Electoral democracy has largely failed. It has been captured by big corporates, suborned and crudified (de-deliberationised) by the corporate media, and sidelined by neoliberal globalisation (and the consequent minute-by-minute power of ‘the markets’).

Perhaps the most spectacular ever instance of the failing of electoral democracy has been very recent indeed: it is the election of Donald Trump to (what is still, even now) the most powerful office in the world.

Probably the most dire but predictable global effect of a Trump Presidency is its catastrophic impact on climate-policy and energy-policy. The most senior salient offices in the land are now stuffed full of the most egregious know-nothing climate-deniers. These people will be busy from Day One of the new administration, actively bringing about the deaths of people all over the world (and especially, in the future) from climate-disasters that would otherwise not occur or that would otherwise not be so severe. (This is not hyperbole. My Green colleague Craig Simmons has undertaken calculations such that it is now possible to produce a (very rough) correlation between GHGs emitted and deaths etc. caused: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anuradha-vittachi/since-flying-is-responsib_b_361777.html

So what is to be done?

Readers of the Ecologist know a lot of the answer. We need to ‘fight’: at Standing Rock; through the ballotbox; through changing our own lifestyles and building bottom-up alternatives; and much much more.

And we must make the most of the good news that there already is: such as Obama’s ban today on Arctic offshore drilling, which may prove difficult for Trump to reverse: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/obama-places-sweeping-ban-offshore-drilling-n698461 We must seek to ensure that it is. For we know the hard truth: that even if humanity burns only that part of Earth’s fossil fuel reserves that is already accessible, that would be enough to virtually guarantee runaway climate change.

But the point of this piece is to warn you about something that might take the wind out of our sails, something which might risk taking the heart right out of our fight. You heard it here first: sometime in 2017, I suspect that Trump will have a ‘climate moment’. Sometime next year, the American President will probably issue a partial mea culpa, and tell us that he now ‘gets it’ on climate: That human activity IS changing our planet’s climate, and not for the better, after all.

And (if and) when this happens, be prepared. Be prepared for a tidal wave of foolishness from the media about how Trump isn’t as bad as we all thought he was. And for a huge collective sigh of relief from across the world – perhaps we still have a chance on climate, after all, if even Trump can ‘get it’.

Be prepared: because this ‘change of heart’ will not be half as good news as it seems. It might not even be good news at all.

To understand why, we need to understand better why Trump will most likely claim at some point in 2017 to ‘get it’ on climate.

Trump on climate: from denialism to agnosticism to…?

The process has actually already begun. Trump has pulled back somewhat from his previous full-on climate-denialism, to a position of ‘agnosticism’ on the issue: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-climate-change-scepticism-may-withdraw-paris-agreement-a7469221.html Why? Because Trump’s climate-denialism in the election period was partly just a pose, to shore up support among Republicans, and to epater les bourgeois. Now that, incredibly, he has made it all the way to the White House, he can afford to stand back and look more ‘Presidential’, less extreme. A position of studied agnosticism fits the bill nicely.

Meanwhile, as I say, the Administration that he heads is getting stuffed full of climate-deniers: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/12/donald-trump-environment-climate-change-skeptics They will be working gung-ho to re-fossilise the U.S. economy, and are thus preparing the ground to harvest the faster destruction of the future of our living planet.

So, why would Trump go further than agnosticism on climate in 2017?

Already, Trump and his aides will be receiving briefings every day from those Government agencies that are well aware of the reality and disastrous consequences of human-triggered dangerous climate change. Foremost among these, perhaps, will be the Pentagon, which has a long record now of being part of the ‘reality-based community’ on climate: http://taskandpurpose.com/dont-count-us-military-among-climate-change-skeptics/

This constant drip-drip of truth into the awesomely thick skulls (and thin skins) of Trump and his team will gradually have its effect. Sooner or later, Trump will most likely decide that the moment is ripe to accept reality.

 The PR bonanza awaiting Trump if he accepts the truth on climate

As this moment – literally – of truth approaches, Trump will discuss with his aides the upsides and downsides of joining the reality-based community.

A downside will be that it will annoy some supporters. But that doesn’t matter that much; Trump doesn’t need them much for the next few years, and he will be confident that in any case he can motivate them in other ways with regular extreme tweets, eye-catching speeches to feed the base, and a million other methods.

The biggest upside is that Trump’s acceptance of climate-reality will be a huge story – a story blindsiding most of his critics (unless they have been forearmed by reading the present article, first…). Trump and his publicists will I think be unable to resist its incredible potential for him to sound so reasonable, rowing-back from some of the less tenable aspects of his public persona and stance.

And it could take the wind out of the sails of a remarkable number of his opponents, to hear Trump say, publicly, that climate change is real, partly human-influenced and dangerous.

Be prepared for this. Don’t let the wind be taken out of your sails.

People are so desperately wanting there to be hope for the world. When Trump’s climate moment comes, it will chime all too easily with this desperation. And too many of the intelligentsia will rush with relief toward the conclusion that Trump can be ‘normalised’ after all, and that we aren’t actually on the brink of a sub-fascist, end-game for democracy.

But we still will be. For Trump’s climate moment won’t be the product of a conversion to rationality, science and precaution (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMyxXs3t7Fs). It will be the product of a cynical decision by a self-publicist-‘populist’-President to cut some of his losses, in a way that his critics are (as yet) totally not expecting.

If Trump accepts the human influence on climate, whither climate-policy?

A key question, in order to become clear on why Trump’s climate moment (that I’m here foreseeing) will not in truth be good news, is this: what will be the real-world consequences, the policy-consequences, of Trump’s ‘moment of truth’ vis-a-vis climate? Here’s my guess as to the rough outline of how little difference it will make, how few consequences it will have in the most obvious places and respects:

It will not significantly affect the behaviour of the climate-denying numpties now getting ready to take the reins of the U.S. Federal Government. They will continue to eviscerate regulations, to back big business, and to burn fossil fuels like (in a sadly-telling phrase) there’s no tomorrow. It will not result in the scaling back of Trump’s horrific ‘infrastructure-building’ programme, which will continue to spill roads and bridges and airports across the U.S.A. And so forth.

It will not ensure either that the U.S. does not pull out of the Paris Agreement; there are plenty of reasons for someone like Trump to continue to hate that Agreement (which is by its nature internationalist), even if he admits the reality of the reason for it. And even if the U.S. does remain within that Agreement, Trump’s own climate-change will not ensure that the U.S. does not in effect gut, delay or bog down the implementation of the Agreement (which was already – is – incredibly weak and problematic to begin with: http://kevinanderson.info/blog/is-the-climate-change-academic-community-reluctant-to-voice-issues-that-question-the-economic-growth-paradigm/).

What actual difference then will Trump’s climate conversion make to policy? Here is where things get complicated, and maybe even worse:One piece of actual good news: it will give Trump the excuse he may already have been looking for to help some parts at least of the U.S. renewable energy sector: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/23/trump-may-not-snuff-out-renewable-energy-industry-despite-his-doubts-on-climate-change.html . Why not embrace green-tech when it’s profitable (while going hell for leather for coal, oil, gas, tracings etc., simultaneously)? Even here, though, enormous care is needed: Trump could easily, for example, embrace large scale agro-fuels in the name of ‘green energy’: with calamitous consequence: http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk 

As I already warned above; a bad effect will be the risk that it encourages complacency (as Paris itself, arguably, already does, unjustifiably). There is a terrible danger that a Trump who ‘gets it’ on climate will suddenly seem not worth the trouble of endlessly fiercely opposing; and that the last-ditch struggle to stop climate-catastrophe will start taking a back-seat in the minds of too many climate activists (including, possibly, you, dear reader: which is why I want to forewarn you).

And here’s the really bad news. Here’s where it gets really scary. There are significant elements of the Right that favour a sort of ‘survivalist’ strategy vis a vis threats such as climate: they aren’t interested in the altruism and enlightened self-interest of climate-change-mitigation, but they are interested in ‘adaptation’. Adaptation is indeed necessary, because we are already, tragically, ‘committed’ to some pretty serious harmful climate-change just by virtue of how much we have polluted our atmosphere with GHGs already; but an adaptationist stance alone looks pretty ugly, and capable of making things worse, in the round. Adaptation, consisting of things like building ever higher ‘hard’ flood defences and hardening one’s heart against climate refugees is hardly… heart-warming, as a response to climate-reality. One can imagine Trump adopting a pretty terrifying narrowly adaptionist climate-policy.

