boko
Haram, Islamic State and the Lord’s Resistance Army — these are the
kind of things that will drive poor people into Europe from Africa
and Asia. The best way to make that flow less overwhelming is not
to reduce population but to extinguish wars, expel dictators and
calm religious extremisms: easier said than done.

The one demographic trend that gives cause for concern is the
birth rate among religious extremists. As Eric Kaufmann pointed out
in 2010 in his book Shall the Religious Inherit the
Earth?, there is a dramatic and growing difference between
the family size of moderate and fundamentalist believers in every
major religion. Fundamentalists are literally out-breeding
moderates within Islam, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Mormonism
and Judaism. Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews have an average of 7.5 children; secular ones
2.2. In cities in Muslim countries, women who are most in favour of
Sharia have twice as many children as women who most oppose it.

Combine this with the result derived from twin studies that,
while the particular religion you practise clearly does not run in
the genes, the degree of religious enthusiasm does to some extent.

Imagine then that by the middle of this century, people with a
tendency to become highly religious have become a much greater
proportion of the population than today. That could be a recipe for
more violence. (You may think I am equating all religion with
violence. No, but next time you hear about a violent atrocity on a
train or in a shopping mall, you don’t say to yourself — there go
those agnostics again.)

Fortunately, children often do the opposite of what their
parents tell them, and religious revivals have a tendency to fade.
So it is just as likely that the spasms of violence causing surges
of migration from poor countries will have died away by mid
century.

Charities in need of reform

My Times column on charities:

David Cameron, luxuriating in the prospect of weak
opposition, has a chance to think about radical reform of both the
private and public sectors. But there is a third sector that
requires his attention even more urgently. He is well known to want
to harness the generosity of Britain. To do that effectively the
charity sector needs some big thinking — because after decades of
regulatory neglect it is starting to unravel and is in crisis.

The collapse of Kids Company and the British Association for
Adoption and Fostering should ring alarm bells throughout the
sector: fear of failure or takeover is one of the things that keep
private companies effective and, for too long, charities have not
felt that breath on their neck. They have been given the benefit of
the doubt because of their noble intent.

Many charities are wonderful institutions, doing tireless work
for little reward. But too many are low on compassion and have thin
financial reserves and big pension fund deficits, making them
vulnerable to donors going on strike following revelations of
problems.

Some charities are running on fumes. Others have governance
arrangements that would never pass muster in private firms: Alan
Yentob has chaired Kids Company for 18 years. A few are little more
than arms of government delivering public services, or have become
overtly political, or covers for extremism.

A charities bill going through parliament offers the chance to
begin to tackle reform. The prime minister has asked Sir Stuart
Etherington to look into the existing system of self-regulation
under the Fundraising Standards Board. Here’s a shocking fact for
Sir Stuart to chew upon: the FRSB’s last annual report speaks of 20 billion fundraising requests
being made in the space of a year. Yet, its board found the time to
look at just one complaint — which it rejected. A body that
receives 98 per cent of its funds from the charities that it
regulates could never have been expected to bite the hand.

After years of factory trawling for funds, the big charities are
finding it ever more costly to find fish, as recent “chugging”
scandals and the plight of the poppy seller Olive Cooke have shown.
In the space of a few years, the cost to a charity of getting one
of the chugging agencies to persuade a passer-by to sign up to a
direct debit has gone up from £40 to £120, which means that even
less of a donor’s money goes to the good cause. (This leads to a
vicious circle of even less trust in charities because so little
gets through to those we wish to help.)

Here’s another issue. A parliamentary question by Lord
Marlesford recently revealed that the RSPCA has access to the
police national computer, via the National Police Chiefs’ Council
criminal records office; and that its Scottish cousin, the Scottish
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, has — even more
surprisingly — direct access to the computer. These are both
organisations with no accountability to the electorate and, with
fundraising benefits from the PR opportunities presented by arrests
and prosecutions, this is a recipe for malpractice.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds runs some fine
nature reserves and conservation initiatives. But why on earth is
it campaigning against fracking — which it knows
offers far less threat to birds than wind farms do? It must be
because getting mentioned in the news keeps donations flowing.

Heather Hancock’s independent review for the BBC last year on
its impartiality with respect to rural issues found an
over-reliance of BBC newsrooms on the RSPB for virtually all rural
issues, not just bird-related ones: “Time after time, when asked
who their top contacts would be for a rural story, BBC programme
makers or journalists quoted the RSPB first.”

Many charities have suffered egregious activist entryism, to the
point where their leaders have views wildly at variance with those
of their donors. William Shawcross, chairman of the Charity
Commission, worries that old ladies who give money to the
RSPCA thinking it will help to save stray cats don’t expect its
executives to compare farming to the Holocaust or call for the end
of pet ownership.

