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November 2007 Archives

November 5, 2007 - Today's housing debate

Today's housing debateThere is something incredibly narrow and reductionist about today’s housing debate, in that it all comes down to crude numbers. How many more houses do we need, by when and where?

Gordon Brown has of course upped the ante by plumping for 3 million new homes, which boils down to 240,000 net additional homes by 2016.

According to CPRE and many others, that’s scary enough. But they will be positively aghast at the new report from the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit (NHPAU) which argues that 240,000 is just for wimps, and what we really need is 270,000 new homes a year by 2016. So do I hear any advance on 270,000?

The NHPAU is a relatively new body which describes itself as “an expert body whose job is to tell decision-makers how they can make housing more affordable”. Fine – and an eminent bunch of people they are too. But CLG’s job (where most of these decision-makers reside) is to facilitate delivery of 3 million homes that are both affordable and sustainable. Not just affordable.

And the NHPAU clearly knows nothing about sustainability, and doesn’t even pretend to. But that makes its report mind-bogglingly inadequate, as it does all its clever sums without any serious reference to sustainability issues whatsoever. (I’m discounting the occasional tokenistic reference to “higher environmental standards” and the like – they are just there to provide the merest green veneer).

So what use is it, I wonder, for all those decision-makers in CLG and for Yvette Cooper herself, Minister for Housing to get a report that may be absolutely brilliant on the affordability side of things (but I’ve got some real reservations about that too, as it happens), but offers literally sod all on the sustainability dimension?

These days, you really can’t do the one without the other, which means that unless advice like this is properly “SD-proofed”, it’s really not of much use.

This lack of basic sd capability is such a huge problem across the whole of government, let alone across its advisory bodies. It’s exactly the same with Treasury’s Sub-National Review of Economic Development and Regeneration, drafted by all sorts of hugely intelligent economic wonks in Treasury who would probably be the first to admit that their only knowledge of sustainable development is their ability to spell the words – on 34 separate, largely meaningless occasions, as it happens (yes, I have counted!).

But I’ll have more to say on the Sub-National Review in a wee while. Meanwhile, I just hope someone is going to take their green pen to the NHPAU’s report.

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Posted on November 5, 2007 12:43 PM | | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

November 15, 2007 - Just how 'anti-science' is it to worry about GM crops?

GM?In the November issue of Prospect, Dick Taverne has published a bitter critique ('The Real GM Food Scandal') of all those organisations and individuals still out there campaigning against the introduction of GM foods.

It's a splendid and largely ludicrous rant, to which I was invited to make an equally polemical response:

Article for Prospect Magazine Website

The pro-GM lobby has always had an almost unique capacity to shoot itself in the foot. From Monsanto's original bully-boy tactics trying to force its GM products on reluctant EU countries back in the 1990s, through to today's inept combination of legal threats and would-be seduction, it knows how to alienate people more effectively than any other industry sector. And Dick Taverne operates very comfortably in that tradition, with a show of arrogance that beggars belief.

His starting point in the Prospect article is a simple one: that anyone who has reservations about the use of genetic modification in agriculture is either mentally defective or simply "anti-science". Having positioned them in that particular corner, he then attributes to them an almost superhuman capacity to whip up fear and hostility amongst ordinary citizens, whom he portrays in turn as ignorant, gullible folk who should just sit back quietly and put their faith in the men in white coats and proselytising GM evangelists such as himself.

I resent this on both counts. I am not an anti-GM fundamentalist. I have always been open to the possibility that GM might have a role to play in securing a more sustainable food production system in the future, and have always said so in public. I am therefore very interested in what is happening in the world of GM science, was fascinated to catch up on various cutting-edge projects on a recent visit to the John Innes Centre outside Norwich, and have just finished a radio documentary on agricultural biodiversity, which I like to think was reasonably balanced. But the fact that I still have concerns (on health, environmental, agronomic and governance grounds) marks me down in Taverne's fundamentalist world as an emotionally-flawed dipstick.

