Matt Ridley's Blog, page 35

Greece may still leave the euro

My Times column on Greece:

For an expert on game theory, Yanis Varoufakis,
the Essex University-trained economics professor turned Greek
finance minister, does not seem very good at negotiating. His style
reminds me of the old joke about playing chess with a pigeon: it
knocks over the pieces, craps on the board and struts about
claiming it won.

Mr Varoufakis and his prime ministerial colleague, Alexis
Tsipras, have annoyed the Germans, accepted a new four-month
bailout and agreed, as they said they would not, to supervision of
economic reforms by the same old Troika of the European Union,
European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund. And yet Mr
Tsipras claims that they have won “a battle, not the war”.

It is still just possible that today’s deadline for the Greek
government to come up with a fresh list of reforms may vindicate
Syriza, because they have at least won a single big concession:
that the Greeks get to propose a different set of reforms this
time. Syriza’s case is that it can come up with a restructuring of
the Greek economy that would work better than the disastrous
austerity-to-no-purpose that has happened so far.

Mr Varoufakis is on record that he thinks in some areas the
previous austerity was not radical enough to encourage business
investment. He wants to “bail in” creditors by swapping their
loans for GDP-linked bonds, which will not pay out till growth
resumes, giving them incentives to encourage growth rather than
just repayment. He has also promised indefinite fiscal surpluses
and reform of the corrupt tax system.

All that sounds good but given that Syriza has also promised a
return to collective bargaining, a cancellation of privatisations,
an increase in the minimum wage and further growth in the already
bloated public sector, the promised reforms are going to have to be
very good indeed.

For if they are not — and the headlines are to be agreed this
week, the details by the end of April — it looks increasingly as if
the rest of Europe is now almost resigned to seeing Greece drop out
of the euro. Syriza seems to have spent a lot of its political
capital to achieve not very much and its hand is now weak. What has
changed since the euro crisis of 2011 is that
the other countries have started to turn things around and have
little sympathy for Greece, which failed to take its medicine.

Ireland, for instance, cut civil servants’ pay by 5 per cent for
the low-paid and 20 per cent for the high paid, slashed spending
and is now growing so strongly its economy will soon be larger than
it was in 2008. Portugal, Slovakia and even Spain are heading in
the right direction — if bumpily — after the pain of “internal
devaluation”. With radical parties like Podemos in Spain ahead in
the polls, these countries do not want to see Syriza’s special
pleading getting Greece a softer deal.

Of course, all these countries would have recovered more quickly
if they had not been in the torture-prolonging mechanism that is
the euro. Iceland and Latvia demonstrate that all too well. Both
had terrifying plunges into recession and insolvency in 2008, but
both devalued their currencies, cut their budgets and are now
booming again - albeit with capital controls in Iceland and
reliance in Latvia on remittances from a diaspora abroad. Latvia
has since joined the euro. There’s no accounting for taste.

Lacking the devaluation option has hampered the recovery of
Greece and the other Mediterranean countries, just as joining the
euro encouraged them to go on an even bigger binge of spending
cheaply borrowed money in the first place. Outside the euro, with
its German-dominated interest rates, they would not have been able
to have such a party and would have suffered less of a
hang-over.

But having your own currency is no panacea as much of Latin
America has spent the past century demonstrating — and as Greece showed with its repeated defaults when using
the drachma. Only with the help of undisclosed swaps from Goldman
Sachs was Greece able to join the euro in the first place.

Even Greece was beginning to see signs of growth in recent
months — until the election of Syriza. Now, with a lot of capital
having flown, Greek banks may be effectively bust when they open
tomorrow if there is no deal. That means that Syriza has to come up
with genuinely credible reforms or drop out of the single currency
and into chaos. Grexit is just as close as ever, perhaps
closer.

Some think the Germans have effectively signalled that they are
not bothered if Greece leaves the euro, but it pays never to
underestimate the Germans’ capacity for guilt-driven forbearance
(is there a word for the opposite
of schadenfreude?). Some in the higher echelons
of the German establishment believe its economy could afford to
support Greece as a basket case indefinitely, just as it did East
Germany.

The euro might now survive Grexit, and might even look stable
for a few years until the next crisis. Inch by inch, despite German
resistance, the eurozone is turning into a state with pooled debts.
You can see this happening already. In 2012, the ECB began buying sovereign bonds from the stressed
parts of the euro zone. That, more than anything, is why Spanish
and Italian debt yields have dropped.

If so, the Germans could eventually come to accept some form of
debt pooling: fiscal transfers to the poorer parts of the eurozone
will become less necessary if and as those countries reform and
learn the lesson that it is not possible to have German standards
of living without German productivity. In Spain, unit labour costs
have come down from their absurdly inflated highs
in 2007, when Spanish workers were effectively being paid three
times as much as Germans per unit of output.

In short, the eurozone is at last imposing the economic
discipline it should have insisted on at the outset and will either
fail or become effectively a country. Over the next few years,
Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania are all set to
join the euro, leaving Britain much more isolated in the non-euro
EU. All the more reason for us to leave the political arrangements
of Brussels and become a member of the European Economic Area, the
economic union, instead. But that’s another story.

Free trade's benefits

My Times column on free trade:

An American friend recently sent me a gift as a
thank you for a weekend’s hospitality. It arrived in the form of a
card from the Post Office telling me to pay a hefty sum of tax
before the item itself (a wooden bowl) could be delivered. Had my
friend been Scottish or French or from the next village there would
have been no charge. What business has government putting a tariff
barrier between two friends?

Last week the Conservative party chairman Grant Shapps delivered a passionate defence of free trade
of the kind that used to come from the radicals in the days of the
Corn Laws but these days is rarely heard from any part of the
political spectrum. Crucially, he took the perspective of the
consumer, not the producer.

The free trade debate that used to be such a huge part of
British politics is re-emerging because of the trade agreement
being negotiated between the United States and the European Union,
the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Inflatable
white elephants with TTIP written on them have been appearing
at 

by-election rallies.

Pressure groups on the left are increasingly agitated that the
agreement is being negotiated in secret and contains clauses that
might force competition on the National Health Service — a canard
that Mr Shapps exposed as nonsense. They couch their opposition
almost entirely in terms of the risks to producers — farmers,
health-service managers and small businesses fearful of American
competition.

But the point about free trade is and always should be that it
is good for consumers. “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of
all production”, said Adam Smith. The genius of the Corn Law
radicals was to turn the debate upside down and give the consumers
a voice. Between 1660 and 1846, the British government passed 127
Corn Laws, imposing tariffs as well as rules about the storage,
sale, import, export and quality of grain and bread. The
justification was much like today’s opposition to TTIP: maintaining
our supposedly high standards against foreign, cheapskate
corner-cutters.

