Matt Ridley's Blog, page 42

The real risks of cherry picking scientific data

My Times column is on the dangers of omitting
inconvenient results:

Perhaps it should be called Tamiflugate. Yet the
doubts reported by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee
last week go well beyond the possible waste of nearly half a
billion pounds on a flu drug that might not be much better than
paracetamol. All sorts of science are contaminated with the problem
of cherry-picked data.

The Tamiflu tale is that some years ago the pharmaceutical
company Roche produced evidence that persuaded the World Health
Organisation that Tamiflu was effective against flu, and
governments such as ours began stockpiling the drug in readiness
for a pandemic. But then a Japanese scientist pointed out that most
of the clinical trials on the drug had not been published. It
appears that the unpublished ones generally showed less impressive
results than the published ones.

Roche has now ensured that all 77 trials are in the public
domain, so a true assessment of whether Tamiflu works will be made
by the Cochrane Collaboration, a non-profit research group. The
person who did most to draw the world’s attention to this problem
was Ben Goldacre, a doctor and writer, whose book Bad Pharma accused the industry of
often omitting publication of clinical trials with negative
results. Others took up the issue, notably the charity Sense About
Science, the editor of the British Medical Journal
, Fiona Godlee, and the Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston. The
industry’s reaction, says Goldacre, began with “outright denials
and reassurance, before a slow erosion to more serious
engagement”.

The pressure these people exerted led to the hard-hitting PAC report last week, which found
that discussions “have been hampered because important information
about clinical trials is routinely and legally withheld from
doctors and researchers by manufacturers”.

The problem seems to be widespread. A paper in the BMJ in 2012 reported
that only one fifth of clinical trials financed by the US National
Institutes of Health released summaries of their results within the
required one year of completion and one third were still
unpublished after 51 months.

The industry protests that it would never hide evidence that a
drug is dangerous or completely useless, and this is probably so:
that would risk commercial suicide. Goldacre’s riposte is that it
is also vital to know if one drug is better than another, say,
saving eight lives per hundred patients rather than six. He puts it this way: “If there are eight people
tied to a railway track, with a very slow shunter crushing them one
by one, and I only untie the first six before stopping and awarding
myself a point, you would rightly think that I had harmed two
people. Medicine is no different.”

Imbued as we are with an instinctive tendency to read meaning
into nature, we find it counter-intuitive that many experiments get
significant results by chance and that the way to check if this has
happened is to repeat the experiment and publish the result. When
the drug company Amgen tried to replicate 53 key studies of cancer,
they got the same result in just six cases. All too often
scientists publish chance results, or “false positives”, like
gamblers or fund managers who tell you about winners they
backed.

Outside medicine, we popular science authors are probably guilty
of too often finding startling results in the scientific literature
and drawing lessons from them without waiting for them to be
replicated. Or as Christopher Chabris, of Union College in
Schenectady, New York, harshly put it about the pop-psychology author Malcolm
Gladwell: cherry-picking studies to back his just-so stories. Dr
Chabris points out that a key 2007 experiment cited by Gladwell in
his latest book, which found that people did better on a problem if
it was written in hard-to-read script, had been later repeated in a
much larger sample of students with negative results.

To illustrate how far this problem reaches, a few years ago
there was a scientific scandal with remarkable similarities, in
respect of the non-publishing of negative data, to the Tamiflu
scandal. A relentless, independent scientific auditor in Canada
named Stephen McIntyre grew suspicious of a graph being promoted by
governments to portray today’s global temperatures as warming far
faster than any in the past 1,400 years — the famous “hockey stick”
graph. When he dug into the data behind the graph, to the fury of
its authors, especially Michael Mann, he found not only problems
with the data and the analysis of it but a whole directory of
results labelled “CENSORED”.

This proved to contain five calculations of what the graph
would have looked like without any tree-ring samples from
bristlecone pine trees. None of the five graphs showed a hockey
stick upturn in the late 20th century: “This shows about as vividly
as one could imagine that the hockey stick is made out of
bristlecone pine,” wrote Mr McIntyre drily. (The bristlecone pine
was well known to have grown larger tree rings in recent years for
non-climate reasons: goats tearing the bark, which regrew rapidly,
and extra carbon dioxide making trees grow faster.)

Mr McIntyre later unearthed the same problem when the hockey
stick graph was relaunched to overcome his critique, with Siberian
larch trees instead of bristlecones. This time the lead author,
Keith Briffa, of the University of East Anglia, had used only a small sample of 12 larch trees
for recent years, ignoring a much larger data set of the same age
from the same region. If the analysis was repeated with all the
larch trees there was no hockey-stick shape to the graph.
Explanations for the omission were unconvincing.

Given that these were the most prominent and recognisable graphs
used to show evidence of unprecedented climate change in recent
decades, and to justify unusual energy policies that hit poor
people especially hard, this case of cherry-picked publication was
just as potentially shocking and costly as Tamiflugate. Omission of
inconvenient data is a sin in government science as well as in the
private sector.

 

Post-script:

This column is not mainly about climate change, but about the
ubiquitous problem of selective citation of data. As I said, we all
do it to some extent, but it is still a sin against statistics.
However, as usual when publishing anything that touches on climate
change, there has been an immediate and highly misleading attempt
to rubbish the work I reported and to imply that I am evil for even
reporting others' opinions that climate scientists, unlike all
other scientists, might not all be infallible. This touchiness is
quite striking and not reassuring. For those who wish to know the
full story of bristlecones and Siberian larch, please follow the
links in the piece, one of which is to a Guardian article, and
please note that this article reports what one of Professor
Briffa's colleagues had to say in an email not intended for
publication:

"In October last year, Briffa's old boss at CRU, Tom Wigley,
said in an email to Briffa's current boss Phil Jones: "Keith
does seem to have got himself into a mess." Wigley felt Briffa
had not answered McIntyre's charges fully. "How does Keith explain
the McIntyre plot that compares Yamal-12 with Yamal-all? And how
does he explain the apparent 'selection' of the less
well-replicated chronology rather than the later (better
replicated) chronology?... The trouble is that withholding data
looks like hiding something, and hiding something means (in some
eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden."

There has been a subsequent attempt to justify the selectivity
of the larch data, but it is not very convincing, and I recommend
McIntyre's ripostes to it here, here and here. The rich irony is that one of Briffa's
justifications for ignoring one of the larger samples is that it
contains "root collar" tree samples. This is exactly equivalent to
the strip-bark problem that leads McIntyre and the National Academy
of Sciences to reject the inclusion of “strip-bark” bristlecones in
temperature reconstructions - that they give a false signal. They
cannot have it both ways.

Leave the last word on this business to McIntyre, discussing
Briffa’s explanation for why we should all ignore the fact that
tree rings inconveniently show a decline in temperatures in recent
years, or “hide the decline”:

“You’ll probably roll your eyes at the following Briffa-ism used
to rationalize Hiding the Decline:

‘In the absence of a substantiated explanation for the decline,
we make the assumption that it is likely to be a response to some
kind of recent anthropogenic forcing. On the basis of this
assumption, the pre-twentieth century part of the reconstructions
can be considered to be free from similar events and thus
accurately represent past temperature variability.’

When I first encountered this, I could not believe that
credentialed scientists could either write such bilge. That the
authors of such bilge should be among the most respected members of
the field was even more unbelievable.”

There is an even more shocking story of data omission in the
manufactured attempt to claim a 97% consensus among scientists on
dangerous man-made climate change. As Jo Nova details here, the conclusion was based
on just 0.3% of the data:

"Of nearly 12,000 abstracts analyzed, there were only 64 papers
in category 1 (which explicitly endorsed man-made global warming).
Of those only 41 (0.3%) actually endorsed
the quantitative hypothesis as defined by Cook in
the introduction."