I also despise his patronising contempt for the general public. He adheres rigorously to the "empty vessel" school of science education: most people are stupid and ill-informed on most issues most of the time, so it's the task of scientists to fill them up with impeccably objective "facts". Then they will be alright.

But Taverne's own abuse of science makes him a very dodgy vessel-filler. He states categorically, for instance, that there is no evidence on risks to human health. "The fact is that there is not a shred of evidence of risk to human health from GM crops". Yet he must know that this is a seriously misleading statement, in that proper animal feeding trials into the potential health effects of new GM crops were not originally required, and even now are still not routinely required. He must also know that there is a body of evidence emerging from governments, universities and companies themselves demonstrating a range of unexplained (and potentially health-threatening) effects from the consumption of genetically-modified organisms.

Taverne is therefore right in saying that there is no evidence of people keeling over and dying as a direct consequence of ingesting GM products; he is totally wrong in seeking to persuade people that there is no evidence regarding potential health risks. Hence the continuing need for strict regulation (whereas Taverne would leave it all up to Monsanto and other multinationals to regulate themselves) based on the proper application of the Precautionary Principle, which Taverne dismisses out of hand as further evidence of anti-scientific obstructionism.

Elsewhere in his article, Taverne states categorically that there is little evidence of environmental damage from GM crops, and that "worldwide experience of GM crops to date provides strong evidence that they actually benefit the environment". To demonstrate this evidence, he quotes from one recent (assertively pro-GM) study without even alluding in passing to the fact that there is a substantial body of "strong evidence" (as published in peer-reviewed science journals) detailing substantial damage to the environment.

Beyond categorical (and highly misleading) assertions, he also does a fine line in exaggeration and over-claiming. For instance, his account of the interesting case study of Golden Rice (modified in such a way as to address the problem of vitamin A deficiency in poor countries) is so one-sided as to be laughable. He pins the blame for delays in bringing Golden Rice to market entirely on over-zealous regulators and environmental campaigners, implying that they are therefore directly responsible for the deaths of between one and two million people a year and 500,000 children a year going blind.

Reality tells us how far from the truth this really is. The problems with Golden Rice have much more to do with underperformance (early strains would have necessitated the consumption of at least 12 bowls of rice to achieve the required dosage of vitamin A!), continuing controversy amongst nutritionists (many of whom believe the answer lies more in a proper diet including green vegetables than in Golden Rice), and aesthetics - Dick Taverne may not like this, but a lot of people in those countries still prefer their rice white not yellow!

A lot of the over-claiming is done by allusion. Taverne makes many references to the contribution that GM crops are (apparently) already making to reducing hunger and disease, and to combatting drought and high levels of salinity in the soil. To anyone in the business, that's a bit of a mystery. True enough, there's a lot more in today's innovation pipeline which specifically addresses those critical issues. But right now, there is very little going on out there that fits any of those categories of need.

This is hardly surprising given that almost all GM crops today are grown either for non-food purposes (primarily cotton), or to produce the protein that is needed to feed the livestock for our ever more meat-intensive diets. On balance, given the latest evidence about the impact of meat-eating on the incidence of cancer, let alone a host of other health impacts, GM feedstuffs are probably responsible for killing far more people than they have rescued from drought, disease or famine.

That's precisely the kind of cheap shot that will enrage Dick Taverne. But I use it deliberately. Because what enrages most people about Taverne's GM fantasies is his refusal to confront some harsh truths about the inherent unsustainability of modern agriculture - a physical reality which current GM strategies and products reinforce at every turn. Today's resource-intensive monocultures are depleting and polluting ground water, degrading soil quality, damaging biodiversity, consuming vast amounts of energy, and contributing significantly to accelerating climate change. GM or non-GM, this is simply unsustainable, and dangling in front of people the chimera of genetically-modified monocultural techno-fixes is classic escapism of the worst kind.

In his Editorial introducing Dick Taverne's article in Prospect, David Goodhart talked of the challenge of avoiding "a Malthusian crunch", and the potential contribution that GM might make to that. In truth, there is no avoiding that Malthusian crunch until we understand that people are not short of food today because of a lack of food but because of poverty, that current levels of wastage throughout the food chain border on the criminal, and that our current meat-intensive diets are not sustainable for the two billion or so people who enjoy them today let alone for the nine billion with whom we'll be sharing this planet by 2050.