In the case of Islamist extremism, the problem is less one of
innocent donors duped into supporting extremism than one in which
both donors and executives may sometimes be keen to disguise
extremism inside moderate charities. Such abuse of charitable status clearly does
happen.

Some charities have become little more than fundraising
businesses, who spend the funds they raise on fundraising. Take
Greenpeace, for example. It aims to save the world, but its output
consists largely of stunts, such as the shockingly ill-advised trespass on the ancient Nazca lines in Peru
last year, whose purpose was to get publicity . . . and raise
funds. The RSPB at least spends money on nature reserves and runs
conservation projects, but even it has been upbraided recently by
the Advertising Standards Authority for misleading advertising on
how much money was going into conservation, rather than
marketing.

Some charities have become overt political campaigners. Last
December, the Charity Commission reprimanded Oxfam for a poster attacking the
government’s austerity policies. The Indian government has been
cracking down on Greenpeace, saying that in “selectively targeting those
projects that were of great national importance for industrial
growth and development” it may have crossed the line “between
creating environmental awareness and creating social unrest”.

Many charities now depend heavily on government for their funds,
and yet are immune to freedom-of-information requests. Worse, they
spend some of those funds on lobbying government for policies
favoured by the very civil servants who doled out the cash to
them.

The Institute of Economic Affairs calls this
circular process “sock-puppetry”, and it is especially rife in
Brussels. It is hard not to see it as corrupt.

This is a partial list of the things that seem to be wrong in
the charity sector. I repeat that most charities do brilliant work,
including, I hope, the ones that I support. But it is a sector of
the economy ripe for the sort of radical cleansing and scrutiny
that the private and public sectors have at least begun to
endure.

A government U-turn on e-cigarettes

My Times Thunderer article on vaping:

 

The government now says vaping with e-cigarettes
is such a good thing that we should be prescribing it and smokers
should be rushing to take it up. It’s 95 per cent less harmful than
smoking, it’s helping people to quit tobacco and there’s no
evidence it’s a gateway into smoking: rather the reverse.

Doing a U-turn when you’ve spent two years building brick walls
on the other carriageway is challenging. The obstacles that the
government will face in encouraging vaping are more than a little
of its own making. The Public Health England review that changed
the government’s mind is concerned “that increasing numbers of
people think e-cigarettes are equally or more harmful than
smoking”.

I wonder why people think that. Could it have anything to do
with the fact that in the government’s last major announcement on
e-cigarettes in June 2013 it recommended (through the Medicines
& Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, or MHRA) “that people
do not use them”? Or that last year the chief medical officer
told New Scientist that e-cigarettes were one of
the UK’s three great health threats?

Or that in September 2013, the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt,
was lobbying MEPs to create heavy regulations on e-cigarettes by
insisting that all should be regulated as medicines? This resulted
in an effective ban on strong e-cigarettes and on consumer
advertising — which will come into force next year.

The truth is, the evidence that vaping is a game-changer in the
fight against tobacco has been obvious for years, but a combination
of yuk-factor gut instinct, drug-company lobbying and dislike of
private sector innovation led the public health mandarins to build
obstacles to it.

The new report is full of delicious coded admissions that this
was a big mistake: “The absence of non-tobacco industry products
going through the MHRA licensing process suggests that the process
is inadvertently favouring larger manufacturers, including the
tobacco industry, which is likely to inhibit innovation in the
prescription market.” Yup, some of us made that point a while
ago.

The Department of Health should have done a proper impact
assessment at the start. The extraordinary result is that Mr Hunt
will now have to navigate the onerous regulations of vaping that he
was the driving force in imposing across Europe. Still, he deserves
congratulations for having the courage to do a U-turn.

The Green Scare Problem

My Wall Street Journal column on how green scares
have led to counterproductive actions:

‘We’ve heard these same stale arguments before,” said President
Obama in his speech on climate change
last week, referring to those who worry that the Environmental
Protection Agency’s carbon-reduction plan may do more harm than
good. The trouble is, we’ve heard his stale argument before, too:
that we’re doomed if we don’t do what the environmental pressure
groups tell us, and saved if we do. And it has frequently turned
out to be really bad advice.

Making dire predictions is what environmental groups do for a
living, and it’s a competitive market, so they exaggerate.
Virtually every environmental threat of the past few decades has
been greatly exaggerated at some point. Pesticides were not causing
a cancer epidemic, as Rachel Carson claimed in her
1962 book “Silent Spring”; acid rain was not devastating German forests, as the Green
Party in that country said in the 1980s; the ozone hole was not
making rabbits and salmon blind, as Al Gore warned in the 1990s.
Yet taking precautionary action against pesticides, acid rain and
ozone thinning proved manageable, so maybe not much harm was
done.