In 1815, Parliament banned the import of all grain if the price
fell below 80 shillings a quarter — to protect landowners. Rioters
vandalised the house of Lord Castlereagh and other supporters.
David Ricardo wrote a pamphlet against the laws, but in vain. It
was not until the 1840s that the railways and the penny post
enabled Richard Cobden and John Bright to stir up a successful mass
campaign against the laws on behalf of the working class’s right to
buy cheap bread from abroad if they wished.

Cobden did not stop there. Elected to parliament but refusing
office and honours, this pacifist radical was as responsible as
anybody for accelerating global economic growth. He persuaded
Gladstone to abolish many tariffs unilaterally, and personally
negotiated the first international free trade treaty in 1860, the
so-called Cobden-Chevalier treaty with France, which established
the unconditional “most-favoured nation” principle, leading to the
dismantling of tariffs all over Europe. “Peace will come to earth
when the people have more to do with each other and governments
less,” he said.

Only when Bismarck began rebuilding tariffs in 1879 did the tide
begin to turn, and competitive protectionism slowly throttled free
trade, eventually contributing to half a century of war. Britain
held out longest, enacting a general tariff only in 1932 under
Neville Chamberlain as chancellor. Trade barriers undoubtedly
helped precipitate war: they shut the Japanese out of resource
markets that they then decided to seize by force instead, while
Germany’s Lebensraum argument would have carried less force in a
free-trading world.

The argument for free trade is paradoxical and much
misunderstood. Free trade benefits consumers because it is the
scourge of expensive or monopolistic national suppliers. It
benefits both sides: yet it works unilaterally. Your citizens
benefit if you let them buy cheap goods from abroad, while
foreigners are punished if their government does not reciprocate.
This creates more demand for local services and hence more growth
and jobs in the importing country.

Contrary to what most people think, therefore, it is imports
that bring the greatest benefit, not exports — which are the price
we have to pay to get the imports. At the centre of the debate lies
David Ricardo’s beautiful yet counterintuitive idea of comparative
advantage — that it will always pay a country (or a person) to
import some goods from another, even if the first country or person
is better at making everything. Truly free trade cannot be a
predatory phenomenon.

But surely all these Cobdenite arguments are old-fashioned and
irrelevant in a world of labour standards, environmental
protections, the internet and so forth? Not so. They are as true
today as ever, and thank goodness we have at least one political
party prepared to make them. The Liberal party used to champion
free trade, as did the Manchester Guardian, but these days both
spout the fearful mercantilism of the pre-Peel Tories.

The trade barriers in the Atlantic cost consumers on both sides.
Mr Shapps pointed out last week that every American pair of jeans
costs you 12 per cent more than it should; every British pint of
beer costs Americans 157 per cent more than it should. Americans
are forbidden by law from buying British lamb or venison. TTIP is
set to tackle some of these absurdities, to reduce non-tariff
barriers, harmonise standards and give people more freedom to buy
from whomever they choose.

TTIP’s opponents are particularly horrified that it includes a
provision to let large and small businesses sue foreign governments
for shutting them out of investment in their countries. My worry is
that this provision may not go far enough — to enable consumers to
have redress against governments.

As a book called A Time for Choosing from the Free
Enterprise Group of MPs will argue, if there is one country that
should be able to benefit from freer trade it is Britain with its
widely spoken language, financial services, management and business
services, software and creative industries, not to mention its
Premiership football, Scotch whisky and boy wizards, all of which
we can sell to the world in exchange for movies, fruits and gadgets
that others are good at producing.

In an ideal world, every citizen of Planet Earth would have the
freedom to buy and sell from every other, without regard to
nationality, and free trade agreements like TTIP would not even be
necessary.

Britain still needs shale gas

My Times column on shale gas:

I don’t know about you, but I have been especially
glad of my gas-fired central heating and hot water in the past few
frigid weeks. Gas really is rather special: it provides us in this
country with 84 per cent of our domestic heat, 27 per cent of our
electricity, much of the feedstock for our synthetic consumer
products, and pretty well all of the nitrogen fertiliser that has
fed the world and largely banished famine. All this from a
surprisingly small number of surprisingly small holes in the ground
and the seabed, drilled with fewer accidents and spills than most
other energy sources.

That is one reason why I will be arguing and voting to help the
government improve its Infrastructure Bill today when it comes
before the House of Lords, so as to make a shale gas industry in
this country possible. When the bill was debated in the Commons,
shale’s increasingly irrational opponents failed to impose an
effective moratorium in England, though they have managed it in Wales and Scotland. But they
still altered the Infrastructure Bill enough to tie the industry in
strangling knots of new and unnecessary red tape that must be
reversed if we are to see domestic shale gas heating British homes,
paying British wages, feeding British factories, generating British
electricity and not delivering us into dependence on a dangerous
Russia.(For Russian views on the shale revolution see here.)

As a source of energy, gas is more reliable than wind, cleaner
than coal, more flexible than solar, cheaper than nuclear, safer
than biofuel, less land-hungry than hydro. We will be burning it
for decades to come under any policy. The National Grid’s extreme
“gone green” scenario for future energy policy, under which we
would have cut our carbon dioxide emissions by 60 per cent by the
year 2035 still sees us burning almost as much gas in that year as
we burn today.

So we will still need gas, whatever happens. Domestic
production, mainly from the North Sea, has fallen by 66 per cent in
the past decade and we now import half our gas. Beneath Lancashire
and Yorkshire, in the Bowland shale, lies one of the richest gas
resources ever discovered, just 10 per cent of which would be
enough to provide nearly 50 years of British needs.

The technology to get it out involves using water and sand to
make cracks that are a millimetre wide in rocks that are a mile and
a half down. A month’s work leads to 25 years of gas flow from a
quiet box of tricks that can be hidden behind a hedge. No need to
festoon the hills with permanent concrete bases for 400ft towers of
steel trying to suck a sparse trickle of energy out of the wind on
a cold, calm day.

Shale gas extraction is a process that has proved very safe and
clean in the United States. It has had virtually no impact on
groundwater, earthquakes or surface pollution anywhere. These are
exaggerated myths constantly repeated by the wealthy multinational
pressure groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, by
wealthy fashion designers and their nimby friends in gin-and-jag
country, and by Vladimir Putin and other Russians with an interest
in expensive gas. In places such as Pennsylvania the effect of
shale gas has been job creation, wealth creation and environmental
benefits. Blackpool could do with more well-paying jobs.

Some are now arguing that falling oil prices have rendered the
argument over British shale gas academic. Prices have fallen so low
as to make the cost of drilling wells and fracturing rocks
uneconomic. Certainly if oil stays at $50 a barrel, the rig count
in the shale-oil fields of Texas and North Dakota will continue to
drop fast, and oil production (currently still rising) will tail
off. But shale gas production has been rising fast in recent years despite
persistently low gas prices in America, partly because of rapid
improvement in the productivity and cost of gas wells as the
practice of horizontal drilling and fracking is perfected.