Get your head around those facts, and then let's have a serious, balanced discussion, looking at the evidence on both sides, about the potential of GM to bring forward solutions in what is going to be a very different world.


Jonathon Porritt
14 November 2007

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Posted by JP on November 15, 2007 12:16 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

November 27, 2007 - China junkie

I have become a bit of a China junkie. China looms so large in today’s sustainability debates, and the challenges that it faces are so “real time, right now”, that it makes any other country’s dilemmas look small by comparison.

So to be part of two high-level presentations from Chinese scientists in one week – one on energy issues and one on water issues – has been quite a fix.

The energy stuff has become pretty familiar. One new coal-fired power station a week (though you never hear about how many power stations they are closing down), two new nuclear reactors a year (the fastest ever nuclear build programme), vast new investments in renewables (wind, PV, hydro etc) and serious efforts (at long last!) to push energy efficiency throughout the economy.

But for China, it’s water that really matters, and the situation here is seriously gloomy. 60% of China’s rivers are seriously polluted; 28% of them are judged to be “completely useless”; 20% of drinking water fails to meet minimum standards; almost every one of China’s fresh water lakes is heavily polluted by agricultural and detergent run-off, leading to massive algal blooms; 80% of discharges to sea are illegal, with huge “dead zones” stretching up and down the coast; at least 10 million hectares of land have been seriously contaminated by the run-off of toxic chemicals and heavy metals – and I could go on!

The damage to China’s economy is just massive – as was eloquently recognised by President Hu Jintao in his recent speech to the Party Congress. And there are good political reasons for trying to get on top of the water challenge: there are literally tens of thousands of civil protests every year around China, many of them relating directly to the pollution and misuse of water.

So the Chinese Government is starting to crack down on polluters (including the 250 multinational companies based in China), to charge much more realistic prices for the use of water, and to build hundreds of sewage treatment works.

Given the horrific legacy the country faces, after decades of systematic abuse of the water environment as China became the “workshop to the world”, it’s going to take decades to get it all sorted. At precisely the point when accelerating climate change is going to make it all that much harder.

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Posted by JP on November 27, 2007 8:08 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

November 30, 2007 - Another inconvenient truth

Hilary Benn will be mightily upset by the United Nations official report prepared for next weekís Bali Conference. Apart from the fact that it's a very grim read indeed (particularly in the focus it brings to bear on just how disproportionately grim things are going to be for the world's poorest people), it also has some extremely harsh words for the UK Government.

With a startling lack of tact, it kicks off by reminding people of the inconvenient truth that the UK's success in meeting our Kyoto targets is almost entirely due to Mrs Thatcher's passion for decarbonising the UK economy by closing down all our coal mines. Not that much of substance has happened since then.

Even less tactfully, it then wades into the Climate Change Bill, the constantly buffed-up jewel in the Government climate change crown. Whilst acknowledging that it is indeed a “bold and innovative step”, in terms of putting CO2 abatement targets in statute, it points out that it won’t be worth a hill of organic beans without much more radical policies than the Government has currently put in place – particularly on renewables, where the UK is miles behind many other EU countries.

Unfairly, it doesnít seem to have taken proper account of the Carbon Reduction Commitment, a mandatory trading scheme for all organisations whose energy spending amounts to more than £500,000 a year, a measure which should come into force by 2009/2010.

Finally, it powerfully reinforces NGO efforts to persuade the Government to include aviation and shipping in the UK targets, working on the assumption that emissions from these two sectors would increase the UK's budget by around 27% by 2050 - more or less cancelling out half the planned 60% reduction. So it was encouraging that the Prime Minister recently accepted the importance of thinking through the implications of including these aviation and shipping emissions in the budget.

It sums it all up as follows: “If the rest of the developed world followed the pathway envisaged in the UK’s Climate Change Bill, dangerous climate change would be inevitable”.

Ouch!

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Posted by JP on November 30, 2007 7:16 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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