Post-script 2:

The Times published a letter from the UK chief scientist and the
head of the UK Met Office, which rather misrepresented what I said,
while conceding my main point - that climate science had not been
sufficiently transparent:

 

Sir,

Matt Ridley falls into his own trap in his Opinion column (
Jan 6), though the title “Roll up: cherry pick your research
results here” is apposite, because that is exactly what Ridley does
with respect to the research evidence for global warming.

There can be no sensible arguments against making available the
results of properly conducted research for open scrutiny. The
arguments for this have been rehearsed very effectively in health —
and, in general, the biomedical research community has accepted
these arguments. Indeed UK scientists pioneered the controlled
clinical trial and the Cochrane Collaboration led the way in the
rigorous meta-analysis of all sources of evidence to reach the most
reliable conclusions allowing the implementation of
“evidence-based” medicine. The pharmaceutical industry, which can
certainly be criticised for past practices in not revealing the
results of all clinical studies of new drugs, is now moving towards
greater transparency, and drug regulators, such as the EMEA, are
rightly pressing hard. Iain Chalmers, Ben Goldacre and others
deserve much credit for their campaigning for openness.

The same can be said of the climate science community. Following
the controversy over leaked University of East Anglia emails there
have been substantial efforts in making source data openly
available. It is partly through this openness and replicablility of
findings by researchers in different institutes the Berkeley Earth
Island Institute analysis published last year is a case in point—
that drew the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the
unassailable conclusion in its most recent report that “warming of
the climate system is unequivocal”.

This report was a consensus led by 259 scientists, from 39
countries, which assessed the findings of all of the relevant,
peer-reviewed scientific literature published between the previous
report in 2007 and March of last year. Would that Matt Ridley
applied the same rigour when it comes to evidence about the
anthropogenic contribution to climate change. The “hockey stick”
graphs, prominent as they were at the time, are just one small part
of a massive global research effort that provides consistent and
overwhelming evidence.

Sir Mark Walport, Chief Scientific Adviser to HM Government

Professor Stephen Belcher, Head of Met Office Hadley Centre

My reply was as follows:

Dear Mark and dear Professor Belcher,

I am glad to see you recognising in your letter to the Times the
need for science, as well as industry, to clean up its act
with respect to transparency and data withholding. As for
the argument relating to the hockey stick that
"following the controversy over leaked University of East Anglia
emails, there have been substantial efforts to make source data
openly available", it is good that you acknowledge the role that
Climategate played in sparking this improved transparency.
Indeed, the surmise by Stephen McIntyre of Climate Audit that the
University of East Anglia had failed to report a Yamal regional
chronology that did not have a Hockey Stick shape was an important
issue leading into Climategate. Yet it was not investigated by
any of the East Anglia inquiries. As McIntyre says, "The existence
of this unreported adverse result was only revealed by subsequent
Freedom of Information requests - requests that were fiercely
resisted by the University." It was wrong that
those interested in understanding the hockey sticks had
to resort to freedom-of-information requests to get publicly funded
data that should have been freely published and wrong that the
requests were resisted.

You might be interested in McIntyre's account (to me) of what
has happened since: "In 2013, four years after the Climate Audit
criticisms, Briffa and coauthors published a re-stated version of
their Yamal chronology with a much diminished blade from the
previous superstick.  Rather than "discrediting" the earlier
criticisms, the re-statement implicitly conceded the validity of
the earlier criticism, as shown by the measures taken by Briffa and
coauthors to avoid repetition of the earlier mistakes.  While
they have avoided some of their earlier errors, their new
attenuated chronology still contains important methodological
defects and errors, as discussed at Climate Audit. Nor should
much weight be given to findings of the Muir Russell panel. Muir
Russell did not even attend the only interview with CRU academics
on the Hockey stick.  Nor did the panel interview CRU critics.
Nor did the Muir Russell panel even ask Briffa and Jones about
their destruction of documents to evade FOI requests."

You then go on to say that global warming is unequivocal, with
which I entirely agree (if we take a 30-50 year period) though it
is the evidence, not the number of scientists who have put their
name to a report, that convinces me. (It is equally unequivocal
that warming has been slower than the models forecast.) But this is
a straw man. My article did not claim that the hockey stick was
necessary to prove the warming unequivocal. "Unequivocal" is not
the same as "Unprecedented", which was the claim made by the
hockey-stick graphs. So I did not "fall into my own
trap". May I urge you in future to address the actual
arguments of sceptics rather than the almost entirely mythical
claim that they think climate change does not happen.

Best wishes

Matt

The Anglosphere's long shadow

My Times column of 30 December 2013:

It was only five years ago that “Anglo-Saxon”
economics was discredited and finished. Continental or Chinese
capitalism, dirigiste and heavily regulated, was the future. Yet
here’s the Centre for Economics and Business Research last week
saying that Britain is on course to remain the sixth or seventh
biggest economy until 2028, by when it is poised to pass Germany,
mainly for demographic reasons. Three others of the top ten will be
its former colonies: the US, India and Canada.

Even today, of the IMF’s top ten countries by per capita income,
four are part of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora — the United States,
Canada, Australia and Singapore, (Hong Kong would be there too if
it were a country). Apart from Switzerland, all of the others are
small city- or petro-states: San Marino, Brunei, Qatar, Luxembourg,
Norway. It appears that we ain’t dead yet.

League tables mean little, of course, and predictions even less.
Nonetheless, there is something resilient about the “Anglosphere”
model of running a country. The recent book by Daniel Hannan MEP
— How we Invented Freedom and Why it
Matters — might have been titled to annoy foreigners, but
it contains a challenging idea. Bottom-up systems work best.

As Hannan points out, while we tend to stress the differences
between Britain and America, foreigners usually see the
similarities. The secret ingredient of the Anglosphere is not, of
course, racial. We can bury the Victorian notion that there is
something specially clever or tough about pale-skinned folk with
mostly Celtic DNA, mostly Saxon words and a mostly Protestant
faith.

Nor was it inevitable in the Whig-history sense. It was not
manifest destiny, but a chain of semi-happy accidents that gave the
English-speaking people their chance — including a sea channel to
protect against invaders, a randy king, a Dutch commercial
takeover, a coastal coalfield, a brilliant customs official from
Kirkcaldy, and a well timed tax revolt.

The secret is institutional. For Hannan, the habit of liberty
under the law proved good at generating prosperity wherever it was
adopted and whatever the skin colour of the people who caught it —
and even if it was sometimes honoured in the breach. It was a
peculiarity of the British that, early on, they got into the habit
of dispersing both property and power and never quite lost that
habit even under some strong Norman or Tudor rulers.

The monarchy was at least partly elective, the common law was
evolutionary and derived from cases rather than principles,
property was at least partly sacred, the press was fairly free,
Parliament was eventually sovereign. The Government was subject to
the law, rather than the other way round. Even in the Middle Ages
these features were visible to an unusual degree in Britain.

The common law plays a central role in Hannan’s argument — what
he calls “that beautiful, anomalous system that belongs to the
people, not the state”. Having government under the law, rather
than in charge of it, gave rise to security of property and
contract, which proved peculiarly helpful when the free market came
along and tipped the balance of incentive from predation to
production. The roots of these institutions go very deep into Saxon
times but many of the key features came together in 1688 and
1787.

For all its periodic lurches into hierarchy and imperialism, the
Anglosphere has always hemmed in its rulers with bottom-up
traditions. That is what the English Civil War and the American War
of Independence shared — two episodes in the same family argument
with surprising philosophical and religious similarities. Hannan
makes clear how much the Roundheads and the rebels both harked back
to Magna Carta and what they saw as their birthright of
liberty.

The British version of the Protestant Reformation adopted the
rejection of top-down authority, but not its usual Calvinist
substitute: providential predestination. So Protestantism became
enmeshed with freedom in that potent recipe known as Whiggery.
Besides, scholars now think the British Reformation owes as much or
more to old Lollard ideas as to new Lutheran ones. Even the English
language, unusually, never had a top-down academy to decide how it
could evolve.