American shale drillers can break even at lower and lower
prices. Indeed, the falling oil price may drive some drillers back
to gas. Over here, gas prices remain much higher anyway, though so
do the regulatory costs likely to be borne by the industry.
Besides, energy companies do not make their decisions based on spot
prices but on forecasts of prices averaged over several years. By
the time a British shale gas industry is up and running in the
2020s, prices may well be higher. (Incidentally, few people seem to
be arguing that given the falling price of oil, we should be
cancelling wind farm projects — oh, the joys of a guaranteed
government subsidy.)

The dash for gas in the United States has lowered that country’s
carbon dioxide emissions further and faster than the dash for wind
has lowered ours. If we got gas flowing from the northwest of
England, we would cut our emissions just by substituting imported
gas, much of which comes in liquid form from places such as Qatar —
liquefaction uses energy and generates emissions. If we used the
gas to displace coal, we would cut emissions even faster. (In
passing I declare an interest in coal.)

Admittedly, by 2050 the government is committed to decarbonising
not just electricity but also almost all heating and transport, by
switching us to electric cars and electric central heating, and
insisting that such electricity comes from zero-carbon sources. And
this is incompatible with burning gas. It is also incompatible with
common sense. Electricity costs three times as much as gas per unit
of energy, and the worst pockets of fuel poverty in this country
are in places where people rely on electricity for heating. And
that’s with most of our electricity made from cheap coal, rather
than dear nuclear, solar or wind.

We have a huge chemical industry in this country, employing
hundreds of thousands of people directly and indirectly, and it
needs methane and ethane, derived from natural gas wells, as
feedstock. That industry will disappear rapidly if we do not
exploit domestic shale. It has repeatedly warned us of this.

As I reach my nineties in the 2040s, will I be nervously
watching the weather forecast in order to plan when I can have a
hot shower, and will quadrillions of cubic feet of gas still lie
under Lancashire and Yorkshire untapped and unburnt, just because
some rich people objected to making millimetre-wide cracks in rocks
a mile and a half down? I do hope not.

Mitochondrial donation is a wonderful opportunity

My Times column on Britain's impending decision
to allow mitochondrial donation:

Tomorrow’s vote in the House of Commons on whether
to allow mitochondrial donation has at least flushed out the
churches. Both the Catholic and Anglican churches have decided that
it is not acceptable to let a handful of desperate families apply
to the authorities to be allowed to have their own children free of
the risk of rare mitochondrial conditions that, in the words of one
parent, “strip our children of the skills they have learnt and tire
their organs one by one until they fail”.

What conceivable greater moral good overrides the need of such
families? I suspect some clerics have gone no further into the
science behind this than the headline “Three-parent children”, and
said “Yuk!” If so, they have been horribly misled. There has rarely
been a more inaccurate phrase.

The DNA inside the mitochondrion, a tiny organ inside each of
our cells, is used only to make and run the mitochondrion. So even
if you wanted to make your child into, say, a musical prodigy, you
could not do so by altering his or her mitochondrial DNA.

That DNA is 500 [this should be more like 200,000: there are
16,000 base pairs of DNA in a mitochondrion, 3 billion in a haploid
nucleus; the gene ratio is more like 500] times less in quantity
than the DNA that runs the rest of the body and contains only 37 of
our 22,000 genes. It is barely any more relevant to your
personality than the bacteria in your gut. To call somebody with
donated mitochondria a three-parent child is like calling somebody
with a kidney transplant a three-person chimera, for the gene ratio
is the same: 0.2 per cent.

What is being suggested is a microscopic transplant. Admittedly,
it is a transplant that prevents horrible diseases recurring in
future generations, too, but what’s so immoral about that?

The churches’ main argument is that we should not be rushing
into this without proper consultation and review. Rushing? This has
been debated and studied for seven years. There have been three
independent reviews of the safety and efficacy plus many
discussions of the ethics.

The opponents of new technologies are always saying things have
been rushed, as they did with fracking last week. It’s the last
refuge of the person who wants to oppose something but has seen all
his arguments shot down. And the change in the law will not create
a free-for-all but merely allow clinicians to apply to the Human
Fertilisation & Embryology Authority (HFEA) for a licence. So
each case will be scrutinised and approved by scientists, lawyers
and ethicists, who are more competent to do so than your average
MP.

Ever since Baroness Warnock’s pioneering report on embryo
research in 1984, Britain has regulated advances in genetics and
embryology by having parliament set the overall ethical and social
tone, then devolving the detail to the HFEA, an approach that is
internationally admired. The church is effectively asking
parliament to be a regulator of medical research and practice.

Shockingly, I understand that Doug Turnbull, the Newcastle
University scientist leading the mitochondrial research, had not
once been invited by the archbishops’ council — which advised the
Church of England on this decision — to present his case to them
before they issued their fatwa against mitochondrial donation.
Knowing this debate was coming (and, if passed by the Commons, it
reaches the Lords in three weeks), I went to meet Professor
Turnbull, toured his lab and asked him some searching
questions.

I listened to him presenting his case in parliament twice. I saw
no bishop there on either occasion.

Or maybe our clerics are worried about slippery slopes and thin
ends of wedges. In that case they could go back and read what
people said about heart transplants and in vitro fertilisation
(IVF) and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD; that is the
selection of healthy embryos for IVF). Those debates were full of
blood-curdling warnings about what they might lead to. As soon as
people could choose donors, or pick embryos, they would be off to
the eugenic sperm bank in search of superior genomes for designer
babies, so the pessimists insisted.

No: it turned out that people want to use IVF largely to have
their own children and to avoid horrid diseases. Transplants, IVF
and PGD have generated happiness on an almost industrial scale with
almost no ethical downsides.

The slope just isn’t slippery. We’ve gone down it gradually and
carefully if at all because life is better nearer the bottom.

The part that surprises me most about this debate is that it is
some Conservative MPs who are leading the charge against
mitochondrial transplant therapy. I thought the whole point of
being a Conservative was that, as far as possible, you believed in
leaving decisions to individuals and families rather than the
state. If you think people should be free to choose their schools,
you might also think they can be free to choose healthy
mitochondria for their children.

Here are parents unable to have children without painful
afflictions, saying that they would like the chance to try a
procedure that will remove that risk. It is surely rational to say
that, if the state considers the procedure safe, it is up to those
families to decide whether they wish to try the procedure. How can
politicians or priests possibly know what is best for mothers in
this position?

Here is what a parent, Alison Maguire, says: “For families like
us, the consideration of risk is very different from those who
object from the sidelines with no real understanding of this
disease.”

She points out that the remote risk of something going wrong in
later life for one of the donee children has to be weighed against
the vast risk they now run of a much worse outcome. “This is a risk
that many of our families would jump at the chance to take, as
actually it is not a risk at all, for us it is hope.”