The scariest possibility of all, by far, is that a climate ‘wake-up call’ for Trump could take him in the same direction that a number of influential voices on the hard Right (including, notably, Newt Gingrich) have already moved in: that of climate-engineering or ‘geo-engineering’ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/opinion/the-risks-of-climate-engineering.html The idea of a kind of total planetary management of climate fits well with the hubris, techno-utopianism and refusal to change course of many on the Right: in fact, they sound exactly like Trump…. Why alter ‘the American way of life’, if we (who, exactly?) can just put mirrors in space to cool the Earth down a little? The extreme moral hazard of climate-engineering, of course, is that it provides the perfect seeming-excuse for not bothering to rein in our GHG emissions.

Paris, climate-engineering – and the hard Right…

Lest all this seem a remote possibility to you, I want you to notice something that very few people have noticed yet: that the Paris Agreement made climate-engineering mainstream. Worse than that: it committed us to it: http://kevinanderson.info/blog/the-hidden-agenda-how-veiled-techno-utopias-shore-up-the-paris-agreement The Paris figures don’t add up without desperate, utterly untried, utterly reckless vast-scale technological gambles, later this century.

Why not – Trump’s advisers will whisper – speed the process up a little? What bolder idea for Trump than to ‘wake up’ to the reality of human-influenced climate change – and propose that we tackle it in the biggest way imaginable: by allegedly ‘taking charge’ of the Earth’s climate, and finding a ‘solution’ that will let us keep the petrol flowing (and keep the oceans dying, and keep the atmosphere moving into uncharted waters, and so forth) indefinitely? I can see Trump, for example, providing a huge Government funded prize for the most successful (sic) plan to geo-engineer the future. Take it a step further: it’s not that hard to imagine a Hollywood-ification of climate disaster(s) in which Trump’s narrative becomes that of: America ‘saves the world’, by high-tech, ultra-reckless gambles such as mirrors in space, ‘seeding the oceans’, GM-monoculture fuels and forests…

That’s why I say: be careful what you wish for. When Trump’s climate moment comes, we need to be ready to push back. Otherwise, he might ‘lead’ us out of the frying pan of climate-denialism, into the fire (literally) of what would actually be an out-of-control tech-mad future, in which climate reality became an excuse for allowing the world’s biggest polluter (and its military) in effect to take ownership of the atmosphere itself.

This Author

Rupert Read is philosopher working and writing at UEA, the Chair of Green House think tank, and a former parliamentary candidate for the Green Party of England & Wales. He Tweets at: @GreenRupertRead & @rupertread

Laikipia and Samuel have travelled five hours on the bus, they’re clutching a sheaf of receipts. These are the latest proofs of the cattle they’ve had confiscated earlier this year (2016). They claim that they’ve lost thousands of cattle, sequestered by government and police, herded into compounds miles away and then sold. The communities are lucky if they get the chance to ‘buy back’ their own cattle for millions of Tanzanian shillings (several thousand dollars) but receive nothing if their cattle are sold on. These nomadic communities, a collection of different tribes including Maasai, are called pastoralists.

A recent report funded by the Danish government reveals that thousands of pastoralists are being systematically evicted, with government, army and private militia’s collusion, in order to free up land for local elite and foreign investors[i].

Pastoralist groups are constantly harassed, their leaders arrested or killed and routinely have complete villages de-registered, their houses burnt, and are moved off land in violent, fatal conflicts – land that has traditionally been used by their communities for hundreds of years. Recently there have been calls for them to increase productivity, of their cattle, and of their land, and as part of this a new call to tag and identify their beloved cows. Now more than ever it’s vital their value is recognised.

One of the reasons for the conflict is the lack of value placed on pastoralists’ ways of life and their land tenure (which is communal). “They’re jealous of the high quality of our cattle and the fact that they are never fenced in, and we love them and they obey us like children” says Samuel. He is not joking. Pastoralists play a dominant role in the livestock sector, contributing greatly to Tanzania’s economy: according to government records, pastoralists and agro pastoralists today rear 98% of the country’s 21 million cattle and 22 million small stock; and produce most of the milk and meat consumed nationally[ii]. They also contribute 80% of the meat and livestock products in Tanzania[iii] and contribute to 13% of Ethiopia’s GDP.

But the issue of placing value on other facets of pastoralists’ life – their role as custodians of complex ecosystems, their decision-making strategies, their medicinal abilities, is extremely tricky. The Bio-Cultural Protocols and Nagoya protocols may change this if they are ratified and domesticated: actually incorporated into Tanzanian law.

In Kenya, Sudan and Tanzania where Pastoralists are the most common, there is a general ignorance amongst mainstream populations about their ways of life. Colourful Maasai warriors may advertise Kenyan Airways, but they don’t receive any real social, political or legal recognition.

Paola de Meo of Hands off the Land and Terra Nuova is keen to change this. She believes one way this can happen is by introducing Bio-cultural Protocols, which will put value on their lifestyles. She says ” Pastoralists are amongst the most vulnerable and affected groups, because grazing lands are perceived as unused, and their way of life as unproductive from an industrial point of view”.

In the wider context, their ability to travel enormous distances in very extreme conditions, to read the land, to make ropes, snares and traps from plants and trees, and to survive using phyto-medicinal products (Maasai medicine is allegedly able to cure everything – from cancer, to miscarriages to malaria), has only just begun to be noticed, let alone systematically chronicled.

Pascal* is a senior leader, representing several thousand Masaai in Southern Tanzania. He believes that the situation has to change. Gesturing around to the grasslands with zebra, gazelle, and elephants in the bush he says: “We have been here since the 1700’s. The mountains and the steppes  have Maasai names, and we have to be valued as people who are custodians of the land. We manage it; seeding, weeding, and using our cattle constructively. When you look at the conservation areas and game parks in Tanzania, these are all former pastoralists’ lands. We were displaced, we aren’t legally allowed to keep our cattle on them now, but we looked after them, which is why they are such important biodiverse places now.”

There is widespread stereotyping and misinformation about the pastoralists, particularly the damage they do to wildlife. Despite the propaganda, there is not a single study that proves that cattle impact negatively with wildlife, in fact there’s a body of scientific evidence that pastoralist cattle in particular (whose genetic lineages are robust, diverse and long), graze in ways to encourage browsers – animals that eat the higher foliage – to thrive. And their dung spreads diverse grass seeds.

In Mvomero district, in Southern Tanzania, several hundreds of Paracuyo  Masaii are gathering together for a rare aging ceremony; the elders sit on plastic chairs in the dusk – these meetings go on for days – discussing the latest move by regional government to tag their beloved cattle. This is part of a wider scheme to monetise the cattle, which represent the assets and wealth of the pastoralists’ communities.

For Paola De Meo it is now time for this to stop: “We must stop the EU support for African agriculture[iv] unleashing the power of the private sector – it is part of a process of commodification of food, land, water, seeds and nature in Africa. Framed through the industrial system’s “productivity” lens, increasingly governments, donors, transnational corporations, private and financial capital companies try to take advantage of policies and gain control of resources through supply chains. This is destructive and inefficient”.

The recent (2014) Nagoyo Protocol (NP)[v] could radically change the game. It is a mechanism to provide a transparent legal framework for the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources. It builds on the UNEP Natural Justice laws of 2009[vi] and the Bio-Cultural Protocols (BCP’s) that were conceptualised there. Fundamentally NP challenges the Global North’s practice of looting traditional medicinal systems/land/knowledge, patenting it, earning from it, and then restricting access. The German government[vii] has been the most forward-thinking when it comes to implementing BCP’s. It has written the BCP’s into its binding action strategies in Tanzania. The Danish government is the only donor actively supporting pastoralists’ ways of life.

For the first time community-based natural resource management systems, knowledge, innovations, rights and practices (i.e. in situ conservation and sustainable use) of indigenous flora and fauna, and details of those natural resources is potentially being institutionally recognized. And internationally, legally-binding conditions are being set out by the community for granting access to their lands, including  procedures for Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). Where there are still massive gaps is regarding implementation: at a regional and district level Tanzanian governmental authorities

The pastoralist Samburu could potentially protect their knowledge of the selective raising and breeding of East African Zebu cattle, Red Masaai sheep and East African goats. Exotic cattle breeds include the Boran, Sahiwal, Friesian and Ayrshire and Jersey will be acknowledged too.

