Richard Wrangham is Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. He is the author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, and Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (with Dale Peterson).

In addition, Professor Wrangham is a leader in primate behavioral ecology. He is the recipient of the Rivers Memorial Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy.

Curtis Abraham (CA): The Goodness Paradox is your latest book. What is so paradoxical about human kindness?

Richard Wrangham (RA): On the one hand, compared to other species, humans in our daily interactions are astonishingly tolerant, benign, friendly, unaggressive etc; on the other hand, compared to other species humans have a high rate of killing each other, often with great callousness or even cruelty. So the paradox is why we are both one of the least aggressive and most aggressive of species.

CA: The European Enlightenment and post-Darwinian thought gave us two opposing views of human aggression. What are they?

RW: The view expounded by philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau says that humans are a naturally unaggressive species whose violence comes from our being corrupted by social experience. The other view, which was favoured by English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, says that humans are a naturally aggressive species made civil by social experience. 

CA: What is wrong with this dichotomy?

RW: The dichotomy implies that our biology, or evolutionary psychology, generates only one aspect of our behavior – either our ‘niceness’ or our ‘nastiness’. 

CA: Scientists have discovered that aggression comes in two forms: proactive and reactive. What’s the distinction?

RW: Proactive aggression is premeditated, “cold” and often unemotional. Reactive aggression is spontaneous, “hot”, and always emotional-often lashing out with a loss of temper.

CA: Why would natural selection develop two distinct forms of aggression?

RW: Proactive and reactive aggression serves different purposes. Reactive aggression tends to be defensive, serving to stop a competitor from taking a resource or challenging for status. Proactive aggression tends to be offensive: it is used to achieve a goal, such as killing an infant, or obtaining a resource that happens to have someone in the way.

CA: Are there also two different biological processes at work to explain these two varieties of aggression and, if so, how were they discovered? 

RW: The science of aggression is best understood in laboratory rats and mice. In those species, proactive and reactive aggressions are found to be controlled by different neural pathways. Both types of aggression are produced by activation of the same brain regions (such as the hypothalamus, amygdala and periaqueductal gray), but the specific pathways within those brain regions differ between proactive and reactive aggression. 

CA: Are there any connections between the two?

RW: There can be literal physical connections between the pathways for proactive and reactive aggression. In cats, those connections carry signals when one type of aggression is occurring that inhibit the other form of aggression. 

CA: Why is it important to study other primates besides ourselves?

RW: Among primates, closely related animals tend to share similarities with each other in many types of behavior, from calls and facial expressions to social relationships and social organization. The explanation is that there are important influences on behavior from their shared biology. Studying non-human primates, especially our closest relatives, gives us the opportunity to understand biological influences on human behavior.

CA: What do we know about aggression in chimpanzees and bonobos-two of our closest living relatives?

RW: Compared to humans, chimpanzees exhibit a similarly high propensity for proactive aggression. Chimpanzees also show a high propensity for reactive aggression (unlike humans, whose reactive aggression is produced much less easily). Whether bonobos show any significant tendency for proactive aggression is uncertain, but possibly they show none. Reactive aggression in bonobos is less frequent and violent than in chimpanzees, but nevertheless bonobos have rates of reactive aggression that are hundreds of times greater than in humans.

CA: What is self-domestication?

RW: I define self-domestication as a reduced tendency for reactive aggression compared to a recent ancestor, thanks to natural selection. It means that for some reason other than being domesticated by humans, a species is less aggressive than its ancestors were. 

CA: Do you think bonobos underwent a process of self-domestication once having branched off from a common ancestor with chimps about two millions years ago? 

RW: Yes. To judge from their uniquely juvenile-like skull, bonobos descended from a more chimpanzee-like ancestor sometime between 875,000 and 2.1 million years ago. They are now markedly less aggressive than chimpanzees. 

CA: Do you think humans are just another domesticated ape?

RW: I would not say “just another domesticated ape” exactly. Anatomical changes during the last half-million years indicate that Homo sapiensis a domesticated form of a more aggressive human-for example, the mid-Pleistocene common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

CA: How and why might this have happen? 

RW: In small-scale societies nowadays, men who are too aggressive are executed through a system of capital punishment. A version of the same process seems likely to explain how human males became less reactively aggressive during the evolution of Homo sapiens.

CA: Does the fossil record tell us anything about the evolution of proactive aggression?

RW: Reactive aggression in men is associated with broad faces, big brains and several other traits in the skull. By comparison, proactive aggression does not have any obvious anatomical associations.