In the run-up to this debate, I found it hard to believe that
anybody, however strong their religious convictions, would fail to
be swayed by the facts once they knew just how carefully this work
has been assessed from every angle. Surely, I thought, most
church-going folk are not in the business of denying people hope
merely to avoid the remote theoretical possibility of — well, of
what, exactly? I still cannot see a reasonable objection to this
magnificent piece of technology in the service of human compassion.
I hope that when it reaches the Lords some bishops say so.

Cryptocurrency

My review of the book Cryptocurrency appeared in the Times:

When the internet started, few guessed how it would develop. I
remember reviewing a string of books in the early 1990s arguing
that it would lead to atomised and isolated lives, cut off from
social contact. Social media put paid to that.

So it is rash to suggest just what the internet has in store for
us next. But it is also rash to think we can expect merely more of
what we have now. The internet is young and it is now evolving in a
virtually autonomous fashion with startling surprises in store. If
forced to make a (rash) guess, I would hazard that the next big
thing is going to be spawned by bitcoin, or rather the “blockchain”
technology behind bitcoin: cutting out the middleman in all forms
of commerce.

Meaning what exactly? When you buy a cup of coffee with a credit
card, it seems to be an effortless and efficient exchange. Within a
few seconds, your credit is checked, your account is debited, the
merchant is assured you can be trusted and your coffee is handed
over.

Yet, as Paul Vigna and Michael Casey describe in this
fascinating book, behind this smooth event lies a sequence of
online interactions controlled by a duopoly of card issuers, a
handful of big banks, not to mention some currency-controlling
central banks, each trousering a fee and each knowing a great deal
about you. It is far from frictionless and far from fraud-proof.
The “credit” system runs on trust, but trust verified by expensive
third parties, who will hand you over to the authorities at the
drop of a warrant, or to criminals at the hint of a hack. It is
even worse in countries like Argentina, where people do not trust
banks, or Afghanistan, where few people use banks at all.

Is there a different way? Is there a way to generate trust among
strangers — the elixir of commerce, indeed of money itself —
without banks, without lawyers, without third parties of any
kind?

This is precisely what the mysterious founder of bitcoin,
pseudonymously calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto, set out to do in
2008: “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s
fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” he announced
tersely. It was no accident that it came to life during the
financial crisis. “Satoshi” — who is probably mainly the legal
scholar and code-writer Nick Szabo, with a bit of help from the
late Hal Finney and a couple of others in the “cypherpunk” movement
— had diagnosed the problem and invented a surprisingly robust
solution: a cryptographic universal ledger.

If this seems incomprehensible to you, remember so do Alan
Turing’s computable numbers to most people, yet they can still use
computers. Sentences from Cryptocurrency sometimes
read like they were written by Tolkien: “Such is the fate of the
billions of nonces produced and discarded as the high-powered
mining rigs look for the winning block hash.”

All the same, the effects of this baffling stuff are clear
enough. Venture capitalists are investing in firms that install
vast, energy-hungry data-farms sited in cool countries (because the
computers overheat) with cheap electricity to crunch through the
calculations necessary to “mine” virtual bitcoins, which get harder
and harder to earn. At the same time people ranging from drug
dealers to female Afghan film-makers hoard and trade these
bitcoins, thrilled to have a currency that cannot suffer from
debauchery by government and that leaves no trace for authorities
or criminals to steal.

But the “money” side of bitcoin is only the start. The real
breakthrough comes when the blockchain technology behind bitcoin,
which is essentially the idea that all transactions are recorded
anonymously in a growing ledger open to all, begins to be applied
to the creation of firms, and enterprises of all sorts. Imagine
setting up a company, buying property, producing goods without ever
needing all those tiresome middle-men in suits called bankers,
lawyers and brokers. Because the blockchain gives you trust without
third-party verification.

Take Ethereum, one of the more promising “blockchain 2.0”
start-ups, which aims to be a platform on which anybody can build a
business using autonomous “smart contracts”. It was founded just
last year by a Russian-Canadian teenager and is based in Zug,
Switzerland.

Cryptocurrencies may yet prove as dead an end as Esperanto.
Vigna and Casey are cautious, though enthusiastic guides to this
strange new world. Being Wall Street Journal
reporters, they know how to dig beneath the surface and they also
know how to write. The book is full of fascinating stories, from
the origins of money to the future of decentralised commerce, from
the Mt Gox meltdown to the Silk Road bust. The Silk Road was a
bitcoin-based virtual black market being run by a chap calling
himself the Dread Pirate Roberts. In October 2013, the FBI arrested
Ross Ulbricht in a San Francisco library and charged him with being
that pirate. In court he said he was just a very successful bitcoin
trader.

My guess is that somewhere in this world of blockchains and
cryptocurrencies lies the seed of the next online revolution — one
that brings radical decentralisation, autonomous organisations, a
cull of brokers and fixers, a new constraint on government and fiat
currencies, and a supercharge to the sharing economy. Vigna and
Casey think “it’s hard to get away from the idea that these trends
point inevitably to an age of cryptocurrency, if not immediately,
then a decade or so in the future”.

Move the bats, eliminate the rats

My recent column in The Times is on wildlife
conservation:

On the day last week that the House of Commons was
debating a private member’s bill dealing with bats in churches,
conservationists were starting to eliminate rats from the island of South
Georgia by dropping poisoned bait from helicopters. Two very
different facets of wildlife conservation: the bats stand for
preservation of pristine nature from human interference; the rats
for active intervention to manage nature in the interests of other
wildlife. Which is better value for money?

Bats love roosting in churches, but those who love bats and
those who love churches are increasingly at loggerheads. Bat pee
has damaged many of the brasses in British churches, and stained or
eroded precious medieval monuments and paintings. Expensive
restoration work is often undone in a matter of months by
micturating bats.

Vicars and church wardens are tearing their hair out, but there
is little legally they can do. Excluding bats from a church, or
even disturbing them, is forbidden, and building a bespoke bat
roost elsewhere rarely works because the bats must choose to leave;
they cannot be evicted.

While one arm of government, English Heritage, enforces EU
directives to preserve cultural heritage, another, Natural England,
enforces a directive that churches may not disturb bat roosts. Both
demand the spending of money, which is thus circular. Church
wardens complain of officious bullying by amateur and self-trained
busybodies from the Bat Conservation Trust, to whom the task of
enforcing the bat rules has been delegated by government.

Relishing their role, these amateur bat policemen demanded that
work was stopped in one church because of a single dropping, which
was probably from a mouse. Elsewhere, they reported a church
architect to the police based on the false presumption gathered
during a snap inspection that he had ordered work on a roof. In
another case, they suggested a monument be wrapped in plastic to
protect it.

Most bat species are not rare or declining, but it makes no
difference. The whole system wastes money, time and goodwill
towards bats (there are huge incentives to eliminate them
surreptitiously) while doing very little to help to conserve rare
species, and contributing massively to the desecration of our
cultural heritage. But it is all highly lucrative for the bat
people: building managers must order expensive bat inspections from
the bat folk themselves before converting or repairing
buildings.