The combination of free trade and some recourse against
arbitrary law did happen elsewhere, too. Phoenicia, ancient Athens,
Ashokan India, Song China, Abbasid Arabia, Renaissance Italy,
17th-century Holland — they all tried it, at least in part, with
astonishing results for their prosperity. But the experiments all
petered out because of some combination of invasion, superstition
or bureaucracy. For most of the time in most of the world, what
Hannan calls the Ming-Mogul-Ottoman habit of expecting laws to come
down from above — of uniformity, centralisation, high taxation and
state control — prevailed.

So the obvious question is whether the Anglo-Saxon experiment
with liberty under the law can last till 2028 as the CEBR report
implicitly assumes. Hannan is far from optimistic. He sees the EU
steadily undermining the common law, imposing rules and taxes
passed by appointed rather than elected commissioners, erecting
trade barriers with the rest of the world, and assuming that there
is little middle ground between regulated and compulsory.

Creeping centralisation afflicts other parts of the Anglosphere
but Hannan notes that America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and
India are busy negotiating progressively deeper free-trade
agreements among themselves. Britain, as an EU member, cannot sign
independent commercial agreements. Imagine if it could — if we
regained the power to represent ourselves at international
negotiations and aim for more access to vast, Asian markets rather
than cramped and dwindling European ones. Imagine being able to
take our own decisions about innovation — genetically modified
crops, for example. That alone would not secure our position in the
2030 league table, but it would certainly help.

The civilising process

There is a common thread running through many
recent stories: paedophilia at Caldicott prep school and in modern Rochdale, the murders of Lee Rigby in Woolwich and by Sergeant Alexander Blackman in Afghanistan, perhaps
even segregation of student audiences and
opposition to the badger cull. The link is that people are left
stranded by changing moral standards, because morality is always
evolving.

What is so striking about the prep school scandal is not only
that nobody thought at the time that a predatory headmaster was
much of an issue (just the price you have to pay, old chap, for a
really dedicated teacher), but that even ten years ago a judge
could argue that it was better for all concerned if a prosecution
was halted. The idea that the child’s welfare is paramount in such
a case is relatively new; it would have seemed laughable in the
1950s.

Compared with then, modern society is far more tolerant of
homosexuality but far less tolerant of paedophilia. The Caldicott
headmaster, Peter Wright, would probably have been prosecuted with
gusto for living openly with a man his own age in 1959, the year of
his first offence against boys.

At the time you would have been hard put to predict this moral
reversal. Indeed, some guessed wrong about how tolerance would
evolve. It has emerged that in the mid-1970s the National
Council on Civil Liberties (now Liberty) accepted the Paedophile
Information Exchange (PIE) as an affiliate member, allowed its
chairman to address its conference and passed a motion declaring
that “awareness and acceptance of the sexuality of children is an
essential part of the liberation of the young homosexual”. The Home
Office launched an investigation last week into its own apparent
funding of the PIE at the time.

Jimmy Savile just escaped, as Stuart Hall did not, this
evolution of morality. In their heyday there was not thought to be
all that much wrong in celebrities seducing under-age, star-struck
girls. The Rochdale abusers in the news last week, and those who
failed to investigate their cases thoroughly, likewise failed to
appreciate society’s changing standards.

The morality of war is changing too. Sergeant Blackman is
discovering that the modern world does not consider cold-blooded
murder, even in the heat of battle, acceptable. Such a prosecution
would never have happened after, say, Stalingrad or Normandy.
Anybody who thinks Lee Rigby’s murder would never have happened in
London in the “good old days” needs to read more history. But Anjem
Choudary and Michael Adebolajo are similarly caught out of time —
both wanting to push the moral clock back to a time when
eye-for-eye revenge against the innocent was honourable or pious.
The question responsible Muslims need to answer is why some
followers of Islam are so keen on reversing this inexorable,
progressive evolution of morality.

The best understanding of how morality evolves comes from the
work of Norbert Elias, a sociologist who had four
horrible experiences of violence: a nervous breakdown in the First
World War when fighting for Germany, emigration to escape Nazi
persecution in 1933, internment by Britain for being a German in
1940 and the death of his mother in Auschwitz. Yet half way through
this series of blows he published a book that argued the world was
getting less violent. The year 1939 was not a good year to
disseminate such a message, let alone in German. It was only when
it was translated into English in 1969, by which time Elias had
retired from Leicester University, that the book
(called The Civilising Process) shot him to
fame.

Elias had spent many hours delving into medieval archives,
concluding that life in the Middle Ages was routinely much more
violent than today. He also argued that manners and etiquette were
coarser in the old days and he linked the two. The book’s revival
was helped 12 years later by the compilation of a graph that showed
a hundredfold decrease in homicide rates per 100,000 people in
England since the 1300s: statistical evidence for Elias’s hunch.
Till then, most people thought the modern world more violent than
the old days; plenty still do.

The psychologist Steven Pinker, alerted by the graph and others
like it from all across Europe, documented in his recent
book The Better Angels of our Nature the
inexorable, widespread and continuing decline in the West in
virtually all forms of violence: homicide, rape, torture, corporal
punishment, capital punishment, war, genocide, domestic violence,
child abuse, hate crimes and more. Pinker agreed that etiquette
changes were part of the same trend.

Pinker summarises the Elias argument thus: beginning in the 11th
century and maturing in the 18th, “Europeans increasingly inhibited
their impulses, anticipated the long-term consequences of their
actions, and took other people’s thoughts and feelings into
consideration”. The root of this change lay in government and
commerce. As monarchs centralised power in feudal societies, being
polite at court began to matter more than being good at violence.
And as commerce replaced feudal obligations, people had to learn to
treat strangers as potential customers rather than potential
prey.

Whatever the explanation, there is no doubt that — with
occasional backward lurches, and some exceptions — morality has
progressed towards niceness. Hence the long list of habits that,
one by one, become unacceptable as the decades pass: hanging,
drawing and quartering; spitting at meals; slavery; cock fighting;
sexism; homophobia; smoking.

So the question immediately suggests itself. What am I doing
today that my great-grandchildren will find disgusting and might
even get me prosecuted in old age? When I asked Pinker for his
answer, he replied: “That’s easy — meat eating.” I would add field
sports. I consider hooking a trout on a dry fly, or shooting a fast
woodcock for the pot, to be acts of almost noble communion with
nature, but others already see them as barbaric. It seems unlikely
that my view will prevail in the very long run.

Medicinal regulation of vaping could kill people

My recent speech in the House of Lords on the dangers of too
much regulatory precaution over electronic cigarettes has sparked a
huge amount of interest among "vapers". I am reprinting the speech
here as a blog:

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Astor, on securing this
debate. It is an issue of much greater importance than the sparse
attendance might imply and one that is growing in importance. I
have no interest to declare in electronic cigarettes: I dislike
smoking and have never done it. I have only once tried a puff on an
e-cigarette, which did nothing for me. I am interested in this
issue as a counterproductive application of the precautionary
principle. I should say that I am indebted to Ian Gregory of
Centaurus Communications for some of the facts and figures that I
will cite shortly.

There are, at the moment, about 1 million people in this country
using electronic cigarettes, and there has been an eightfold
increase in the past year in the number of people using them to try
to quit smoking. Already, 15% of ex-smokers have tried them, and
they have overtaken nicotine patches and other approaches to
become the top method of quitting in a very short time. The
majority of those who use electronic cigarettes to try to quit
smoking say that they are successful.

Here we have a technology that is clearly saving lives on a huge
scale. If only 10% of the 1 million users in the country are
successful in quitting, that would save £7 billion, according to
the Department of Health figures given in answer to my Written
Question last month, which suggest that the health benefits of each
attempt to quit are £74,000. In that Answer, Minister said
that,

“a policy of licensing e-cigarettes would have to create very
few additional successful quit attempts for the benefits to justify
its costs”.—[Official Report, 18/11/13;
col.WA172.]