So very little can be directly inferred about ancient proactive aggression directed towards other humans, except from occasional fossil finds such as the massacre recorded 10,000 years ago among hunter-gatherers in Nataruk, Kenya by Marta Lahr and colleagues. However, since human ancestors have been hunting throughout much of the Pleistocene, and hunting other animals is strongly associated with killing members of one’s own species, proactive aggression has likely been an important part of human social behavior for hundreds of thousands of years.

CA: Can scientific inquiry into the nature and evolution of human aggression help us to control its darker manifestations such as war, mass murder, violence against women and children, etc..?

RW: Whether or how a better understanding of the biology of human evolution will help make vulnerable people safer is unpredictable: one can only hope.

This Author

Curtis Abraham is a freelance writer and researcher on African development, science, the environment, biomedical/health and African social/cultural history. He has lived and worked in sub-Saharan Africa for over two decades with his work appearing in numerous publications including New Scientist, BBC Wildlife Magazine, New African and Africa Geographic.

From the rapid decline of once common birds and the disappearance of butterflies, to the destruction of flower rich meadows and pollution of our most beautiful rivers, we have in a short time seen a huge transformation in the environment that we all live in and depend upon. 

Having destroyed and degraded so much of what was once commonplace, many people believe it is time to start down the road to the recovery of nature in Britain, and that is why WWF is hoping many supporters will join many others there to send the signal that political and business leaders need to hear: that ‘we want our wildlife back’.

The support and passion for Britain’s wildlife is huge and diverse. Tomorrow will see a demonstration of unity behind the need for action – from individual citizens, different focused campaigning groups, to large mass membership organizations. Our call will be for a new plan for the recovery of nature across our islands, reversing the decades’-long spiral of decline that has left us today as one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth.

Long-term plans

We know all we need to know to do this. We have a tool kit that is tried and tested, but which now needs to be modernised, properly resourced and harnessed with renewed vigour and ambition. New policies being developed by government, including a new farming policy and a new Environment Act, could be part of the package of changes that we need to adopt. 

For WWF, one of our top priorities is for a new Environment Act backed by a powerful watchdog. We are campaigning for that to enshrine in law a duty on ministers and public bodies to adopt policies and decisions that support the recovery of nature. A pledge to leave nature in better shape that we found it was made earlier this year by the Prime Minister, in the form of a non-binding 25 Year Environment Plan.

Although that made some welcome commitments, including paying farmers to help wildlife recover, such a document might not survive a change of ministers, never mind a change of government. 

This is why new laws are needed, to place the recovery of nature on a legal and long-term footing, as we did ten years ago to reduce climate changing pollution with the adoption of the Climate Change Act. That has proved effective in delivering long-term action for a long-term problem, and we believe the same needs to be done now, for the recovery of the natural environment. This would put the UK on a path to restoring its nature 

We also need to see government allocating the money needed to deliver this. Last year Britain’s official conservation bodies spent the equivalent of about two cups of coffee each for everyone in the country. With such limited resources and recent budget cuts that have made things worse, perhaps it is no wonder these bodies are struggling to undertake even their basic functions, never mind the ever more challenging task that now lies before them. 

Essential investment

Part of the trouble appears to be down to the extent to which we have fallen into the trap of seeing the protection and recovery of nature as a cost, rather than as a sound investment. Natural areas protect homes from flooding, insects pollinate crops, healthy ecosystems purify water, wildlife is a massive asset for tourism and spending time outside in vibrant natural areas supports and protects public health.

All that is worth far more than we pay to keep and restore it. Now is the time to step up and make the investment needed, for nature is not only beautiful and vital to save for its own sake, but essential for people too. 

For young people in particular, this is an agenda of huge importance. They will inherit the consequences of our present direction of travel and we hope they more than any other group will join us and lead in the process of change.

That process is not only about the UK, of course, but the entire world. The simple fact is that we are tearing apart the web of life globally. If we can halt and reverse this disaster here in Britain, one of the richest democracies in the world, with its top scientists and informed public, then that will be an important act of leadership. 

After all, if we can’t do that here, then where will it be done?

This Author

Tony Juniper CBE is executive director for advocacy and campaigns at WWF-UK.

Professor Michael Mann is, through the deniers’ looking glass, an accomplished dissembler, a manipulator of science, a fraud, and a threat to the American people.

He is reviled, attacked and harassed. A former CIA agent has contacted his colleagues looking for dirt. The hacker who broke into the University of East Anglia servers during Climategate was searching for his data and emails, among other things.

The hockey stick graph, which Mann helped create and showed that the rapid rise in global temperatures over the last decades has been unprecedented in human history, has become the totem the deniers are most desperate to tear down.