The spotlight on the illegality of land grabs, the human rights abuses and the marginalisation of the pastoralists and indigenous communities is being chronicled by international NGO’s such as Oxfam, the Danish NGO IWGIA, Terra Nuova, Hands off the Land, CELEP, and the UN special Rapporteur Oliver De Schutter. However there are still key wins to be had  – notably with the World Bank, which is allowing countries such as Tanzania to opt out of their clauses that protect their indigenous peoples.

Deogracias Tokai* is a leading (and currently very vulnerable) indigenous leader in Tanzania. He is also angry; “We do not want to be romanticised or fetishized or exploited as a tourist attraction. We need the value of our meat, milk and cattle production to be acknowledged. But more than this we need our rights as people who have the choice to move to be absolutely recognised. Sure, I actually live in a city house, that’s not the point. The point is I chose it.”

* All the names of the people in this article have been changed at their request.

The Lead Author

Thembi Mutch has been living and working in East Africa/Southern Africa since 1991, has a PhD from SOAS. She is an award-winning journalist, and works as an academic, trainer and journalist specializing in resources, land rights, identity, gender and community rights

This project was funded through Journalismfund.eu‘s Flanders Connects Continents grant programme.

[ii] Source IWIGIA  report 23 TANZANIAN PASTORALISTS THREATENED: Evictions, Human Rights and Loss of Livliehood Copyright: IWGIA Published by: IWGIA in collaboration with PINGO’s Forum, PAICODEO and UCRT

Editors: IWGIA, Carol Sørensen and Diana Vinding; May 2016 Denmark

[iii] Source. Ibid. And Fiona Flinton, Senior scientist ILRI

[iv] European, US and DFID funds are currently putting over 8billion US towards various agricultural initiatives, including the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, and SAGCOT; which are directly implicated in the land grabs described in this story

[v] https://www.cbd.int/abs/about/default.shtml

[vi] Excerpt from UNEP laws: “We uphold the sacredness of life and oppose ideas, systems, world views and practices, including global finance and patent laws, which define the natural world, its life forms and the knowledge of Indigenous Peoples as property or “commodities”

[vii] GTZ, 2012, author Barbara Lassen, Bio Community Protocols http://www.bing.com/search?q=bio+cultural +protocols +GTZ&src=IE-SearchBox&FORM=IENTTR&conversationid=

In terms of entertainment value, the Environmental Protection Agency had it all last week.

The agency held a four-day-long gathering of scientists aimed at the rather dry task of analyzing numerous research studies connected to cancer concerns swirling around a chemical called glyphosate.

Glyphosate is the world’s most widely used herbicide and is the key ingredient in Monsanto Co.’s Roundup brand. But along with the slicing and dicing of data came razor sharp debate, questions about chemical industry influence over regulators, and even a bit of theater as one group of environmental activists interrupted proceedings to break out in song. Their refrain? “Monsanto is the Devil. No Glyphosate.”

The meetings brought together a roster of scientists with expertise in epidemiology, toxicology and related expertise to advise the EPA on whether or not the agency has properly determined that the weight of evidence indicates glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic“ to humans.

The determination runs counter to the classification made in March 2015 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization. IARC said a review of scientific research shows that glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen“.

A crucial decision- for many reasons

The EPA’s determination is crucial on many fronts:

• Monsanto is currently defending itself against more than three dozen lawsuits claiming glyphosate-based Roundup gave people non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), a type of blood cancer;
• both the EPA and the European Union are assessing re-registrations of glyphosate to determine if limits should be placed on the chemical;
• and Monsanto is attempting a $66 billion merger with German-based Bayer.

But while the EPA may have hoped for resounding support from the Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) it assembled, from the outset of the meetings on Tuesday, concerns were raised by some of the experts about the quality of the EPA’s analysis.

Some scientists were concerned that the EPA was violating its own guidelines in discounting data from various studies that show positive associations between glyphosate and cancer. Several of the SAP members questioned why the EPA excluded some data that showed statistical significance, and wrote off some of the positive findings to mere chance.

Monique Perron, a scientist in the Health Effects Division of EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, explained that “professional judgment” played a role in looking at the “weight of evidence” from various studies. The EPA looked at both published studies as well as unpublished studies conducted by industry players like Monsanto, according to Perron. The IARC review focused on published, peer-reviewed research.

The public comments portion of the agenda opened with an interesting twist as a representative from the Italy-based European Food Safety Authority and one from the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) took to the microphones to weigh in on their perceptions of glyphosate’s safety. Both said their own assessments were largely in line with the EPA view, that glyphosate is not a cause of cancer.

The BfR, which is part of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Germany, advised EFSA and drafted the report that EFSA issued in November 2015 that declared glyphosate was “unlikely to be carcinogenic.” That report has been the subject of some controversy because the BfR relied on the advice of the Glyphosate Task Force, the consortium of chemical companies that includes Monsanto, when it did its evaluation.

The EPA did not invite either BfR or EFSA to travel to the United States to deliver the support for glyphosate safety, according to Steven Knott, the EPA official who oversaw the meeting logistics. The foreign scientists simply asked for the opportunity to appear, he said. Who invited them and/or arranged for their travel raised some eyebrows among onlookers.

Industry presenters swamp the timetable

Another element of the meetings that did more than raise a few eyebrows was the devotion of time given to industry presenters supportive of glyphosate versus representatives from non-profits or others who urged regulators to rein in use of glyphosate.

Monsanto representatives were granted roughly 3½ hours on Wednesday to make the case for glyphosate safety, and several other pro-glyphosate industry players were granted additional time as well.

In comparison, most critics of glyphosate had comment periods that ranged from 5-15 minutes. Knott said speaking allotments were assigned based on how much time commentators asked for, but some glyphosate opponents said they were told they could not have more than a few minutes.

Monsanto used its time to present a defense of glyphosate’s value to agriculture, to offer detailed explanations for why the IARC analysis was flawed, and to explain why the company believes a host of data points found in various studies should be discounted, and/or are not relevant.

Company representatives also argued that glyphosate residues found in numerous urine tests were nothing to worry about, and actually helped show that the chemical does not bio-accumulate in the human body. They also said reports of glyphosate residues found in human breast milk were “implausible”.

Groups concerned about glyphosate argued to the panel that the EPA was favoring industry studies over published literature, which is generally considered more authoritative, and was using flimsy protocols to shrug off statistical significance found in several studies.

Many of the participants from both sides of the debate spoke of a need for research on the safety of formulated products that have glyphosate as the active ingredient. The EPA evaluates only glyphosate and not the actual formulation in which it is applied, even though the formulations are increasingly being feared to be more potentially dangerous to human health than the active ingredient alone.

World expert epidemiologist Peter Infante excluded for ‘bias’

One particularly interesting story line that played out this week was the saga of Dr. , a nationally recognized epidemiologist who initially was invited and confirmed by EPA as one of the agency’s scientific advisory panel members for the glyphosate meetings.

The meetings were slated for Oct. 18-21 but CropLife America, which represents the interests of Monsanto and other agribusinesses, sent a letter to the EPA on Oct. 12 calling for Infante to be completely disqualified, saying he had “patent bias”.

Infante appeared to have impeccable credentials, having spent decades working for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health specializing in the determination of cancer risks associated with toxic substances. But CropLife insisted Infante be thrown off the panel. One of its reasons: Infante would give more weight to independent research than the industry’s own research.

The EPA did as the industry asked, but the ousting did not sit well with Infante, who had spent long hours studying the data EPA sent the panel members in advance. In part to defend his reputation, and also to offer his analysis, a somewhat disgruntled Infante showed up at the EPA meetings anyway, telling the SAP members there is “impressive evidence” of glyphosate ties to NHL that should not be ignored.

“There is clearly the evidence for the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma related to glyphosate exposure”, Infante said in an interview after he addressed the panel. “Is it conclusive? No, I don’t think so. But I think that EPA is concluding that there is no evidence. And that’s exactly wrong, according to their own criteria.” There is enough data to classify glyphosate as having “limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans”, Infante said.

And even some light relief

By the time the singing broke out, the room seemed ready for the distraction. The Rev. Billy Talen, who leads a group of self-proclaimed ‘earth-loving urban activists’ that frequently use performance as protest, took his turn at the microphone. Talen told the SAP members of his group’s concern about glyphosate applications made on playgrounds around the country and the danger this could pose to children.

