Matt Ridley's Blog, page 33

Spectator diary

My recent Spectator diary:

Martin Williams, former head of the government’s air quality
science unit, has declared that the reason we have a problem with
air pollution now is that ‘policy has been focused on climate
change, and reducing CO2 emissions, to the exclusion of much
else, for most of the past two decades. Diesel was seen as a good
thing because it produces less CO2, so we gave people incentives to
buy diesel cars.’ Yet another example of how the global warming
obsession has been bad for the environment — like subsidising
biofuels, which encourage cutting down rainforests; or windfarms,
which kill eagles and spoil landscapes; or denying coal-fired
electricity to Africa, where millions die each year from the
effects of cooking over smoky wood fires.

Greens are too hard on coal. If much of the world had not
switched from wood to coal in the 1800s, we would have deforested
the planet almost entirely. By 1860, Britain was getting as much
energy from coal as a forest the size of Scotland could yield;
today, we’d need a forest the size of South Africa. And coal
produces less carbon dioxide than wood per unit of energy. I would
say this, wouldn’t I? My ancestors were in coal from about 1700 and
I still am, hosting a temporary surface mine on my land. It
provides good jobs, lots of tax, a community benefits fund and an
income windfall for local residents as well as me. Plus
opportunities for spectacular restoration schemes, like
Northumberlandia (look it up). It also helps keep electricity
affordable.

The Guardian, unhappy that I said last week
that its fossil-fuel divestment campaign was likely to hurt the
poor, writes to tell me that it intends to have a go at me, rather
than tackle my argument, by quoting an unreliable blogger about the
amount I make from coal. I don’t own as much land as he thinks I
do, nor share as little of the income with other residents, but I
am under no obligation to invade others’ privacy by naming the
sums. I always declare my interest when relevant. If I were getting
similar money from wind or solar power — as I could if I approved
of them — I’d be a hero to greens. It’s a strange world where the
left likes rich people getting money only if it comes from a tax on
poor people’s bills. (Meanwhile, part of
the Guardian’s website is sponsored by a
coal-mining company.)

Back in January, on the day a Japanese captive was beheaded by
Islamic State, the Guardian published its
previous attack on me over a picture of a severed zombie’s head. My
crime was to write about how I had been furiously denounced merely
for presenting the evidence that climate change is real but may not
be net harmful — so the Guardian piece rather
proved my point. Beneath the article online appeared two comments
recommending that I be beheaded, and one revealing the writer of
these comments was a Guardian contributor, Gary
Evans. Astonishingly, the comment outing Mr Evans was deleted to
protect him, while the death threats remained — until I
complained.

Although the economy of the North-east is doing better than for
many years, Northumberland’s old mining towns are still not
prospering. My wife and I fund a charity that supports community
projects mainly in Blyth, the port city that was built to export
coal and in the 1990s became a drugs hotspot. Visiting one of these
projects last week, the Silx Teen Bar, which gives 700 young people
a year a place to hang out, a meal to eat and coaching in applying
for jobs, I was encouraged. The bar’s been refurbished by
volunteers, jobs are more numerous, heroin has faded, but legal
highs are the new problem. Over tea and chocolate pizza, Jackie
Long, the incredibly dedicated senior youth worker, told me what
had happened to a young man I met on my last visit. Orphaned when
his parents died from drugs, he relied on Silx from the age of 12
for food and friendship, and lived with his grandmother. Apparently
she died recently and he drifted between evictions. Now he has a
secure job and was recently named employee of the week. Silx was
the family he came to show the certificate to.

The Homosexual Necrophiliac Duck Opera is opening
at Kings Place in London in August. Where I sometimes go salmon
fishing on the incomparably beautiful Coquet, there’s a mallard
ménage-a-trois. For two months now, every time I have visited, two
drakes and duck have been together in the mill race or below the
dam. They are inseparable. I can tell they are the same birds from
their markings. There’s no sexual jealousy, let alone necrophilia.
They just keep on working the shallows for fly larvae beneath the
tip of my fly rod. The rod is new and expensive. ‘There’s no
pockets on a shroud,’ said David, my fishing companion, excusing my
extravagance.

FIFA and other unaccountable international fiefdoms

My on unaccountable chairmen of
international agencies:

 

The Fifa fiasco is not just about football. It is
also emblematic of a chronic problem with international
bureaucracies of all kinds. The tendency of supranational quangos
to become the personal fiefdoms of their presidents or
directors-general, and to sink into lethargy or corruption,
followed by brazen defiance when challenged, is not unique to Fifa
or sport. It is an all too common pattern.

Fifa is an extreme example mainly because of the enormous
opportunity for bribery involved in granting the right to host a
vastly lucrative tournament every four years. A similar corruption
scandal befell the International Olympic Committee in 1998 over its
practices when awarding the Winter Games to Salt Lake City, while
under the 21-year presidency of Juan Antonio Samaranch. Reform
followed.

Outside sport, consider what happened to Unesco, the UN cultural
body, in the 1980s. No organisation had ever begun with higher
ideals. Its first delegates were mostly distinguished writers and
intellectuals.

Under the presidency of Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, from 1974 to 1987,
it became (in the words of The New York Times at the time) “bogged
down into a totally politicised, demoralised bureaucracy whose
chief concern is to provide cushy jobs for politicians unwanted at
home and a forum for attacking the very concepts Unesco was
supposed to serve — human rights for all, press freedom,
unrestricted access to culture.”

At its meetings, Mr M’Bow was wont to win landslide votes for
resolutions praising himself and his regime, not unlike Sepp
Blatter or Augustus Caesar. Only when Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher took the provocative step of withdrawing their countries
entirely from Unesco did reform come. Mr M’Bow, unwelcome in his
native Senegal, retired to Morocco where he still lives.

Hiroshi Nakajima’s two terms as director-general of the World
Health Organisation (1988-98) saw an enormous expansion of its
budget and bureaucracy and rows over the response to Aids. As Mr
Nakajima fought off a challenger, the Japanese government lavished
research contracts on 23 of the 31 members of the executive board —
a coincidence that “presented a problem of ethics”, a later audit
delicately decided. Mr Nakajima eventually
bowed out only after saying that Africans had difficulty writing
reports, which is why they were under-represented in the
organisation. That is how far you have to go before you lose the
support of delegates in such bodies.

Or take the case of 74-year-old Rajendra Pachauri, until
recently the chairman of the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate
Change. He dismissed as “voodoo science” an official
report by India’s leading glaciologist challenging the IPCC’s
mistaken claim that all Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.
The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), which Pachauri founded,
had hired the man who made the claim about the short life of the
glaciers, and snared a share in a €3 million grant from the
European Union to pursue it. The IPCC had to withdraw the
claim.

That and other errors led to what Mr Pachauri hoped would be a
friendly inquiry into the IPCC by the world’s top science
academies, but which in fact found “significant shortcomings” in
the IPCC’s assessment process on conflicts of interest,
transparency, the presentation of uncertainty and other matters. It
said the chairman should serve only one term. Asked if that meant
Mr Pachauri should step down immediately, the chairman of the panel
said that was “one logical conclusion”, but Mr Pachauri sailed on for another five years as if nothing
had happened, flying around the world telling people they should
not fly.