If Mann is any of these things, then he is the most convincing con artist the world has ever seen, because to the rest of the world he is living the American dream. I interviewed him over 14 hours in Austin, Texas and asked everything from his relationship with his father, his sources of income, and his motives for studying climate. He is very evidently honest, open, kind and highly intelligent. 

Family Life

Mann is a distinguished professor and director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. He is married to Lorraine, a cell biologist also working at the university. The two met at an event in an amphitheatre in Charlottesville in Virginia and married the following year, in the summer of 2003 on Long Island Harbour, New York.

They live with their daughter in a 3,300-square-feet, three-bedroom detached house in Pennsylvania, which they bought with a mortgage for $600,000 in 2005. Mann now earns $150,000 a year through his professorship, as well as around $30,000 from talks and events.

He follows American Football and each year watches the UC Berkeley College game against rivals Stanford who, he tells me, “often pummels us”.

Mann will tell you everything about his life, his work and his finances if you ask him politely; he has, over the years, come to enjoy the media spotlight.

“My daughter thinks it’s pretty cool that Daddy is often on TV. She knows that it’s a little different from her friends,” he beams. “But I’ve been able to shield them, her especially, from the nonsense and the uglier episodes.”       

Middle Class American

Mann is like millions of middle class Americans in that his family fled destitution and persecution, but were able to prosper through hard work and strong ethics in the Land of the Free.

His father’s grandfather was a newspaper merchant who fled Ukraine during increasingly deadly pogroms, while his mother’s family were forced to flee their home on the Polish border with Imperial Russia because of the tide of violent anti-semitism.

His great-grandfather came through Ellis Island and, once in America, won a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, after which he became a doctor.

Mann’s father became a maths professor, while his mother grew up in a small town in Katanning, outside Pittsburgh, and moved to Pennsylvania to gain a degree in education.

The family history is steeped in the values of education and hard work. Mann was raised in the college town of Ambrose, Massachusetts, a “progressive enclave”. As a child, he was given freedom to follow his own interests but was never allowed to wander too far from the path of knowledge.

Bipartisan Influence

One of Mann’s earliest memories is escaping the family home in his nappy in search of cookies and calling in at the neighbours’ house. The neighbours were James and Edna Anderson, retired Republicans and staunch Christians.

Mr Anderson was a pomologist, an apple expert, at the University of Massachusetts, and he railed against environmentalists who criticised the new Alar insecticide, believing the chemical was providing food for the poor.

The elderly neighbours “adopted” the young tearaway and taught him the Ten Commandments. Perhaps because they were Christian and Republican, while Mann’s family were Jewish and Democrats, the core values seemed to the young boy to contain some universal truths.

“I had a sort of bipartisan upbringing,” he recalls fondly. “That’s where I acquired some of my ethical foundations, as much from their influence as from my parents’ influence. From an early age I grew up with a belief that it’s important to do good with your life. It is important to try and make the world a better place.”

Schoolwork and education were always highly valued. “In elementary school I was sort of, liked to goof off a bit,” he recalls. During junior high, Mann scored a B in maths for one quarter and was immediately taken to one side by his father for a stern word.

“I remember there being some discussion about what happened. There was a little bit of incentive provided. Maybe a down payment towards a new bike,” he recalls. “I ended up getting an A+ the next quarter.”

Fellow Scientists

While still a high school senior at Amherst High School, Mann competed in a computer programming contest at Western New England University College – and still takes considerable pride at having won the prize.

“What I was really driven by, what the reward really about, was in solving an important problem, solving a difficult problem, and I suppose at some level, there is some, you know, recognition for that: That provides an additional incentive. It’s fun to be recognised by your fellow computer nerds.”

He adds: “What means a lot to me is the recognition I’ve received from my colleagues, awards from my fellow scientists. I can be smeared by charlatans and it sort of washes over me because what really matters to me is how I’m viewed and how my work is viewed by my colleagues.”

If Mann is really trying to fool the world into wasting billions during a recession to pump his research grants then he is seriously jeopardising the love and admiration of his entire family, his wife, and his closest friends.

‘Dead End’

Mann graduated from UC Berkeley and in the autumn of 1989 went to Yale University where he focused on theoretical physics; however, he found himself losing interest with the specific project he was funded to work on.

“I talk about the random path, the random walk – a term that has meaning both in science and in life. It was this random walk and I sort of walked into a bit of a dead end… I just had to back up a little bit and find my way out of it, back into the main part of the maze.”

Many of his university friends were also leaving university to enter Wall Street, where their maths and physics knowledge could be used to create complex derivatives and other financial instruments that would fool American investors, and ultimately the state, out of billions of dollars.