For a tenth of the cost of this system, the active provision of
special bat roosts aimed at the rarer species, as a quid pro quo
for giving people the right to exclude bats, would achieve more.
And therein lies a lesson: active conservation is better than
passive preservation.

The bat policy preserves an outdated model of what wildlife
conservation is: the passive preservation of a supposedly pristine
natural system — though churches designed for worship, not bat
roosting, are hardly natural habitats anyway. For better or for
worse, human intervention is messing up wildlife all over the
world, and active human intervention is necessary to un-mess
it.

For example, the demise of the water vole in much of England was
caused almost entirely by the spread of the mink, an alien invader
from North America, released by people. Protecting river banks from
disturbance would do almost nothing to help water voles;
eradicating mink would and does make all the difference. Likewise
protecting red squirrel habitat achieves little unless alien grey
squirrels are removed.

More invasive pests are on the way. A friend recently
encountered a raccoon in her hen house, eating her hens. Escaped
pet raccoons are beginning to establish themselves in northern
England with potentially devastating consequences for native
wildlife. Escaped Chinese raccoon-dogs have already ravaged the
ground-nesting birds of Finland and are starting to escape here
too: why are on earth are they allowed as pets?

Signal crayfish and killer shrimps in rivers, Himalayan balsam
and rhododendrons, mitten crabs, ash dieback — wherever you look,
the urgent conservation priority in Britain is the eradication of
invasive aliens, not the officious preservation of habitats for
species doing just fine.

By far the commonest cause of species extinction globally is the
spread of invasive alien species. This is especially true on
islands. On Gough island in the south Atlantic, sweet little house
mice, released by people, feed by gnawing at the flesh of albatross
chicks, killing them slowly. Even the demise of the dodo on
Mauritius was actually caused by the introduction of alien species
— monkeys, rats and pigs — rather than humans themselves.

Of the 190 species of mammal and bird that are known to have
become extinct in the past 500 years, all but nine were found
exclusively on islands (if you count Australia as an island) and
most of the extinctions were caused by the introduction to islands
by people of goats, cats, rats, snakes, sparrows and all sorts of
pests and parasites. So this month’s ambitious plan to eradicate
the remaining rat infestations on South Georgia (two thirds of the
island has already been cleared) in order to revive the seabird
colonies there, is exactly what conservationists should be
doing.

In the Pacific, 34 islands have already been cleared of rats and
other invasives. In December the charity Birdlife announced that
all the goats and rats had been eradicated from Monuriki, the
100-acre Fijian island where Tom Hanks
filmed Castaway. This is good news for the
wedge-tailed shearwaters and Fijian crested iguanas that live on
the tiny island.

Birdlife recently published a report identifying 25 islands among the
2,500 in the UK Overseas Territories where eradication of invasives
should begin. The most crucial include Henderson, a large,
uninhabited and almost impossibly remote island 3,000 miles from
the nearest continent, where rats are eating 95 per cent of the chicks of
breeding Henderson petrels and threatening 54 other species found
nowhere else. Getting rid of the rats is the single most valuable
thing British conservationists can do to save species. The first
attempt failed, but conservationists are trying again.

Just imagine if you took all the money spent on bat surveys in
churches and other such futile tick-box conservation bureaucracies
and redirected it to active rat eradication on such islands, and to
the eradication of the mink, the grey squirrel, the raccoon and
other invasives threatening British wildlife. That’s true
conservation.

Machine intelligence

Edge.org has an annual question to which 190 people are invited
to respond. This year it is "What do you think of machines
that think?" and the answer I gave is below:

 

What I think about machines that think is that we are all
missing the point still. The true transforming genius of human
intelligence is not individual thinking at all but collective,
collaborative and distributed intelligence—the fact that (as
Leonard Reed pointed out) it takes thousands of different people to
make a pencil, not one of whom knows how to make a pencil. What
transformed the human race into a world-dominating technium was not
some change in human heads, but a change between them: the
invention of exchange and specialisation. It was a network
effect.

We really have no idea what dolphins or octopi or crows could
achieve if their brains were networked in the same way. Conversely,
if human beings had remained largely autonomous individuals they
would have remained rare hunter-gatherers at the mercy of their
environments as the huge-brained Neanderthals indeed did right to
the end. What transformed human intelligence was the connecting up
of human brains into networks by the magic of division of labour, a
feat first achieved on a small scale in Africa from around 300,000
years ago and then with gathering speed in the last few thousand
years.

That is why the AI achievements of computers were
disappointingly limited when they were single machines, but as soon
as the Internet came along remarkable things began to happen. The
place that machine intelligence will make the most difference is
among the machines, not within the machines. It's already clear
that the Internet is the true machine intelligence. In the future,
network phenomena like block-chains, the technology behind
crypto-currencies, may be the route to the most radical examples of
machine intelligence.

My life as a climate lukewarmer

I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global
warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue but I no longer
think it is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic
progress so far is what we should expect in the future. That last
year was the warmest yet, in some data sets, but only by a smidgen
more than 2005, is precisely in line with such lukewarm
thinking.

This view annoys some sceptics who think all climate change is
natural or imaginary, but it is even more infuriating to most
publicly funded scientists and politicians, who insist climate
change is a big risk. My middle-of-the-road position is considered
not just wrong, but disgraceful, shameful, verging on scandalous. I
am subjected to torrents of online abuse for holding it, very
little of it from sceptics.

I was even kept off the shortlist for a part-time, unpaid
public-sector appointment in a field unrelated to climate because
of having this view, or so the headhunter thought. In the climate
debate, paying obeisance to climate scaremongering is about as
mandatory for a public appointment, or public funding, as being a
Protestant was in 18th-century England.

Kind friends send me news almost weekly of whole blog posts
devoted to nothing but analysing my intellectual and personal
inadequacies, always in relation to my views on climate. Writing
about climate change is a small part of my life but, to judge by
some of the stuff that gets written about me, writing about me is a
large part of the life of some of the more obsessive climate
commentators. It’s all a bit strange. Why is this debate so
fractious?

Rather than attack my arguments, my critics like to attack my
motives. I stand accused of “wanting” climate change to be mild
because I support free markets or because I receive income
indirectly from the mining of coal in Northumberland. Two surface
coal mines (which I do not own), operating without subsidies, do
indeed dig coal partly from land that I own. They pay me a fee, as
I have repeatedly declared in speeches, books and articles.

I do think that coal, oil and gas have been a good thing so far,
by giving us an alternative to cutting down forests and killing
whales, by supplying fertiliser to feed the world, by giving the
global poor affordable energy, and so on. But instead of defending
the modern coal industry I write and speak extensively in favour of
gas, the biggest competitive threat to coal’s share of the
electricity market. If we can phase out coal without causing too
much suffering, then I would not object.