But who thinks that licensing will create extra quit attempts?
By adding to the cost of e-cigarettes, by reducing advertising and
by unglamorising them, it is far more likely that licensing will
create fewer quit attempts. Will the Minister therefore confirm
that, by the same token, a policy of licensing e-cigarettes would
have to reduce quit attempts by a very small number for that policy
to be a mistake?

Nicotine patches are also used to reduce smoking and they have
been medicinally regulated, but there has been extraordinarily
little innovation in them and low take-up over the years. Does the
Minister agree with the report by Professor Peter Hajek in
the Lancet earlier this year, which said that the
30-year failure of nicotine patches demonstrated how the expense
and delays caused by medicinal regulation can stifle innovation?
Does my noble friend also agree with analysts from Wells Fargo who
this month said that if e-cigarette innovation is stifled,

“this could dramatically slow down conversion from combustible
cigarettes”?

We should try a thought experiment. Let us divide the country in
two. In one half—let us call it east Germany for the sake of
argument—we regulate e-cigarettes as medicines, ban their use in
public places, restrict advertising, ban the sale of refillable
versions, and ban the sale of e-cigarettes stronger than 20
milligrams per millilitre. In the other half, which we will call
west Germany, we leave them as consumer products, properly
regulated as such, allow them to be advertised as glamorous, allow
them on trains and in pubs, allow the sale of refills, allow the
sale of flavoured ones, and allow stronger products. In which of
these two parts of the country would smoking fall fastest? It is
blindingly obvious that the east would see higher prices—and prices
are a serious deterrent to attempts to quit smoking because many of
the people who smoke are poorer than the average. We would see less
product innovation, slower growth of e-cigarette use and more
people going back to real cigarettes because of their inability to
get hold of the type, flavour and strength that they wanted.
Therefore, more people would quit smoking in the western half of
the country.

What are the drawbacks of such a policy? There is a risk of harm
from electronic cigarettes, as we have heard. How big is that risk?
The Minister confirmed to me in a Written Answer earlier this year
that the best evidence suggests that they are 1,000 times less
dangerous than cigarettes. The MHRA impact assessment says
that the decision on whether to regulate e-cigarettes should be
based on the harm that they do. Yet that very impact statement says
that,

“any risk is likely to be very small”,

that there is,

“an absence of empirical evidence”

and “no direct clinical evidence”, that “the picture is
unclear”, and—my favourite quote—states:

“Unfortunately, we have no evidence”,

of harm.

There is said to be a risk of children taking up e-cigarettes
and then turning to real cigarettes. Just think about that for a
second. For every child who goes from cigarettes to electronic
cigarettes, there would there have to be 1,000 going the other way,
from e-cigarettes to cigarettes, for this to do any net harm. The
evidence suggests, as my noble friend Lord Borwick has said, that
the gateway is the other way. Some 20% of 15 year-olds smoke, and
evidence from ASH and a study in Oklahoma suggests strongly that
when young people use electronic cigarettes they do so to quit,
just like adults do.

If we are to take a precautionary approach to the risks of
nicotine, will the Minister consider regulating aubergines as
medicines? They also contain nicotine. If you eat 10 grams of
aubergine, which you easily could with a plateful of moussaka, you
will absorb the same amount of nicotine as if you shared a room
with a cigarette smoker for three hours. It is not an insignificant
quantity. That is data from the New England Journal of
Medicine in 1993. If we are worried about unknown and small
risks, can the Minister explain to me why, as Professor Hajek, put
it, more dangerous chemicals, such as bleach, rely on packaging and
common sense rather than on medicinal licensing?

There has been approximately an 8% reduction in the use of
tobacco in Europe in the past year. The tobacco companies are
worried. A big part of that reduction seems to be because of the
rapid take-up of electronic cigarettes. They are facing their Kodak
moment—the moment when their whole technology is replaced by a
rival technology that, in this case, is 1,000 times safer. Does my
noble friend think that there may be a connection between the rise
of electronic cigarettes, the rapid decline in tobacco sales and
the enthusiasm of tobacco companies for the medicinal regulation of
electronic cigarettes?

It is not just big tobacco; big pharma has shown significant
interest in the regulation of electronic cigarettes. That is not
surprising because they are, again, a rival to patch products and
other nicotine replacement therapies. Perhaps more surprising is
that much of the medical establishment is in favour of medicinal
regulation. I never thought I would live to see the BMA and the
tobacco industry on the same side of an argument. The BMA says that
electronic cigarettes cannot be considered a lower-risk option, but
this completely flies in the face of the evidence. As we have heard
already, electronic cigarettes are 1,000 times safer. The BMA says
that it is worried about passive vaping, the renormalising of
smoking and the use of electronic cigarettes as a gateway to
smoking. The excellent charity Sense About Science, to which I
am proud to be an adviser, has asked the BMA for evidence to
support those assertions. I must say that there is a strong
suspicion that the only reason the medical establishment wants to
see these things regulated as medicines is because it cannot bear
to see the commercial sector achieving more in a year in terms of
getting people off cigarettes than the public sector has achieved
in 10. Instead of talking about regulating this product, should we
not be talking about encouraging it, promoting it and letting
people vape indoors if they want to—in pubs, on trains and in
football grounds—specifically so that they are tempted to vape
instead of smoke? That would be of enormous benefit to them and to
the country as a whole.

I end by asking specifically in relation to the agreement that,
as we heard from my noble friend Lord Borwick, was agreed last
night, what its impact will be on what is happening, and in
particular on advertising. As I understand it, under the agreement
reached yesterday, it will be possible for the advertising of these
things to be banned as if they were cigarettes. What is the
justification for that, given the proportionality and the evidence
that they will actually save lives rather than harm them?

 

Here are some of the messages I have received since making the
speech:

I would like to show my sincere gratitude to you for the honest
facts on the debate in the House of Lords regarding e-cigarettes
... I was a 30+ a day cigarette smoker for nearly 50 years and have
not had a single one since I found the e-cig 11 months ago, my
health has vastly improved .... thank you!

I'll lift my hat for your effort to explain, how vapers would
have been affected by eu regulations. Started to smoke at age
9, tried every thing to stop in the next 50 years (
nicorette-hypnosis akupunktur,  you name it ) In juli i
bought my first e-cigarett,  with 12mg/ml nicotine :) for the
first time in 50 years   I was not smoking but vaping, and are
now after 5 months down to 6mg nicotine.

Thank you for your support in our fight to give every smoker the
chance to move away from the lit tobacco that is killing them. I
hope you enjoyed being able to make all the statements from a
position of science and common sense, not fettered by the big
tobacco and pharma companies. I speak as an ex smoker who is
now a vaper with no attachment to the e cig business. Can I
leave you with one thought. I know, over Internet, thousands of
vapers and most of the long term ones reduce their nicotine. I have
reduced mine from 24mg to 6mg in nine months. What other form of
addiction has "users" REDUCING their substance of addiction.
Nicotine may not be "highly addictive" as commonly quoted.

From across the pond we are making your speech viral amongst the
fold of E-Cigarette users and yes you are right in every word.
 I have quit smoking thanks to E-Cigarettes like so many
British and Europeans have.  I am so proud of not smoking
anymore after 40 yrs. of smoking, and I am hoping that the TRUTH
that you spoke of will spread and grow eventually that it will out
way the greed from the opposition.  Thank you from the bottom
of my heart for your bravery and brilliance.

I would like to thank you for your outstanding speech on
E-Cigarettes  on 17 Dec 2013 (seen on CASAA link), I have to
applaud your sensible argument in support of E-Cigs based on
science and common sense. The rubbish that has been propagandized
by the anti-smoking, Big Tobacco companies and  Big Pharma
groups has been obscene, especially when E-Cigs can save thousands
of lives. I smoked for 40 years and have now stopped for over 7
months by using an E-cig which I have lowered my nicotine levels
down to 9mg during this time. I know that thousands of people are
doing the same thing as I am.

And finally...!