It was only this year, after a 29-year-old female employee of
Teri went to police alleging sexual assault, stalking and
harassment that Mr Pachauri resigned as IPCC chairman (he is at
present on bail). This month, an internal Teri panel found him guilty of work-

place sexual harassment. So once again it took unrelated events to
remove a chief from the top of an international fiefdom.

A smaller example: the Parliamentary Assembly of the
Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe is not much of
a household name, but its secretary-general, a former US
congressional staffer called Spencer Oliver (one of those whose
phones was bugged by the Watergate burglars), has served
continuously for all its 22 years. He has fended off challenges and
tried to frustrate attempts to reform the constitution. Having now
— at 77 — reluctantly conceded that he might like to think about
letting somebody else play with the limos and tax-free,
Danish-diplomatic status that go with the job, he seems intent on
influencing the choice of his successor.

Fiefdoms suffer from cock-up as well as conspiracy. In March
this year, leaked emails revealed just how much the World Health
Organisation’s officials delayed urgent responses to the ebola
outbreak in West Africa last year. Ignoring increasingly frantic
pleas from its own staffers and other organisations, WHO refused to
declare a public health emergency for two months during which the
epidemic got out of control. The organisation even hindered the
attempts of some to get more expertise to the region.

“This outbreak isn’t different from previous outbreaks,” said a WHO spokesman in April last year. As
late as October, when the ebola crisis was at its worst, the WHO
director general, Margaret Chan, gave her apologies to an
international conference on ebola, preferring to talk about the
dangers of electronic cigarettes at a meeting in Russia.

There is no suggestion of corruption, here, just failure to do
the job properly. But it would be inconceivable in the private
sector, or in national bodies, that heads would not roll after such
a lethal debacle. Instead of which, WHO has come out with the usual
“lessons will be learnt” platitudes and gone about its
business.

This illustrates the problem. Companies are answerable to
shareholders; even national agencies are answerable to parliaments;
both fear the press and the police. International quangos are
utterly unaccountable and effectively above the law. That it took
the FBI to charge some of Fifa’s executives for things they did
elsewhere, because of a glancing connection to American
jurisdiction, illustrates the difficulty. If determined, such
bodies can ignore the views of national parliaments, dismiss the
attention of journalists, scoff at legal challenges, and write
their own expense-account rules. Most of the people who serve on
such bodies are too principled to let this go to their heads. But
not all.

Cholesterol is not bad for you

My Times column on the U-turn over cholesterol
and saturated fat:

 

If you are reading this before breakfast, please
consider having an egg. Any day now, the US government will
officially accept the advice to drop cholesterol from its list of
“nutrients of concern” altogether. It wants also to “de-emphasise” saturated fat,
given “the lack of evidence connecting it with cardiovascular
disease”.

This is a mighty U-turn, albeit hedged about in caveats, and
long overdue. The evidence has been building for years that eating
cholesterol does not cause high blood cholesterol. A 2013 review by the American Heart Association and
the American College of Cardiology found “no appreciable
relationship between consumption of dietary cholesterol and serum
[blood] cholesterol”.

Cholesterol is not some vile poison but an essential ingredient of life, which makes
animal cell membranes flexible and is the raw material for making
hormones, like testosterone and oestrogen. Your liver manufactures
most of the cholesterol found in your blood from scratch, and
adjusts for what you ingest, which is why diet does not determine
blood cholesterol levels. Lowering blood cholesterol by changing
diet is all but impossible.

Nor is there any good evidence that high blood cholesterol
causes atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease or shorter life. It
is not even a risk factor in people who have already had heart
attacks. In elderly people — ie, those who have the most heart
attacks — the lower your blood cholesterol, the greater your risk
of death. Likewise in children.

From the very first, the studies that linked the ingestion of
cholesterol and saturated animal fats to cardiovascular disease
were not just flawed, but tinged with scandal.

In the 1950s, an upsurge in heart disease in American men
(probably caused mostly by smoking) led the physiologist Ancel Keys
to guess that dietary cholesterol was to blame. When that seemed
not to fit, he switched to saturated fat as a cause of high blood
cholesterol. To make his case he did things like leave out
contradictory data, shift points on graphs and skate over
inconvenient facts. He then got big charities and state agencies on
side and bullied his critics into silence.

His most famous study, the seven-country study, started out much
larger; he dropped 16 countries from the sample to get a
significant correlation. Add them back in and it vanishes. Hidden
in his data is the fact that people in Corfu and Crete (in the same
country) ate the same amounts of saturated fats, but the Cretans
died 17 times more frequently of heart attacks.

In the 1970s, the famous Framingham Heart Study stumbled on the
fact that people with high cholesterol over the age of 47 (long
before most people have heart attacks) lived longer than those with
low cholesterol, and that those whose cholesterol dropped faced
higher risk of death. But the consensus ignored this and sailed
on.

If challenged to show evidence for low-cholesterol advice, the
medical and scientific profession has tended to argue from
authority — by pointing to WHO guidelines or other such official
compendia, and say “check the references in there”. But those
references lead back to Keys and Framingham and other such dodgy
dossiers. Thus does bad science get laundered into dogma. “One of
the great commandments of science is ‘Mistrust arguments from
authority’,” said Carl Sagan.

Eventually, the medical profession began to distinguish between
cholesterol and the proteins that carried it, with a distinction
emerging between “good” high-density lipoproteins, and “bad”
low-density ones. The fatty plaques in arteries are made partly of
cholesterol, true, but they form on scars and irregularities caused
by other problems: smoking, infections, damage, age. The
lipoproteins and cholesterol are part of the repair kit. You don’t
blame a fire engine for a fire. We’ve confused effect with
cause.

The battle is not over. The medics and scientists who have been
insisting for 20 years that the cholesterol emperor has no clothes,
and that low-carb, high-fat diets are safer, have been ostracised
as quacks and flat-earthers for so long that the habit will die
hard. People such as Uffe Ravnskov in Sweden, author
of Ignore the Awkward: How the Cholesterol Myths are
Kept Alive and Malcolm Kendrick, a GP in Macclesfield,
author of The Great Cholesterol
Conand Doctoring Data, will not soon be
welcomed back into the fold. A scientific consensus can be very
intolerant of heretics.

Nonetheless, the medical establishment here too is tiptoeing
away from its previous advice to avoid eating cholesterol and
saturated fat. It is covering the retreat with a smokescreen,
redirecting its fire on trans fats (with more justification), or on
sugar. That’s what lies behind all this talk about the dangers of
sugar these days — a huge paradigm shift away from the low-fat,
low-cholesterol diet. I am not about to say the advice about sugar
will also prove wrong.

Indeed, the evidence that insisting on low-fat diets caused
people to eat more carbohydrates, and that led to the explosion in
obesity and diabetes, looks pretty strong — so far. After all, the
main route by which the body lays down fat is to manufacture it
from excess sugar in the liver. But why did carbohydrate
consumption start to increase so rapidly in the 1960s? At least
partly because of the advice to avoid meat and cheese. Obesity and
diabetes are the price we have paid for getting fat and cholesterol
so wrong.