“Anybody with any sort of advanced training in maths and physics could immediately find a job working for an investment firm doing derivatives modelling and some people in my cohort of physics graduate students at Yale at the time did leave for Wall Street to do just that – and made a lot of money doing it.”

The Bigger Picture

The government had just scrapped the super collider project in Texas. Funding for Mann’s specific area of science was significantly reduced. But Mann was not interested in earning millions.

“I was interested in bigger picture problems, solving big picture problems, you know, like the wide-open existential problems of cosmology, e.g. the grand unified theory of physics. I wanted to work on really interesting big picture problems.”

He thumbed the Yale University prospectus and decided to change course; in doing so, he changed the course of his life.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

Fracking is due to begin at a site in Lancashire “in the next few weeks” after the government gave the final nod to a second test well.

The site already had planning permission and environmental permits in place, and exploratory fracking at the first well was signed off in July, subject to the company providing proof that the Cuadrilla had sufficient funding to back the operations and decommissioning the site afterwards.

Lancashire County Council had originally blocked planning permission for fracking at the site, but the government “called in” the case and gave permission for up to four exploratory wells.

Caroline Lucas, former Green party co-leader and MP for Brighton Pavilion, criticised energy minister Claire Perry for announcing the decision while Parliament is in recess over the party conference season.

Vote down

Lucas said: “Claire Perry has deliberately signed off this second well during recess so that MPs – including many from her own party who are opposed to this move – can’t hold her to account.

“The fiasco of allowing fracking at Preston New Road has been an exercise in trampling over democracy and the wishes of local people,” she added.

Francis Egan, chief executive of Cuadrilla said: “We are delighted to receive this consent. We are currently completing works on site in readiness to start hydraulically fracturing both wells in the next few weeks.”

Earlier this week, it was reported that some 20 Conservative MPs were planning to vote down government proposals, currently under consultation, to allow exploratory fracking to go ahead without planning permission.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for the Ecologist. She was formerly the deputy editor of the Environmentalist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76. 

In 2015, Nuclear Monitor published a detailed analysis of the many ways nuclear industry insiders and lobbyists trivialise and deny the connections between nuclear power – and the broader nuclear fuel cycle – and nuclear weapons proliferation.

Since then, the arguments have been turned upside down with prominent industry insiders and lobbyists openly acknowledging power-weapons connections. This remarkable about-turn has clear origins in the crisis facing nuclear power and the perceived need to secure increased subsidies to prevent reactors closing and to build new ones.

The new sales pitch openly links nuclear power to weapons and argues that weapons programs will be jeopardised unless greater subsidies are provided for the civil nuclear industry. The US Nuclear Energy Institute, for example, tried in mid-2017 to convince politicians in Washington that if the only reactor construction projects in the US ‒ in South Carolina and Georgia ‒ weren’t completed, it would stunt development of the nation’s nuclear weapons complex.

The Nuclear Energy Institute paper wasn’t publicly released. But in the second half of 2017, numerous nuclear insiders and lobbyists openly acknowledged power-weapons connections and called for additional subsidies for nuclear power. The most important of these initiatives was a paper by the Energy Futures Initiative ‒ a creation of Ernest Moniz, who served as energy secretary under President Barack Obama.

The uranium industry jumps on the bandwagon

Even the uranium industry has jumped on the bandwagon, with two US companies warning that reliance on foreign sources threatens national security and lodging a petition with the Department of Commerce calling for US utilities to be required to purchase a minimum 25 percent of their requirements from domestic mines.

Decades of deceit have been thrown overboard with the new sales pitch linking nuclear power and weapons. However there are still some hold-outs. Until recently, one nuclear lobbyist continuing to deny power-weapons connections was Michael Shellenberger from the ‘Environmental Progress’ pro-nuclear lobby group in the US.

Shellenberger told an IAEA conference last year that “nuclear energy prevents the spread of nuclear weapons”. And he claimed last year that “one of FOE-Greenpeace’s biggest lies about nuclear energy is that it leads to weapons” and that there is an “inverse relationship between energy and weapons”.

Shellenberger’s backflip

In two articles published in August, Shellenberger has done a 180-degree backflip on the power-weapons connections. “[N]ational security, having a weapons option, is often the most important factor in a state pursuing peaceful nuclear energy”, Shellenberger now believes.

A recent analysis from Environmental Progress finds that of the 26 nations that are building or are committed to build nuclear power plants, 23 have nuclear weapons, had weapons, or have shown interest in acquiring weapons.