I would just like to express my appreciation for the speech to
the Lords regarding Electronic Cigarettes. I was thinking I'd have
to vote UKIP next time.

Is there life on Europa?

My Times column on how earthlings communicate
with life in space:

The Hubble telescope has revealed that Europa, a
moon of Jupiter, has fountains of water vapour near one of its
poles, which means its ocean might not always be hermetically
sealed by miles-thick ice, as previously assumed.

Europa’s huge ocean, being probably liquid beneath the ice, has
long been the place in space thought most favourable to life, so
the prospect of sampling this Jovian pond for bugs comes a little
closer. My concern is a touch more mundane. Who’s in charge of
the response down here when we do find life in space?

Even if we only find a blob of protoplasmic ooze, the arguments
could get wild. Who is allowed to study it? Who sets the rules
about not polluting or harming it? And if instead we receive a
radio signal from intelligent life — and such a broadcast might
arrive any day — imagine the chaos. President Obama will make a
soaring but content-free speech, while his generals will act as if
the matter is entirely for them; Ban Ki Moon will set up a
committee with gold-plated expense accounts; Vladimir Putin will
send a reply unilaterally; the Chinese (who released a rover on the
Moon this weekend) will hack the aliens’ computers; Lady Ashton of
the European Union will issue directives.

And that’s just the governments. Before the news is cold, Green
lobbyists will have demanded — and been granted — observer status
at any meetings being held to decide what happens, will have
persuaded European commissioners to divert funds their way to lobby
them on the matter (this circular feedback is known as 
sock puppetry) and will have announced they are to sue
governments for not taking the life forms’ interests into
sufficient account when launching communication satellites.

Meanwhile, a shady group of the Green Great and Good — those
rich people who like telling others to live more frugally — will
meet in a luxury resort to draw up ethical guidelines for the rest
of the world to follow when dealing with extraterrestrials. The
guidelines will surprisingly include the suggestion of
well-salaried jobs for themselves.

The International Academy of Astronautics drew up a protocol in 1996 for
deciding whether and how to reply to a radio signal from aliens.
It’s fairly vague, but it does suggest that “the United Nations
General Assembly should consider making the decision on whether or
not to send a message to extraterrestrial intelligence, and on what
the content of that message should be, based on recommendations
from the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space of the
United Nations and within other governmental and non-governmental
organisations”.

Somehow that prospect horrifies me. Who would be on the
committee set up by the UN to write the reply? The Pope probably; a
chap from the Pentagon perhaps; an ex-Norwegian prime minister
almost certainly; the head of the World Wildlife Fund; and of
course Bono. The mind boggles.

In the movies it’s all so much simpler. Scientist (Jeff Goldblum
or Sigourney Weaver) goes and tells president (Tommy Lee Jones or
Morgan Freeman) he’s made contact, then hero (Will Smith or Bruce
Willis) does the necessary violence. There’s neither need nor time
for summits, protocols, plebiscites and arguments over money. In
real life, things would very quickly get a lot more bureaucratic, a
lot more bad-tempered and a lot less exciting.

Within days of first contact with alien life, the news coverage
would become deadly dull and all too earthly. You can almost write
the BBC News report now: “The Prime Minister today defended his
decision to fund the UK’s 2 per cent stake in the mission to
communicate with extraterrestrial life forms by cutting language
courses for Bulgarian immigrants. Protests at the awarding of the
contract to a private security firm are planned for later today.”
That sort of thing.

Another alarming thought: the place is called Europa. What
adjective are we to use for the creatures: Europans? Spellchecker
nightmare. Then imagine the preening that will go on in Brussels,
and the gnashing of teeth at Tory headquarters. Is it not just our
bad luck that the most promising body in the entire solar system
for alien life should turn out to have the same name as that bane
of our existence, that byword for boringness, Europe?

I mean, why could a frozen ocean not have turned up on Callisto,
Io or Ganymede? Or Hegemone, Sinope, Callirrhoe or Eukelade?
(Jupiter’s big moons are named after Zeus’s conquests, small ones
mostly after his offspring and would-be conquests.) Actually,
there’s a glimmer of hope: in 2005 the spacecraft Cassini found
good evidence of water plumes near the south pole of Enceladus, a
small but hospitable-looking moon of Saturn that also seems to have
a frozen ocean. Do let’s check that one out first.

Last year I was lucky enough to meet the man who is putting
together for Nasa some of the technology for exploring the ocean on
Europa. A ridiculously capable Texan named Bill Stone, he dives in
very deep caves in Mexico, travelling underground for weeks on end;
he also designs highly sophisticated autonomous 
robots, and he thinks deeply about space exploration. One of
his probes has successfully solved a key problem already. Unleashed
beneath the four-metres-thick ice of an Antarctic lake, it went off
exploring on its own, then came back, homing precisely on the hole
in the ice where its journey started.

That combination of autonomy and homing skill will be necessary
on Europa, where radio messages from Earth would take half an hour
to arrive and would probably never penetrate the ice. Now it’s just
a matter of getting Bill Stone’s probe on to the surface of Europa,
and working out how it will melt its way down through miles of ice
and back again.

All very simple really, at least compared with solving the
politics of deciding what to do about alien life forms.

Heritable IQ is a sign of social mobility

My fellow Times writer the
cricketer Ed Smith posed me a very good question the other day. How
many of the people born in the world in 1756 could have become
Mozart? (My answer, by the way, was four.) So here’s a similar
question: how many Britons born in 1964, if educated at Eton and
Balliol, could have achieved what Boris Johnson has achieved? It’s
clearly not all of them; it’s probably not one; but it’s not a big
number.

My point? There is little doubt that Boris Johnson is a highly
intelligent man, notwithstanding his inability to cope with a radio
ambush of IQ test questions, and that he would be a highly
intelligent man even if he had not gone to Eton and Balliol —
barring extreme deprivation or injury.

The recent burst of interest in IQ, sparked first by Dominic
Cummings (Michael Gove’s adviser), and then by Boris, has been
encouraging in one sense. As Robert Plomin, probably the world’s
leading expert on the genetics of intelligence, put it to me, there
used to be a kneejerk reaction along the lines of “you can’t
measure intelligence”, or “it couldn’t possibly be genetic”. This
time the tone is more like: “Of course, there is some genetic
influence on intelligence but . . .”

The evidence from twin studies, adoption studies and even from DNA evidence is relentlessly consistent: in children, in
Western society, the heritability of IQ scores is about 50 per
cent. The other half comes equally from family (shared environment)
and from unshared individual experiences: luck, teachers,
friends.

This numerical precision easily misleads us into thinking genes
and environment struggle against each other. In fact, they are like
two pillars supporting an arch: nature makes you seek out nurture,
which brings out your nature. But here is where things get
interesting. The acceptance of genetic influence on intelligence
leads to some surprising, even paradoxical implications, some of
which turn the assumptions of both the Right and the Left upside
down.

First, if intelligence was not substantially genetic, there
would be no point in widening access to universities, or in grammar
schools and bursaries at private schools trying to seek out those
from modest backgrounds who have more to offer. If nurture were
everything, kids unlucky enough to have been to poor schools would
have irredeemably poor minds, which is nonsense. The bitter irony
of the nature-nurture wars of the 20th century was that a world
where nurture was everything would be horribly more cruel than one
where nature allowed people to escape their disadvantages.

The Left, which has championed nurture against nature, is
learning to take a different view — over homosexuality, for
example, or learning disability, genetic influence is used as an
argument for tolerance. A recent Guardian headline
criticised Boris by saying “gifted children are failed by the
system”, which presupposes the existence of (genetically) gifted
children.

The second surprise is that genetic influence increases with age. If you measure the
correlation between the IQs of identical twins and compare it with
that of adopted siblings, you find the difference grows
dramatically as they get older. This is chiefly because families shape the
environments of young children, whereas older children and adults
select and evoke environments that suit their innate preferences,
reinforcing nature.