“We’re very aware of the cancers that come from, we believe, from glyphosates”, he told the group.

Shortly after, Talen was warned his five minutes were up, and he and a small number of his followers started singing: “Monsanto is the devil. No glyphosate. Hey.”

Never a dull moment in this debate.

 

---

 

Carey Gillam is Research Director for US Right to Know, a non-profit consumer education group. Follow Carey on Twitter @careygillam.

This article was originally published on Huffington Post.

 

You will undoubtedly have noticed that the phrase “Pop-Up” has become more widely used of late. When I was a lad this was simply an extravagant way of illustrating a storybook in 3D now though it is just so much more. I have heard of all sorts of Pop Ups from bakeries to discos and beyond but the most common type of occasional event that the term has come to represent is the pop up restaurant. The story is one of interest to me as it reflects I think a simmering dissatisfaction with the norm – a desire for something different, that can defiantly be a force for good. Despite the success of the Pop-Up events we see as commonplace these days this is by no means a new idea.

Occasional dining events have been around forever. When I was a youngster the Church was always hosting events like this – a few quid for a full on three-course meal – although of course in those days it was far from trendy and always a daytime thing. I also remember cooking risotto, pasta and home-made ice cream in an old foundry on Old Street in east London, a long time before it was cool to do such things, which just goes to show a good idea can run and run.

There is something very special about bringing people together to eat and it’s something mostly missing in your standard restaurant. It’s the sense of togetherness that’s so real, so human and so important here. We lead busy, compartmentalised lives these days, with most families even not sitting down for a shared meal together more than once or twice a month, let alone extended family, friends and neighbours. There is something more to this though, and that’s the fact that when you do all go out as a big group of friends and family to a restaurant and eat together, you don’t usually share the same meal. For me that’s where communal dinning events and Pop Ups have the key advantage. When you do sit down as part of a group and share a meal that is the same for everyone you immediately have common ground – you are sharing an experience, you may not love it, you may not like it even, but that’s ok. You have been fed, you have stopped, connected with the people around you and that in itself is a good thing, and good for your sense of wellbeing too.

Aside, though, from the humanist, hippy claptrap I find myself indulging in there are other more measurable positive effects of Pop Ups, particularly when they are all about the event, rather than just another platform for the chef’s ego. More and more, we are seeing these Pop Up events providing a platform for connecting local producers with other local producers, and more than that, with their own communities. Pop Ups come in all different shapes and sizes and cater for most tastes and diets too.

And it’s not just dining events that are popping up in brilliant public spaces and community buildings. Farmers’ markets are getting together and networking their products by harnessing the power of the Internet and setting up virtual farmers’ markets where you can then collect your order from a local Pop Up hub. This idea is growing in strength and reach too with the company Food Assembly being up there as the forerunner.

So what of the Pop Up eating events? Well, there are lots to choose from but I really like to stick to the more meaningful ones – anything with a little extra value, a good cause behind it, maybe a speaker too to give a little speech on one foodie issue or another, maybe even a fundraiser for a specific charity.

It strikes me as a very environmentally sensible way of doing business. When we think of food miles we tend to think about the distance the food has travelled to the restaurant, but how about the miles that the customers travel to eat at the restaurant? With local Pop Ups you can sample different food from different chefs and products from different farms without having to make a long trip. If the event is local you can walk to it and that is a big plus in terms of carbon footprints right? Then there are other things too, like not having to consume resources to heat and light a restaurant that may well remain mostly empty many nights of the week. And what about the plates and cutlery etc.? For most pop ups this kit is either provided by the venue as part of the hire fee or it is hired from an event hire company – in either case this limits the amount of crockery and cutlery needed and so is lower in impact than opening permanent premises.

It’s also a lot easier for a young creative chef to set up some regular Pop Ups than it is to get into restaurant premises with all the high costs involved. And as a chef, it feels better to me than being stuck in the same stainless steel windowless vision of hell that is most professional restaurant kitchens.

All around I think the majority of Pop Ups are a very good thing just so long as they serve good quality local food and are more than just an expression of vanity for the chef. Why not pop along and try a few out? Who knows you may find a new supplier just down the road you never knew about who grows just the best spuds, or even meet your next best friend.

This Author

Chef Tim Maddams is the Ecologist’s Ethical Foodie writer and the founder of the Hall & Hearty community pop ups. He will be cooking for the Wolrd Food Prgram dinner in Davros on 24th January 2017 and in his own words ‘scrounging all the ingredients.’

@TimMaddamsChef

If you build a complex machine which has the power to kill its builders, there should be a way to shut it down, to pull the plug.

In Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey the pilot had to physically crawl into the works of the ship’s computer HAL and pull out the memory chips when it killed all the crew.

When the Euratom Basic Safety Standards Directive (BSS) was put together in 1996, the European Parliament added a Suicide Clause.

If any new important scientific information emerged that the levels of exposure permitted by the Directive were wrong, that it was killing people, the whole process had to stop until a new Justification – a positive appraisal of the benefits of the nuclear industry against its public health impacts – was done.

I wrote about this recently in two articles on The Ecologist: ‘No to Bradwell’s ‘secret’ radioactive discharges to the sea’; and ‘Stopping Europe’s nuclear industry in its tracks: here’s how‘.

Justification is a fundamental requirement in permitting radiation exposures. It is based on the Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Although this is outmoded and arguably unethical (Who gets the cost? Who gets the benefit? Not the same people) it is the way things are really done nowadays.

And in some cases this is inevitable (e.g. kidney dialysis vs. expensive terminal cancer treatment). Resources are allocated and political decisions made on the basis of quasi-economic arguments.

How much harm does 1 milliSievert of radiation cause?

The current dose limit for radiation exposures is 1mSv. A useful page of the USA BEIR VII report version shows what it is currently believed this does.

It says 1mSv causes a cancer in one person in 10,000 exposed. Let’s see an example: in the population of Paris (10.5 million) permitted exposures would result in 1,050 extra cancers. About 630 would die. These cancers are justified on the basis that the advantages gained to France by the practice (nuclear energy, atom bombs, etc.) balance the harm. Society believes this is an acceptable equation.

Same in London: 8.5 million population and 850 cancer diagnoses, 510 deaths. I bet you didn’t know this. Would you have agreed? Yet it is there as if you had. It is the law!

So in Paris, capital of a country with contamination from many nuclear plants, radiation at the maximum permitted level would cause a number of legally licensed radiation deaths far exceeding anything terrorists have achieved with their machine guns and bombs.

This is the current official position. The reality is far worse. On December 1st, I published a letter which makes this clear. It appeared in the prestigious American peer-review scientific journal Genetics and was written in response to an earlier paper on the effects of radiation by Bertrand Jordan of the French Centre for Scientific Research in Marseilles.

Jordan’s article in a ‘Perspectives’ review ‘Marking the past – mapping the future’ was about how the public were unreasonably frightened of radiation because science had shown, through the studies of the survivors of Hiroshima: that low doses of radiation were pretty harmless; that you needed very high doses before you increased your chances of cancer; and as for genetic damage, that there was no evidence that radiation caused any effects whatever in humans. The current risk model for heritable effects is based on mice.

The scientific process at work …

Jordan’s article irritated me. Last summer I spent three weeks in the High Court submitting evidence about all this. A significant part of the information which emerged was that the Japanese A-Bomb studies that Jordan believed in and was peddling as the truth, were massively flawed and probably dishonestly manipulated.

I wrote to the overall editor of the Journal and pointed some of this out. To my delight and astonishment, he took me seriously and suggested I provide an account of this which he would send to three expert reviewers. If they passed it, he would publish it and give Jordan space to reply.

This is how science should work, but I have to say, it is rarely how science does work in this area of radiation. In 2015 I wrote to the editor of The Lancet about a disgraceful article on the issue of the A-Bomb studies which they published in their 60th anniversary of Hiroshima issue.

I pointed out that the authors of that travesty of the truth included Richard Wakeford, ex-nuclear industry Rottweiler. I asked to be provided some space to make the points about the failure of the A-Bomb studies. The Lancet refused.

I then wrote a letter and submitted it. Instead of sending it for review, they sent it to the authors of the article! Who (naturally) said there was no merit in what I was saying. The Lancet then threw it out.