“While those 23 nations clearly have motives other than national security for pursuing nuclear energy,” Shellenberger writes, “gaining weapons latency appears to be the difference-maker. The flip side also appears true: nations that lack a need for weapons latency often decide not to build nuclear power plants … Recently, Vietnam and South Africa, neither of which face a significant security threat, decided against building nuclear plants …”

Here is the break-down of the 26 countries that are building or are committed to build nuclear power plants according to the Environmental Progress report:

·         Thirteen nations had a weapons program, or have shown interest in acquiring a weapon: Argentina, Armenia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Iran, Japan, Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, UAE.

·         Seven nations have weapons (France, US, Britain, China, Russia, India and Pakistan), two had weapons as part of the Soviet Union (Ukraine and Belarus), and one (Slovakia) was part of a nation (Czechoslovakia) that sought a weapon.

·         Poland, Hungary, and Finland are the only three nations (of the 26) for which Environmental Progress could find no evidence of weapons latency as a motivation.

Current patterns connecting the pursuit of power and weapons stretch back across the 60 years of civilian nuclear power. Shellenberger notes that “at least 20 nations sought nuclear power at least in part to give themselves the option of creating a nuclear weapon” ‒ Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, France, Italy, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Libya, Norway, Romania, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, West Germany, Yugoslavia.

Shellenberger points to research by Fuhrmann and Tkach which found that 31 nations had the capacity to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium, and that 71% of them created that capacity to give themselves weapons latency.

Nuclear weapons ‒ a force for peace?

So far, so good. The pursuit of nuclear power and weapons are often linked. That’s a powerful reason to eschew nuclear power, to strengthen the safeguards system, to tighten export controls, to restrict the spread of enrichment and reprocessing, and so on. But Shellenberger has a very different take on the issues.

Discussing the Fuhrmann and Tkach article (and studiously avoiding contrary literature), Shellenberger writes:

“What was the relationship between nuclear latency and military conflict? It was negative. “Nuclear latency appears to provide states with deterrence-related benefits,” they [Fuhrmann and Tkach] concluded, “that are distinct from actively pursuing nuclear bombs.”

“Why might this be? Arriving at an ultimate cause is difficult if not impossible, the authors note. But one obvious possibility is that the “latent nuclear powers may be able to deter conflict by (implicitly) threatening to ‘go nuclear’ following an attack.” …

“After over 60 years of national security driving nuclear power into the international system, we can now add “preventing war” to the list of nuclear energy’s superior characteristics. …

“As a lifelong peace activist and pro-nuclear environmentalist, I almost fell out of my chair when I discovered the paper by Fuhrmann and Tkach. All that most nations will need to deter military threats is nuclear power ‒ a bomb isn’t even required? Why in the world, I wondered, is this fact not being promoted as one of nuclear powers many benefits?

“The answer is that the nuclear industry and scientific community have tried, since Atoms for Peace began 65 years ago, to downplay any connection between the two ‒ and for an understandable reason: they don’t want the public to associate nuclear power plants with nuclear war.

“But in seeking to deny the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, the nuclear community today finds itself in the increasingly untenable position of having to deny these real world connections ‒ of motivations and means ‒ between the two. Worse, in denying the connection between energy and weapons, the nuclear community reinforces the widespread belief that nuclear weapons have made the world a more dangerous place when the opposite is the case. …

“Nuclear energy, without a doubt, is spreading and will continue to spread around the world, largely with national security as a motivation. The question is whether the nuclear industry will, alongside anti-nuclear activists, persist in stigmatizing weapons latency as a nuclear power “bug” rather than tout it as the epochal, peace-making feature it is.”

Deterrent effects

Shellenberger asks why the deterrent effect of nuclear power isn’t being promoted as one of its many benefits. Nuclear weapons can have a deterrent effect ‒ in a uniquely dangerous and potentially uniquely counterproductive manner ‒ but any correlation between latent nuclear weapons capabilities and reduced military conflict is just that, correlation not causation.

On the contrary, there is a history of military attacks on nuclear facilities to prevent their use in weapons programs (e.g. Israel’s attacks on nuclear facilities in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007). Shellenberger points to the same problem, asking whether latency could “also be a threat to peace?” and noting Israeli and US threats to take pre-emptive action against Iran. He doesn’t offer an answer or explore the issue further.

Shellenberger argues that Iran should be encouraged to develop nuclear weapons. He cites long-term nuclear weapons proliferation enthusiast Kenneth Waltz, who claims that the “decades-long Middle East nuclear crisis … will end only when a balance of military power is restored”. He cites a German academic who argues that a nuclear-armed Germany “would stabilize NATO and the security of the Western World”. We “should be glad that North Korea acquired the bomb” according to Shellenberger. And on it goes ‒ his enthusiasm for nuclear weapons proliferation knows no bounds.