[See the new paper by Briley, D. A. , &
Tucker-Drob, E. M. (in press). Explaining the
increasing heritability of cognitive ability over development: A
meta-analysis of longitudinal twin and adoption studies.
Psychological Science.]

It follows — the third surprise — that much of what we call the
“environment” proves to be itself under genetic influence. Children
who are very good at reading are likely to have parents who read a
lot, schools that give them special opportunities and friends who
recommend books. They create a reading-friendly environment for
themselves. The well-documented association between family
socio-economic status and IQ, routinely interpreted as an
environmental effect, is, writes Professor Plomin and colleagues,
“substantially mediated by genetic factors”. Perhaps intelligence is an appetite, at least much as
an aptitude, for learning.

The fourth surprise is that the better the economy, education,
and welfare are, the more heritable IQ will be. Just as having
extra food will make you brighter if you are starving, but not if
you are plump, so the same applies to toys, teachers, books and
friends. Once you have enough of any of these things, having more
will not make as much difference. So differences due to environment
will fade. In a world when some are starving and some are kings,
the differences would be mainly environmental. In a world where all
went to Balliol, the main difference remaining would be genetic.
Social reformers rarely face this fact — the more we equalise
opportunity, the more the people who get to the top will be the
genetically talented.

And this brings a final paradox: a world with perfect social
mobility would show very high heritability. The children of Balliol
parents would qualify for Balliol disproportionately, having
inherited both aptitude and an appetite for evoking the
environments that amplified that aptitude. Far from indicating that
parents are giving their children unfair environmental advantages,
a high correlation between the achievements of parents and
offspring suggests that opportunity is being levelled, albeit
slowly and patchily. In Professor Plomin’s words: “Heritability can
be viewed as an index of meritocratic social mobility.”

Moreover, assortative mating is probably reinforcing the trend.
That is to say, 50 years ago, when women were not often allowed
near higher education, Professor Branestawm chose to marry the girl
next door because she was good at ironing his shirts, whereas today
he marries another professor because she writes gorgeous equations
about quantum mechanics, and they have children who are professors
squared.

We are a long way from equality of opportunity, but when we get
there we will not find equality of outcome. Already IQ — for all
its flaws as an objective measure of intelligence — is good at
predicting not just educational attainment, but income, health and
even longevity remarkably well.

Do we reconcile ourselves to inequality, then? No! Just because
capability is inherited does not mean it is immutable. Hair colour
and short sight are highly heritable , but both can be altered.
Education is not just about coaxing native wit from the gifted, but
also coaching it into the less gifted.

Gas and oil prices may soon fall

My Times column was on the likely effect of weaker
oil and gas prices on competitiveness:

The Chancellor is to knock £50 off the average
energy bill by replacing some green levies with general taxation
and extending the timescale for rolling out others. On the face of
it, the possibility that global energy prices may start to fall
over the next few years might seem like good political news for
him, and some of the chicken entrails do seem to be pointing in
that direction. There is, however, a political danger to George
Osborne in such trends .

For Government strategists reeling from the twin blows of Ed
Miliband’s economically illiterate but politically astute promise
of an energy bill freeze and the energy companies’ price hikes, the
prospect of lower wholesale energy prices might seem heaven sent.
But in many ways it only exacerbates their problems, for the
Government is right now fixing the prices we will have to pay for
nuclear, wind and biomass power for decades to come. And it is
fixing those prices at quite a high level.

The more that oil, gas and coal prices drop, the worse these
deals look and the more they threaten our economic competitiveness.
The Liberal Democrats have not allowed the Chancellor to cut
subsidies for the renewable energy industry, the most regressive
redistribution of wealth since the Sheriff of Nottingham was in his
pomp.

They argue that what has driven energy bills up threefold in ten
years is mainly an increase in the wholesale price of energy,
rather than any great lurch towards subsidising renewables. True,
but most of the lurch is yet to come and as wind power capacity
quadruples by 2020, it will add £400 to average bills — not to
mention driving up the price of energy to industry, which will pass
it on to consumers.

“There is not a low-cost energy future out there,” said Ed Miliband when Secretary of State for
Energy and Climate Change in 2009, at the time an enthusiast for
discouraging energy use by price rises. It even became fashionable
to argue, when Chris Huhne filled that post, that
higher prices would cut bills (yes, you read that right) by
encouraging people to use less power.

Anyhow, the forces that have driven energy prices up in recent
years appear to be fading. Consider some of the reasons that oil
and gas prices rose in 2011, the year energy companies pushed up
prices even more than this year. Japan suffered a terrible tsunami,
shut down its nuclear industry and began scouring the world for gas
imports to keep its lights on. At about the same time Libya was
plunged into civil war, cutting off a key supplier of gas. Add in
simmering tension over Iran, Germany’s sudden decision to turn its
back on nuclear power, the legacy of a couple of cold winters and
the lingering depressive effect on oil and gas exploration of low
energy prices from much of the previous decade, and it is little
surprise that oil and gas producers pushed up prices.

Contrast that with today. Several years of high prices have
driven a surge of new exploration. Deep offshore technology is
advancing rapidly and huge gas fields have been found in the
Mediterranean and in the Indian and Atlantic oceans. In the United
States, the shale revolution has glutted both gas and oil markets,
displacing imports. Iran is coming in from the cold, Libya is back
on stream and Australia is preparing to export huge volumes of gas.
Should the rest of the world start producing shale gas — China,
Argentina, Poland and others are on the brink, even Britain might
one day deign to join them — that would further add to supply.

A decade is a long time in energy policy. Ten years ago, no less
an oracle than Alan Greenspan told Congress: “Today’s tight natural
gas markets have been a long time in coming, and distant futures
prices suggest that we are not apt to return to earlier periods of
relative abundance and low prices anytime soon.” Abundance and low
prices are exactly what America now has: so much so that it is
using gas instead of coal to provide base-load electricity,
investing heavily in manufacturing and chemical industry, and
shifting some of its road transport from oil to gas. By 2020, shale
gas will have boosted the American economy by £500 billion, 3 per
cent of GDP and 1.7 million jobs, according to McKinsey Global Institute.

Meanwhile, the argument that the running out of fossil fuels is
what has been driving up prices has been proven once again, for the
third time in my lifetime, to be bunk. America, the most explored
and depleted oil and gas field in the world, is now increasing its
oil and gas production at such a rate of knots that it is heading
towards self-sufficiency. If an oil field as gigantic as the Eagle
Ford can be found (through technological innovation) in Texas,
think how much awaits explorers in the rest of the world. Even five
years ago, gas was thought likely to be the first of the fossil
fuels to run out. Nobody thinks that now.

At least nobody outside Whitehall. As Professor Dieter Helm told a House of Lords committee last month: “I
think one should be very sceptical about this Government and the
last Government embarking on policies that require them to assume
that the oil and gas prices are going to go up and then pursuing
those policies and not being willing to contemplate the consequence
of that not being the case.” According to Peter Atherton of Liberum
Capital, the recent “strike price” deal with EDF to build a nuclear
power station at Hinckley Point in Somerset will only look good
value to consumers if gas prices more than double by 2023.

Suppose, instead, world energy prices come down, even as the
cost of subsidising renewables and nuclear starts to bite. We will
have rising energy bills while the rest of the world has falling
ones. That is a recipe for job destruction.

One of my favourite charts – I know, I should get out more – comes from Professor Robert Allen of the
University of Oxford. It shows the cost of energy, as measured in
grammes of silver per million BTUs, in various world cities in the
early 1700s. Newcastle stands out like a sore thumb, with energy
costs much lower than London and Amsterdam, and far lower than
Paris and Beijing. The average Chinese paid roughly 20 times more
for heat than the average Geordie. This meant that turning heat
into work (via steam engines) throughout the north of England was
profitable. In China, by contrast, it made more sense to employ
lots of people, on low wages . The result was an industrial
revolution in Britain with innovation and rising living standards
and an “industrious” revolution in China (and Japan) with falling
living standards.

