The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has been accused of excluding from its glyphosate assessment a key study only because of a negative comment by a former US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) official.

The former US EPA official, Jess Rowland, is under investigation in a US court case brought by cancer sufferers, who believe that exposure to Roundup triggered their disease. Based on internal Monsanto documents disclosed in the lawsuit, Rowland is accused of colluding with Monsanto to defend glyphosate’s health record.

The accusation against EFSA was made by the toxicologist Dr Peter Clausing, representing Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Germany, at a scientific conference on glyphosate’s health risks, held in the EU Parliament on 10 May. The conference was hosted by the Czech Socialist MEP Pavel Poc. 

Dr Clausing said that he had met the head of EFSA’s pesticides unit, Jose Tarazona, the previous week. They had discussed a key study (Kumar 2001) showing that glyphosate caused malignant lymphoma in mice.

Alleged ‘viral infections’ in study animals

Dr Clausing said that Dr Tarazona was not able able to give any other concrete reasons why the study was excluded from EFSA’s assessment than that a US EPA observer had said the US EPA had not accepted it due to viral infections in the animals.

According to a report in EU Food Policy [1], EFSA and PAN agree that the US EPA observer was Jess Rowland, who made the remark about infections during a teleconference about glyphosate organised by EFSA in 2015.

However, EFSA told EU Food Policy that “it and member states had already picked up on weaknesses with the study and that the majority of member states had agreed there was a high background of malignant lymphomas in the mice used for the study.”

The EU Food Policy article goes on to quote Dr Tarazona as saying that Rowland informed EFSA “about potential flaws in the Kumar study (2001) related to viral infections that could influence survival as well as tumour incidence.”

Dr Tarazona told EU Food Policy that EFSA didn’t just take Rowland’s word for it: “After the teleconference, EFSA experts checked the Kumar (2001) study themselves and found additional indications that confirmed deficiencies in the health status of animals, which supported the plausibility of a viral infection.”

Dr Tarazona told EU Food Policy that Dr Clausing’s remarks “give rise to concerns about the integrity of EFSA’s glyphosate assessment”, but that this is “not borne out by the facts”.

Where’s the evidence for the alleged ‘viral infections’?

So what were these “additional indications that confirmed deficiencies in the health status of animals, which supported the plausibility of a viral infection”? The EFSA has had plenty of chances to describe them. 

First, in its ‘Conclusion on the peer review of the pesticide risk assessment of the active substance glyphosate‘, published in 2015, EFSA declared the Kumar study as “not acceptable due to viral infections that could influence survival as well as tumour incidence – especially lymphomas.”

And second, in a peer-reviewed paper of the same year explaining why EFSA had come to a different conclusion on glyphosate’s carcinogenicity from the World Health Organisation’s cancer agency IARC (which classed it as a probable carcinogen), Dr Tarazona and his co-authors from EFSA and Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) say that the Kumar study “was excluded due to a likely viral infection in the experimental population.”

But in neither document does EFSA give any supporting evidence for viral infections.

And in neither document does EFSA describe any “additional indications that confirmed deficiencies in the health status of animals, which supported the plausibility of a viral infection”, such as Tarazona claimed were present in the Kumar study.

But there is evidence the laboratory animals were healthy

In fact there is an irrefutable (by the EU authorities, at least) source that states that there is no evidence whatsoever that the animals in this experiment suffered from a viral infection or that their health was deficient as a result of such an infection.

That source is none other than the CLH (harmonised classification and labelling) report on glyphosate, based on industry data and submitted by the German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA) to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). The CLH report states:

“During a teleconference (TC 117) on carcinogenicity of glyphosate hold [sic.] by EFSA … it was mentioned by an US EPA observer that the Kumar (2001, ASB2012-11491) study had been excluded from US EPA evaluation due to the occurrence of viral infection that could influence survival as well as tumour incidences, especially those of lymphomas. However, in the study report itself, there was no evidence of health deterioration due to suspected viral infection and, thus, the actual basis of EPA’s decision is not known.” [Page 72.]

Nevertheless, ECHA continued to use the narrative of a virus infection in spite of its admission that there was no evidence for such an infection. In its Opinion, ECHA cautions against “a possible role of oncogenic viruses” – which it apparently deemed as sufficient reason to exclude this important study from the overall assessment. 

Unsurprisingly, having disposed of Kumar using an apparently evidence-free argument, ECHA followed EFSA in concluding that glyphosate is not carcinogenic.

Dr Tarazona’s identification of the “US EPA observer” as Jess Rowland raises questions about the influence on the EFSA glyphosate assessment exercised by this man – who allegedly boasted to a Monsanto executive that he deserved a medal if he could kill another agency’s investigation into the chemical’s health risks.

‘Viral infection’ claim first shows up in Monsanto-supported paper

It seems that Rowland himself did not come up with the narrative of the ‘viral infection’. It first appeared in a Monsanto- and Glyphosate Task Force-supported review, which concluded that glyphosate was non-carcinogenic.

The review was co-authored by Monsanto employee David Saltmiras and published in the journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology, which has industry ties. However, even this review introduces the idea of a viral infection in tentative language, referring to a “possible viral infection” that “may have confounded interpretation of results”.

EFSA goes much further than this Monsanto-linked paper in its unqualified claim that the Kumar study was “not acceptable due to viral infections”.

Malignant lymphoma-prone mice?

But what about the other supposed weakness in the Kumar study, the “high background of malignant lymphomas in the mice used for the study” that EFSA mentioned to EU Food Policy?

That argument doesn’t stand up either, according to Dr Clausing. He told GMWatch that while a good number of control mice did get malignant lymphomas, the glyphosate-treated mice had a statistically significant increase in malignant lymphomas, in a clearly dose-dependent fashion.

Moreover, this statistically significant increase in malignant lymphoma was well above the range of historical control data (the ‘background’ incidence referred to by EFSA) – supporting the observation of a glyphosate-induced carcinogenicity. 

Dr Clausing said that these were valid historical control data as measured by OECD standards. This was important because there are a number of examples where EFSA used invalid historical control data to dismiss significant findings of carcinogenicity. 

GMWatch believes that for EFSA to claim that these increases were due to chance and not to glyphosate is to turn its back on the scientific method.

The study that had to be killed

Dr Clausing believes that the Kumar study, together with two other studies showing the same effect, presents difficult-to-refute evidence of glyphosate’s carcinogenicity.

Its particular significance within EFSA’s assessment is that the reasons used by EFSA to dismiss other studies showing glyphosate is carcinogenic do not apply to the Kumar study and a second study by Wood et al, (2009). In both studies the increase in malignant lymphoma in glyphosate-treated animals was both dose-dependent and significant, at doses that could not be dismissed as only a ‘high-dose phenomenon’.

In reality the Kumar study is far from being an outlier. Before EFSA produced its assessment, the German authority BfR, under pressure from the IARC verdict, had demonstrated statistically significant increases in cancer in seven rodent carcinogenicity studies with glyphosate.

But EFSA denied these results, using what Dr Clausing considers spurious arguments, and insisted that there was only one mouse study – Kumar – with statistical significance.

According to the European legislation, evidence for carcinogenicity in at least two separate studies is “sufficient evidence” to label a compound as carcinogenic (category 1B). That would mean an automatic ban. Thus in Dr Clausing’s view, the Kumar study “presented an obstacle” to EFSA’s apparent intention to declare glyphosate as non-carcinogenic:

“That’s why the exclusion of this particular study from further consideration was so important.”

Dr Clausing is not the only authority to believe that the Kumar study was particularly problematic for those who wish to argue that glyphosate is non-carcinogenic.

The BfR remarked in its assessment of glyphosate that this unpublished industry study “was apparently not available to IARC” – “otherwise, it would have been certainly used as the first place argument for carcinogenicity of glyphosate.” [Page 9.]

Flawed study included by EFSA

Dr Clausing argued in his presentation to the EU Parliament that the Kumar 2001 study should have been included by EFSA in its assessment and that a study by Atkinson (1993), which found no carcinogenic effect of glyphosate, should have been excluded.

The latter study was invalid, he explained, because only animals with signs of malignant lymphoma that were visible to the naked eye were examined more closely – a recipe for missing numerous cases. This flawed study was used as additional ‘proof’ that glyphosate did not cause malignant lymphoma.

If EFSA had included Kumar and excluded Atkinson, it would not have concluded that glyphosate was not carcinogenic, Dr Clausing told the meeting.

Did Rowlands mislead EFSA on glyphosate?

In light of Jess Rowland’s role in the assessment of carcinogenicity of glyphosate in the US as reflected by the internal Monsanto documents, there are serious concerns that he might have influenced the decision by providing wrong information.

Yet EFSA is not an ‘innocent victim’ in this case. It apparently failed to properly scrutinize Rowland’s claim.

To summarize, the only publicly available explanation for EFSA’s dismissal of the Kumar study due to a viral infection is Rowland’s claim – yet there is no factual evidence whatsoever to back up the claim.

Dr Clausing said he has examined the publicly available documents as well as the raw data of the Kumar study, which was made available to him by EFSA. He said:

“Scrutinizing all these documents did not provide any other evidence than the Rowland intervention. As a result, I have doubts about the integrity of EFSA’s assessment of glyphosate. Those doubts have been sown by EFSA itself.”

Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods.

This article was originally published here on GMWatch.

Notes

1. EU Food Policy. EFSA refutes claims it was improperly influenced on glyphosate. 15 May 2017. Subscription only (eufoodpolicy.com); no direct link.

Last month, Survival International was honored to help organize worldwide demonstrations led by Guarani tribal leader and activist Ladio Veron.

We marshalled supporters at the Brazilian embassy in London for a vocal show of support for the Guarani, broadcast live over social media (see video below).