How about a full, drains-up inquiry into how the medical and
scientific profession made such an epic blunder and caused so much
misery to people? Consider not just the damage that was done to
people’s lives by faulty advice, but to the livelihoods of dairy
and beef farmers and egg producers (I declare an interest as a very
small producer of free-range eggs). Which has more sugar: an apple
or an egg?

But what about statins? In men they lower cholesterol and they
prevent heart disease. True, but the connection is not necessarily
causal. Statins do a lot of other things, including reducing
inflammation, which may be why they deter heart attacks. There are
statin sceptics, too, who think the side-effects of taking them are
not worth it, and that far too much of the evidence in favour of
them comes from the pharmaceutical industry.

We like to think clinging stubbornly to dogmas was a habit of
doctors in past centuries, but it still goes on. Medicine needs to
get better at changing its mind.

Fossil-fuel divestment makes no sense

My Times column on the flawed fossil-fuel
divestment campaign:

Institutions and pension funds are under pressure
to dump their investments in fossil-fuel companies. The divestment
movement began in America, jumped the Atlantic and has become the
cause célèbre of the retiring editor of The
Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. The idea is that if we do not
“leave it in the ground”, the burning of all that carbon will fry
the climate.

Some are resisting: the Wellcome Trust has politely declined to divest, saying it thinks
it is better to keep the shares so it can lean on company
executives to decarbonise; the University of Edinburgh unexpectedly
voted last week not to divest, using a similar
argument; and Boris Johnson has just rejected a motion by the London Assembly to
divest its pension funds of fossil-fuel shares. The Church of
England has cunningly confined its divestment to “thermal coal” and
Canadian oil sands companies, getting good publicity but not having
to sell many shares.

Of course, divestment represents an admission that fossil fuels
are not going to run out, as was commonly believed until the shale
bonanza began. The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, seems sympathetic to the argument that climate
change policies will soon make fossil fuels unburnable and that oil
reserves may become “stranded assets”. So sell your BP shares
before the company’s raison d’etre vanishes in a puff of
non-smoke.

It’s all mad. Divestment won’t work, is unethical, hypocritical,
aimed at the wrong target and based on flawed premises.

First, there is a buyer for every seller. Those pressing for
fossil-fuel divestment see themselves as the successors to those
who fought apartheid and tobacco by the same means. But all the
tobacco divestment movement achieved in the 1990s was to lower share prices temporarily,
enabling tobacco companies to buy back their shares. Anybody who
bought tobacco shares when others sold beat the market handsomely
over the next decade. Smoking is going to be killed by innovation
(vaping), not divestment.

Tobacco (like apartheid) has no health benefits, only harms.
That’s not true of fossil fuels. They make fertiliser, which
banishes famine and lowers food prices. They replace wood as a
fuel, saving forests. They transport goods and people, raising
living standards. They make affordable electricity, providing
light, heat and freedom from fatal indoor smoke. The divestment
fanatics who think only of the bad effects of fossil fuels ignore
all this.

So, second, if the world went cold turkey on fossil fuels the
people who would suffer most would be the poor. Divestment is not
an ethical thing to do; it’s a harsh, cold-hearted decision. It
says: sorry, poor people (and rainforests), we have to make you
suffer today so that our great grandchildren can be safe from
a 

risk of rising sea levels in the event that no other energy
technology comes along.

Third, it is hypocritical because the divesters continue to use
electric light and gas heating, and to travel by car and plane.
That’s because there is no alternative to fossil fuels on the scale
we use them. Nuclear power could eventually fill the gap but not
cheaply and not quickly: it currently provides 4 per cent of world
energy consumption. Wind and solar provide only 1 per cent between them, after
two decades of frantic expansion, and need far too much land. We would need to build 100,000 wind turbines on
30,000 square miles of land each year just to keep up with the
annual increase in world electricity consumption, let alone gain
market share. That’s a whole Scotland each year.

Fourth, the campaign will have little effect on the oil
industry. Exxon is the 11th biggest oil company in the world in
terms of reserves; Shell 19th and BP 20th. All but one (Lukoil) of
the rest of the top 20 belong to governments: Iran, Saudi Arabia,
Venezuela, Iraq, Nigeria, Russia, and so on. These regimes will pay
no attention to students occupying senior common rooms in London.
Indeed, if they see quoted firms hurt by divestment and pulling out
of oil, they will shed a crocodile tear, jack up the price and move
in.

It’s not just state-owned firms that will benefit. So will those
owned by private equity or families. I regularly declare a
commercial relationship with a coal company, but it’s not quoted,
so divestment will not hurt it.

Finally, the whole argument is based on a flawed premise. The
divesters argue that if we are to have a decent chance of limiting
any temperature rise to 2C from pre-industrial levels, then we must
burn less carbon in the future than we have burnt in the past two
centuries.

Specifically, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) says that we can burn only 820 gigatonnes of carbon (gtc) in
total to have a 50 per cent chance of staying within 2C. We burn
about 10gtc a year and have burnt 515gtc so far. Since we have
raised the world average temperature by about 0.8C (some of which
may have been natural), then they are suggesting that another
300gtc has an evens chance of bringing us to the point where the
temperatures will have risen by another 1.2C.

Note that they are therefore assuming a rapid acceleration of
the rate of warming, whereas in fact it has slowed down in the past
two decades. That’s one flaw.

A bigger one is this. The IPCC models assume high sensitivity of
the climate to carbon dioxide. With a more realistic estimate of
climate sensitivity taken from a raft of recent high-quality,
observation based studies, and still assuming fossil fuel burning
at 10gtc a year, we would probably not hit the 2C threshold for
more than 100 years (which is bang in line with the rate of warming
over the past 60 years).

A third flaw is that 2C above pre-industrial levels is not the
point at which climate change becomes catastrophic. It is just the
point where (if it comes quickly enough and we do nothing to adapt)
it — perhaps — becomes net harmful. So we are being asked to
prioritise the possibility of the start of net harm in the time of
our great-great-grandchildren over the plight of the poor
today.

By 2115 the OECD reckons that the average person will be between
three and 15 times richer than today — if they are not, they will
have burnt less carbon — so they will most likely be using advanced
forms of zero-carbon energy.

Where is the morality in hurting today’s poor people for the
sake of these distant plutocrats?

How to increase natural capital

My review in The Times of Dieter Helm's book Natural Capital:

The easiest way to get a round of applause at a conference of
ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists. Nature-studiers
think money-studiers are heartless vandals who demand the rape of
Mother Nature in the quest to build up piles of financial assets at
the expense of natural ones. Dieter Helm, an Oxford professor, is a
professional economist but he is bravely crossing the floor into
ecology and wants to show how to build up “natural capital”.

Extreme greens — those who advocate giving up civilisation and
handing the planet back to nature — will not like it. Not a man to
pull his punches, Helm thinks economic growth is a good thing for
poor people, that the followers of Malthus have “never appreciated
the full impact of technology on resource scarcity” and that “a
sort of totalitarianism lurks uncomfortably and implicitly in some
of the manifestos of more extreme green groups”.

Yet Helm, who is probably Britain’s leading energy economist and
much listened to by the government, is not anti-green at all,
indeed far from it. He just wants us to focus on the right issues.
For him the key point is that it is renewable resources that have
been and are being depleted and need to be nurtured and restored,
more than non-renewable ones. Fish, forests, farmland birds —
rather than fossil fuels — are the ones we need to worry about. In
this he is right. No non-renewable resource has come close to
running out; this is not true of mammoths, dodos or Steller’s sea
cows.