 

 

Affordable energy is the indispensable lifeblood of economic
growth. Back in 2011, David Cameron was warned by an adviser that electricity, gas
and petrol prices were of much greater concern to voters than any
other issue, including the NHS, unemployment, public sector cuts
and crime. If subsidies for windmills prevent us from passing on
any future falls in gas and oil prices, and jobs flee to lower-cost
countries, the voters will not be forgiving.

Immigration versus social cohesion?

My Times column is on immigration:

It looks as if David Cameron is determined not to
emulate Tony Blair over European immigration. Faced with opinion
polls showing that tightening immigration is top of the list of
concerns that voters want the Prime Minister to negotiate with
Europe, he is going to fight to keep a Romanian and Bulgarian
influx out as Mr Blair did not for Poles in 2004. It is the ideal
ground for him to pick a fight with Brussels.

One reason is that he now has more political cover on the issue
of immigration. It is no longer nearly as “right wing” an issue as
it once was, though popular enough with UKIP voters. Migration as a
political issue seems itself to be migrating across the political
spectrum from right to centre, if not left. Where once any kind of
opposition to immigration was seen by left-wing parties and the BBC
as just a proxy for racism, increasingly it is now a subject for
real debate.

The best example of this is the positive reception that Paul
Collier’s new book Exodus has received from the bien-pensant
Left. Collier has raised worries about immigration with which
left-leaning commentators can sympathise: in particular social
cohesion and the effect on the global poor. He is following a path
pioneered by David Goodhart, whose book The British Dream argued that overzealous
multiculturalism had “reinforced difference instead of promoting a
common life”, putting at risk the welfare state.

Both books make the case that the generosity with which British
citizens are prepared to hand welfare payments to others could be
damaged if Britons no longer think of their neighbours as part of
the same “country”. In effect they are voicing an old-fashioned
nationalism. Collier warns that “while migration does not make
nations obsolete, the acceleration of migration in conjunction with
a policy of multiculturalism might potentially threaten their
viability”. Nations, he points out, have fallen out of favour as
“solutions to collective action problems”. It is not clear how
large an unabsorbed diaspora could get before it weakened “the
mutual regard on which society depends”.

Of course, the diaspora that the British migrants established
around the world, swamping native Americans, Aborigines, Maoris and
French Canadians, created a rather successful sense of
supranational solidarity. Daniel Hannan’s new book How We Invented Freedom and Why it Matters,
published today, tells an extraordinary story about how the values
of “the West” were actually a very peculiar set of Anglosphere
traditions — above all, the notion that the State is the servant,
not the master, of the individual.

He argues that this idea, carried by emigrants from one damp
island to North America and Australasia, is quite distinct from the
top-down traditions of many other European countries. Freedom
survived the mid 20th century by the skin of its teeth, thanks
almost entirely to the Anglosphere. When Boris Johnson says that
the current system of immigration is mad, “cracking down on
Australians and New Zealanders and high-spending Chinese students
and tourists — but completely incapable of dealing with a sizeable
influx from within the EU, some of whom show no sign of wanting to
work”, he is partly echoing the idea that we feel solidarity with
the Anglosphere but not the Eurosphere.

In a thought-provoking article for Wired magazine this month, Balaji
Srinavasan, a Californian entrepreneur and academic, argues that
many people now feel social solidarity with virtual diasporas,
“finding their true peers in the cloud, a remedy for the isolation
imposed by the anonymous apartment complex or the remote rural
location”. He then makes the startling claim that such virtual
diasporas may be about to become real ones, as such people get
drawn together to found some colony of like-minded folk, either
within a country or maybe offshore or on Mars.

That’s a long way off. But it is a reminder that the migration
argument in support of international solidarity is beginning to
sound more like a right-wing one. Libertarian-leaning economists on
the right continue to sing the praises of migration, arguing that
free trade in people is just as valuable as free trade in goods and
services. And the Right’s traditional supporters, the wealthy, are
indeed the main beneficiaries of immigration in the form of
nannies, cleaners, waiters and oncologists.

Perhaps as racial prejudice fades — and the number of white
people who even secretly dislike non-white people merely because
they are non-white must surely be falling with almost every funeral
— a great realignment will become apparent, with migration being
seen increasingly through the lens of what it does to what used to
be called the working class: competition for low-wage jobs, houses,
threats to their culture.

In short, Mr Cameron is right to pick a fight on the length of
time an immigrant must stay before claiming welfare. It plays into
the social cohesion point beloved of the Centre Left. When Collier
says that “it may prove unsustainable to combine rapid migration
with multicultural policies that keep absorption rates low and
welfare systems that are generous”, he’s only rephrasing in
academic lingo what plenty of ordinary people think.

The unprecedented wave of immigration that Britain received
between 1997 and 2010 (about 3.2 million net immigrants) did not
just put pressure on housing and welfare; it also put pressure on
culture. The more that immigrants fail to integrate, either by
sheer numbers or by the encouragement of multiculturalism, the more
resented they will be. What America did so well for so long was to
suck in millions of people from Ireland, Germany, Italy and Africa
but turn them into flag-waving democrats who loved free
enterprise.

As the history of America showed, migration has a tendency to
accelerate because diasporas tend to draw more people after them.
Collier adds that rising incomes in poor countries lead to still
more acceleration, not less, since the very poorest cannot afford
the price of a people-smuggler’s fee, let alone an air fare. The
slave trade excepted, the people who flocked to the United States
were not the poorest of the global poor from rural parts of Asia
and Africa. They were the moderately poor urban masses of Europe.
Likewise, today it is generally the people who have already
migrated from village to city, and scraped together some savings
who come to Britain. Even rising educational standards accelerate
migration by allowing more people to surmount any educational
hurdles in the path of migrants, Collier argues.

So there’s no prospect of immigration pressure easing even
though poor countries are getting rich faster than we are. It’s
obvious that this country cannot have unrestrained migration, and
equally obvious that it cannot have no migration. The question is,
and always will be, how much.

Put Collier’s and Hannan’s books together and you get one clear
recommendation. A country like Britain should do its utmost to pull
in as many talented people from poor countries as it can, turn them
into fans of the Anglosphere tradition of freedom, and send them
back home where they can help enrich and liberate the poor, while
not threatening the livelihoods of poorer people here. In short,
stop making life difficult for foreign students.

Spectator Australia diary

After my recent visit to Australia I wrote the diary column in the Australian edition of the
Spectator:

I flew from London into Sydney, then Melbourne, to make three
dinner speeches in a row. Through nerves I never finished the main
course of three dinners. Pity, because in my experience Australian
food is as fine as anywhere in the world: fresher than American,
more orientally influenced than France and more imaginative than
Britain. That was certainly not true the first time I visited
Australia 37 years ago, when I slept in youth hostels and Ansett
Pioneer buses, and ate rib-eye steaks for breakfast. I still
remember with horror the moment I realized I had left my wallet on
a park bench in Alice Springs, dazed after 31 hours on a bus. I
went back and it was still there, wet from a lawn sprinkler.

Like Britain, Australia’s been confronting the costs of climate
policies. The Abbott government has begun to deal with them
robustly, whereas in Britain we are still in denial. Our opposition
leader Ed Miliband has promised to “freeze” energy bills for two
years if he gets into power – a threat that probably caused
companies to push them up now -- even though it was he as Energy
and Climate Change secretary who did most to load green levies on
to consumers. Conservatively it looks like his Climate Act of 2008,
with its targets for carbon emission cuts, will cost us £300
billion by 2030 in subsidies to renewable energy, in the cost of
connecting wind farms to the grid, in VAT, in costs of insulation
and new domestic appliances, and in the effect of all this on
prices of goods in the shops. If people are upset about the cost of
energy now, they will be furious by the election in 2015. I don’t
like to say “I told you so”, but I did, in my maiden speech in the
House of Lords in May: “One reason why we in this country are
falling behind the growth of the rest of the world is that in
recent years we have had a policy of deliberately driving up the
price of energy.” David Cameron should take note that Tony Abbott
is the first world leader elected by a landslide after expressing
open skepticism about the exaggerated claims of imminent and
dangerous climate change. Nor can greens argue that the issue was
peripheral. The carbon tax was what won Mr Abbott his party’s
leadership, and it was front and central in the election campaign.
More and more politicians will be finding out that defending green
levies on energy bills is more of an electoral liability than
doubting dangerous climate change.