In 2016, Alexey Yablokov, Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, Alex Rosen and I sent a letter about the failure of the current risk model to the editor of The Lancet, recorded delivery, sent from Geneva by the Independent WHO. There was no reply from The Lancet. This is utterly disgraceful, and the editors who made those decisions should be sacked and shamed.

My Genetics letter is now out there, and it is the trigger, or one of the triggers, for invoking the Suicide Clause of the Euratom 96/29 and 2013/59 Basic Safety Standards Directives and thus shutting down all nuclear energy. At its core is the evidence that the entire basis of the current radiation risk model is false and dishonest.

Piltdown Man has nothing on the ‘Lifespan Study’ scientific fraud

Most people, including Jordan, believed (and he stated in his article) that the Japanese A-Bomb study consisted of looking for cancer and heritable effects in groups of people who were exposed to radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the bombs exploded compared with groups who were not in the city but came in later.

So you have three exposed groups, near the bomb, further away and far away and one control group: not there when the bombs exploded. That might be a reasonable epidemiological study. And that is how the Lifespan Study (LSS) started in 1952.

But we discovered by some forensic digging into the annual reports of the outfit, that in 1973, when the early cancer effects began to be assembled, the US / Japanese Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) organisation which superseded the original US / Japanese Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) changed the study protocols in mid study.

Why? Because it emerged (and they wrote this in their 1973 report) that the Not-In-City control group were ‘too healthy’, making the health of those who were exposed look bad (which is exactly what it was). In other words, the cancer rates in the exposed group were too high for their liking.

So they decided to look only at those groups who were exposed and to assume that their cancer rates were linearly correlated with their doses. These doses were not measured, but were calculated mathematically from studies carried out with A-Bomb experiments in the Nevada desert.

This is how the cancer coefficients on which the current risk model are based were created! But they are wildly incorrect.

How do we know? Well, we know from the effects on the leukemia children at Sellafield and all the other nuclear sites, the effects on Thyroid Cancer at Fukushima, the cancer effects in Northern Sweden seen in the study by Martin Tondel, the effects seen in all the Chernobyl-affected countries of Europe reviewed by Alexey Yablokov and many other peer-reviewed studies published in the last 20 years.

‘The dose is too low’ – a familiar but now defunct refrain

But whenever these are discussed by government committees and nuclear industry apologists, it always comes back to the A-Bomb studies, and the arguments of Jordan, Wakeford and others like them. We are told to deny what we see because the dose is too low.

The ‘dose is too low’ means that it is too low on the basis of the A-Bomb studies. But if the A-Bomb studies are wrong, then everything fits. This is their Queen on the chessboard and it is taken – captured in the High Court in London.

The LSS dose group populations, whatever their assumed doses, all lived on the contaminated sites of the towns for many years after the bomb. This contamination was derived from the Uranium and Plutonium in the bomb casing and fissile material. My description is based on Expert and Disclosed evidence presented by Prof. Shoji Sawada and Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake in the Test Veteran case.

The up-draught from the rising fireball at Hiroshima and Nagasaki sucked in moist maritime air which cooled with altitude and condensed on the 95% un-fissioned Uranium nano-particles created in the plasma. This produced ‘black rain’ over an area which included all of the dose groups used for the LSS study where dose was calculated by distance from the hypocentre.

The Uranium was measured later in the contaminated areas. But the LSS studies denied the existence of any fallout.

I have been working on this A-Bomb study issue since 2010 in connection with various court cases in the USA. The obvious way to see the real effects of the exposures, external and internal is to compare the cancer rates of the LSS groups with cancer in the national population or some other unexposed control group.

I used all-Japan data to show that the LSS data were wrong, but never got round to finishing this work, which is tedious and costly in time and effort and no one would pay for it. But a Japanese epidemiologist, Tomoyuki Wanatabe and colleagues did something similar in 2008.

Highest cancer rate / unit dose found in the lowest radiation exposure group

They employed the adjacent Okayama prefecture as control and compared age and sex specific cancer rates between 1971 and 1990. They found that there were significantly greater levels of cancer in all the exposed groups – including the LSS lowest dose controls compared with the Okayama control group, but also (to a lesser extent) when compared with an all-Hiroshima control group.

When compared with Okayama, the highest cancer effect per unit dose was seen in the lowest dose LSS group, where there was a 33% excess risk of all cancer in men at external doses estimated at 0-5mSv. The authors write: “the contribution of residual radiation, ignored in LSS is suggested to be fairly high.”

We can make a rough assessment of how high. As calculated by the current risk model, this dose group 0-5mSv would not have received more than 1mSv from the internal black rain Uranium particles, and probably less. So being very conservative, let’s assume that it is 1mSv.

Then that means that instead of the 1 cancer per 100,000 per 1mSv, we have a 33% increase on the background rate of about 450 cancers from other causes, which is 148 cancers.

This number, 148 times more than ‘official’ estimates, is the minimum error that Wanatabe’s research defines in the LSS study. The real number is higher because the true internal dose (as calculated by the current model) is lower.

Incidentally, you may wonder why low doses of radiation had a more powerful effect than higher doses, per unit of radiation. Here is my explanation. Cancer arises when the DNA in cells is damaged, but the cells are not killed. Higher radiation doses are more likely to kill cells outright. So the lower doses are disproportionately carcinogenic.

Radiation is most definitely not good for you!

By the way, the internal dose to England and Wales from global weapons fallout that came down with the rain in the period 1959-63 was about 1mSv according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR.

This caused an increase in infant mortality at the time of about 5%, and 20 years later the cancer rate had increased in real terms (age standardised) by about 35% – which fits pretty well with the Wanatabe 2008 finding.

It is these results and others in similar populations that are the basis of the risk model of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) which I helped develop in 2003 and by now (in the ECRR 2010 publication) has been shown to be pretty accurate if you want to know the outcome of any exposure.

So this realisation and evidence that the LSS dishonestly discarded its control group when it looked like there would a result, feeds through to the ‘justification’ issue. There is now no defence. Of course they will wriggle and wriggle, telling us that radiation is good for you, Sellafield leukemias are caused by population mixing, and such such nonsense).

In fact Jordan replied to my letter in very much those terms. He wriggled and wriggled and (predictably) referred to how radiation might be good for you. But no one said we were wrong. No one said that they didn’t discard the control group. And that means that no one can any more say the dose is too low. There is no referent.

The silent massacre

We are taking the war to the regulators and Euratom legislators now. No one can justify a regime where the number of deaths in Paris from a dose of 1 mSv become not 1,000, but 93,000. That is a massacre. And legally this is not a single exposure but can occur every year!

And it has been a silent global massacre.

You all have friends and family that have died from cancer. About one in four of those, maybe more, was due to the radiation in the weapons fallout in the 1960s. Unless they lived near Hinkley Point, Trawsfynydd, Bradwell, Sellafield or some other nuclear site or contaminated estuary which added its own further excess risk.

The death yield from Chernobyl has been epic, as Yablokov and others have shown. Sellafield discharges to the Irish Sea are the cause of the 10-fold excess child leukemia at Seascale, as everyone always thought, but which the government’s tame committees can’t explain because the basis of the dose being too low.

They are also the cause of the childhood cancer increases on the coast of Wales – which the Wales Cancer Intelligence (Yes!) Unit deny though fixing the numbers and environmental journalist George Monbiot believes because he knows no better. And the adult cancer increases in Wales also.

All these manifestations of radiation toxicity are denied on the basis of what forensic research now shows is a totally dishonest and manipulated study in Japan, paid for (and no doubt orchestrated by) the United States so as to permit bomb development. And as for Fukushima, watch this space. The thyroid cancers have already appeared.

Anyway, I want to thank the brave American Genetics Society editors, for allowing me to say this in their prestigious journal.

Let’s invoke the Suicide Clause and pull the plug on the monster. It’s simple.

Action: Submit your own claim for rejustification: UK; Ireland; all other EU countries.

The letter: ‘Letter to the Editor on ‘The Hiroshima/Nagasaki Survivor Studies: Discrepancies Between Results and General Perception’ by Bertrand R. Jordan‘. is by Christopher Busby and published in Genetics December 1, 2016 vol. 204 no. 4 1627-1629; DOI: 10.1534/genetics.116.195339. The letter is not open access, but the text can be found at the back of the Euratom Justification Campaign templates.

More information at www.greenaudit.org.

In terms of entertainment value, the Environmental Protection Agency had it all last week.