There were further protests in São Paulo, San Francisco, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona and Milan. We also handed letters of protest from Survival and the Guarani people themselves, in to representatives of Brazil’s government.

Ladio stood defiant in a tribal headdress and face paint. Though London on an April morning was rather colder than what he was used to in central Brazil, he nevertheless spoke passionately – both to the supporters who were there to see him, and to the embassy official who received his letter.

As the son of the murdered tribal leader Marcos Veron, Ladio has an understandable emotional investment in his people’s struggle. All of the Guarani feel a profound stake in it. The theft of their ancestral land by ranchers and agribusiness has been a trauma endured over decades.

They face violent harassment by gunmen when they try to reoccupy tiny patches of the land, most of which has been deforested and turned into plantations. Their water is polluted with pesticides, and they are partitioned off from the land by wire fencing. Some communities are living in makeshift camps on roadsides.

Paper laws, paper promises

The fact that the Guarani have to risk their very lives for their land is both tragic and baffling. It is rightfully theirs under both Brazilian and international law.

The fact that cases are on the books over Guarani land tenure in both Mato Grosso do Sul state, and the federal capital of Brasilia, is a tacit admission from the Brazilian establishment that the tribe at least has a claim.

It’s their land, yet they have been trapped in legal hell for decades, waiting for full demarcation and the proper enforcement of their rights.

Mato Grosso do Sul itself is so dominated by agribusiness that it is almost impossible for the Guarani to appeal to politicians and other authorities there, as they are emphatically on the side of the ranchers. Men like Jose Teixiera serve as state deputies while owning large ranches, and happily partner with big corporations profiting from sugarcane produced on Guarani land.

This footage from 2016 shows heavily-armed Brazilian police evicting a small group of Guarani from their land. The tribespeople are unarmed, they are peaceful – they make their case in strong words but present no threat whatsoever. Yet around 100 men were sent to clear them off a scrap of land so that their village could be bulldozed.

Exploited, low wage labourers on their own land

Incidents such as this clearly illustrate the situation. The Guarani have very few allies in Brazil – certainly not among the country’s rulers. They are forced to look elsewhere to bring global attention to their plight, and to exert pressure on the people who have the authority to transform their situation.

Survival International has been campaigning in partnership with the Guarani for over 30 years. The Guarani are the most populous indigenous people of this part of central Brazil, and they are slowly being destroyed.

In pursuit of profit, the over-mighty ruralista lobby has subjected them to poverty, violence, disease and destitution. Some live and work in towns and cities in Mato Grosso do Sul state, or further afield. Many more have no option but to work as wage laborers on the vast sugar cane plantations and cattle ranches, forced to scratch out a living in a society created on their own land without their consent which offers them next to nothing.

According to some studies, the tribe suffers the highest suicide rate in the world, a problem which is especially acute among younger people.

With international pressure, the Guarani can assert their legal rights

There is hope, however. International pressure has been proven to be effective in holding Brazil’s leaders to account and empowering indigenous people through recognition of their land rights.

In 1992 for example, after years of campaigning, the government relented and agreed to create the largest forested indigenous territory in the world: the Yanomami indigenous territory in the northern Amazon. It is an area the size of Switzerland that is now home to over 20,000 tribal people.

In 2014, concerted campaigning by Survival supporters pushed Brazilian authorities to carry out an unprecedented crackdown on illegal logging, drastically improving the situation facing the Awá people from the Amazon’s eastern fringe.

And last year, similar pressure pushed the Minister of Justice to sign a decree creating a protected territory for the hard-pressed Kawahiva people, a small uncontacted tribe and one of the most vulnerable peoples on the planet.

We’re devoted to giving tribal peoples a platform to speak to the world. As Ladio himself said: “We will resist at any price. All we have left to lose is our lives.”

His powerful speech at the Brazilian embassy, and the sight of him moved to tears as he addressed an embassy official were heartening for everyone who turned out in solidarity with his people.

More importantly, this sort of direct action could help to tip the balance in the Guarani’s favor. There is always hope.

Lewis Evans is an author and a campaigner at Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights.

As the Conservative Manifesto portends a planning ‘free for all’ for shale gas, Talk Fracking launches its new report demonstrating the flaws in the Government’s case on fracking and climate change.

The Government’s case – detailed in the Mackay-Stone report – has been widely criticized in the past.

Research published over the last 18 months, outlined in Talk Fracking’s new report, questions the accuracy of the data used in the Mackay-Stone report. And as a result of this new information Whitehall’s climate case has arguably collapsed.

The issue here is about science and uncertainty. So first, What is ‘science’? It is a process for how we find, measure and then evaluate the real world in order to identify how it works.

The problem is, particularly for contentious debates in the media and politics, that we seldom hear about the degree of confidence attached to scientific findings, or the uncertainties that surround them. Rarely is the method by which those results were produced ever discussed.

In such an environment it is easy to use ‘results’ outside the context in which they were formed, extrpolating them to novel circumstances in a way that is scientifically invalid.

When we hear the fracking industry and academics argue over leakage figures, we might presume the issue is whether or not one or other set of figures are correct. In fact, the issue here is the method used to make those measurements, and whether or not that system of measurement produces a realistic result.

Fracking and Whitehall’s energy policy

The Government in Whitehall (distinct from those in Edinburgh or Cardiff, who currently have moratoriums in place on shale gas development) has promoted fracking as a means to meet climate change obligations.

As Energy Secretary Ed Davey claimed in 2013, shale gas is a “bridge“ to a low carbon economy. That claim rests on the results of one report, written by the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s (DECC) Chief Scientist, David Mackay, and the economist, Timothy Stone.

The Mackay-Stone report, ‘Potential Greenhouse Gas  Emissions Associated with Shale Gas Extraction and Use‘, states:

“We have gathered available information on the carbon footprint of shale gas to inform our estimate of the potential impacts of shale gas exploration, extraction and use in the UK on UK climate change objectives … With the right safeguards in place, the net effect on UK GHG emissions from shale gas production in the UK will be relatively small.”

The point at issue today is whether that process of evaluation was valid, even when the report was first published in September 2013.

‘Bottom-up’ versus ‘top-down’

How we measure and evaluate the pollution emitted by industrial processes is a compromise between what is technically possible and realistically practicable. Reliably measuring gases emitted from equipment outdoors is difficult, so it require some flexibility.

These historic difficulties mean that regulators have relied on a ‘bottom-up’ or ‘inventory’ method to assess the leaks from oil and gas operations.

Small parts of the equipment are tested, either in a laboratory or specially constructed test rigs. The leaks are measured or estimated. Finally the figures are combined in an ‘inventory’ of the system being monitored to produce a total.

When the climate impacts of oil and gas production were first assessed in the 1990s the assumption was that the effects of leakage were ‘insignificant‘.

What has happened since is that the monitoring technology has improved. Today it is possible to equip aircraft or ground vehicles as mobile gas laboratories. These are flown or driven around oil and gas fields to sniff the air. From that sampling it is possible to produce a ‘top-down’ estimate of how much gas is leaking in order to create the measured concentrations in the air.

In an ideal world the top-down and bottom-up measurements would, within a reasonable boundary of uncertainty, match. The difficulty is that they do not.

What consistent studies carried out over the last decade or so have found is that real-world, ‘top-down’ monitoring exceed the estimated ‘bottom-up’ measurement of emissions by at least two to four times.

It’s this mismatch over measuring that is at the heart of the fracking and climate debate.

Howarth and the significance of methane

The research paper which highlighted the significance of this debate over measurement methods was produced by Howarth, Santoro and Ingraffea in June 2011, entitled ‘Methane and the greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations‘.

The ‘Howarth paper’ gained prominence because it claimed to show that shale gas was not only worse than conventional gas. Under certain circumstances it could be even worse than coal-fired power generation.

The reason why the paper claimed such high climate impacts was due to two main factors:

• Firstly, because it was using ‘top-down’ assessments of leakage from natural gas systems. As noted above, these have consistently produced much higher levels of leakage than ‘bottom-up’ data.

• Secondly, it used a global warming potential (GWP) figure for methane reflecting its impact for the first 20 years after emission, rather than the 100-year figure used by Mackay-Stone. Because methane is a very powerful but relatively short-lived greenhouse gas, this gives a much higher figure, and one more relevant to the immediate climate crisis.

The 20-year issue is important as methane has gained prominence as a greenhouse gas. Again, new sampling techniques have been finding far higher concentrations in the environment than were expected.

As we approach climatic tipping points, the impact of fast-warming methane is becoming more significant to how we respond to climate change.

The Mackay-Stone review

In Britain, DECC commissioned Mackay and Stone to evaluate the climate impacts of shale gas – although if you read the report, it is clear that it is targeted squarely at invalidating the results of the Howarth study.

Very roughly, Mackay and Stone:

• Took a figure for how much gas leaks from a gas well and then calculated the climate impact of those leaks;

• They added the impacts of the gas being burnt;

• Then they divided the total figure for impacts by the amount of gas produced from each well to produce a figure for impacts per unit of energy produced;

• Then they compared that to other available figures for conventional gas, coal-fired power and imported liquefied natural gas (LNG).

That is a fair assessment procedure in order to test the impacts of shale gas against other sources of natural gas for power generation. But the problem with Mackay and Stone’s report is not the process, it is the data which they used in their calculations:

• Their figures for gas leakage were predominantly from ‘bottom-up’ studies – which on the basis of a range of research studies have traditionally underestimated emissions by two to four times;

• They deliberately excluded the figures in the Howarth study from their final calculations because they claimed they were a statistical ‘outlier’ which would skew their results; and

• The figures used for gas production per well were at least twice what is seen in US gas wells – and had no clear independent source. However they probably came from Cuadrilla, which had questionable links to DECC at that time.