He argues that policies should be aimed at building up
“aggregate natural capital”. In search of how to do this, he works
his way through all the various environmental policies on offer,
telling the reader what he thinks of each: taxing pollutants can be
better than banning them; compensating for damage can be better
than insisting on no damage; protecting common goods through clubs
and voluntary associations often works better than doing so through
government control.

To take one of Helm’s favourite examples: imagine a river
flowing through a pretty valley that is full of trout and salmon.
The fish, and the clean water they live in have — or should have —
a value attached to them and it should be possible to reward people
for improving that value. If a farmer’s nitrate fertiliser is
polluting the river he should be asked or forced to pay the cost,
or undo the damage. The best advocate for the fish, and the best
monitor of pollution threats, is probably a club of anglers rather
than a distant bureaucrat.

All of this is sensible but it is not markedly different from
what happens today. Helm’s recommendations for improving
environmental policy are about marginal adjustments, rather than
bringing in some revolutionary approach. His many examples are
drawn mainly from the management of the British countryside.

But I could not help thinking that the natural capital approach
brings a much more uncomfortable series of questions that are not
tackled here. For example, take that farmer who uses nitrate on his
crops. Nitrates, Helm says, “have had devastating impact on the
flora and, in leaching into rivers, they have significantly
impaired water quality and biodiversity”. In some places, this is
true.

But there is another side to the story. Nitrates have increased
the yields of farms. They are the biggest single reason why the
world now needs about one-third as much land to grow the same
quantity of food as it did in 1960. Now imagine a world in which we
did not use gas to make synthetic nitrates: to feed seven billion
people we would need an extra Australia, and we would have to get
it from what’s left of the rainforests, the wetlands and the
uplands.

My point is that the single best thing we have done to save this
planet is to intensify the way we farm the acres we currently use,
so that we need fewer acres. It’s called “sustainable
intensification”, “decoupling” or “land sparing” and it is the big
new idea in ecology — the central point in a recently published
“eco-modernist manifesto”. It’s not just true in food production,
it is true in the growing of textiles and energy too: shifting to
fossil fuels unquestionably saved the forests of Europe, which
would have been chopped down to create fuel.

So if the nitrate-spreading farmer is to pay for the damage to
the fish, is he not also due a cheque for contributing to the
saving of the rainforest? Fertiliser also prevents soil erosion —
the 1930s American “dustbowl” happened because the land was dry and
exhausted of nutrients — and it enriches wild ecosystems. One study
of the fish and bird life of the north-east coast concluded that
there might be many fewer birds and fish without the nutrients
coming down the Tweed and the Tyne.

Talking of the Tyne brings me to another beef I have with Helm’s
book. He is relentlessly negative about the state of the
environment, reciting the usual litany about the devastation of the
atmosphere, the oceans, the forests and the wildlife. Sure, there
is a lot wrong. But when I was a boy the river Tyne had no salmon,
few otters, no ospreys, no red kites. Today all of those are back
thanks to the cleaning up of the estuary, the removal of the
insecticide DDT and the protection or reintroduction of birds of
prey.

Are these just minor detours on the road to doom? I don’t think
so. Many countries, including Britain but also Bangladesh and
China, are now seeing a steady increase in forest cover decade
after decade. The size of wildlife populations in Europe has shot
up in recent years, according to a recent
study, Wildlife Comeback in Europe, by various
conservation groups such as the Zoological Society of London . The
humpback whale population has rebounded spectacularly as have polar
bears, walruses, fur seals and many penguin species. Why? Because
we substituted manufactured products for the resources we used to
get from these creatures. We decoupled from nature, we sustainably
intensified — and we increased natural capital.

And where natural capital is still in ever more trouble, it is
because humankind has not yet decoupled from nature and still
relies on wild ecosystems for firewood, bushmeat and revenue. All
this is well known, and I would have expected Helm to discuss it.
But not only is the land-sparing/decoupling argument largely absent
from the book, so are the names of the economists and authors who
have been making these points so eloquently for many years: people
such as Julian Simon, Bjørn Lomborg, Vaclav Smil, Jesse Ausubel,
Indur Goklany and Robert Bryce.

To say, as Helm does, that we need to use technology to improve
the planet is not wrong; it is spot on. But to add, as he could
have done, “and don’t despair — we’ve already made a great start in
some areas in the past few decades” would have been much more
powerful.

Comeback creatures

In the 19th century, whalers and sealers went after whales, seals
and penguins largely for their oil. All three types of creatures
are rich in blubber, which can be rendered into oil, which was used
for lighting, to make soap or margarine. Many species were hunted
to the brink of extinction. All are now recovering. For example,
the king penguins of Macquarie island were reduced to about 3,400
pairs by 1930. Today they number 500,000. Northern elephant seals
were reduced to about 100 individuals by 1890; now they number
130,000.

Humpback whales were very rare by the 1950s. Now they are back
almost to pre-exploitation levels of 75,000 individuals. Antarctic
fur seals (valued mainly for their pelts) were all but wiped out
except for a tiny population on South Georgia in 1900. Today there
are four million all around the sub-Antarctic. Walruses were wiped
out in many parts of the Arctic. Today they have recolonised many
areas and number 130,000 in the Bering Sea and adjacent areas
alone. These vast increases in natural capital are the result of
“sustainable intensification” — substituting petroleum products for
animal products — at least as much as any other cause. The world
uses far more energy; but it gets far less of it from blubber.

There is no bee apocalypse

My Times column on bee declines and neonicotinoid
pesticides:

So those beastly farmers want the ban on
neonicotinoid pesticides lifted to help them to poison more bees,
eh? Britain’s honeybees are supposedly declining and so are our 25
species of bumblebee and 230 species of solitary bee. “Almost all
are in decline,” laments one of the green blob’s tame
journalists, echoing thousands of other articles.

But it’s bunk. There is no continuing decline in honeybee or
wild bee numbers. There was in the 1980s when the varroa mite hit
bee hives. But not today. Honeybee numbers are higher today than
they were in the 1990s when neo-nics began to be widely used. This
is true in Europe, North America and the world. There are about ten million more beehives in
the world today than there were in 2000.

The EU’s “Epilobee” survey found that winter losses for 2013-14,
the last winter before the neo-nic ban went into effect, were low.
Sure, bees will die if fed neo-nics in the lab (they are
insecticides after all). But last month’s European Academies
Science Advisory Council report to justify the neo-nic ban turned
out to be a shameless rehash of a discredited report whose authors
had been caught red-handed discussing how to select the
laboratory evidence to help the “campaign” to get neo-nics
banned.

So greens have stopped talking about honeybees and started
talking about the threat to wild bees instead. There is little data
on wild bee populations, but what we do have suggest some declines, some expansions and
some species showing no change in recent years.

A 2013 study found that the species richness of British
bumblebees declined from the 1950s to the 1990s, but the decline
then reversed. Other studies agree that wild bees are doing better
since neo-nics came on the market. Solitary mining bees have been
thriving. Conservation and wildlife-friendly
farming have brought five rare bumblebees back from the
brink of extinction.