‘Shellenberger has gone down a rabbit hole’

Nuclear Monitor has previously exposed the litany of falsehoods in Shellenberger’s writings on nuclear and energy issues. In his most recent articles he exposes himself as an intellectual lightweight prepared to swing from one extreme of a debate to the other if that’s what it takes to build the case for additional subsidies for nuclear power.

A dangerous intellectual lightweight. Environmental Progress attorney Frank Jablonski writes:

“From Shellenberger’s article you would conclude that, for any “weak nation”, or for the “poor or weak” persons within such nations, things are bound to improve with acquisition of nuclear weapons. So, for humanitarian reasons, the imperialistic nations and hypocritical people standing in the way of that acquisition should get out of the way. No. The article’s contentions are falsified by … logical untenability, things it got wrong, and things it left out. While Shellenberger’s willingness to take controversial positions has often been valuable, a “contrarian” view is not always right just because it is contrarian.”

Sam Seitz, a student at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, argues that Shellenberger’s argument is “almost Trumpian in its incoherence”. He takes issue with Shellenberger’s claims that no nuclear powers have been invaded (“a pretty misleading statistic” and “wrong”); that battle deaths worldwide have declined by 95% (“fails to prove that nuclear weapons are responsible for this trend … as we are frequently reminded, correlation and causation are not equivalent”); that Indian and Pakistani deaths in two disputed territories declined sharply after Pakistan’s first nuclear weapons test in 1998 (“doesn’t account for non-nuclear factors like the role of outside mediation and domestic politics”); and that Nazi Germany invaded France because the French lacked a credible deterrent (“makes very little sense and conflates several things … also silly”).

Hostile response

Responding to Shellenberger’s more-the-merrier attitude towards nuclear weapons proliferation, pro-nuclear commentator Dan Yurman puts it bluntly: “Here’s the problem. The more nations have nuclear weapons, the more dangerous the world will be. Sooner or later some tin pot dictator or religious zealot is likely to push a button and send us all to eternity.”

Shellenberger’s about-turn on power-weapons connections provoked a hostile response from Yurman:

“Shellenberger has crossed a red line for the global commercial nuclear industry, which has done everything in its power to avoid having the public conflate nuclear weapons with commercial nuclear energy. Worse, he’s given opponents of nuclear energy, like Greenpeace, a ready-made tool to attack the industry. …

“In the end he may have painted himself into a corner. Not only has he alienated some of his supporters on the commercial nuclear side of the house, but he also has energized the nonproliferation establishment, within governments and among NGOs, offering them a rich opportunity promote critical reviews of the risks of expanding nuclear energy as a solution to the challenge of climate change. …

“Shellenberger has gone down a rabbit hole with his two essays promoting the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Given all the great things he has done to promote commercial nuclear energy, it is a perplexing and disturbing development.

“It’s ok to be contrarian, but I fear he will pay a price for it with reduced support from some of his current supporters and he will face critical reviews from detractors of these essays. In the end public support and perception of the safety of nuclear energy may be diminished by these essays since they will lead to increased conflating of commercial nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. The fatal attraction of the power of nuclear weapons has lured another victim. It’s an ill-fated step backwards.”

Power-weapons connections

No doubt there will be more acknowledgements of power-weapons connections by nuclear industry insiders and lobbyists. As Shellenberger notes, the nuclear ‘community’ today finds itself in an increasingly untenable position denying the connections.

There is a degree of domestic support for nuclear weapons programs in weapons states … but few people support generalised nuclear weapons proliferation and few would swallow Shellenberger’s arguments including his call to shred the non-proliferation and disarmament system and to encourage weapons proliferation.

Understanding of the power-weapons connections, combined with opposition to nuclear weapons, is one of the motivations driving opposition to nuclear power. According to Shellenberger, the only two US states forcing the closure of nuclear plants, California and New York, also had the strongest nuclear disarmament movements.

There is some concern that claims that the civil nuclear industry is an important (or even necessary) underpinning of a weapons program will be successfully used to secure additional subsidies for troubled nuclear power programs (e.g. in the US, France and the UK). After all, nuclear insiders and lobbyists wouldn’t abandon their decades-long deceit about power-weapons connections if not for the possibility that their new argument will gain traction, among politicians if not the public.