One of the more incoherent arguments for green energy policies,
repeated unthinkingly by Mr Cameron recently, is that they are an
“insurance policy” against future typhoons like the one that
devastated the Philippines. Since there has been no increase in
either frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones during the
period of global warming since 1980 – if anything the reverse – and
since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thinks “the
global frequency of occurrence of
tropical cyclones will either
decrease or remain essentially unchanged”, this makes no sense.
There are going to be typhoons in the Pacific whether it warms or
not. What sort of insurance policy is it that costs you a fortune,
does nothing to reduce the risk and does not pay out? The way to
save lives from typhoons is to equip people with better shelter,
communications, transport and rescue services – in short to make
them richer. That’s what we have been doing, thanks to fossil
fuels, which is why global death rates from storms are down by 55%
since the 1970s.

Another issue that has parallels in Britain and Australia is
freedom of speech. Julia Gillard’s government tried in its dying
days to use the excuse of the phone hacking scandal in Britain
bring in a clumsy form of press censorship. Did embarrassing
revelations about a union slush fund have anything to do with it?
Says Hedley Thomas of The Australian: “we may never know for
certain, but the attempted regulation reeked of payback.” Thanks
partly to a vigorous campaign by the Institute of Public Affairs, a
free-market think-tank in Melbourne, she failed.

Payback is exactly how most British parliamentarians apparently
see the issue of press regulation. Almost every MP and lord seems
to have a sore memory of being viciously and inaccurately traduced
by a British newspaper (I know I do: the Guardian regularly
publishes hilariously nasty and misleading pieces about me). There
is no doubt that if they could, politicians would use the threat of
the expensive arbitration proposed by a new Royal Charter to
intimidate journalists into self-censorship. It’s a very dangerous
mood. Even lip service to freedom of the press is in pretty short
supply in the House of Lords.

Hyde Park in Sydney is full of white ibises – though many are a
dirty grey. Big birds with bare black heads and ludicrously long,
curved beaks, they scavenge litter. A colony of them nesting in a
palm tree made jabberwocky squawks as I walked beneath. This is
new: white ibises colonized the city in the last two decades. It is
a worldwide phenomenon – local wildlife becoming urbanized. Time
was, only rats, sparrows, starlings and rock doves (town pigeons)
lived in city centres. Increasingly, these face competition from
more species that used to be too shy to come near human beings.
London is now full of wood pigeons, not to mention foxes, sparrow
hawks, ring-necked parakeets (from India) and even peregrine
falcons. Because urban human beings – unlike rural ones – never
kill wildlife, urban life is safer and more reliable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Frackers

My review of Gregory Zuckerman's book The Frackers appeared in The Times on 23
November.

In the long tradition of serendipitous mistakes that led to
great discoveries, we can now add a key moment in 1997. Nick
Steinsberger, an engineer with Mitchell Energy, was supervising the
hydraulic fracturing of a gas well near Fort Worth, Texas, when he
noticed that the gel and chemicals in the “fracking fluid” were not
mixing properly. So the stuff being pumped underground to crack the
rock was too watery, not as gel-like as it should be.

Steinsberger noticed something else, though. Despite the mistake
in mixing the fracking fluid, the well was producing a respectable
amount of gas. Over a beer at a baseball game a few weeks later he
mentioned it to a friend from a rival company who said they had had
good results with watery fracks elsewhere. Steinsberger attempted
to persuade his bosses to try removing nearly all the chemicals
from the fluid and using mostly water. They thought he was mad
since everybody knew that, while water might open cracks in
sandstone, in clay-containing shale it would seal them shut as the
clay swelled.

Steinsberger was stubborn enough to persist, and got his way by
pointing out how cheap water is. He could save more than $200,000
per well by leaving out the gels and about 95 per cent of the
chemicals. “The idea was crazy at the time. He had guts, no one
else would have even thought of doing it,” said a colleague. Three
wells were fracked with “slick water” in May 1997. The results were
only mediocre at first, but gradually the recipe got better and
better and once the new watery mixture was combined with horizontal
drilling and “multi-stage” fracks, astonishing quantities of gas
began to pour out of the shale.

The world energy scene was transformed. In America, gas is
superabundant and getting cheaper; it’s not running out any time
soon; it’s taking market share from coal, thus cutting carbon
dioxide emissions; chemical and manufacturing industries are
“re-shoring” from overseas at a breakneck pace; Russia and Iran are
no longer able to push up gas prices; the same technology applied
to oil is reducing America’s thirst for oil imports, possibly to
zero within ten years. A few years ago I could not interest editors
in shale gas: now it’s all the rage.

The Frackers documents the bloody-minded stubbornness
that made all this possible. Steinsberger’s refusal to accept
conventional wisdom was one of many such stories. His boss George
Mitchell tried for years and years, in the teeth of often fierce
opposition from his own board, to prove that he could get gas out
of shale in Texas. A similarly stubborn self-made Oklahoman named
Harold Hamm did the same for oil from shale in North Dakota, once
again having to stick to his guns for years before the breakthrough
came.

At the other end of the social scale, an aristocratic Lebanese
immigrant named Charif Souki, bored of starting fashionable
restaurants and aware that American gas was running out, set out to
raise billions to build a terminal to import liquefied gas from the
Middle East. When shale gas came along, he then abruptly
about-turned to spend billions switching the facility into an
export terminal. Though not directly about fracking, Souki’s tale
is about its far-reaching implications.

This is a story of innovation as perspiration. There are few
Eureka moments, just lots of incremental steps. The people who
created the shale gas revolution, and their gutsy backers in the
financial markets, sank billions of dollars into often fruitless
gambles over long periods before eventually reaping rich rewards.
It is a reminder that innovation is neither easy nor cheap nor
inevitable. To do what these wild-catters did against the
background of expensive and hyper-cautious regulation, as envisaged
here in Europe, would have been utterly impossible.

Yet we in Europe can now benefit from their efforts. They
reduced the use of chemicals by 95 per cent to very low levels;
they proved that significant earthquakes or the contamination of
aquifers by fracking are both almost impossible; that methane
leakage is no worse than in conventional gas drilling; that the
time and cost spent in fracking a well can be greatly reduced with
experience. We can come in, in other words, when others have shown
how effective, safe and affordable slick-water fracking in shale
is. And we in Britain have thicker, richer shales than perhaps
anybody else in the world.

Gregory Zuckerman tells the story of the shale revolution well.
He has an eye for detail and a flair for narrative that makes it
highly readable. He is a financial reporter by trade, so the book
focuses more on the financing of the gas industry than I would have
liked and less on the geology and technology. His geological
weakness is illustrated by a line where he implies that coal is
derived from marine life, rather than from terrestrial forests.

And at the end of the book, there is a sudden and rather hurried
account of the environmental opposition to shale gas that, in
attempting to show “balance”, gives the protesters far too much
credit. He fails to challenge many of the myths they have
promulgated about water contamination, gas leakage and other
problems. It is as if he came back to New York from Texas and
Oklahoma to be told by a green-tinged editor in a restaurant
(air-conditioned with electricity made from gas) to please put in
some anti-fracking stuff so she could stay socially acceptable at
(gas-cooked) dinner parties in (gas-warmed) duplex apartments on
the (gas-lit) Upper East Side.

We are living through a disruptive innovation as far-reaching as
the steam engine or the discovery of petroleum. It deserves a
detailed chronicle of who made it possible and how, with all the
twists and turns along the way. Zuckerman’s book, despite some
minor flaws, is an excellent first draft of the history of
shale.