Using a figure for leakage which was perhaps a half of what it should have been, and a figure for gas production which was twice what it should have been, the level of impacts which their analysis found is arguably a quarter of what it should be.

Mackay and Stone, while rejecting Howarth’s figures, also disregarded other studies produced around that time which had produced similar results to Howarth. Instead they promoted an as yet unpublished study, by Allen et al., which claimed that leakage rates could be minimized using what was called ‘reduced emissions completions’ (REC).

The Allen study

The 2013 study by Allen et al. was part-funded by the campaign group, the Environmental Defense Fund. It is a ‘bottom-up’ analysis of leakage from oil and gas operations, and claimed levels of leakage far lower than similar studies.

However, the study ran into problems from the start:

• The publishing journal, PNAS, had to issue a correction because the authors had failed to declare their conflicting industry affiliations.

• More significantly, the study does not disclose which, and what type of sites were being tested, so it was difficult to relate the results to the industry as a whole.

• Most seriously though, the sites were not randomly selected for testing – as acknowledged in the supporting information published alongside the paper. Their industry partners selected which sites they were to test, and so there’s no evidence the sample of sites measured were representative of the industry as a whole.

The real problems for the Allen study emerged in 2015:

• First, research by Howard et al. highlighted that one of the most widely used sensors to measure methane concentrations – which had been used in the Allen study – routinely malfunctioned, under-reporting methane concentrations.

• Next, the US Argonne National Laboratory, which co-ordinates the reporting of US carbon emissions, noted that the sensor might be under-reporting methane levels by three to five times.

• Finally, in 2016, the Environmental Defense Fund, who had part-funded the Allen study, rejected its results.

Misleading Parliament and the public

From the date of its publication the Mackay-Stone report has been flawed, due to the approach taken to calculate the impacts of shale gas, and in particular due to the selection of data.

DECC and its authors defended this by referencing the Allen study as proof that emissions could be reduced to levels where the impacts would be ‘small’. Now that the Allen study has been shown to be flawed, the Mackay-Stone report has been definitively invalidated too.

However, that has not stopped ministers and Parliamentarians quoting it to support the Government’s policies on oil and gas extraction.

DECC itself was disbanded in 2016, but in January 2017 the new department – the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) – issued revised guidance on shale gas. Once again it echoed the results of the Mackay-Stone report.

Distorting the evidence

In March 2016, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) produced a report on onshore oil and gas production. BEIS did not release it for four months, until Parliament had almost finished for the Summer Recess.

When Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom announced the report to Parliament she claimed that the CCC said that onshore oil and gas was compatible with the UK’s climate targets. This was misleading, as this is not within the context of the CCC’s conclusions.

As stated in the recent House of Commons Library briefing on Shale Gas and Fracking, the CCC concluded that fracking must pass three tests to be acceptable. The third of those requires that we reduce emissions elsewhere in the economy to accommodate the emissions from onshore oil and gas.

That could be extremely difficult – and might not be possible. As Climate Change Secretary Nick Hurd stated in evidence to a Select Committee in January 2017, finding even the 50% of savings that have yet to be identified to meet the UK’s climate targets will be “hard”.

Whitehall’s fracking policies are completely flawed

The Mackay-Stone report was flawed on the day of its publication. Today it is wholly discredited. No minister can quote its conclusions with any certainty without demonstrably misleading MPs and the public as to the current state of the science.

In fact, like the Mackay-Stone report, large parts of the two other reports which the Government rely upon to justify fracking – the Royal Society report from 2012, and the Public Health England report from 2014 – can be similarly invalidated if we look at the weight of evidence now available.

The Mackay-Stone report must be withdrawn, and a moratorium implemented on all fracking operations until we can state their impacts with certainty.

At the same time Whitehall and government ministers must admit to the mistakes in their previous claims, and commit to an open and transparent review of the evidence now available.

Download the Talk Fracking report, ‘Whitehall’s ‘Fracking’ Science Failure‘, written & researched by Paul Mobbs.

Paul Mobbs is an independent environmental researcher and freelance author. He is also the creator of the Free Range Activism Website, FRAW

A fully referenced version of this article is available on FRAW.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has been accused of excluding from its glyphosate assessment a key study only because of a negative comment by a former US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) official.

The former US EPA official, Jess Rowland, is under investigation in a US court case brought by cancer sufferers, who believe that exposure to Roundup triggered their disease. Based on internal Monsanto documents disclosed in the lawsuit, Rowland is accused of colluding with Monsanto to defend glyphosate’s health record.

The accusation against EFSA was made by the toxicologist Dr Peter Clausing, representing Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Germany, at a scientific conference on glyphosate’s health risks, held in the EU Parliament on 10 May. The conference was hosted by the Czech Socialist MEP Pavel Poc. 

Dr Clausing said that he had met the head of EFSA’s pesticides unit, Jose Tarazona, the previous week. They had discussed a key study (Kumar 2001) showing that glyphosate caused malignant lymphoma in mice.

Alleged ‘viral infections’ in study animals

Dr Clausing said that Dr Tarazona was not able able to give any other concrete reasons why the study was excluded from EFSA’s assessment than that a US EPA observer had said the US EPA had not accepted it due to viral infections in the animals.

According to a report in EU Food Policy [1], EFSA and PAN agree that the US EPA observer was Jess Rowland, who made the remark about infections during a teleconference about glyphosate organised by EFSA in 2015.

However, EFSA told EU Food Policy that “it and member states had already picked up on weaknesses with the study and that the majority of member states had agreed there was a high background of malignant lymphomas in the mice used for the study.”

The EU Food Policy article goes on to quote Dr Tarazona as saying that Rowland informed EFSA “about potential flaws in the Kumar study (2001) related to viral infections that could influence survival as well as tumour incidence.”

Dr Tarazona told EU Food Policy that EFSA didn’t just take Rowland’s word for it: “After the teleconference, EFSA experts checked the Kumar (2001) study themselves and found additional indications that confirmed deficiencies in the health status of animals, which supported the plausibility of a viral infection.”

Dr Tarazona told EU Food Policy that Dr Clausing’s remarks “give rise to concerns about the integrity of EFSA’s glyphosate assessment”, but that this is “not borne out by the facts”.

Where’s the evidence for the alleged ‘viral infections’?

So what were these “additional indications that confirmed deficiencies in the health status of animals, which supported the plausibility of a viral infection”? The EFSA has had plenty of chances to describe them. 

First, in its ‘Conclusion on the peer review of the pesticide risk assessment of the active substance glyphosate‘, published in 2015, EFSA declared the Kumar study as “not acceptable due to viral infections that could influence survival as well as tumour incidence – especially lymphomas.”

And second, in a peer-reviewed paper of the same year explaining why EFSA had come to a different conclusion on glyphosate’s carcinogenicity from the World Health Organisation’s cancer agency IARC (which classed it as a probable carcinogen), Dr Tarazona and his co-authors from EFSA and Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) say that the Kumar study “was excluded due to a likely viral infection in the experimental population.”

But in neither document does EFSA give any supporting evidence for viral infections.

And in neither document does EFSA describe any “additional indications that confirmed deficiencies in the health status of animals, which supported the plausibility of a viral infection”, such as Tarazona claimed were present in the Kumar study.

But there is evidence the laboratory animals were healthy

In fact there is an irrefutable (by the EU authorities, at least) source that states that there is no evidence whatsoever that the animals in this experiment suffered from a viral infection or that their health was deficient as a result of such an infection.

That source is none other than the CLH (harmonised classification and labelling) report on glyphosate, based on industry data and submitted by the German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA) to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). The CLH report states:

“During a teleconference (TC 117) on carcinogenicity of glyphosate hold [sic.] by EFSA … it was mentioned by an US EPA observer that the Kumar (2001, ASB2012-11491) study had been excluded from US EPA evaluation due to the occurrence of viral infection that could influence survival as well as tumour incidences, especially those of lymphomas. However, in the study report itself, there was no evidence of health deterioration due to suspected viral infection and, thus, the actual basis of EPA’s decision is not known.” [Page 72.]

Nevertheless, ECHA continued to use the narrative of a virus infection in spite of its admission that there was no evidence for such an infection. In its Opinion, ECHA cautions against “a possible role of oncogenic viruses” – which it apparently deemed as sufficient reason to exclude this important study from the overall assessment. 

Unsurprisingly, having disposed of Kumar using an apparently evidence-free argument, ECHA followed EFSA in concluding that glyphosate is not carcinogenic.

Dr Tarazona’s identification of the “US EPA observer” as Jess Rowland raises questions about the influence on the EFSA glyphosate assessment exercised by this man – who allegedly boasted to a Monsanto executive that he deserved a medal if he could kill another agency’s investigation into the chemical’s health risks.

‘Viral infection’ claim first shows up in Monsanto-supported paper

It seems that Rowland himself did not come up with the narrative of the ‘viral infection’. It first appeared in a Monsanto- and Glyphosate Task Force-supported review, which concluded that glyphosate was non-carcinogenic.

The review was co-authored by Monsanto employee David Saltmiras and published in the journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology, which has industry ties. However, even this review introduces the idea of a viral infection in tentative language, referring to a “possible viral infection” that “may have confounded interpretation of results”.

EFSA goes much further than this Monsanto-linked paper in its unqualified claim that the Kumar study was “not acceptable due to viral infections”.

Malignant lymphoma-prone mice?

But what about the other supposed weakness in the Kumar study, the “high background of malignant lymphomas in the mice used for the study” that EFSA mentioned to EU Food Policy?

That argument doesn’t stand up either, according to Dr Clausing. He told GMWatch that while a good number of control mice did get malignant lymphomas, the glyphosate-treated mice had a statistically significant increase in malignant lymphomas, in a clearly dose-dependent fashion.