The growing acknowledgement ‒ and public understanding ‒ of power-weapons connections might have consequences for nuclear power newcomer countries such as Saudi Arabia. Assuming that the starting point is opposition to a Saudi nuclear weapons program, heightened sensitivity might constrain nuclear exporters who would otherwise export to Saudi Arabia with minimalist safeguards and no serious attempt to check the regime’s weapons ambitions. Or it might not lead to that outcome ‒ as things stand, numerous nuclear exporters are scrambling for a share of the Saudi nuclear power program regardless of proliferation concerns.

More generally, a growing understanding of power-weapons connections might lead to a strengthening of the safeguards system along with other measures to firewall nuclear power from weapons. But again, that’s hypothetical and it is at best some way down the track ‒ there is no momentum in that direction.

And another hypothetical arising from the growing awareness about power-weapons connections: proliferation risks might be (and ought to be) factored in as a significant negative in comparative assessments of power generation options.

This Author

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter, where a longer version of this article was originally published.

Liz Truss told a right-wing US think tank that “a thicket of regulation and control” is holding back business and called for a new “Anglo-American dream” while the group published details of a proposed deregulatory US-UK trade deal.

Her speech – given at the Cato Institute during a taxpayer-funded trip to Washington – came as Cato and other right-wing think tanks launched a major report at joint events in London and US outlining an “ideal” free-trade agreement after Brexit.  

The proposed deal would threaten environmental regulations, remove current rules on imports of chlorine chicken and hormone-fed beef and open up the NHS to competition from the American healthcare industry.

Close ties

At the Washington DC launch of the report yesterday, Truss delivered a speech entitled ‘Market Millennials’ in which she described Brexit as a “huge opportunity” to “shape a new relationship with America” and “turbo charge freedom”.

The DC launch was also attended by former UK environment secretary Owen Paterson, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, and MEP Daniel Hannan, who edited the report.

Speaking at the London launch of the report in Westminster, the Cato Institute’s Daniel Ikenson said workplace and environmental rules do not belong in trade agreements, insisting that companies can be “self-regulating” when it comes to environmental standards.

Ikenson also suggested “local farmers” had been “scaring” people about chlorinated chicken and suggested that “incumbent” providers such as the NHS should be opened up to competition as part of a de-regulatory trade deal. 

I don’t think labour and environmental provisions belong in trade agreements

That report, an “ideal” version of a US-UK trade agreement, was a collaboration between 11 influential right-wing US and UK think tanks – including the Institute of Economic Affairs, which enjoys close ties to trade secretary Liam Fox and former foreign secretary Boris Johnson, and the Initiative for Free Trade.

Carve-outs

The report calls for an extensive free trade deal between the US and the UK, with no tariffs on any goods, reductions in regulation, and equivalence between the UK and USA’s rules, which could open up the UK to the sale of chlorinated chicken, hormone beef, and other products.

In remarks at the report’s London launch, its primary author Daniel Ikenson, the director of Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute was blunt about its effects – and his view on regulation.

“Healthcare is a service, we call for opening services to competition,” he said. “And I know some people are worried about what happens to the NHS, for example. We think competition is a good thing and it would lead to better quality healthcare.”

Ikensen noted the report would allow the UK government to protect up to 10% of its service sector from the full effects of competition – but noted that even if this full allocation was used on the NHS it might not be enough to shelter it, given the organisation’s scale.

“If the UK government were to choose to want to insulate the NHS or other services they have an allotment of 10% of the economy, though that might not be enough to cover all of the NHS but there is room for carve-outs,” he said. “But this is a free trade agreement, the purpose of liberalising trade is to expose incumbent business to competition, including healthcare.”

Ikenson also admitted the “ideal” trade agreement the 11 think tanks had drafted included no protections for workers or the environment, and was dismissive of their existence.

Post-Brexit trade

“Labour and environmental provisions are in most trade agreements nowadays, I don’t think they belong in trade agreements,” he said. “Couple of things the left insists on having that I disagree with … I would like to have a much cleaner, smaller set of rules that gives maximum flexibility to transact as they wish.”

Ikenson continued: “Are there labour violations on occasion involving Western companies? Yes. Are there environmental issues and externalities? Yes. But I’ve got to say they’re the exception and not the rule and these companies, for a lot of these companies, their most important asset is their brand, and they want to do their utmost to avoid these things, and so they make amends – I think it’s self-regulating.”

Amy Mount of the Greener UK coalition responded to Ikensen’s remarks to Unearthed. 

“This is a depressing vision for our future. Flooding our supermarkets with chlorinated chicken, undercutting our farmers and lowering standards for chemicals would be a strange way to take back control,” she said.

“The UK has benefited from trade deals that embrace high standards, and enjoyed high quality food and safer products as a result. Our blueprint for post-Brexit trade should be defined by a lighter footprint on the global environment, not a low-standards free-for-all.”