So there is no recent pollinator crisis that can be laid at the
door of neo-nics. The reverse in fact: farmers who cannot now use
neo-nics are using pyrethroids instead. These cause more collateral
damage to insects other than pests because they are sprayed on
rather than locked inside the plant as seed dressing.

If you would prefer farming with fewer pesticides, there’s a
simple way to achieve it. No, not organic but genetically modified
crops. Bees thrive in them.

Reform is the theme of great governments

My Times column on reform as a political
theme:

If there is political paralysis on Friday, as
seems likely, and given how many of their powers national
politicians have anyway passed to bodies like the Bank of England
and the European Commission, perhaps we can look forward to a spell
of legislative calm. That might be no bad thing. But there is one
thing even a weak minority government can and should do:
reform.

The great political battles that shaped the history of
parliament, especially in the 19th century, were all about reform.
Prison reform, social reform, moral reform, civil service reform,
reform of the corn laws, above all parliamentary reform. The very
purpose of the old Liberal party, meeting in the Reform Club, was
reform.

With one or two exceptions, such as the protectionist
“tariff-reform” movement of Joseph Chamberlain, I hope that I would
always have been on the side of reform. With hindsight, I find it
hard to sympathise with the reactionaries of any era. That applies
right up to the 1960s, when Roy Jenkins and David Steel reformed
the laws on capital punishment, homosexuality and abortion, and the
1980s, when Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson reformed the trade
unions, taxation and the nationalised industries.

In short, I think “reform” is not a bad yardstick by which we
should judge governments. Do they just set out to tax, spend,
legislate and administer — or do they set out to reform whatever
entrenched bureaucracies most need challenging? We know from
Parkinson’s law, or what the Americans call “public choice theory”,
that a body granted a regular income by the state — be it a
Plantagenet king, a monastic order, a parliamentary oligarchy, a
nationalised industry, or the BBC — tends over time towards budget
maximisation and to looking after the interests of its members
rather than its customers. A prime job of an elected government is
to challenge this tendency by embarking on reform.

Reform is the one job that politicians must do because nobody
else can. All the rest of the things governments do can easily be
left to civil servants or hired consultants. Reform is bound to
stir up hornet’s nests of reaction, so it needs careful assembling
of support. The things we remember good governments for decades
later are spotting where a bureaucracy has got out of control, a
law has got out of date, or a system has got complacent — and
having the courage to fix them.

By this criterion, the coalition government led by David Cameron
has a lot to be proud of. Not even its worst enemies can deny that
it set out to reform the welfare state in order to encourage work
and the education system to encourage learning. If that saved
money, fine, but surely only Arthur Scargill, Dave Spart and
perhaps Nicola Sturgeon really subscribe to the belief that Iain
Duncan Smith and Michael Gove were trying to hurt rather than help
the disadvantaged.

The government’s reforms of the National Health Service and the
justice system may not have proved popular but they were clearly
well-intentioned. Theresa May has bravely brought much needed
reform to the police. Owen Paterson was bringing overdue reform to
the power of the unaccountable Green Blob before he was
inexplicably dropped to appease said blob.

The contrast between this record and that of the 13 years of
Blair-Brown are striking. On what is sometimes called the
Nixon-to-China principle (that only a hardline red-baiter could get
away with rapprochement towards a communist regime), Labour would
have been trusted far more to reform the NHS, schools and the
welfare state, but its achievements in this respect were
half-hearted at best.

Instead Labour largely put its faith in spending more money on
problems. The keen reformers such as Frank Field, Alan Milburn or
Andrew Adonis were largely stymied by the implacably reactionary
force that was Gordon Brown. Even the reform of the House of Lords,
which should have been a doddle for Tony Blair with his huge
Commons majority, ground to a halt, only half done (to my
benefit).

I, as a peer — alongside lunatics and criminals — am prohibited
from voting on Thursday, but if I could it would be for the party
most likely to reform. And that’s the Tories, by a mile. Ed “Moses”
Miliband wants to do a lot of things like put platitude-laden
megaliths in his garden, fix prices (in energy and housing), clamp
down (on non-doms and Islamaphobia), tax (mansions and pensions)
and spend (on the NHS and wind farms). But hardly any of what he
wants to do counts as reforming, let alone challenging the perverse
incentives of entrenched bureaucracies. Indeed, it looks set to
undo, or stall, recent reforms to education and welfare.

We badly need lots more reform in many areas of life: reform of
the ludicrously complex tax system and the ludicrously sluggish
planning system, for a start. Pensions need reform. Quangos need
reform. The City of London needs further reform — not more
regulation, which just raises barriers to entry and so hinders
reform.

We need somebody to challenge the idea that the only way to
provide public-service broadcasting in the era of the internet is
via a poll-tax-funded monopoly with a captive internal regulator:
to reform the funding and supervision of the BBC. As for the NHS,
most people now realise that the notion that the Tory party wants
to privatise or destroy it is a daft leftist conspiracy theory. But
for those with an interest in keeping the NHS inefficient and
unresponsive to its users, repeating that calumny helps to maintain
the unhealthy status quo.

And then there is Europe. If ever there was an institution that
resembles the papacy before the Reformation in its reactionary,
self-indulgent and arrogant inertia, it is surely the Brussels
behemoth. I am pessimistic about David Cameron’s ability to get
sufficiently radical reform by negotiation before a 2017
referendum, and I am worried that breaking the stranglehold of
Brussels will prove as hard as breaking Rome’s grip proved in the
16th century. But I am also acutely aware that the Conservatives
want reform of the EU far more than Labour, and have a strategy of
sorts for getting it.

Instead of squabbling over cuts and targets and bribes, a
minority government should set out to assemble multi-party support
for reform.

Cameron faces guerrilla warfare in the House of Lords

 

My Times column on a perverse outcome of the
election:

In one respect last week’s election result has
made David Cameron’s life more difficult. While gaining seats in
the Commons from the Liberal Democrats, he has effectively lost
them in the Lords. That is to say, the 101 Lib Dem peers will
presumably all cross the aisle from the government benches to the
opposition benches when the Lords next meet.

There they will squeeze in among 214 Labour, one Green, two
Plaid Cymru and two Ukip peers. There will be much jostling for
space, whereas we on the Conservative side can spread out a bit.
This bodes ill for the government winning votes, however. Do the
maths: 224 Tories against 315 Labour and Lib Dem peers, assuming
they vote the same way. (There are 779 active peers at
present.)

Even when it was 325 coalition peers against 214 Labour peers at
the end of the last parliament, government defeats were not
infrequent, because Labour, aided by some of the 178 cross-benchers
(many of whom lean left), have sometimes managed to outnumber
supporters of the coalition. It becomes hard now to see how the
Conservatives will ever win a controversial vote. There will be
plenty of those: on Europe, on devolution, on the Human Rights Act,
on the BBC licence fee, and so on.

Not that there is much love lost between the two main opposition
parties — just as there were moments, especially when the Lib Dems
voted down boundary reform in the Lords, when relations between the
Conservatives and Lib Dems were poor. One is reminded of a second
world war joke. Allies to Germany: we had the Italians last time;
it’s your turn now.