Moreover, this statistically significant increase in malignant lymphoma was well above the range of historical control data (the ‘background’ incidence referred to by EFSA) – supporting the observation of a glyphosate-induced carcinogenicity. 

Dr Clausing said that these were valid historical control data as measured by OECD standards. This was important because there are a number of examples where EFSA used invalid historical control data to dismiss significant findings of carcinogenicity. 

GMWatch believes that for EFSA to claim that these increases were due to chance and not to glyphosate is to turn its back on the scientific method.

The study that had to be killed

Dr Clausing believes that the Kumar study, together with two other studies showing the same effect, presents difficult-to-refute evidence of glyphosate’s carcinogenicity.

Its particular significance within EFSA’s assessment is that the reasons used by EFSA to dismiss other studies showing glyphosate is carcinogenic do not apply to the Kumar study and a second study by Wood et al, (2009). In both studies the increase in malignant lymphoma in glyphosate-treated animals was both dose-dependent and significant, at doses that could not be dismissed as only a ‘high-dose phenomenon’.

In reality the Kumar study is far from being an outlier. Before EFSA produced its assessment, the German authority BfR, under pressure from the IARC verdict, had demonstrated statistically significant increases in cancer in seven rodent carcinogenicity studies with glyphosate.

But EFSA denied these results, using what Dr Clausing considers spurious arguments, and insisted that there was only one mouse study – Kumar – with statistical significance.

According to the European legislation, evidence for carcinogenicity in at least two separate studies is “sufficient evidence” to label a compound as carcinogenic (category 1B). That would mean an automatic ban. Thus in Dr Clausing’s view, the Kumar study “presented an obstacle” to EFSA’s apparent intention to declare glyphosate as non-carcinogenic:

“That’s why the exclusion of this particular study from further consideration was so important.”

Dr Clausing is not the only authority to believe that the Kumar study was particularly problematic for those who wish to argue that glyphosate is non-carcinogenic.

The BfR remarked in its assessment of glyphosate that this unpublished industry study “was apparently not available to IARC” – “otherwise, it would have been certainly used as the first place argument for carcinogenicity of glyphosate.” [Page 9.]

Flawed study included by EFSA

Dr Clausing argued in his presentation to the EU Parliament that the Kumar 2001 study should have been included by EFSA in its assessment and that a study by Atkinson (1993), which found no carcinogenic effect of glyphosate, should have been excluded.

The latter study was invalid, he explained, because only animals with signs of malignant lymphoma that were visible to the naked eye were examined more closely – a recipe for missing numerous cases. This flawed study was used as additional ‘proof’ that glyphosate did not cause malignant lymphoma.

If EFSA had included Kumar and excluded Atkinson, it would not have concluded that glyphosate was not carcinogenic, Dr Clausing told the meeting.

Did Rowlands mislead EFSA on glyphosate?

In light of Jess Rowland’s role in the assessment of carcinogenicity of glyphosate in the US as reflected by the internal Monsanto documents, there are serious concerns that he might have influenced the decision by providing wrong information.

Yet EFSA is not an ‘innocent victim’ in this case. It apparently failed to properly scrutinize Rowland’s claim.

To summarize, the only publicly available explanation for EFSA’s dismissal of the Kumar study due to a viral infection is Rowland’s claim – yet there is no factual evidence whatsoever to back up the claim.

Dr Clausing said he has examined the publicly available documents as well as the raw data of the Kumar study, which was made available to him by EFSA. He said:

“Scrutinizing all these documents did not provide any other evidence than the Rowland intervention. As a result, I have doubts about the integrity of EFSA’s assessment of glyphosate. Those doubts have been sown by EFSA itself.”

Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods.

This article was originally published here on GMWatch.

Notes

1. EU Food Policy. EFSA refutes claims it was improperly influenced on glyphosate. 15 May 2017. Subscription only (eufoodpolicy.com); no direct link.

Last month, Survival International was honored to help organize worldwide demonstrations led by Guarani tribal leader and activist Ladio Veron.

We marshalled supporters at the Brazilian embassy in London for a vocal show of support for the Guarani, broadcast live over social media (see video below).

There were further protests in São Paulo, San Francisco, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona and Milan. We also handed letters of protest from Survival and the Guarani people themselves, in to representatives of Brazil’s government.

Ladio stood defiant in a tribal headdress and face paint. Though London on an April morning was rather colder than what he was used to in central Brazil, he nevertheless spoke passionately – both to the supporters who were there to see him, and to the embassy official who received his letter.

As the son of the murdered tribal leader Marcos Veron, Ladio has an understandable emotional investment in his people’s struggle. All of the Guarani feel a profound stake in it. The theft of their ancestral land by ranchers and agribusiness has been a trauma endured over decades.

They face violent harassment by gunmen when they try to reoccupy tiny patches of the land, most of which has been deforested and turned into plantations. Their water is polluted with pesticides, and they are partitioned off from the land by wire fencing. Some communities are living in makeshift camps on roadsides.

Paper laws, paper promises

The fact that the Guarani have to risk their very lives for their land is both tragic and baffling. It is rightfully theirs under both Brazilian and international law.

The fact that cases are on the books over Guarani land tenure in both Mato Grosso do Sul state, and the federal capital of Brasilia, is a tacit admission from the Brazilian establishment that the tribe at least has a claim.

It’s their land, yet they have been trapped in legal hell for decades, waiting for full demarcation and the proper enforcement of their rights.

Mato Grosso do Sul itself is so dominated by agribusiness that it is almost impossible for the Guarani to appeal to politicians and other authorities there, as they are emphatically on the side of the ranchers. Men like Jose Teixiera serve as state deputies while owning large ranches, and happily partner with big corporations profiting from sugarcane produced on Guarani land.

This footage from 2016 shows heavily-armed Brazilian police evicting a small group of Guarani from their land. The tribespeople are unarmed, they are peaceful – they make their case in strong words but present no threat whatsoever. Yet around 100 men were sent to clear them off a scrap of land so that their village could be bulldozed.

Exploited, low wage labourers on their own land

Incidents such as this clearly illustrate the situation. The Guarani have very few allies in Brazil – certainly not among the country’s rulers. They are forced to look elsewhere to bring global attention to their plight, and to exert pressure on the people who have the authority to transform their situation.

Survival International has been campaigning in partnership with the Guarani for over 30 years. The Guarani are the most populous indigenous people of this part of central Brazil, and they are slowly being destroyed.

In pursuit of profit, the over-mighty ruralista lobby has subjected them to poverty, violence, disease and destitution. Some live and work in towns and cities in Mato Grosso do Sul state, or further afield. Many more have no option but to work as wage laborers on the vast sugar cane plantations and cattle ranches, forced to scratch out a living in a society created on their own land without their consent which offers them next to nothing.

According to some studies, the tribe suffers the highest suicide rate in the world, a problem which is especially acute among younger people.

With international pressure, the Guarani can assert their legal rights

There is hope, however. International pressure has been proven to be effective in holding Brazil’s leaders to account and empowering indigenous people through recognition of their land rights.

In 1992 for example, after years of campaigning, the government relented and agreed to create the largest forested indigenous territory in the world: the Yanomami indigenous territory in the northern Amazon. It is an area the size of Switzerland that is now home to over 20,000 tribal people.

In 2014, concerted campaigning by Survival supporters pushed Brazilian authorities to carry out an unprecedented crackdown on illegal logging, drastically improving the situation facing the Awá people from the Amazon’s eastern fringe.

And last year, similar pressure pushed the Minister of Justice to sign a decree creating a protected territory for the hard-pressed Kawahiva people, a small uncontacted tribe and one of the most vulnerable peoples on the planet.

We’re devoted to giving tribal peoples a platform to speak to the world. As Ladio himself said: “We will resist at any price. All we have left to lose is our lives.”

His powerful speech at the Brazilian embassy, and the sight of him moved to tears as he addressed an embassy official were heartening for everyone who turned out in solidarity with his people.

More importantly, this sort of direct action could help to tip the balance in the Guarani’s favor. There is always hope.

Lewis Evans is an author and a campaigner at Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights.

As the Conservative Manifesto portends a planning ‘free for all’ for shale gas, Talk Fracking launches its new report demonstrating the flaws in the Government’s case on fracking and climate change.

The Government’s case – detailed in the Mackay-Stone report – has been widely criticized in the past.

Research published over the last 18 months, outlined in Talk Fracking’s new report, questions the accuracy of the data used in the Mackay-Stone report. And as a result of this new information Whitehall’s climate case has arguably collapsed.

The issue here is about science and uncertainty. So first, What is ‘science’? It is a process for how we find, measure and then evaluate the real world in order to identify how it works.

The problem is, particularly for contentious debates in the media and politics, that we seldom hear about the degree of confidence attached to scientific findings, or the uncertainties that surround them. Rarely is the method by which those results were produced ever discussed.

In such an environment it is easy to use ‘results’ outside the context in which they were formed, extrpolating them to novel circumstances in a way that is scientifically invalid.

When we hear the fracking industry and academics argue over leakage figures, we might presume the issue is whether or not one or other set of figures are correct. In fact, the issue here is the method used to make those measurements, and whether or not that system of measurement produces a realistic result.

Fracking and Whitehall’s energy policy

The Government in Whitehall (distinct from those in Edinburgh or Cardiff, who currently have moratoriums in place on shale gas development) has promoted fracking as a means to meet climate change obligations.

As Energy Secretary Ed Davey claimed in 2013, shale gas is a “bridge“ to a low carbon economy. That claim rests on the results of one report, written by the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s (DECC) Chief Scientist, David Mackay, and the economist, Timothy Stone.