Climate change is different. President Obama’s plan to cut U.S.
carbon-dioxide emissions from electricity plants by 32% (from 2005
levels) by 2030 would cut global emissions by about 2%. By that
time, according to Energy Information Administration data analyzed
by Heritage Foundation statistician Kevin Dayaratna, the
carbon plan could cost the U.S. up to $1 trillion in lost GDP. The
measures needed to decarbonize world energy are going to be vastly
more expensive. So we had better be sure that we are not
exaggerating the problem.

But it isn’t just that environmental threats have a habit of
turning out less bad than feared; it’s that the remedies sometimes
prove worse than the disease.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are a case in point. After
20 years and billions of meals, there is still no evidence that they harm
human health, and ample evidence of their environmental and
humanitarian benefits. Vitamin-enhanced GM “golden rice” has been
ready to save lives for years, but opposed at every step by
Greenpeace. Bangladeshi eggplant growers spray their
crops with insecticides up to 140 times in a season, risking their
own health, because the insect-resistant GMO version of the plant
is fiercely opposed by environmentalists. Opposition to GMOs has
certainly cost lives.

Besides, what did GMOs replace? Before transgenic crop
improvement was invented, the main way to breed new varieties was
“mutation breeding”: to scramble a plant’s DNA randomly, using
gamma rays or chemical mutagens, in the hope that some of the
monsters thus produced would have better yields or novel
characteristics. Golden Promise barley, for
example, a favorite of organic brewers, was produced this way. This
method still faces no special regulation, whereas precise transfer
of single well known genes, which could not possibly be less safe,
does.

Environmentalists are currently opposing neonicotinoid
pesticides on the grounds that they may hurt bee populations, even
though the European Union notes that honeybee numbers have been
rising in the 20 years since they were introduced. The effect in
Europe has been to cause farmers to return to much more harmful
pyrethroid insecticides, which are sprayed on crops instead of used
as seed dressing, hitting innocent bystander insects. And if
Europeans had been allowed to grow GMOs, then less pesticide would
be necessary. Again, green precaution increases risks.

Nuclear power has been energetically opposed by the
environmental lobby for decades, on the grounds of danger. Yet
nuclear power causes fewer deaths per unit of energy generated than
even wind and solar power. Compared with fossil fuels, nuclear
power has prevented 1.84 million more deaths than it caused,
according to a study by two NASA
researchers. Opposition to nuclear
power has cost lives.

Likewise widespread opposition to fracking for shale gas, is
based almost entirely on myths and lies, as Reason
magazine’s science correspondent, Ronald Bailey, has
reported. This opposition has substantially delayed the growth of
onshore gas production in Europe and in parts of the U.S. That has
meant more reliance on offshore gas, Russian gas, and coal—all of
which have greater safety issues and environmental risks.
Opposition to fracking has hurt the environment.

In short, the environmental movement has repeatedly denied
people access to safer technologies and forced them to rely on
dirtier, riskier or more harmful ones. It is adept at exploiting
people’s suspicion of anything new.

Many exaggerated early claims about the dangers of climate
change have now been debunked. The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change has explicitly abandoned previous claims that
malaria will likely get worse, that the Gulf Stream will stop
flowing, the Greenland or West Antarctic Ice sheet will
disintegrate, a sudden methane release from the Arctic is likely,
the monsoon will collapse or long-term droughts will become more
likely.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, in contrast to our
experience with acid rain and the ozone layer, the financial,
humanitarian and environmental price of decarbonizing the energy
supply is proving much steeper than expected. Despite falling costs
of solar panels, the system cost of solar power, including land,
transmission, maintenance and nighttime backup, remains high. The
environmental impact of wind power—deforestation, killing of birds
of prey, mining of rare earth metals—is worse than expected.
According to the BP Statistical Review of World
Energy, these two sources of power provided, between them, just
1.35% of world energy in 2014, cutting emissions by even less than
that.

Indoor air pollution, caused mainly by cooking over wood fires
indoors, is the world’s biggest cause of environmental death. It
kills an estimated four million people every
year, as noted by the nonprofit science news website,
SciDev.Net. Getting fossil-fueled
electricity and gas to them is the cheapest and quickest way to
save their lives. To argue that the increasingly small risk of
dangerous climate change many decades hence is something they
should be more worried about is positively obscene.

The great filter

My Times column on the paradox that planets seem
to be abundant, but signs of life are rare:

The search for another world that can sustain life
is getting warmer. We now know of 1,879 planets outside the solar
system. A few weeks ago, we (the planetary we, that is: no thanks
to me) found Earth’s twin, a planet of similar size and a habitable
distance from its sun, but 1,400 light years from here. Last week
we found a rocky planet close to a star just
21 light years away, which means if anybody lives there and tunes
in to us, they could be watching the first episode
of Friends.