Does it matter if the House of Lords is deadlocked? Peers are
well used to the conventions by which they restrain their own
temptations to defy the elected chamber. The Lords does not handle
finance bills, it does not challenge legislation for which the
government has sought a specific mandate in its manifesto (the
Salisbury convention) and in the last resort it can be brushed
aside by the use of the Parliament Act to insist on respecting the
will of the elected house.

Yes, but there are still opportunities to filibuster and resort
to procedural tricks. Labour often uses uncertainty about whether
and when it will test the opinion of the House to keep the Tories
tied down and unable to slope off to the opera, though, to be fair,
opera-going is just as often a Labour habit. So some long evenings
beckon.

The Lib Dems, armed with their new and largely bogus theory that
they have been punished for championing compassion and opposing
grievance and fear, may be only too ready to join in the fun.
Meanwhile, the over-representation of Lib Dems in the Lords may get
worse after a dissolution honours list. Add Lord Cable, Lord Davey,
Lord Alexander, Lord Laws, Lord Hughes, Lord Beith, Lord Campbell
and co, and the party could have many more peers than their share
of the votes last week would imply: 8 per cent of the vote, 14 per
cent of the seats in the upper House. This is ironic given their
perpetual complaints about the fairness of the political system,
and their fury at the failure of Lords reform in 2013.

By contrast, the Tories and indeed all other political parties
are under-represented in the Lords compared with their electoral
vote. Ukip is now especially unfairly treated: 12.6 per cent of the
vote, 0.3 per cent of the Lords seats. But the most
under-represented party in the Lords is the Scottish National
party. Whereas Plaid Cymru, Ukip, the Greens and the Ulster
unionist parties all have peers, the Scottish nationalists have
none at all. It has been their choice to refuse to appoint any.

Now Alex Salmond and his 55 “progressives” are camped in the
Commons, they may quickly find that it’s a pity not to be able to
answer when challenged and criticised in the upper chamber. From
Lord Foulkes on the left to Lord Forsyth on the right, the case for
the Union and against Scottish independence is often passionately
made but goes unanswered.

Since peers are unsackable, short of criminal conviction, the
only way to redress the imbalances is to appoint more peers. True,
there is now a formal retirement process, which 17 peers have taken
up since it came in last August, including most recently Lord
Ashcroft, but there is not a big incentive to use it.

The coalition agreement of 2010 committed the last government to
striving to reflect the vote share of the last general election in
the make-up of the Lords. But that is a recipe for ever more
appointments and the number of peers is already too high for many
practical purposes. There are rumours abroad that up to 50 more
peers may be heading for the red benches shortly.

The modern purpose of the House of Lords, accidentally arrived
at over the past century, is to improve legislation by raising
problems, scrutinising detail and debating the implications. Given
that it is stuffed with expertise from almost every profession,
it’s like a huge think-tank when at its best, like a trade union of
special interests at its worst. More and more though, it is a place
for scoring party political points.

So David Cameron may have to be sparing in the legislation he
puts before parliament to avoid getting bogged down in guerrilla
warfare on the red benches. To put it another way, he would be well
advised to do much of his policy making by regulation and statutory
instrument, rather than primary legislation.

The reform of the Lords is undoubtedly coming, but it cannot now
be seen in isolation from other constitutional reforms, notably
Scottish devolution. Lord Salisbury’s recent suggestion is that the
Lords should become a directly elected federal parliament, while
the Commons becomes an English Parliament, with Scots MPs moving to
Edinburgh to become the second, revising chamber of the Scottish
parliament — likewise Wales and Northern Ireland.

That is a radical option and may not appeal to David Cameron as
a good use of lots of parliamentary time. But something will have
to give, if only to limit numbers. Meanwhile, the Palace of
Westminster is due a £5 billion refurbishment or it will crumble
away. That probably means moving the Lords out to some temporary
accommodation for several years, while the Commons borrows our
chamber. If we choose somewhere sufficiently inconvenient, perhaps
there will be a rush of retirements.

Ancient DNA makes pre-history an open book

My Saturday essay in the Wall Street Journal:

Imagine what it must have been like to look through the first
telescopes or the first microscopes, or to see the bottom of the
sea as clearly as if the water were gin. This is how students of
human prehistory are starting to feel, thanks to a new ability to
study ancient DNA extracted from bodies and bones in archaeological
sites.

Low-cost, high-throughput DNA sequencing—a technique in which
millions of DNA base-pairs are automatically read in
parallel—appeared on the scene less than a decade ago. It has
already transformed our ability to see just how the genes of human
beings, their domestic animals and their diseases have changed over
thousands or tens of thousands of years.

The result is a crop of new insights into precisely what
happened to our ancestors: when and where they migrated, how much
they intermarried with those they met along the way and how their
natures changed as a result of evolutionary pressures. DNA from
living people has already shed some light on these questions.
Ancient DNA has now dramatically deepened—and sometimes
contradicted—those answers, providing a much more dynamic view of
the past.

It turns out that, in the prehistory of our species, almost all
of us were invaders and usurpers and miscegenators. This scientific
revelation is interesting in its own right, but it may have the
added benefit of encouraging people today to worry a bit less about
cultural change, racial mixing and immigration.

Consider two startling examples of how ancient DNA has solved
long-standing scientific enigmas. Tuberculosis in the Americas
today is derived from a genetic strain of the disease brought by
European settlers. That is no great surprise. But there’s a twist:
1,000-year-old mummies found in Peru show symptoms of TB as well.
How can this be—500 years before any Europeans set foot in the
Americas?

In a study published late last
year in the journal Nature, Johannes Krause of the Max Planck
Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and
his colleagues found that all human strains of tuberculosis share a
common ancestor in Africa about 6,000 years ago. The implication is
that this is when and where human beings first picked up TB. It is
much later than other scientists had thought, but Dr. Krause’s
finding only deepened the mystery of the Peruvian mummies, since by
then, their ancestors had long since left Africa.

Modern DNA cannot help with this problem, but reading the DNA of
the tuberculosis bacteria in the mummies allowed Dr. Krause to
suggest an extraordinary explanation. The TB DNA in the mummies
most resembles the DNA of TB in seals, which resembles that of TB
in goats in Africa, which resembles that of the earliest strains in
African people. So perhaps Africans gave tuberculosis to their
goats, which gave it to seals, which crossed the Atlantic and gave
it to native Americans.

Another genetic puzzle has been the fact that most modern
Europeans have certain DNA sequences that are similar to those of
some American Indians but different from those of most Asians,
including natives of Siberia. How can this be, since American
Indians are supposedly descended from Asians who migrated across
the Bering land bridge from Siberia to Alaska about 14,000 years
ago? Were there ancient seafarers in the Atlantic? Or is it simply
from mating between European settlers and American Indians after
Columbus? Neither, as it happens.

Modern DNA could not resolve these issues, but ancient DNA
provides answers. Eske Willerslev’s research group at the
University of Copenhagen, working with Russian scientists, read the
genomes of two bits of human remains found near Lake Baikal in
Siberia; one of these individuals lived 24,000 years ago, the other
17,000.