The Mackay-Stone report, ‘Potential Greenhouse Gas  Emissions Associated with Shale Gas Extraction and Use‘, states:

“We have gathered available information on the carbon footprint of shale gas to inform our estimate of the potential impacts of shale gas exploration, extraction and use in the UK on UK climate change objectives … With the right safeguards in place, the net effect on UK GHG emissions from shale gas production in the UK will be relatively small.”

The point at issue today is whether that process of evaluation was valid, even when the report was first published in September 2013.

‘Bottom-up’ versus ‘top-down’

How we measure and evaluate the pollution emitted by industrial processes is a compromise between what is technically possible and realistically practicable. Reliably measuring gases emitted from equipment outdoors is difficult, so it require some flexibility.

These historic difficulties mean that regulators have relied on a ‘bottom-up’ or ‘inventory’ method to assess the leaks from oil and gas operations.

Small parts of the equipment are tested, either in a laboratory or specially constructed test rigs. The leaks are measured or estimated. Finally the figures are combined in an ‘inventory’ of the system being monitored to produce a total.

When the climate impacts of oil and gas production were first assessed in the 1990s the assumption was that the effects of leakage were ‘insignificant‘.

What has happened since is that the monitoring technology has improved. Today it is possible to equip aircraft or ground vehicles as mobile gas laboratories. These are flown or driven around oil and gas fields to sniff the air. From that sampling it is possible to produce a ‘top-down’ estimate of how much gas is leaking in order to create the measured concentrations in the air.

In an ideal world the top-down and bottom-up measurements would, within a reasonable boundary of uncertainty, match. The difficulty is that they do not.

What consistent studies carried out over the last decade or so have found is that real-world, ‘top-down’ monitoring exceed the estimated ‘bottom-up’ measurement of emissions by at least two to four times.

It’s this mismatch over measuring that is at the heart of the fracking and climate debate.

Howarth and the significance of methane

The research paper which highlighted the significance of this debate over measurement methods was produced by Howarth, Santoro and Ingraffea in June 2011, entitled ‘Methane and the greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations‘.

The ‘Howarth paper’ gained prominence because it claimed to show that shale gas was not only worse than conventional gas. Under certain circumstances it could be even worse than coal-fired power generation.

The reason why the paper claimed such high climate impacts was due to two main factors:

• Firstly, because it was using ‘top-down’ assessments of leakage from natural gas systems. As noted above, these have consistently produced much higher levels of leakage than ‘bottom-up’ data.

• Secondly, it used a global warming potential (GWP) figure for methane reflecting its impact for the first 20 years after emission, rather than the 100-year figure used by Mackay-Stone. Because methane is a very powerful but relatively short-lived greenhouse gas, this gives a much higher figure, and one more relevant to the immediate climate crisis.

The 20-year issue is important as methane has gained prominence as a greenhouse gas. Again, new sampling techniques have been finding far higher concentrations in the environment than were expected.

As we approach climatic tipping points, the impact of fast-warming methane is becoming more significant to how we respond to climate change.

The Mackay-Stone review

In Britain, DECC commissioned Mackay and Stone to evaluate the climate impacts of shale gas – although if you read the report, it is clear that it is targeted squarely at invalidating the results of the Howarth study.

Very roughly, Mackay and Stone:

• Took a figure for how much gas leaks from a gas well and then calculated the climate impact of those leaks;

• They added the impacts of the gas being burnt;

• Then they divided the total figure for impacts by the amount of gas produced from each well to produce a figure for impacts per unit of energy produced;

• Then they compared that to other available figures for conventional gas, coal-fired power and imported liquefied natural gas (LNG).

That is a fair assessment procedure in order to test the impacts of shale gas against other sources of natural gas for power generation. But the problem with Mackay and Stone’s report is not the process, it is the data which they used in their calculations:

• Their figures for gas leakage were predominantly from ‘bottom-up’ studies – which on the basis of a range of research studies have traditionally underestimated emissions by two to four times;

• They deliberately excluded the figures in the Howarth study from their final calculations because they claimed they were a statistical ‘outlier’ which would skew their results; and

• The figures used for gas production per well were at least twice what is seen in US gas wells – and had no clear independent source. However they probably came from Cuadrilla, which had questionable links to DECC at that time.

Using a figure for leakage which was perhaps a half of what it should have been, and a figure for gas production which was twice what it should have been, the level of impacts which their analysis found is arguably a quarter of what it should be.

Mackay and Stone, while rejecting Howarth’s figures, also disregarded other studies produced around that time which had produced similar results to Howarth. Instead they promoted an as yet unpublished study, by Allen et al., which claimed that leakage rates could be minimized using what was called ‘reduced emissions completions’ (REC).

The Allen study

The 2013 study by Allen et al. was part-funded by the campaign group, the Environmental Defense Fund. It is a ‘bottom-up’ analysis of leakage from oil and gas operations, and claimed levels of leakage far lower than similar studies.

However, the study ran into problems from the start:

• The publishing journal, PNAS, had to issue a correction because the authors had failed to declare their conflicting industry affiliations.

• More significantly, the study does not disclose which, and what type of sites were being tested, so it was difficult to relate the results to the industry as a whole.

• Most seriously though, the sites were not randomly selected for testing – as acknowledged in the supporting information published alongside the paper. Their industry partners selected which sites they were to test, and so there’s no evidence the sample of sites measured were representative of the industry as a whole.

The real problems for the Allen study emerged in 2015:

• First, research by Howard et al. highlighted that one of the most widely used sensors to measure methane concentrations – which had been used in the Allen study – routinely malfunctioned, under-reporting methane concentrations.

• Next, the US Argonne National Laboratory, which co-ordinates the reporting of US carbon emissions, noted that the sensor might be under-reporting methane levels by three to five times.

• Finally, in 2016, the Environmental Defense Fund, who had part-funded the Allen study, rejected its results.

Misleading Parliament and the public

From the date of its publication the Mackay-Stone report has been flawed, due to the approach taken to calculate the impacts of shale gas, and in particular due to the selection of data.

DECC and its authors defended this by referencing the Allen study as proof that emissions could be reduced to levels where the impacts would be ‘small’. Now that the Allen study has been shown to be flawed, the Mackay-Stone report has been definitively invalidated too.

However, that has not stopped ministers and Parliamentarians quoting it to support the Government’s policies on oil and gas extraction.

DECC itself was disbanded in 2016, but in January 2017 the new department – the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) – issued revised guidance on shale gas. Once again it echoed the results of the Mackay-Stone report.

Distorting the evidence

In March 2016, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) produced a report on onshore oil and gas production. BEIS did not release it for four months, until Parliament had almost finished for the Summer Recess.

When Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom announced the report to Parliament she claimed that the CCC said that onshore oil and gas was compatible with the UK’s climate targets. This was misleading, as this is not within the context of the CCC’s conclusions.

As stated in the recent House of Commons Library briefing on Shale Gas and Fracking, the CCC concluded that fracking must pass three tests to be acceptable. The third of those requires that we reduce emissions elsewhere in the economy to accommodate the emissions from onshore oil and gas.

That could be extremely difficult – and might not be possible. As Climate Change Secretary Nick Hurd stated in evidence to a Select Committee in January 2017, finding even the 50% of savings that have yet to be identified to meet the UK’s climate targets will be “hard”.

Whitehall’s fracking policies are completely flawed

The Mackay-Stone report was flawed on the day of its publication. Today it is wholly discredited. No minister can quote its conclusions with any certainty without demonstrably misleading MPs and the public as to the current state of the science.

In fact, like the Mackay-Stone report, large parts of the two other reports which the Government rely upon to justify fracking – the Royal Society report from 2012, and the Public Health England report from 2014 – can be similarly invalidated if we look at the weight of evidence now available.

The Mackay-Stone report must be withdrawn, and a moratorium implemented on all fracking operations until we can state their impacts with certainty.

At the same time Whitehall and government ministers must admit to the mistakes in their previous claims, and commit to an open and transparent review of the evidence now available.

Download the Talk Fracking report, ‘Whitehall’s ‘Fracking’ Science Failure‘, written & researched by Paul Mobbs.

Paul Mobbs is an independent environmental researcher and freelance author. He is also the creator of the Free Range Activism Website, FRAW

A fully referenced version of this article is available on FRAW.

How we farm and feed ourselves says a lot about our society’s priorities.

Like many things in today’s world, food has largely been forced into hungry jaws of hyper-capitalism driven by the twin pistons of ‘economies of scale’ and ‘efficiency’.

Large-scale, industrial agri-business is proffered as the only way we can feed ourselves in the face of growing populations and dwindling resources.

But this is just one of the myths of our techno-capitalist worldview. And it needn’t be this way.

Small-scale, agro-ecological farming can, and does, provide a model for agriculture that provide enough food, equitably, ecologically and economically.

The Ecological Land Co-operative is a social enterprise helps new entrants into ecological agriculture in England supporting the growth of farming that works with the grain of nature.

Land, land, everywhere – but not a patch to farm!

Farming and horticulture are incredibly hard to get into for new entrants. It’s no surprise the average age of a British farmer stands at 59.

High set up costs, high costs of housing, a history of land amalgamation and a planning system anathema to small-scale agriculture make the barriers for new entrants seemingly insurmountable.

The price of agricultural land is now trading at record price levels of approximately £8,500 per acre. Between 2000-2010 new farm entrants accounted for just 4% of agricultural land purchasers. Wedded to this is the cost of rural housing. The average house price in rural England has more than doubled over the past decade to over £250,000, but the average salary is still £21,000.

The historical trend in land amalgamation has lead to the availability of a fewer number of predominantly large farms for purchase. This has happened at the same time that the number of County Farms and smallholdings has declined. The result is a substantial body of people who wish to farm an ecological smallholding but are unable to afford to do so.