The agency held a four-day-long gathering of scientists aimed at the rather dry task of analyzing numerous research studies connected to cancer concerns swirling around a chemical called glyphosate.

Glyphosate is the world’s most widely used herbicide and is the key ingredient in Monsanto Co.’s Roundup brand. But along with the slicing and dicing of data came razor sharp debate, questions about chemical industry influence over regulators, and even a bit of theater as one group of environmental activists interrupted proceedings to break out in song. Their refrain? “Monsanto is the Devil. No Glyphosate.”

The meetings brought together a roster of scientists with expertise in epidemiology, toxicology and related expertise to advise the EPA on whether or not the agency has properly determined that the weight of evidence indicates glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic“ to humans.

The determination runs counter to the classification made in March 2015 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization. IARC said a review of scientific research shows that glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen“.

A crucial decision- for many reasons

The EPA’s determination is crucial on many fronts:

• Monsanto is currently defending itself against more than three dozen lawsuits claiming glyphosate-based Roundup gave people non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), a type of blood cancer;
• both the EPA and the European Union are assessing re-registrations of glyphosate to determine if limits should be placed on the chemical;
• and Monsanto is attempting a $66 billion merger with German-based Bayer.

But while the EPA may have hoped for resounding support from the Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) it assembled, from the outset of the meetings on Tuesday, concerns were raised by some of the experts about the quality of the EPA’s analysis.

Some scientists were concerned that the EPA was violating its own guidelines in discounting data from various studies that show positive associations between glyphosate and cancer. Several of the SAP members questioned why the EPA excluded some data that showed statistical significance, and wrote off some of the positive findings to mere chance.

Monique Perron, a scientist in the Health Effects Division of EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, explained that “professional judgment” played a role in looking at the “weight of evidence” from various studies. The EPA looked at both published studies as well as unpublished studies conducted by industry players like Monsanto, according to Perron. The IARC review focused on published, peer-reviewed research.

The public comments portion of the agenda opened with an interesting twist as a representative from the Italy-based European Food Safety Authority and one from the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) took to the microphones to weigh in on their perceptions of glyphosate’s safety. Both said their own assessments were largely in line with the EPA view, that glyphosate is not a cause of cancer.

The BfR, which is part of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Germany, advised EFSA and drafted the report that EFSA issued in November 2015 that declared glyphosate was “unlikely to be carcinogenic.” That report has been the subject of some controversy because the BfR relied on the advice of the Glyphosate Task Force, the consortium of chemical companies that includes Monsanto, when it did its evaluation.

The EPA did not invite either BfR or EFSA to travel to the United States to deliver the support for glyphosate safety, according to Steven Knott, the EPA official who oversaw the meeting logistics. The foreign scientists simply asked for the opportunity to appear, he said. Who invited them and/or arranged for their travel raised some eyebrows among onlookers.

Industry presenters swamp the timetable

Another element of the meetings that did more than raise a few eyebrows was the devotion of time given to industry presenters supportive of glyphosate versus representatives from non-profits or others who urged regulators to rein in use of glyphosate.

Monsanto representatives were granted roughly 3½ hours on Wednesday to make the case for glyphosate safety, and several other pro-glyphosate industry players were granted additional time as well.

In comparison, most critics of glyphosate had comment periods that ranged from 5-15 minutes. Knott said speaking allotments were assigned based on how much time commentators asked for, but some glyphosate opponents said they were told they could not have more than a few minutes.

Monsanto used its time to present a defense of glyphosate’s value to agriculture, to offer detailed explanations for why the IARC analysis was flawed, and to explain why the company believes a host of data points found in various studies should be discounted, and/or are not relevant.

Company representatives also argued that glyphosate residues found in numerous urine tests were nothing to worry about, and actually helped show that the chemical does not bio-accumulate in the human body. They also said reports of glyphosate residues found in human breast milk were “implausible”.

Groups concerned about glyphosate argued to the panel that the EPA was favoring industry studies over published literature, which is generally considered more authoritative, and was using flimsy protocols to shrug off statistical significance found in several studies.

Many of the participants from both sides of the debate spoke of a need for research on the safety of formulated products that have glyphosate as the active ingredient. The EPA evaluates only glyphosate and not the actual formulation in which it is applied, even though the formulations are increasingly being feared to be more potentially dangerous to human health than the active ingredient alone.

World expert epidemiologist Peter Infante excluded for ‘bias’

One particularly interesting story line that played out this week was the saga of Dr. , a nationally recognized epidemiologist who initially was invited and confirmed by EPA as one of the agency’s scientific advisory panel members for the glyphosate meetings.

The meetings were slated for Oct. 18-21 but CropLife America, which represents the interests of Monsanto and other agribusinesses, sent a letter to the EPA on Oct. 12 calling for Infante to be completely disqualified, saying he had “patent bias”.

Infante appeared to have impeccable credentials, having spent decades working for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health specializing in the determination of cancer risks associated with toxic substances. But CropLife insisted Infante be thrown off the panel. One of its reasons: Infante would give more weight to independent research than the industry’s own research.

The EPA did as the industry asked, but the ousting did not sit well with Infante, who had spent long hours studying the data EPA sent the panel members in advance. In part to defend his reputation, and also to offer his analysis, a somewhat disgruntled Infante showed up at the EPA meetings anyway, telling the SAP members there is “impressive evidence” of glyphosate ties to NHL that should not be ignored.

“There is clearly the evidence for the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma related to glyphosate exposure”, Infante said in an interview after he addressed the panel. “Is it conclusive? No, I don’t think so. But I think that EPA is concluding that there is no evidence. And that’s exactly wrong, according to their own criteria.” There is enough data to classify glyphosate as having “limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans”, Infante said.

And even some light relief

By the time the singing broke out, the room seemed ready for the distraction. The Rev. Billy Talen, who leads a group of self-proclaimed ‘earth-loving urban activists’ that frequently use performance as protest, took his turn at the microphone. Talen told the SAP members of his group’s concern about glyphosate applications made on playgrounds around the country and the danger this could pose to children.

“We’re very aware of the cancers that come from, we believe, from glyphosates”, he told the group.

Shortly after, Talen was warned his five minutes were up, and he and a small number of his followers started singing: “Monsanto is the devil. No glyphosate. Hey.”

Never a dull moment in this debate.

 

---

 

Carey Gillam is Research Director for US Right to Know, a non-profit consumer education group. Follow Carey on Twitter @careygillam.

This article was originally published on Huffington Post.

 

If you build a complex machine which has the power to kill its builders, there should be a way to shut it down, to pull the plug.

In Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey the pilot had to physically crawl into the works of the ship’s computer HAL and pull out the memory chips when it killed all the crew.

When the Euratom Basic Safety Standards Directive (BSS) was put together in 1996, the European Parliament added a Suicide Clause.

If any new important scientific information emerged that the levels of exposure permitted by the Directive were wrong, that it was killing people, the whole process had to stop until a new Justification – a positive appraisal of the benefits of the nuclear industry against its public health impacts – was done.

I wrote about this recently in two articles on The Ecologist: ‘No to Bradwell’s ‘secret’ radioactive discharges to the sea’; and ‘Stopping Europe’s nuclear industry in its tracks: here’s how‘.

Justification is a fundamental requirement in permitting radiation exposures. It is based on the Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Although this is outmoded and arguably unethical (Who gets the cost? Who gets the benefit? Not the same people) it is the way things are really done nowadays.

And in some cases this is inevitable (e.g. kidney dialysis vs. expensive terminal cancer treatment). Resources are allocated and political decisions made on the basis of quasi-economic arguments.

How much harm does 1 milliSievert of radiation cause?

The current dose limit for radiation exposures is 1mSv. A useful page of the USA BEIR VII report version shows what it is currently believed this does.

It says 1mSv causes a cancer in one person in 10,000 exposed. Let’s see an example: in the population of Paris (10.5 million) permitted exposures would result in 1,050 extra cancers. About 630 would die. These cancers are justified on the basis that the advantages gained to France by the practice (nuclear energy, atom bombs, etc.) balance the harm. Society believes this is an acceptable equation.

Same in London: 8.5 million population and 850 cancer diagnoses, 510 deaths. I bet you didn’t know this. Would you have agreed? Yet it is there as if you had. It is the law!

So in Paris, capital of a country with contamination from many nuclear plants, radiation at the maximum permitted level would cause a number of legally licensed radiation deaths far exceeding anything terrorists have achieved with their machine guns and bombs.