Besides, I could probably earn even more from renewable energy.
As a landowner, I am astonished by the generosity of the offers I
keep receiving for green-energy subsidies. Wind farm developers in
smart suits dangle the prospect of tens of thousands of pounds per
turbine on my land — and tens of turbines. A solar developer wrote
to me recently saying he could offer more than a million pounds of
income over 25 years if I were to cover some particular fields with
solar panels. Many big country houses have installed subsidised
wood-fired heating to the point where you can hear their Canalettos
cracking. I argue against such subsidies, so I don’t take them.

I was not always a lukewarmer. When I first started writing
about the threat of global warming more than 26 years ago, as
science editor ofThe Economist, I thought it was a
genuinely dangerous threat. Like, for instance, Margaret Thatcher,
I accepted the predictions being made at the time that we would see
warming of a third or a half a degree (Centigrade) a decade,
perhaps more, and that this would have devastating
consequences.

Gradually, however, I changed my mind. The failure of the
atmosphere to warm anywhere near as rapidly as predicted was a big
reason: there has been less than half a degree of global warming in
four decades — and it has slowed down, not speeded up. Increases in
malaria, refugees, heatwaves, storms, droughts and floods have not
materialised to anything like the predicted extent, if at all. Sea
level has risen but at a very slow rate — about a foot per
century.

Also, I soon realised that all the mathematical models
predicting rapid warming assume big amplifying feedbacks in the
atmosphere, mainly from water vapour; carbon dioxide is merely the
primer, responsible for about a third of the predicted warming.
When this penny dropped, so did my confidence in predictions of
future alarm: the amplifiers are highly uncertain.

Another thing that gave me pause was that I went back and looked
at the history of past predictions of ecological apocalypse from my
youth – population explosion, oil exhaustion, elephant extinction,
rainforest loss, acid rain, the ozone layer, desertification,
nuclear winter, the running out of resources, pandemics, falling
sperm counts, cancerous pesticide pollution and so forth. There was
a consistent pattern of exaggeration, followed by damp squibs: in
not a single case was the problem as bad as had been widely
predicted by leading scientists. That does not make every new
prediction of apocalypse necessarily wrong, of course, but it
should encourage scepticism.

What sealed my apostasy from climate alarm was the extraordinary
history of the famous “hockey stick” graph, which purported to show
that today’s temperatures were higher and changing faster than at
any time in the past thousand years. That graph genuinely shocked
me when I first saw it and, briefly in the early 2000s, it
persuaded me to abandon my growing doubts about dangerous climate
change and return to the “alarmed” camp.

Then I began to read the work of two Canadian researchers, Steve
McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. They and others have shown, as
confirmed by the National Academy of Sciences in the United States,
that the hockey stick graph, and others like it, are heavily
reliant on dubious sets of tree rings and use inappropriate
statistical filters that exaggerate any 20th-century upturns.

What shocked me more was the scientific establishment’s reaction
to this: it tried to pretend that nothing was wrong. And then a
flood of emails was leaked in 2009 showing some climate scientists
apparently scheming to withhold data, prevent papers being
published, get journal editors sacked and evade
freedom-of-information requests, much as sceptics had been
alleging. That was when I began to re-examine everything I had been
told about climate change and, the more I looked, the flakier the
prediction of rapid warming seemed.

I am especially unimpressed by the claim that a prediction of
rapid and dangerous warming is “settled science”, as firm as
evolution or gravity. How could it be? It is a prediction! No
prediction, let alone in a multi-causal, chaotic and poorly
understood system like the global climate, should ever be treated
as gospel. With the exception of eclipses, there is virtually
nothing scientists can say with certainty about the future. It is
absurd to argue that one cannot disagree with a forecast. Is the
Bank of England’s inflation forecast infallible?

Incidentally, my current view is still consistent with the
“consensus” among scientists, as represented by the reports of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The consensus is that
climate change is happening, not that it is going to be dangerous.
The latest IPCC report gives a range of estimates of future
warming, from harmless to terrifying. My best guess would be about
one degree of warming during this century, which is well within the
IPCC’s range of possible outcomes.

Yet most politicians go straight to the top of the IPCC’s range
and call climate change things like “perhaps the world’s most
fearsome weapon of mass destruction” (John Kerry), requiring the
expenditure of trillions of dollars. I think that is verging on
grotesque in a world full of war, hunger, disease and poverty. It
also means that environmental efforts get diverted from more urgent
priorities, like habitat loss and invasive species.

The policies being proposed to combat climate change, far from
being a modest insurance policy, are proving ineffective,
expensive, harmful to poor people and actually bad for the
environment: we are tearing down rainforests to grow biofuels and
ripping up peat bogs to install windmills that still need
fossil-fuel back-up. These policies are failing to buy any comfort
for our wealthy grandchildren and are doing so on the backs of
today’s poor. Some insurance policy.

To begin with, after I came out as a lukewarmer, I would get
genuine critiques from scientists who disagreed with me and wanted
to exchange views. I had long and time-consuming email exchanges or
conversations with several such scientists.

Yet I grew steadily more sceptical as, one by one, they failed
to answer my doubts. They often resorted to meta-arguments,
especially the argument from authority: if the Royal Society says
it is alarmed, then you should be alarmed. If I want argument from
authority, I replied, I will join the Catholic Church. “These are
just standard denialist talking points” scoffed another prominent
scientist, unpersuasively, when I raised objections — as if that
answered them.

My experience with sceptical scientists, many of them
distinguished climatologists at leading universities, was
different. The more I probed, the better their data seemed. They
did not resort to the argument from authority. Sometimes I
disagreed with them or thought they went too far. I have yet to be
convinced, for example, that changes in the output of the sun
caused the warming of the 1980s and 1990s — an idea that some
espouse. So for the most part, I found myself persuaded by the
middle-of-the-road, “lukewarm” argument – that CO2-induced warming
is likely but it won’t be large, fast or damaging.

Then a funny thing happened a few years ago. Those who disagreed
with me stopped pointing out politely where or why they disagreed
and started calling me names. One by one, many of the most
prominent people in the climate debate began to throw vitriolic
playground abuse at me. I was “paranoid”, “specious”, “risible”,
“self-defaming”, “daft”, “lying”, “irrational”, an “idiot”. Their
letters to the editor or their blog responses asserted that I was
“error-riddled” or had seriously misrepresented something, but then
they not only failed to substantiate the charge but often roughly
confirmed what I had written.

I have seen bad-tempered polarisation of scientific debates
before, for example during the nature-nurture debates of the 1970s
and 1980s between those who thought genes affected behaviour and
those who thought upbringing was overwhelmingly important. That
debate grew vicious. What caused the polarisation, I realised then,
was not just that people on one side read the articles they agreed
with, reinforcing their prejudices, but something more. They relied
on extreme distortions of their enemies’ arguments, written by
self-appointed guardians of the flame on their own side, so they
were constantly attacking straw men.