“New entrants to farming have no possibility of buying a farm in England”, says Zoe Wangler, Executive Director of the Ecological Land Co-operative. “The cost of land and rural housing is too high. Yet new entrants have the passion, vision and skills needed to reduce the negative environmental impacts of conventional farming and globalised food distribution.”

The Ecological Land Co-operative

The core business of the ELC is the creation of smallholding clusters. The ELC buys agricultural land and seeks planning permission for new residential smallholdings as well as providing shared infrastructure. The ‘starter farms’ are then leased to smallholders – well below market rates – on a long and secure leasehold.

Sites are protected for affordability and ecological agriculture use in perpetuity on the ideas and advice of organic farmers, ecologists, planners, customers, and local residents, the prospective cluster of smallholdings has a binding whole site ecological management plan.

“Two things attracted us to the ELC”, says Ruth Wilson, of Steepholding, one of the smallholdings at the ELC’s first site, Greenham Reach. “One was the cost, which is based on the land price plus there was some infrastructure. The other really important one was the support for the planning side of things.

“Having two young children, setting up and doing this kind of thing, is quite hard work, and we wanted that element of risk – and potentially risk – taken out of it. Having met a lot of people getting into ecological agriculture and hearing their stories of having to go through planning appeals and seeing how much energy that had consumed was a major draw to us coming to the ELC to take that energy drain out of the equation.”

As a not-for-profit community benefit society the ELC largely relies on public financing to carry out their work. Members not only invest money, but are backing a values-led approach where the returns aren’t simply material and immediate but take a longer view longer such as the health of the land, the continuation of rural skills, rekindling local economies as well as the production of good, healthy food.

Their community share offer, in partnership with Ethex, experts in helping people make social investments, runs until 12th June (2017). Community Shares allow people to directly support enterprises that matter to them.

Inviting members of the public to invest, the ELC is looking to raise £340,000 for the creation of two new clusters of small farms. Investors are offered up to 3% interest on share capital annually. The minimum investment is £500 (in withdrawable shares) and anyone can invest.

The answer: small-scale ecological farming

Forward-thinking, stewardship-minded and ecologically based, small-scale farming injects creativity and care into agriculture. Small-scale farms make a distinctive contribution to rural life and economies. Providing local food, generating jobs (and income) such farmers are moving from being ‘price takers’ (as dictated by supermarkets) to ‘price makers’ (connecting with consumers).

Scaling back, not scaling up can provide a model for a truly ecological agriculture.

Studies have shown that the smaller the farm size the greater the yield per hectare. A 2014 UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report concludes that family farms produce over three-quarters of the world’s food. This is a direct challenge to the myth that Big Ag feeds the world.

Crop diversity, species rich polycultures and sound ecological land management means less use of chemicals, more care and more labour. And more labour translates as a higher quality of work inspired by an ecological ethic.

The industrial farming model has led to an ecological crisis in the UK. And we’ve a lot to answer for in our pursuit of more and more. Biodiversity loss, the degradation of soils, environmental contamination from agrochemicals, disease and antibiotic resistance, high greenhouse gas emissions, and huge amounts of food waste.

According to the UN 75% of the world’s food is generated from only 12 plants and five animal species. This narrowing and specialisation is prone to the shocks and challenges of a changing climate.

Despite this 84% of the world’s farms are less than two hectares. That’s a little over the size of two football pitches. For small-scale ecological agriculture biodiversity is the cornerstone of farm life.

Making the dream real in 21st century England

Such an approach can help create a more ecological healthy countryside which provides employment, produces good food and makes a positive contribution to wildlife and the natural world – the ultimate store of our natural capital which drives the planet.

And it’s increasingly taking root in the UK, drawing inspiration from the past while employing the latest ideas and techniques from organic, no-dig, permaculture, agroforestry and agroecology methods.

The ELC seeks to create such ecologically based stewardship-minded farms to make small-scale agriculture a viable reality in 21st century England.

Phil Moore is one half of the communications team for the Ecological Land Co-operative. He is passionate about ‘enlightened agriculture’ – in the words of Colin Tudge – and works to promote it through documentary film and writing. He tweets at @ecolandcoop and @permapeople

More information

The Ecological Land Co-operative community share offer seeks to draw investment from the public for the creation of two new clusters of farms. Inviting members of the public to invest, the ELC is looking to raise £340,000 for the creation of two new clusters of small farms.

Latest News: The community share offer has just pushed over the £200K mark! With three weeks to go, our supporters have already raised £205,651 of investment. Amazing!

Investors are offered up to 3% interest on share capital annually. The minimum investment is £500 (in withdrawable shares) and anyone can invest. The share offer runs until 12th June 2017.

The Ecological Land Co-operative is a social enterprise helps new entrants into ecological agriculture in England supporting the growth of farming that works with the grain of nature.

In Thai and Lao languages, Mekong roughly translates as ‘mother of rivers.’ As one of the world’s largest waterways it stretches more than 4,000 kilometers thrusting through China, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam before emptying into the South China Sea.

For wildlife enthusiasts in the region, these are exciting times. A horned lizard and rainbow-headed snake were among 163 delightful new species documented last year by scientists alongside 10 endangered Irrawaddy dolphin calves. Fewer than 90 Irrawaddy dolphins exist on the planet.

But all is not well.

In January 2016, build on the 260-megawatt hydroelectric Don Sahong dam began less than a mile from Laos’ border with Cambodia. The area is home to a trans-boundary dolphin pool where numbers are critical. Just three remain. A figure the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warns is ‘no longer viable. (Functionally Extinct)

In recent months the dolphins have moved out of their two-kilometer preservation into areas where illegal fishing methods are rife. Villagers blame the daily boom of dynamite used to blast rocks in dam construction.

“Even when you are inside the water, it’s very loud,” says Mekong river ranger, Sok Laing, responsible for patrolling the dolphins’ protected area. “The noise is too loud and dolphins need to live in a place that is quiet,” he adds.

It’s a worry for villagers who rely on the thousands of tourists the dolphins bring yearly.

“Only local (protected) fishing is allowed in this part of the river but where the dolphins are now, no one is responsible for controlling,” says Bu Maen, a 27-year-old boat driver.

His village, Anlong Svay Thom, in Cambodia’s Stung Treng province, lies just south of the dam. It’s a smattering of wooden frame houses built on stilts in the Khmer fashion that overlook the river.

A new road was constructed to provide greater access to the secluded village. This boosted business for those driving tourists across the waters.

“Customers increased because of the road but now the dolphins have gone I don’t know what will happen,” Maen says.

Dolphin habitats threatened by human activity

Irrawaddy dolphins in Cambodia can be found in Stung Treng and Kratie, forming pools they generally live in for life.

These freshwater marine mammals are one of the oldest creatures in the world, long symbolizing the health of a river but forced now into near extinction by human activity.

Illegal fishermen are wise to the times when dynamite is used on the construction site say villagers. Some employ homemade bombs to blast fish; particularly in the new area the dolphins seek refuge.

“Poachers are very intelligent and very smart,” says Rin Narouen, conservation area manager at WWF Cambodia. “They use it on the same day so nobody can catch them.”

He believes if no action is taken, “they [dolphins] will become extinct.”

If such dire prognosis were to happen, “it means the income of people here will be affected,” says Laing. “Right now people come here because they want to see dolphins, if the dolphins are gone then no tourists will come again.”

Why governments are damming the Mekong

Around 120 million in Southeast Asia have no access to electricity. South East Asia Energy Outlook

In Cambodia this equates to 44 percent of its population according to Word Bank figures. Access To Energy

For governments that border the river, the cheaper and greener solution is to dam. In China for example, 88 percent of energy consumption uses fossil fuels. Fossil Fuel Energy Consumption

Large hydropower dams already exist on the Mekong in China, but more than 100 are planned by Mekong bordering countries. Of these, 11 will dam the river’s mainstream in Laos and Cambodia built by Thai, Malaysian, Chinese, and Vietnamese developers.

Laos, the poorest of its neighbors with a GDP of just $12.37 billion has declared its ambition to be ‘the battery of Southeast Asia.’ It will host nine of the dams for much needed revenue generation despite not benefitting from the electricity produced. For example, Don Sahong’s energy will be exported mainly to Thailand and Cambodia.

 Life in Preah Rumkel remains as it has for centuries

Fish is a staple sought from a river containing over 1,000 species of fish. The Mekong accounts for an astonishing one quarter of the world’s freshwater catch.  

Every morning, 29-year-old fisherman Horn Phoeun heads onto the Mekong.

“Before there was a lot of fish but now there are not many,” says Phoeun.  He has frequently changed the pools he fishes from in order to accommodate for the loss of catch. He blames illegal fishing and dams.

“It takes longer to catch the same amount of fish,” he says. Like many other villagers, he is considering switching to farming seeds and nuts. But it’s an expensive occupation costing $750 more to run and one riddled with risks of flooding.

“My father was a fisherman, my whole generation were fisherman,” he adds.

Upstream the Lower Sesan 2 dam is almost complete.

Some 34 miles east of the Don Sahong, fishermen and women gather on the muddy banks of the river’s Sesan channel with reams of mesh nets cascading around them.

Almost lost in the fabric of the net, they must decide whether any further attempts at fishing today will bring in a catch.

Here most come from Pluk Village in northern Cambodia, close to the $800m Lower Sesan 2 dam nearing completion on a Mekong tributary. It’s a venture between China’s Lancang Hydropower International Energy, Cambodia’s Royal Group, and Vietnam’s EVN International.

Utha Camy, a fisherman in his late 50s, stoops beside the nets. “Before the dams I would have caught more than 5 kilos by now,” says Camy. “And if I kept fishing from now until 6.30pm I would have caught a further 10 kilos.”