Both had genes similar to modern Europeans and modern American
Indians but distinct from modern Siberians or other East Asians. As
the researchers say in a paper published early last year in
Nature, this implies that a population of hunter-gatherers
lived in northern Eurasia in the last ice age and partly gave rise
to the first Americans in the East and to Europeans in the West,
before they themselves died out in Siberia and were replaced by
immigrants from elsewhere in Asia.

This may help to explain the enigma known as Kennewick Man, a
9,000-year-old skeleton from Washington state, which seems to have
features more like those of a modern European than of a modern
American Indian. The earliest inhabitants of the Americas seem to
have been distant cousins of Europeans, connected through Siberia,
with their genes later diluted by other Asians migrating through
Alaska.

As this example shows, one of the common themes of research on
ancient DNA is that the mixing of native and immigrant populations
happened much more often than previously suspected. The new
research allows us to identify the many different elements of that
complex history. It is like watching a cake being
reverse-engineered into flour, sugar, eggs, milk and its other
ingredients. The familiar textbook notion that, for most of human
existence, people native to one region developed in isolation from
those native to a different region no longer makes sense.

A long-running debate in archaeology revolves around how to
explain such key events as the advent of agriculture or the
replacement of a certain type of tool by another. The key divide is
over what caused the change: Did hunter-gatherers take up farming,
or did farmers move in and replace hunter-gatherers? This is
sometimes called the “pots versus people” debate.

Geneticists studying the genes of people alive today have leaned
toward theories based on “serial founder effects” rather than on
mass migrations. The idea is that while most people stayed put,
small groups of farmers would have moved short distances and
started new colonies, which would then have expanded. This would
account for the fact that the further from Africa a population
lies, the lower is its genetic diversity: The populations had been
through a series of genetic bottlenecks caused by small numbers of
founders.

The study of ancient DNA has challenged this view. We now know
that mass migrations occurred repeatedly, overwhelming natives
while absorbing some of their genes. In a study published in 2009
in the journal Science, analysis of ancient DNA by Joachim Burger
and Barbara Bramanti of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz,
Germany, and Mark Thomas at University College London, showed that
the first farmers of central Europe could not have been descended
solely from their hunter-gatherer forerunners.

In response to such research and to their own findings, Joseph
Pickrell of Columbia University and David Reich of
Harvard University argue that “major upheavals” of human population
have been “overwriting” the genetic history of the past 50,000
years. The result, they say, is that “present-day inhabitants of
many places in the world are rarely related in a simple manner to
the more ancient peoples of the same region.” In short, we are none
of us natives or purebred.

Perhaps the most striking example of this is a discovery
announced by Dr. Reich’s team in a paper recently published in
Nature: Just 4,500 years ago, long after the arrival of farming
in Europe from the near East—a transition that had largely
displaced the genes of the indigenous hunter-gatherers—another
“massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern
periphery” occurred. People from the steppes northeast of the Black
Sea swamped the European genome with their DNA, and that relatively
new pool of DNA is still ubiquitous among Europeans today.

This tips the balance in another long-running argument among
anthropologists about the origin of the “Indo-European” languages.
From Irish to Sanskrit, there are close similarities of vocabulary
among most of the languages of Europe and those spoken in parts of
Central Asia, Iran and India—connections not shared by languages
like Basque, Turkish, Arabic, Hungarian and Finnish.

Two main rival theories have been offered to explain this
pattern. The first holds that proto-Indo-European was spoken by the
first farmers who left the fertile crescent of Syria, Turkey and
Iraq for adjacent regions. The second view is that the foundational
language was spoken not by these early farmers but, as certain
shared words seem to suggest, by horse-riding sheep and cattle
herders who spilled out of the Ukrainian steppe a few thousand
years later.

The recent research of Dr. Reich and his colleagues supports
this latter hypothesis: Indo-European languages probably originated
in the steppes just two millennia before the Christian era.

The discovery of the massive migration from the steppes 4,500
years ago was made possible by the analysis of DNA from 69
different individual bodies from between 8,000 and 3,000 years ago
and the comparison of nearly 400,000 different sections on their
genomes. This sort of massive analysis would have been impossible
just a decade ago, but since the advent of low-cost,
high-throughput DNA sequencing, as well as advances in statistical
analysis, it is now almost routine.

Before these technical innovations, reading DNA required the
laborious amplification of short segments, one at a time. By 2008,
companies such as 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Conn., and the San
Diego-based Illumina began marketing machines that could read
millions of DNA samples in parallel. In the past, researchers
wanting to study ancient or modern DNA had to sip from raindrops;
now they can drink from fire hoses.

For now, such work can only be done in a few laboratories—not
just because the sequencing requires big machines but also because
the procedures needed to avoid contamination of ancient samples by
modern DNA are elaborate and expensive, to say nothing of the
skills required to analyze the massive amounts of data produced. As
a result, says Greger Larson, head of a new ancient-DNA research
group at Oxford University, scientists are conducting this work not
at many different laboratories but in huge teams gathered around
the leading experts in the field, such as David Reich at Harvard
Medical School, Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen
or Svante Pääbo of the Max
Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

Dr. Pääbo is best known for his achievement in sequencing the
Neanderthal genome in 2009 and for his discovery that a small
amount (up to 4%) of Neanderthal DNA is found in modern Europeans
and other non-Africans. This suggests that when African emigrants
overwhelmed the Neanderthal populations of Europe and western Asia
some 40,000 to 30,000 years ago, they interbred with them to some
small extent—thus anticipating the scenarios of admixture described
by studies of later waves of migration.

In 2010, Dr. Pääbo and his colleagues startled the world again
by discovering (from the DNA in a 50,000-year-old finger bone found
in a cave at Denisova in the mountains of western Siberia) that a
hitherto unsuspected third type of early human lived in Asia at
this time. These “Denisovans” are as distantly related to the
Neanderthals as they are to us “Africans.” A small amount (up to
6%) of their DNA survives in the genomes of Melanesians and
Australian aborigines, which suggests that somewhere on their way
east from Africa, probably in southeast Asia, modern humans mated
occasionally with Denisovans.

Now comes evidence that Tibetans also have a Denisovan
connection. In the thin air of the Tibetan plateau, the local
people can survive only because of specially evolved versions of a
gene called EPAS1. In a study published last summer
in Nature, Emilia Huerta-Sánchez and Rasmus Nielsen of the
University of California, Berkeley, and their colleagues found this
version of the DNA sequence around EPAS1 in the ancient genetic
material of the Denisovans. Mating with Denisovans seems to have
enabled people to survive at high elevations in Tibet.

Ancient DNA is telling us, in short, not only who mated with
whom and when but which genes were then promoted by natural
selection in the resulting offspring to improve their chances of
survival. As Dr. Thomas of University College London points out,
changes in the frequency of particular DNA sequences are the stuff
of evolution itself. Directly measuring how DNA changed over time,
by comparing samples from different periods of human history,
allows us to see evolution not in the survival rates of organisms
(that is, through a middleman of sorts) but in genetic material
itself.

Consider, for example, the invention of farming in Europe about
8,500 years ago, a shift that caused rapid evolutionary change in
the genes of Europeans as they adapted to new diets, new pathogens
and new social structures. Some of this can be inferred from the
study of modern DNA, but ancient DNA can catch it in the act.