It’s the same here. Most of the people who attack me seem to
think I am a “denier” of climate change because that’s what a few
hyperventilating bloggers keep saying about me. It’s not, of
course, true. It’s these flame guardians who polarise such
debates.

The most prolific of them is a man named Bob Ward. Although
employed at the London School of Economics, he is not a researcher
or lecturer, but policy and communications director, somebody whose
day job is to defend the climate orthodoxy in the media. Some might
call him a spin doctor. It appears to me that he feels compelled to
write something rude about me every time I publish on this topic
and although his letters to editors are often published, he throws
an online tantrum if they are not. He is hilariously obsessed with my
peerage, lovingly reciting my title every time he attacks me,
like a Bertie Woosterish snob.

As an example of playing the man and not the ball, Ward and Lord
Deben, chairman of the government’s official committee on climate
change, are both wont to mock the fact that my Oxford DPhil thesis
in 1983 was on the behaviour of birds. Good luck to them but I
notice they don’t mock the fact that the DPhil thesis of Lord Krebs
was also on birds, earned in the very same research group as me:
the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology. Lord Krebs is the
chairman of the adaptation subcommittee of the committee on climate
change.

John Krebs, a fine scientist and superb lecturer, was the
internal examiner of my thesis, which he praised at the time, after
telling me to correct a couple of silly mistakes he had spotted in
the calculation of a probability result. I did so. Imagine my
surprise when he recently told several separate people (who
reported it to me) that I should not be listened to on climate
change because my DPhil thesis, all those years ago, contained
mathematical errors. Lord May even used this argument against me in a debate
in the House of Lords: that because I got a number wrong in a
calculation 31 years ago, I cannot ever be right again. This is the
kind of hilarious thing that happens to you if you come out as a
lukewarmer.

Talking of the committee on climate change, last year Lord Deben
commissioned an entire report to criticise
something I had said. Among other howlers, it included a quotation
from the IPCC but the quote had a large chunk cut from the middle.
When this cut was restored the line supported me, not Lord Deben.
When I pointed this out politely to Lord Deben, he refused to restore the excision and left the
document unchanged on the committee’s website. Presenting
quotations so they appear to mean something different from what
they do is quite a sin in journalism. Apparently not in Whitehall
committees.

I suppose all this fury means my arguments are hitting home. If
they were easily demolished they would demolish them rather than
try to demolish me. Many of the things that I was abused for saying
have since proved to be right. I was one of the first to write an
article in the mainstream media (in The Wall Street
Journal in 2012) arguing that the latest data supported much
lower estimates of climate sensitivity (the amount of warming
induced by a doubling of carbon dioxide levels) than those being
assumed by the models used by the IPCC.

This produced the usual vituperation online from about a dozen
high-profile science commentators with nothing better to do. Since
then four papers (the latest being this one) have appeared in the scientific
literature, authored by very prominent climate scientists, giving
low estimates of climate sensitivity, some even
lower than I had said. I am waiting for my critics to acknowledge
that my story was sound.

I have never met a climate sceptic, let alone a lukewarmer, who
wants his opponents silenced. I wish I could say the same of those
who think climate change is an alarming prospect.

GM crops: the scientific argument's over

My Times column on genetic modification of
crops:

The European Parliament votes tomorrow on whether
to let countries decide their own policies on growing genetically
modified crops. The vote would allow countries such as Britain to
press ahead because of hard evidence that such crops are good for
the environment, good for consumers and good for farmers; and let
countries such as Austria continue to ban the things despite such
evidence. It’s an alliance of the rational with the superstitious
against the bureaucratic.

Indeed, the untold story is that it was a triumph of subtle
diplomacy by Owen Paterson — the Eurosceptic former environment
minister who knows how to work the Brussels system. Having gone out
on a limb to support GM crops in two hard-hitting speeches in 2013,
he was approached by his Spanish counterpart who was desperate to
unclog the interminable Brussels approval process for new
crops.

Spain, the only European country growing GM maize, wanted to try
a new variety. The approval process had been designed by the big
green multinationals — Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and co —
who wield enormous power in Brussels. It was taking new varieties
up to ten years to get through the maze they had built,
discouraging applicants.

So Britain and Spain set out quietly to lobby the other
countries. Those opposed to GM were won over by the argument that
repatriating the decision meant they could remain obdurate for
purely superstitious reasons, and not be forced by world trade
rules into accepting GM crops if the science supported them. So at
a ministerial meeting in Brussels last June, Mr Paterson and his
anti-GM Austrian counterpart went round the table together
persuading countries to support the proposal, whether they liked GM
crops or not.

It helped that the Greeks, who were anti-GM crops, put the
proposal forward. This lulled the French, who liked the existing
system of a de-facto ban by bureaucratic delay, into missing what
was going on until it was too late. Only Belgium and Luxembourg
abstained. Now the parliament is the last obstacle.

Scientifically, the argument over GM crops is as good as over.
With nearly half a billion acres growing GM crops worldwide, the
facts are in. Biotech crops are on average safer, cheaper and
better for the environment than conventional crops. Their benefits
accrue disproportionately to farmers in poor countries. The best
evidence comes in the form of a “meta-analysis” — a study of
studies — carried out by two scientists at Göttingen University, in
Germany.

The strength of such an analysis is that it avoids
cherry-picking and anecdotal evidence. It found that GM crops have reduced the quantity
of pesticide used by farmers by an average of 37 per cent and
increased crop yields by 22 per cent. The greatest gains in yield
and profit were in the developing world.

If Europe had adopted these crops 15 years ago: rape farmers
would be spraying far less pyrethroid or neo-nicotinoid
insecticides to control flea beetles, so there would be far less
risk to bees; potato farmers would not need to be spraying
fungicides up to 15 times a year to control blight; and wheat
farmers would not be facing stagnant yields and increasing
pesticide resistance among aphids, meaning farmland bird numbers
would be up.

Oh, and all that nonsense about GM crops giving control of seeds
to big American companies? The patent on the first GM crops has just expired, so you can grow them from your
own seed if you prefer and, anyway, conventionally bred varieties
are also controlled for a period by those who produce them.

African farmers have been mostly denied genetically modified
crops by the machinations of the churches and the greens, aided by
the European Union’s demand that imports not be transgenically
improved. Otherwise, African farmers would now be better able to
combat drought, pests, vitamin deficiency and toxic contamination,
while not having to buy so many sprays and risk their lives
applying them.

I made this point recently to a charity that works with farmers
in Africa and does not oppose GM crops but has so far not dared say
so. Put your head above the parapet, I urged. We cannot do that,
they replied, because we have to work with other, bigger green
charities and they would punish us mercilessly if we broke ranks.
Is the bullying really that bad? Yes, they replied.