This is the current official position. The reality is far worse. On December 1st, I published a letter which makes this clear. It appeared in the prestigious American peer-review scientific journal Genetics and was written in response to an earlier paper on the effects of radiation by Bertrand Jordan of the French Centre for Scientific Research in Marseilles.

Jordan’s article in a ‘Perspectives’ review ‘Marking the past – mapping the future’ was about how the public were unreasonably frightened of radiation because science had shown, through the studies of the survivors of Hiroshima: that low doses of radiation were pretty harmless; that you needed very high doses before you increased your chances of cancer; and as for genetic damage, that there was no evidence that radiation caused any effects whatever in humans. The current risk model for heritable effects is based on mice.

The scientific process at work …

Jordan’s article irritated me. Last summer I spent three weeks in the High Court submitting evidence about all this. A significant part of the information which emerged was that the Japanese A-Bomb studies that Jordan believed in and was peddling as the truth, were massively flawed and probably dishonestly manipulated.

I wrote to the overall editor of the Journal and pointed some of this out. To my delight and astonishment, he took me seriously and suggested I provide an account of this which he would send to three expert reviewers. If they passed it, he would publish it and give Jordan space to reply.

This is how science should work, but I have to say, it is rarely how science does work in this area of radiation. In 2015 I wrote to the editor of The Lancet about a disgraceful article on the issue of the A-Bomb studies which they published in their 60th anniversary of Hiroshima issue.

I pointed out that the authors of that travesty of the truth included Richard Wakeford, ex-nuclear industry Rottweiler. I asked to be provided some space to make the points about the failure of the A-Bomb studies. The Lancet refused.

I then wrote a letter and submitted it. Instead of sending it for review, they sent it to the authors of the article! Who (naturally) said there was no merit in what I was saying. The Lancet then threw it out.

In 2016, Alexey Yablokov, Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, Alex Rosen and I sent a letter about the failure of the current risk model to the editor of The Lancet, recorded delivery, sent from Geneva by the Independent WHO. There was no reply from The Lancet. This is utterly disgraceful, and the editors who made those decisions should be sacked and shamed.

My Genetics letter is now out there, and it is the trigger, or one of the triggers, for invoking the Suicide Clause of the Euratom 96/29 and 2013/59 Basic Safety Standards Directives and thus shutting down all nuclear energy. At its core is the evidence that the entire basis of the current radiation risk model is false and dishonest.

Piltdown Man has nothing on the ‘Lifespan Study’ scientific fraud

Most people, including Jordan, believed (and he stated in his article) that the Japanese A-Bomb study consisted of looking for cancer and heritable effects in groups of people who were exposed to radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the bombs exploded compared with groups who were not in the city but came in later.

So you have three exposed groups, near the bomb, further away and far away and one control group: not there when the bombs exploded. That might be a reasonable epidemiological study. And that is how the Lifespan Study (LSS) started in 1952.

But we discovered by some forensic digging into the annual reports of the outfit, that in 1973, when the early cancer effects began to be assembled, the US / Japanese Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) organisation which superseded the original US / Japanese Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) changed the study protocols in mid study.

Why? Because it emerged (and they wrote this in their 1973 report) that the Not-In-City control group were ‘too healthy’, making the health of those who were exposed look bad (which is exactly what it was). In other words, the cancer rates in the exposed group were too high for their liking.

So they decided to look only at those groups who were exposed and to assume that their cancer rates were linearly correlated with their doses. These doses were not measured, but were calculated mathematically from studies carried out with A-Bomb experiments in the Nevada desert.

This is how the cancer coefficients on which the current risk model are based were created! But they are wildly incorrect.

How do we know? Well, we know from the effects on the leukemia children at Sellafield and all the other nuclear sites, the effects on Thyroid Cancer at Fukushima, the cancer effects in Northern Sweden seen in the study by Martin Tondel, the effects seen in all the Chernobyl-affected countries of Europe reviewed by Alexey Yablokov and many other peer-reviewed studies published in the last 20 years.

‘The dose is too low’ – a familiar but now defunct refrain

But whenever these are discussed by government committees and nuclear industry apologists, it always comes back to the A-Bomb studies, and the arguments of Jordan, Wakeford and others like them. We are told to deny what we see because the dose is too low.

The ‘dose is too low’ means that it is too low on the basis of the A-Bomb studies. But if the A-Bomb studies are wrong, then everything fits. This is their Queen on the chessboard and it is taken – captured in the High Court in London.

The LSS dose group populations, whatever their assumed doses, all lived on the contaminated sites of the towns for many years after the bomb. This contamination was derived from the Uranium and Plutonium in the bomb casing and fissile material. My description is based on Expert and Disclosed evidence presented by Prof. Shoji Sawada and Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake in the Test Veteran case.

The up-draught from the rising fireball at Hiroshima and Nagasaki sucked in moist maritime air which cooled with altitude and condensed on the 95% un-fissioned Uranium nano-particles created in the plasma. This produced ‘black rain’ over an area which included all of the dose groups used for the LSS study where dose was calculated by distance from the hypocentre.

The Uranium was measured later in the contaminated areas. But the LSS studies denied the existence of any fallout.

I have been working on this A-Bomb study issue since 2010 in connection with various court cases in the USA. The obvious way to see the real effects of the exposures, external and internal is to compare the cancer rates of the LSS groups with cancer in the national population or some other unexposed control group.

I used all-Japan data to show that the LSS data were wrong, but never got round to finishing this work, which is tedious and costly in time and effort and no one would pay for it. But a Japanese epidemiologist, Tomoyuki Wanatabe and colleagues did something similar in 2008.

Highest cancer rate / unit dose found in the lowest radiation exposure group

They employed the adjacent Okayama prefecture as control and compared age and sex specific cancer rates between 1971 and 1990. They found that there were significantly greater levels of cancer in all the exposed groups – including the LSS lowest dose controls compared with the Okayama control group, but also (to a lesser extent) when compared with an all-Hiroshima control group.

When compared with Okayama, the highest cancer effect per unit dose was seen in the lowest dose LSS group, where there was a 33% excess risk of all cancer in men at external doses estimated at 0-5mSv. The authors write: “the contribution of residual radiation, ignored in LSS is suggested to be fairly high.”

We can make a rough assessment of how high. As calculated by the current risk model, this dose group 0-5mSv would not have received more than 1mSv from the internal black rain Uranium particles, and probably less. So being very conservative, let’s assume that it is 1mSv.

Then that means that instead of the 1 cancer per 100,000 per 1mSv, we have a 33% increase on the background rate of about 450 cancers from other causes, which is 148 cancers.

This number, 148 times more than ‘official’ estimates, is the minimum error that Wanatabe’s research defines in the LSS study. The real number is higher because the true internal dose (as calculated by the current model) is lower.

Incidentally, you may wonder why low doses of radiation had a more powerful effect than higher doses, per unit of radiation. Here is my explanation. Cancer arises when the DNA in cells is damaged, but the cells are not killed. Higher radiation doses are more likely to kill cells outright. So the lower doses are disproportionately carcinogenic.

Radiation is most definitely not good for you!

By the way, the internal dose to England and Wales from global weapons fallout that came down with the rain in the period 1959-63 was about 1mSv according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR.

This caused an increase in infant mortality at the time of about 5%, and 20 years later the cancer rate had increased in real terms (age standardised) by about 35% – which fits pretty well with the Wanatabe 2008 finding.

It is these results and others in similar populations that are the basis of the risk model of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) which I helped develop in 2003 and by now (in the ECRR 2010 publication) has been shown to be pretty accurate if you want to know the outcome of any exposure.

So this realisation and evidence that the LSS dishonestly discarded its control group when it looked like there would a result, feeds through to the ‘justification’ issue. There is now no defence. Of course they will wriggle and wriggle, telling us that radiation is good for you, Sellafield leukemias are caused by population mixing, and such such nonsense).

In fact Jordan replied to my letter in very much those terms. He wriggled and wriggled and (predictably) referred to how radiation might be good for you. But no one said we were wrong. No one said that they didn’t discard the control group. And that means that no one can any more say the dose is too low. There is no referent.

The silent massacre

We are taking the war to the regulators and Euratom legislators now. No one can justify a regime where the number of deaths in Paris from a dose of 1 mSv become not 1,000, but 93,000. That is a massacre. And legally this is not a single exposure but can occur every year!