A forthcoming paper by Dr.
Reich’s group looks at 83 individuals from the period before,
during and after the arrival of agriculture. The study analyzes
300,000 different sections of their genomes and pinpoints just five
genes that changed rapidly.

The strongest signal came from the mutation for lactase
persistence—that is, the ability to continue digesting the milk
sugar lactose after infancy. Normally, mammals don’t need to digest
lactose as adults, and the necessary lactase gene switches off when
a baby is weaned from its mother.

This changed for human beings, however, when dairy farming
introduced milk into the adult diet. A mutation that prevented the
weaning switch-off spread in Europeans fairly late, around 4,300
years ago, probably long after dairy farming was invented, but it
gave its possessors a significant advantage: They derived more
nutrition from drinking milk (and suffered less indigestion) than
their rivals.

Two genes that affect skin color were also subject to rapid
evolutionary selection as early farmers tried to subsist on
grain-rich, vitamin-D-poor diets in northern areas with low levels
of sunlight. (Sunlight helps the body to convert a form of
cholesterol into a form of vitamin D.) The shift to pale skin—which
produces vitamin D more efficiently than darker skin—among northern
Europeans after the advent of farming appears to have proceeded
rapidly, pointing to some of the strongest selection pressures
ever recorded in human genetics.

Since the discovery of DNA’s structure more than a half-century
ago, genetic science has promised—and begun to deliver—a medical
revolution, but it keeps producing other kinds of revolutions too.
In the 1990s, it transformed the field of forensics, for example,
and now it is having a similar effect on history and archaeology.
Today, the prehistory of humanity is an open book as never
before.

The lessons of this DNA revolution are not just scientific,
however; they are social and political as well. The discoveries
made possible by our new access to ancient DNA show that very few
people today live anywhere near where their distant ancestors
lived. Virtually no one on the planet is a true native—an
instructive fact to consider at a time when ethnic and national
differences still abound and the world continues to throw human
beings together in new and unexpected ways.

Electricity for Africa

My column in The Times is on the undeniable truth
that western countries are preventing Africans getting access to
the cheapest power, which is fossil-fuelled.

In what is probably the silliest comment on
climate since a Ukip councillor blamed floods on gay marriage, a
green journalist opined of the refugees dying in the
Mediterranean: “This is what climate crisis looks like . . . We
know there is evidence that the violence triggered by the Arab
Spring uprisings of 2011 were in part fuelled by protests over
soaring food prices.”

The soaring prices were actually exacerbated (as the Food and Agriculture
Organisation of the UN confirmed) by the diversion of much of the
world’s farmland into making motor fuel, in the form of ethanol and
biodiesel, for the rich to salve their green consciences. Climate
policies were probably a greater contributor to the Arab Spring
than climate change itself.

Many refugees are fleeing Islamist persecution in Libya and the
Sahel but as Dr Kandeh Yumkella, UN under-secretary-general, told the BBC, the “long-term push factors”
that are driving people to make the “miserable journey” include the
lack of energy in sub-Saharan Africa.

Without abundant fuel and power, prosperity is impossible:
workers cannot amplify their productivity, doctors cannot preserve
vaccines, students cannot learn after dark, goods cannot get to
market. Nearly 700 million Africans rely mainly on wood or dung to cook and heat
with, and 600 million have no access to electric light. Britain with 60
million people has nearly as much electricity-generating capacity
as the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, minus South Africa, with 800
million.

As the International Energy Agency recently put it in a recent report, “increasing access to modern
forms of energy is crucial to unlocking faster economic and social
development in sub-Saharan Africa”. Africa is awash with fossil
fuels — but not the capital to build plants to turn them into
electricity.

Just to get sub-Saharan electricity consumption up to the levels
of South Africa or Bulgaria would mean adding about 1,000 gigawatts
of capacity, the installation of which would cost at least £1
trillion. Yet the greens want Africans to hold back on the cheapest
form of power: fossil fuels. In 2013 Ed Davey, the energy
secretary, announced that British taxpayers will no
longer fund coal-fired power stations in developing countries, and
that he would put pressure on development banks to ensure that
their funding policies rule out coal. (I declare a commercial
interest in coal in Northumberland.)

In the same year the US passed a bill prohibiting the Overseas Private
Investment Corporation — a federal agency responsible for
underwriting American companies that invest in developing countries
— from investing in energy projects that involve fossil fuels.

There is a growing backlash against this policy. The Republicans
want to reverse it. Yvo de Boer, head of the Global
Green Growth Institute, says: “You really have to be able to offer
these countries an economically viable alternative, before you
begin to rule out coal.” And Donald Kaberuka, president of the
African Development Bank, says it is hypocritical for western
governments, made rich by fossil fuels, “to say to African
countries, ‘You cannot develop dams, you cannot develop coal, just
rely on these very expensive renewables’. African countries will
not listen.”

The Center for Global Development calculates that $10 billion invested in
renewable energy technology in sub-Saharan Africa could give 20-27
million people access to basic electricity, whereas the same sum
spent on gas-fired generation would supply 90 million.

Meanwhile, China’s new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, is stepping in as the Americans and Europeans
step back. Its willingness to fund coal projects is one of the
reasons other Asian countries are rushing to join the project, to
the irritation of Washington. The Australian government is joining forces with Japan to push for the
construction of “clean coal” plants in the developing world — power
stations that burn coal more efficiently.

Some greens argue that rural parts of Africa may be able to
eschew giant power grids and leapfrog into off-grid solar-powered
electricity, a bit like Kenya has with mobile banking. But that
costs more and it won’t power factories. The continent needs both,
and those who advocate no support for coal are effectively saying
that the adoption of renewable energy is more important than
alleviating African poverty.

The evidence suggests that investing in affordable energy in
Africa will not only achieve great good in itself but will equip
Africans better to cope with dangerous climate change if it
happens: weather-related mortality correlates with poverty. A
survey of more than two million Africans finds that
climate change comes dead last of 16 concerns they were asked
about.

So far, the African climate has not changed significantly,
anyway: dangerous weather is no more frequent and a recent analysis by Euan Mearns found that
temperatures in southern Africa, outside cities, are no higher than
in the 1930s. (He also found evidence of “shocking, mass
manipulation of temperature records”, a charge that is now to be
investigated on a global level by a panel chaired by Professor
Terence Kealey.)

Meanwhile, satellite images show a spectacular and beneficial greening all
across the Sahel, caused partly by better land management and
partly by higher carbon dioxide levels in the air, which encourage
plant growth. A German study projects that this may continue for most of
the current century.

The economist Bjørn Lomborg has been making the case that getting energy and clean
water to Africans is a higher moral priority than pursuing
renewable energy. He still thinks climate change is a danger, but
he thinks developing new energy technologies will get far better
results than rolling out expensive and land-hungry renewables
today.

For this heresy against the renewable energy boondoggle, he is
being attacked by the green Taliban, which is campaigning to
prevent him joining the University of Western Australia. As the
blogger Andrew Montford put it: “Bjørn Lomborg argues that we should
focus our spending on immediate problems, such as ensuring Africans
have access to clean water. For this he is vilified, attacked and
has his livelihood threatened. His critics wish to see money spent
on climate change mitigation measures instead. A tragedy for the
Africans.”