Yet the Green Blob realises that it has made a mistake here. Not
a financial mistake — it made a fortune out of donations during the
heyday of stoking alarm about GM crops in the late 1990s — but the
realisation that all it has achieved is to prolong the use of
sprays and delay the retreat of hunger.

Likewise the organic farming movement made a mistake. For them
GM crops were a potential godsend that could have made organic
crops genuinely competitive, instead of a small niche for the
wealthy. Here was a technology that was organic, in that it used
biology instead of chemistry. In one case it even used the very
same substance to fight insects that organic farmers had been using
for decades — called Bt.

However, the organic movement decided to oppose GM crops and has
paid the price by shrinking into irrelevance: only 2 per cent of food sales in Britain are now organic, and in
a recent survey ethical concern was the least important of ten
factors driving shoppers’ food choices. Ironically, the organic
movement happily uses crops whose genetic material has been
modified in a much less careful way — by gamma rays or chemical
mutagens — for these are categorised as “conventional” crops and
lightly regulated. Golden Promise barley, used by organic brewers,
for example, was made in a nuclear reactor.

In practice, we in Europe may have missed most of the GM
revolution, for the next technologies are different again. The
future lies with a combination of conventional breeding with
precise gene-editing, rather than gene transplants from other
species. This should enable the last of the critics of GM crops to
climb off their high horses without anybody noticing.

Supporters of GM crops have no wish to ban conventional or
organic varieties. They just want to allow GM crops as well. Their
opponents, however, insist on total intolerance of things they
abhor. There are echoes here of the battle for free speech.

The inevitability of cancer

My Times column on cancer, luck and good
deaths:

 

If we could prevent or cure all cancer, what would
we die of? The new year has begun with a war of words over whether
cancer is mostly bad luck, as suggested by a new study from Johns Hopkins
School of Medicine, and over whether it’s a good way to die,
compared with the alternatives, as suggested by Dr Richard Smith, a former editor
of the BMJ.

It is certainly bad luck to be British and get cancer,
relatively speaking. As The Sunday Times reported yesterday, survival rates after
cancer diagnosis are lower here than in most developed and some
developing countries, reflecting the National Health Service’s
chronic problems with rationing treatment by delay. In Japan,
survival rates for lung and liver cancer are three times higher
than here.

Cancer is now the leading cause of death in Britain even though
it is ever more survivable, with roughly half of people who
contract it living long enough to die of something else. But what
else? Often another cancer.

In the western world we’ve conquered most of the causes of
premature death that used to kill our ancestors. War, smallpox,
homicide, measles, scurvy, pneumonia, gangrene, tuberculosis,
stroke, typhoid, heart disease and cholera are all much rarer,
strike much later in life or are more survivable than they were
fifty or a hundred years ago.

The mortality rate in men from coronary heart disease, for
instance, has fallen by an amazing 80 per cent since 1968 —
for all age groups. Mortality rates from stroke in both sexes have
halved in 20 years. Cancer’s growing dominance
of the mortality tables is not because it’s getting worse but
because we are avoiding other causes of death and living
longer.

It is worth remembering that some scientists and anti-pesticide
campaigners in the 1960s were convinced that by now lifespans would
be much shorter because of cancer caused by pesticides and other
chemicals in the environment.

In the 1950s Wilhelm Hueper — a director of the US National
Cancer Institute and mentor to Rachel Carson, the environmentalist
author of Silent Spring — was so concerned that
pesticides were causing cancer that he thought the theory that lung
cancer was caused by smoking was a plot by the chemical industry to
divert attention from its own culpability: “Cigarette smoking is
not a major factor in the causation of lung cancer,” he insisted.

In fact it turns out that pollution causes very little cancer
and cigarettes cause a lot. But aside from smoking, most cancers
are indeed bad luck. The Johns Hopkins researchers found that
tissues that replicate their stem cells most run the highest risk
of cancer: basal skin cells do ten trillion cell divisions in a
lifetime and have a million times more cancer risk than pelvic bone
cells which do about a million cell divisions. Random DNA copying
mistakes during cell division are “the major contributors to cancer
overall, often more important than either hereditary or external
environmental factors”, say the US researchers.

The study does not exonerate lifestyle altogether: lung, skin
and colorectal cancers are ones with risks higher than their
stem-cell replication rate would imply. So diet and sunburn do
matter, as well as smoking. But it does imply that even if
everybody lived in the healthiest possible way, we would still get
a lot of cancer.

Jonathan Haidt, author of a book called The Righteous Mind, points out that the
political left tends to agonise about the morality of food these
days in the same way that the right agonises about the morality of
sex: railing against fast food, junk food, genetically modified
food, cheap food, food waste. But there’s no diet with anything
like the cancer risk that smoking brings.

To the noticeable disappointment of the bossier end of the
public health lobby, cancers are mostly not the wages of sin, just
the wages of age. Short of genetically engineering us with the DNA
repair genes of bowhead whales, which live for centuries, there
is little we can do to prevent it.

Just because cancer is mostly accidental does not make it
incurable. But in battling to prevent and cure cancer we are up
against a formidable foe: Charles Darwin. Inside a tumour, the
cells with cancerous mistakes that make them thrive, grow, divide
and spread are the ones that survive at the expense of those that
do as they are told and commit suicide.

In becoming more aggressive, cancer literally evolves. Cancer
cells massively rearrange their genomes all the time, increasing
their “evolvability”. This genetic trial and error eventually
enables the tumour to come up with countermeasures to most drugs.
Hence the tendency for cancer patients to relapse after
remission.

If genetic accidents accumulate in tissues with dividing stem
cells, then the longer we live, the more likely we are to get
cancer, however careful we are about lifestyle and diet.

Richard Smith has come in for a lot of stick for suggesting that
it is a better way to go than the alternative of dementia or organ
failure, but he has a point. Many of the burdens that afflict us in
our ninth and tenth decades, if we escape cancer, are mental, or
require hospital. At home with “love, morphine and whisky”, says Dr Smith, may be better.

And even if we do make progress against Alzheimer’s and
Parkinson’s and other mental afflictions, we won’t reach some
sunlit upland of ease and comfort.

I have harped on before in these columns about the
strange paradox that, despite rapidly increasing average lifespan
and a rapidly increasing population of elderly people, the number
of people over the age of 115 is actually lower than it was 20
years ago. Once you reach 110 your chance of dying rockets to 50
per cent a year.

Cancer will dominate end-of-life medicine for many, whatever we
do. Surely the right approach is to go hell for leather to prevent
and cure cancer when we can, especially in the young, but also be
prepared rather more than we are — and much more than the American
medical profession is — to admit defeat when necessary. I knew
people who bravely refused brutal treatment that had little chance
of success and asked for palliative care instead. In each case it
was harder than it should have been to get what Dr Smith calls
“overambitious oncologists” to admit that this was the better
course of action.