Today, after an unsettling 6am rise he has caught just one fish in five hours. The number of dams already built mean irregular variations in water levels that interfere with fish migration and spawning. There is no longer enough fish to go around.

“We all know this but right now there is no job for us to do, so we continue to just fish,” shrugs Camy.

A 2012 study by researchers from the U.S. and Cambodia estimated that the Sesan 2 dam once complete would reduce fish catch by 9 percent. Fish Biodiversity, Food Security & Hydropower in the Mekong River

The Mekong River Commission (MRC) oversees dam constructions on the lower Mekong through a 1995 agreement. It’s a committee of four member nations-Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos. China is not part of the voluntary commission and it’s yet to resolve disagreements on projects.

And as the Ecologist has reported previously, many of the dams have gone ahead without backing from all member states. Death By Strangulation

So many dams are catastrophic for fisheries activists warn

According to conservationists, Cambodia’s 400-megawatt Sesan 2 dam will prevent sediment travel down to the Mekong’s delta, depriving it of nutrients needed for aquatic life and rice production.

A two and a half year study submitted by Vietnam to the MRC in 2016 concluded that there were “high to very high adverse effects on some of the key sectors and environmental resources in Cambodia and Vietnam,” as a result of planned dams.

Around 40 percent of Vietnam’s rice stock is grown in the delta. The country is still recovering from last year’s scathing El Nino induced drought – its worst in a century. [http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/vietnam-hit-by-worst/2562802.html].

“The further downstream a hydropower is sited, the more impact it will have on fisheries, notably on fish migration,” Marc Goichot, water lead at WWF’s Greater Mekong Programme said via email.

In the case of Don Sahong, for example the dam would block the only channel known as a year round route for migrating fish, vital to around 60 million people who rely on the protein the Mekong’s fish provide.

Mega First Corporation, the dam’s developers have in the past dismissed concerns, saying a new fish passage would be built.

“What the developers have done is widen some of the other surrounding channels and blast clear them out so that they are passable for fish migration as alternative routes,” says Maureen Harris, Southeast Asia program director at advocacy group International Rivers. “The problem is they’ve been doing this as they build the dam.”

Scientists believe there is lack of sufficient evidence that fish would migrate through new channels. The Myth of Sustainable Hydropower

“There are no example of success in large tropical rivers,” says Goichot.

In northern Cambodia villagers battle developers

Bai Pumsen, a 30-year-old rice farmer and his family of five were relocated six months ago to make way for the Sesan 2. His old home in Kbal Romeas will be flooded along with 5,000 others when the dam opens later this year.

Pumsen’s resettlement village currently called Kbal Romeas II is a regimented mix of yellow and blue concrete houses alongside traditional wooden builds.

Each family is entitled to either a house or $6,000 to build a new home as compensation and a 12-acre land to farm. New villages boast schools, health centers, and crucially electricity. However villagers complain the land isn’t ideal for farming, and is far from freshwater sources.

“Staying here is more difficult,” says Pumsen. “More than 50 families are waiting with no job to do.”

Land is yet to be cleared for agriculture.

Like Pumsen, many frequently make the two hour round trip back to their old rice fields for work and food and are demanding to move back.

“Here I have to spend a lot of money,” says 31-year-old mother of two, Sarun Nan. “Before there was no need to buy food, we just go down to the river and catch fish … now also for drinking and cooking I need to buy water.”

Nan and her husband commute by motorbike to their old village to fish and hunt in the forest. “I don’t know what I will do if I cannot continue to go,” she says.

There are some in Kbal Romeas who refuse to move to the resettlement site having seen how their former neighbours are struggling.

Dams are not the problem say experts but they need to be better planned

“It is easy to assess which ones will have the greatest negative impacts and the most positive. Common sense would be to prioritise the ones with least negative impacts, and postpone the ones with the greatest,” says Goichot. “Don Sahong, Lower Sesan, are in the 20 percent group with the highest negative impacts. They should not have been prioritised.”

Others point to more ecological means of energy generation through solar power. But these are difficult to attract financial investment and slow to generate immediate revenue.

“Typically what’s usually done in these projects is an economic impact assessment, where they weigh up the benefit but not the costs,” believes Mark Zeitoun, professor of water policy and security, at the University of East Anglia in England.

Zeitoun has been researching similar environmental issues on the $2.4 billion Merowe dam built on the River Nile in Northern Sudan. It’s displaced more than 50,000 people, blocking fish migration and degrading water quality. Impacts of Merowe Dam

In the US, older dams are being decommissioned. After its largest dam removal – the 210-foot-high Glines Canyon dam – salmon have returned to the Elwha river in Washington after almost a century of absence say scientists. River Restoration

But, “decommissioning is very expensive, much more expensive than building a dam,” adds Zeitoun. “Once you build a dam you are locked into it for a very long time.”

“The dams are affecting everyone who live along the river,” reflects Laing as he sits, legs crossed in front of his house looking ahead towards the calm waters. “We have to try to find a way to keep the fish and the dolphins within the Mekong. But how I don’t know.”

This author

Nosmot Gbadamosi is a freelance journalist based in London. She can be followed on Twitter @nosmotg

Nicolas Axelrod and Thomas Cristofoletti are co-founders of Ruom, a collective of journalists based in Asia. Read stories here [http://www.ruom.net/feature-stories/]

More information: Save the Mekong [https://savethemekong.org] campaign.

Also on The Ecologist: How the largest inland fisheries in the world are being destroyed. Destuction of the world’s largest inland fisheries

Last month, Survival International was honored to help organize worldwide demonstrations led by Guarani tribal leader and activist Ladio Veron.

We marshalled supporters at the Brazilian embassy in London for a vocal show of support for the Guarani, broadcast live over social media (see video below).

There were further protests in São Paolo, San Francisco, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona and Milan. We also handed letters of protest from Survival and the Guarani people themselves, in to representatives of Brazil’s government.

Ladio stood defiant in a tribal headdress and face paint. Though London on an April morning was rather colder than what he was used to in central Brazil, he nevertheless spoke passionately – both to the supporters who were there to see him, and to the embassy official who received his letter.

As the son of the murdered tribal leader Marcos Veron, Ladio has an understandable emotional investment in his people’s struggle. All of the Guarani feel a profound stake in it. The theft of their ancestral land by ranchers and agribusiness has been a trauma endured over decades.

They face violent harassment by gunmen when they try to reoccupy tiny patches of the land, most of which has been deforested and turned into plantations. Their water is polluted with pesticides, and they are partitioned off from the land by wire fencing. Some communities are living in makeshift camps on roadsides.

Paper laws, paper promises

The fact that the Guarani have to risk their very lives for their land is both tragic and baffling. It is rightfully theirs under both Brazilian and international law.

The fact that cases are on the books over Guarani land tenure in both Mato Grosso do Sul state, and the federal capital of Brasilia, is a tacit admission from the Brazilian establishment that the tribe at least has a claim.

It’s their land, yet they have been trapped in legal hell for decades, waiting for full demarcation and the proper enforcement of their rights.

Mato Grosso do Sul itself is so dominated by agribusiness that it is almost impossible for the Guarani to appeal to politicians and other authorities there, as they are emphatically on the side of the ranchers. Men like Jose Teixiera serve as state deputies while owning large ranches, and happily partner with big corporations profiting from sugarcane produced on Guarani land.

This footage from 2016 shows heavily-armed Brazilian police evicting a small group of Guarani from their land. The tribespeople are unarmed, they are peaceful – they make their case in strong words but present no threat whatsoever. Yet around 100 men were sent to clear them off a scrap of land so that their village could be bulldozed.

Exploited, low wage labourers on their own land

Incidents such as this clearly illustrate the situation. The Guarani have very few allies in Brazil – certainly not among the country’s rulers. They are forced to look elsewhere to bring global attention to their plight, and to exert pressure on the people who have the authority to transform their situation.

Survival International has been campaigning in partnership with the Guarani for over 30 years. The Guarani are the most populous indigenous people of this part of central Brazil, and they are slowly being destroyed.

In pursuit of profit, the over-mighty ruralista lobby has subjected them to poverty, violence, disease and destitution. Some live and work in towns and cities in Mato Grosso do Sul state, or further afield. Many more have no option but to work as wage laborers on the vast sugar cane plantations and cattle ranches, forced to scratch out a living in a society created on their own land without their consent which offers them next to nothing.

According to some studies, the tribe suffers the highest suicide rate in the world, a problem which is especially acute among younger people.

With international pressure, the Guarani assert can their legal rights

There is hope, however. International pressure has been proven to be effective in holding Brazil’s leaders to account and empowering indigenous people through recognition of their land rights.

In 1992 for example, after years of campaigning, the government relented and agreed to create the largest forested indigenous territory in the world: the Yanomami indigenous territory in the northern Amazon. It is an area the size of Switzerland that is now home to over 20,000 tribal people.

In 2014, concerted campaigning by Survival supporters pushed Brazilian authorities to carry out an unprecedented crackdown on illegal logging, drastically improving the situation facing the Awá people from the Amazon’s eastern fringe.

And last year, similar pressure pushed the Minister of Justice to sign a decree creating a protected territory for the hard-pressed Kawahiva people, a small uncontacted tribe and one of the most vulnerable peoples on the planet.

We’re devoted to giving tribal peoples a platform to speak to the world. As Ladio himself said: “We will resist at any price. All we have left to lose is our lives.”

His powerful speech at the Brazilian embassy, and the sight of him moved to tears as he addressed an embassy official were heartening for everyone who turned out in solidarity with his people.

More importantly, this sort of direct action could help to tip the balance in the Guarani’s favor. There is always hope.

Lewis Evans is an author and a campaigner at Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights.

As the Conservative Manifesto portends a planning ‘free for all’ for shale gas, Talk Fracking launches its new report demonstrating the flaws in the Government’s case on fracking and climate change.