Also last week the Philae lander’s results showed that the comet it is riding on has
organic (carbon-based) molecules in its dust, the ingredients of
life. Even in our own solar system we know of a moon, Titan, where
it rains methane, and another, Europa, with an ice-covered ocean.
In short, it is getting ever more likely that there are lots of
bodies like Earth in our own galaxy alone: with liquid water and
the right sort of temperatures for the carbon chemistry of the kind
that life runs on here.

Which only underlines Enrico Fermi’s famous question, first
delivered over lunch at Los Alamos in 1950 during a conversation
about UFOs: “Where is everybody?” His point was that if there are
billions of habitable planets, and many have had billions of years
to produce intelligent life forms, then the chances are that some
of them must have had time to broadcast to, or even visit other
solar systems. So why is there not a whisper in the ether of their
version of Top Gear, let alone a glimpse of a
tentacled Clarkson careering through the air in a flying saucer, or
even a bit of ancient, rusty wreckage to show where he once
crashed?

The Fermi paradox gets ever more baffling, as the evidence grows
of other habitable planets. The silence is beginning to seem
ominous. Robin Hanson, the chief scientist of the prediction market
research firm Consensus Point, advises: “Take a minute to look up at the dark
night sky, see the vast, ancient and unbroken deadlands, and be
very afraid.” He thinks there may be an obstacle ahead of us that
has caused every previous planetary civilisation to collapse before
colonising the galaxy: nuclear war, or something equally
horrible.

He calls this argument the great filter, and defines it thus, “The sum total of all of the obstacles
that stand in the way of a simple dead planet (or similar sized
material) proceeding to give rise to a cosmologically visible
civilisation.” Have we got past the great obstacles, or are there
still some insuperable ones ahead?

We’ve certainly got through at least five big filters. First,
life evolved. Nick Lane in his magnificent new book The
Vital Question thinks that a peculiar feature of all earthly
life — that it traps energy in the form of protons pumped across
membranes — indicates that it began at warm alkaline vents on the
floor of the early ocean. Gradually that energy came to be used to
make information, in the form of genes, and the machinery to
replicate it.

Genetically and biochemically, there is only one form of life on
this planet, which might imply that it’s a rare and lucky accident,
but then later forms would have struggled to compete with the first
one, so it’s not clear how difficult this step was and how many
planets with the right conditions failed to take it. That life did
not then die out thanks to a global freeze-up or fry-up may have
depended — David Waltham argues in his book Lucky
Planet— on the good fortune of having a relatively large
moon that stabilised our spin and moderated our climate: another
possible stroke of luck that other planets perhaps did not
share.

Next, after a couple of billion years, creatures bigger than
microbes emerged, once (Nick Lane argues) an energy-per-gene limit
was breached by the invention of the mitochondrion, a specialised
energy-generating microbe living inside another cell. This gave us
large and complex cells of the kind found in plants, animals and
fungi, and eventually multicellular creatures making and using
oxygen. It took a very long time to achieve this step, so many
planets may have been filtered out at that stage, and be stuck with
microbes only.

Earth, then, had complex life forms for more than half a billion
years before anything remotely intelligent enough to develop
technology appeared. For 140 million years, the dinosaurs achieved
large size and nimble agility without ever threatening to do much
mental or physical (as opposed to genetic) innovation. Their
evolutionary experiment was cut short by a meteorite, and the
mammals took another 60 million years even to start on technology.
Even then, it was only one species, a primate, that became
technological, rather than the almost equally large-brained
dolphins. So that was a strong filter: intelligence without
technology is clearly possible.

Even once we had big brains, technology, language and culture,
human ancestors spent a few million years stuck in
hunter-gathering, before something triggered an explosion of
cumulative culture in one sub-species on one part of one continent,
Africa, about 200,000 years ago. I have argued before that this
step was enabled by the invention of exchange and specialisation,
which made us capable of “cloud intelligence” so we could
collaboratively build devices too complex for individual minds to
comprehend. Only then did we experience rapid cultural evolution
and innovate to the point where we could start exploring space.

It is, in other words, very likely that most planets would have
failed to clear all these hurdles, which may explain the silence.
Many may teem with microbes; others could be rich in fossils of
life that died out; a few possibly host herds of agile, even
ingenious, creatures, some of which communicate in languages; one
or two might have got to the point of inventing weapons of war
before some catastrophe intervened. But almost none have reached
the point where they could send messages and spacecraft out of
their atmospheres.

Is it not incredibly lucky that we live on a rare planet that
did make it? Well, no, because whoever lived on such a planet would
say that about themselves. It is for this reason that I am not
persuaded yet that the most severe filter, the one that stops most
planets colonising the galaxy, comes after the stage we have
reached. I think that’s unnecessary pessimism. And with that I am
off on a summer holiday.