And it has been a silent global massacre.

You all have friends and family that have died from cancer. About one in four of those, maybe more, was due to the radiation in the weapons fallout in the 1960s. Unless they lived near Hinkley Point, Trawsfynydd, Bradwell, Sellafield or some other nuclear site or contaminated estuary which added its own further excess risk.

The death yield from Chernobyl has been epic, as Yablokov and others have shown. Sellafield discharges to the Irish Sea are the cause of the 10-fold excess child leukemia at Seascale, as everyone always thought, but which the government’s tame committees can’t explain because the basis of the dose being too low.

They are also the cause of the childhood cancer increases on the coast of Wales – which the Wales Cancer Intelligence (Yes!) Unit deny though fixing the numbers and environmental journalist George Monbiot believes because he knows no better. And the adult cancer increases in Wales also.

All these manifestations of radiation toxicity are denied on the basis of what forensic research now shows is a totally dishonest and manipulated study in Japan, paid for (and no doubt orchestrated by) the United States so as to permit bomb development. And as for Fukushima, watch this space. The thyroid cancers have already appeared.

Anyway, I want to thank the brave American Genetics Society editors, for allowing me to say this in their prestigious journal.

Let’s invoke the Suicide Clause and pull the plug on the monster. It’s simple.

Action: Submit your own claim for rejustification: UK; Ireland; all other EU countries.

The letter: ‘Letter to the Editor on ‘The Hiroshima/Nagasaki Survivor Studies: Discrepancies Between Results and General Perception’ by Bertrand R. Jordan‘. is by Christopher Busby and published in Genetics December 1, 2016 vol. 204 no. 4 1627-1629; DOI: 10.1534/genetics.116.195339. The letter is not open access, but the text can be found at the back of the Euratom Justification Campaign templates.

More information at www.greenaudit.org.

In terms of entertainment value, the Environmental Protection Agency had it all last week.

The agency held a four-day-long gathering of scientists aimed at the rather dry task of analyzing numerous research studies connected to cancer concerns swirling around a chemical called glyphosate.

Glyphosate is the world’s most widely used herbicide and is the key ingredient in Monsanto Co.’s Roundup brand. But along with the slicing and dicing of data came razor sharp debate, questions about chemical industry influence over regulators, and even a bit of theater as one group of environmental activists interrupted proceedings to break out in song. Their refrain? “Monsanto is the Devil. No Glyphosate.”

The meetings brought together a roster of scientists with expertise in epidemiology, toxicology and related expertise to advise the EPA on whether or not the agency has properly determined that the weight of evidence indicates glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic“ to humans.

The determination runs counter to the classification made in March 2015 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization. IARC said a review of scientific research shows that glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen“.

A crucial decision- for many reasons

The EPA’s determination is crucial on many fronts:

• Monsanto is currently defending itself against more than three dozen lawsuits claiming glyphosate-based Roundup gave people non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), a type of blood cancer;
• both the EPA and the European Union are assessing re-registrations of glyphosate to determine if limits should be placed on the chemical;
• and Monsanto is attempting a $66 billion merger with German-based Bayer.

But while the EPA may have hoped for resounding support from the Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) it assembled, from the outset of the meetings on Tuesday, concerns were raised by some of the experts about the quality of the EPA’s analysis.

Some scientists were concerned that the EPA was violating its own guidelines in discounting data from various studies that show positive associations between glyphosate and cancer. Several of the SAP members questioned why the EPA excluded some data that showed statistical significance, and wrote off some of the positive findings to mere chance.

Monique Perron, a scientist in the Health Effects Division of EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, explained that “professional judgment” played a role in looking at the “weight of evidence” from various studies. The EPA looked at both published studies as well as unpublished studies conducted by industry players like Monsanto, according to Perron. The IARC review focused on published, peer-reviewed research.

The public comments portion of the agenda opened with an interesting twist as a representative from the Italy-based European Food Safety Authority and one from the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) took to the microphones to weigh in on their perceptions of glyphosate’s safety. Both said their own assessments were largely in line with the EPA view, that glyphosate is not a cause of cancer.

The BfR, which is part of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Germany, advised EFSA and drafted the report that EFSA issued in November 2015 that declared glyphosate was “unlikely to be carcinogenic.” That report has been the subject of some controversy because the BfR relied on the advice of the Glyphosate Task Force, the consortium of chemical companies that includes Monsanto, when it did its evaluation.

The EPA did not invite either BfR or EFSA to travel to the United States to deliver the support for glyphosate safety, according to Steven Knott, the EPA official who oversaw the meeting logistics. The foreign scientists simply asked for the opportunity to appear, he said. Who invited them and/or arranged for their travel raised some eyebrows among onlookers.

Industry presenters swamp the timetable

Another element of the meetings that did more than raise a few eyebrows was the devotion of time given to industry presenters supportive of glyphosate versus representatives from non-profits or others who urged regulators to rein in use of glyphosate.

Monsanto representatives were granted roughly 3½ hours on Wednesday to make the case for glyphosate safety, and several other pro-glyphosate industry players were granted additional time as well.

In comparison, most critics of glyphosate had comment periods that ranged from 5-15 minutes. Knott said speaking allotments were assigned based on how much time commentators asked for, but some glyphosate opponents said they were told they could not have more than a few minutes.

Monsanto used its time to present a defense of glyphosate’s value to agriculture, to offer detailed explanations for why the IARC analysis was flawed, and to explain why the company believes a host of data points found in various studies should be discounted, and/or are not relevant.

Company representatives also argued that glyphosate residues found in numerous urine tests were nothing to worry about, and actually helped show that the chemical does not bio-accumulate in the human body. They also said reports of glyphosate residues found in human breast milk were “implausible”.

Groups concerned about glyphosate argued to the panel that the EPA was favoring industry studies over published literature, which is generally considered more authoritative, and was using flimsy protocols to shrug off statistical significance found in several studies.

Many of the participants from both sides of the debate spoke of a need for research on the safety of formulated products that have glyphosate as the active ingredient. The EPA evaluates only glyphosate and not the actual formulation in which it is applied, even though the formulations are increasingly being feared to be more potentially dangerous to human health than the active ingredient alone.

World expert epidemiologist Peter Infante excluded for ‘bias’

One particularly interesting story line that played out this week was the saga of Dr. , a nationally recognized epidemiologist who initially was invited and confirmed by EPA as one of the agency’s scientific advisory panel members for the glyphosate meetings.

The meetings were slated for Oct. 18-21 but CropLife America, which represents the interests of Monsanto and other agribusinesses, sent a letter to the EPA on Oct. 12 calling for Infante to be completely disqualified, saying he had “patent bias”.

Infante appeared to have impeccable credentials, having spent decades working for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health specializing in the determination of cancer risks associated with toxic substances. But CropLife insisted Infante be thrown off the panel. One of its reasons: Infante would give more weight to independent research than the industry’s own research.

The EPA did as the industry asked, but the ousting did not sit well with Infante, who had spent long hours studying the data EPA sent the panel members in advance. In part to defend his reputation, and also to offer his analysis, a somewhat disgruntled Infante showed up at the EPA meetings anyway, telling the SAP members there is “impressive evidence” of glyphosate ties to NHL that should not be ignored.

“There is clearly the evidence for the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma related to glyphosate exposure”, Infante said in an interview after he addressed the panel. “Is it conclusive? No, I don’t think so. But I think that EPA is concluding that there is no evidence. And that’s exactly wrong, according to their own criteria.” There is enough data to classify glyphosate as having “limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans”, Infante said.

And even some light relief

By the time the singing broke out, the room seemed ready for the distraction. The Rev. Billy Talen, who leads a group of self-proclaimed ‘earth-loving urban activists’ that frequently use performance as protest, took his turn at the microphone. Talen told the SAP members of his group’s concern about glyphosate applications made on playgrounds around the country and the danger this could pose to children.

“We’re very aware of the cancers that come from, we believe, from glyphosates”, he told the group.

Shortly after, Talen was warned his five minutes were up, and he and a small number of his followers started singing: “Monsanto is the devil. No glyphosate. Hey.”

Never a dull moment in this debate.

 

---

 

Carey Gillam is Research Director for US Right to Know, a non-profit consumer education group. Follow Carey on Twitter @careygillam.

This article was originally published on Huffington Post.