The Government’s case – detailed in the Mackay-Stone report – has been widely criticized in the past.

Research published over the last 18 months, outlined in Talk Fracking’s new report, questions the accuracy of the data used in the Mackay-Stone report. And as a result of this new information Whitehall’s climate case has arguably collapsed.

The issue here is about science and uncertainty. So first, What is ‘science’? It is a process for how we find, measure and then evaluate the real world in order to identify how it works.

The problem is, particularly for contentious debates in the media and politics, that we seldom hear about the degree of confidence attached to scientific findings, or the uncertainties that surround them. Rarely is the method by which those results were produced ever discussed.

In such an environment it is easy to use ‘results’ outside the context in which they were formed, extrpolating them to novel circumstances in a way that is scientifically invalid.

When we hear the fracking industry and academics argue over leakage figures, we might presume the issue is whether or not one or other set of figures are correct. In fact, the issue here is the method used to make those measurements, and whether or not that system of measurement produces a realistic result.

Fracking and Whitehall’s energy policy

The Government in Whitehall (distinct from those in Edinburgh or Cardiff, who currently have moratoriums in place on shale gas development) has promoted fracking as a means to meet climate change obligations.

As Energy Secretary Ed Davey claimed in 2013, shale gas is a “bridge“ to a low carbon economy. That claim rests on the results of one report, written by the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s (DECC) Chief Scientist, David Mackay, and the economist, Timothy Stone.

The Mackay-Stone report, ‘Potential Greenhouse Gas  Emissions Associated with Shale Gas Extraction and Use‘, states:

“We have gathered available information on the carbon footprint of shale gas to inform our estimate of the potential impacts of shale gas exploration, extraction and use in the UK on UK climate change objectives … With the right safeguards in place, the net effect on UK GHG emissions from shale gas production in the UK will be relatively small.”

The point at issue today is whether that process of evaluation was valid, even when the report was first published in September 2013.

‘Bottom-up’ versus ‘top-down’

How we measure and evaluate the pollution emitted by industrial processes is a compromise between what is technically possible and realistically practicable. Reliably measuring gases emitted from equipment outdoors is difficult, so it require some flexibility.

These historic difficulties mean that regulators have relied on a ‘bottom-up’ or ‘inventory’ method to assess the leaks from oil and gas operations.

Small parts of the equipment are tested, either in a laboratory or specially constructed test rigs. The leaks are measured or estimated. Finally the figures are combined in an ‘inventory’ of the system being monitored to produce a total.

When the climate impacts of oil and gas production were first assessed in the 1990s the assumption was that the effects of leakage were ‘insignificant‘.

What has happened since is that the monitoring technology has improved. Today it is possible to equip aircraft or ground vehicles as mobile gas laboratories. These are flown or driven around oil and gas fields to sniff the air. From that sampling it is possible to produce a ‘top-down’ estimate of how much gas is leaking in order to create the measured concentrations in the air.

In an ideal world the top-down and bottom-up measurements would, within a reasonable boundary of uncertainty, match. The difficulty is that they do not.

What consistent studies carried out over the last decade or so have found is that real-world, ‘top-down’ monitoring exceed the estimated ‘bottom-up’ measurement of emissions by at least two to four times.

It’s this mismatch over measuring that is at the heart of the fracking and climate debate.

Howarth and the significance of methane

The research paper which highlighted the significance of this debate over measurement methods was produced by Howarth, Santoro and Ingraffea in June 2011, entitled ‘Methane and the greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations‘.

The ‘Howarth paper’ gained prominence because it claimed to show that shale gas was not only worse than conventional gas. Under certain circumstances it could be even worse than coal-fired power generation.

The reason why the paper claimed such high climate impacts was due to two main factors:

• Firstly, because it was using ‘top-down’ assessments of leakage from natural gas systems. As noted above, these have consistently produced much higher levels of leakage than ‘bottom-up’ data.

• Secondly, it used a global warming potential (GWP) figure for methane reflecting its impact for the first 20 years after emission, rather than the 100-year figure used by Mackay-Stone. Because methane is a very powerful but relatively short-lived greenhouse gas, this gives a much higher figure, and one more relevant to the immediate climate crisis.

The 20-year issue is important as methane has gained prominence as a greenhouse gas. Again, new sampling techniques have been finding far higher concentrations in the environment than were expected.

As we approach climatic tipping points, the impact of fast-warming methane is becoming more significant to how we respond to climate change.

The Mackay-Stone review

In Britain, DECC commissioned Mackay and Stone to evaluate the climate impacts of shale gas – although if you read the report, it is clear that it is targeted squarely at invalidating the results of the Howarth study.

Very roughly, Mackay and Stone:

• Took a figure for how much gas leaks from a gas well and then calculated the climate impact of those leaks;

• They added the impacts of the gas being burnt;

• Then they divided the total figure for impacts by the amount of gas produced from each well to produce a figure for impacts per unit of energy produced;

• Then they compared that to other available figures for conventional gas, coal-fired power and imported liquefied natural gas (LNG).

That is a fair assessment procedure in order to test the impacts of shale gas against other sources of natural gas for power generation. But the problem with Mackay and Stone’s report is not the process, it is the data which they used in their calculations:

• Their figures for gas leakage were predominantly from ‘bottom-up’ studies – which on the basis of a range of research studies have traditionally underestimated emissions by two to four times;

• They deliberately excluded the figures in the Howarth study from their final calculations because they claimed they were a statistical ‘outlier’ which would skew their results; and

• The figures used for gas production per well were at least twice what is seen in US gas wells – and had no clear independent source. However they probably came from Cuadrilla, which had questionable links to DECC at that time.

Using a figure for leakage which was perhaps a half of what it should have been, and a figure for gas production which was twice what it should have been, the level of impacts which their analysis found is arguably a quarter of what it should be.

Mackay and Stone, while rejecting Howarth’s figures, also disregarded other studies produced around that time which had produced similar results to Howarth. Instead they promoted an as yet unpublished study, by Allen et al., which claimed that leakage rates could be minimized using what was called ‘reduced emissions completions’ (REC).

The Allen study

The 2013 study by Allen et al. was part-funded by the campaign group, the Environmental Defense Fund. It is a ‘bottom-up’ analysis of leakage from oil and gas operations, and claimed levels of leakage far lower than similar studies.

However, the study ran into problems from the start:

• The publishing journal, PNAS, had to issue a correction because the authors had failed to declare their conflicting industry affiliations.

• More significantly, the study does not disclose which, and what type of sites were being tested, so it was difficult to relate the results to the industry as a whole.

• Most seriously though, the sites were not randomly selected for testing – as acknowledged in the supporting information published alongside the paper. Their industry partners selected which sites they were to test, and so there’s no evidence the sample of sites measured were representative of the industry as a whole.

The real problems for the Allen study emerged in 2015:

• First, research by Howard et al. highlighted that one of the most widely used sensors to measure methane concentrations – which had been used in the Allen study – routinely malfunctioned, under-reporting methane concentrations.

• Next, the US Argonne National Laboratory, which co-ordinates the reporting of US carbon emissions, noted that the sensor might be under-reporting methane levels by three to five times.

• Finally, in 2016, the Environmental Defense Fund, who had part-funded the Allen study, rejected its results.

Misleading Parliament and the public

From the date of its publication the Mackay-Stone report has been flawed, due to the approach taken to calculate the impacts of shale gas, and in particular due to the selection of data.

DECC and its authors defended this by referencing the Allen study as proof that emissions could be reduced to levels where the impacts would be ‘small’. Now that the Allen study has been shown to be flawed, the Mackay-Stone report has been definitively invalidated too.

However, that has not stopped ministers and Parliamentarians quoting it to support the Government’s policies on oil and gas extraction.

DECC itself was disbanded in 2016, but in January 2017 the new department – the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) – issued revised guidance on shale gas. Once again it echoed the results of the Mackay-Stone report.

Distorting the evidence

In March 2016, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) produced a report on onshore oil and gas production. BEIS did not release it for four months, until Parliament had almost finished for the Summer Recess.

When Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom announced the report to Parliament she claimed that the CCC said that onshore oil and gas was compatible with the UK’s climate targets. This was misleading, as this is not within the context of the CCC’s conclusions.

As stated in the recent House of Commons Library briefing on Shale Gas and Fracking, the CCC concluded that fracking must pass three tests to be acceptable. The third of those requires that we reduce emissions elsewhere in the economy to accommodate the emissions from onshore oil and gas.

That could be extremely difficult – and might not be possible. As Climate Change Secretary Nick Hurd stated in evidence to a Select Committee in January 2017, finding even the 50% of savings that have yet to be identified to meet the UK’s climate targets will be “hard”.

Whitehall’s fracking policies are completely flawed

The Mackay-Stone report was flawed on the day of its publication. Today it is wholly discredited. No minister can quote its conclusions with any certainty without demonstrably misleading MPs and the public as to the current state of the science.

In fact, like the Mackay-Stone report, large parts of the two other reports which the Government rely upon to justify fracking – the Royal Society report from 2012, and the Public Health England report from 2014 – can be similarly invalidated if we look at the weight of evidence now available.

The Mackay-Stone report must be withdrawn, and a moratorium implemented on all fracking operations until we can state their impacts with certainty.

At the same time Whitehall and government ministers must admit to the mistakes in their previous claims, and commit to an open and transparent review of the evidence now available.

Download the Talk Fracking report, ‘Whitehall’s ‘Fracking’ Science Failure‘, written & researched by Paul Mobbs.

Paul Mobbs is an independent environmental researcher and freelance author. He is also the creator of the Free Range Activism Website, FRAW

A fully referenced version of this article is available on FRAW.