Chlorinated chicken

At the launch, the report’s authors noted trade deals provided an opportunity to lock-in rules and prevent “backsliding”, dismissing concerns around trade deals and food as lobbying and scaremongering, attacking UK farmers in the process.

“There’s a lot of politics involved [in trade deals],” Ikenson noted. “A lot of bootlegger and Baptist stories where you have interests that want protection … and they enlist the support of unknowing groups who have social consciences, for example they don’t want to eat chlorinated chicken – and chlorinated chicken, there’s nothing wrong with it scientifically, it’s available for sale.

“The local farmers who benefit from scaring people about chlorinated chicken have won them to their side, to do their bidding for them. There’s a lot of that going on in trade policy.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

Climate science denial campaign group the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has apparently been left with a hole in its finances after a major donor did not renew its funding.

The Atkin Charitable Foundation had given the GWPF £20,000 each year between 2012 and 2016. But the foundation pulled its funding in 2017, its latest accounts filed with the Charity Commission show.

The GWPF was founded by climate science denier Nigel Lawson in 2009 with the purpose of combating what the foundation describes as “extremely damaging and harmful policies” designed to mitigate climate change.

Network of politicians

The Atkin Charitable Foundation was set up in February 2006 to fund efforts towards the “relief of poverty, distress and sickness, the advancement of education, the protection of health and for any other charitable purpose”, according to its annual trustees’ report.

Edward Atkin sits on both the Atkin Charitable Foundation and GWPF’s board of trustees. He made his money through selling his baby-feeding business Aventa for £300 million in 2005.

Atkin is a major Conservative Party donor, having donated almost £230,000 to the party since 2002, according to Electoral Commission data.

Atkin also donated £2,000 to Boris Johnson’s London mayoral campaign in 2008. Johnson is a significant part of a network of politicians and lobbyists pushing disinformation on climate change and for Brexit, which DeSmog UK previously mapped.

‘Great physicist’

Johnson has flirted with climate science denial over the years. In a Telegraph column in 2013,he said a cold snap in weather casts doubt on the science. Then, writing in the Telegraph in December 2015, he argued recent warm winter weather had nothing to do with climate change.

In both columns he referred to the “great physicist and meteorologist Piers Corbyn” – brother of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and a well-known climate science denier.

The Atkin Charitable Foundation and GWPF have been contacted for comment.

This Author

Mat Hope is editor of Desmog.uk, where this article first appeared.

Roger Bate, when head of the Environment Unit at the free market think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), was an extremely energetic man.  

Not only did Bate help to organise the first major climate denial conference in Britain, hosted by the IEA in 1995, but he also established his own think tank, the European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF), by turning the contacts he made into funders and contributors.

One of these contacts was Dr John Emsley, a chemist at Imperial College London who wrote a regular “Molecule of the Month” column in the left-liberal Independent newspaper. The idea behind his column was to explain to the public the benefits that chemicals brought to people and the planet.

Bate’s recruits

Emsley attended IEA events where he met Bate and his friend Julian Morris. “I must say I did enjoy talking to and arguing with Roger and Julian, mainly because I was at the opposite end of the political spectrum,” Emsley told me.

Bate invited Emsley to join the ESEF and help edit his forthcoming book, What Risk? Emsley explained: “I was mainly involved in editing the two climate change books it produced, which echoed my thoughts at the time about the relative importance of CO2 as a greenhouse gas.”

Bate also persuaded professor Frits Bottcher, the director of the Global Institute for the Study of Natural Resources in The Hague, to come on board. “The issue of climate change was the initiation for the meeting,” according to ESEF’s promotional material.

The charity set out its aim on its website as being “to inform the public about scientific debates” and to “provide a forum for scientific opinions that are usually not heard in public policy debates”.

Bate would place comment articles across the international media under headlines like A Myth Stubbed Out, Is Nothing Worse than Tobacco? and Global Warming, Don’t Believe the Hype. Bate even attacked attempts to reduce lead in drinking water.

‘Imposing consensus’

He set about sending out press releases and helping maverick scientists to write articles for the popular press. He offered to “advise scientists [on] how to present their findings to the media, and how the media will perceive, and may use, the information”.

The ESEF joined the deniers’ vitriolic attack on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in March 1996 with the headline “Scientists attack ‘official consensus’ on global warming”. The article accused the IPCC of “imposing consensus” on scientists, retarding research and relying on dodgy climate models.

Bate also drew up a comprehensive plan for the ESEF project that year. The think tank produced a paper for publication in the US and Europe under the headline “Why regulate nicotine when caffeine is more addictive?” which was described as “a follow-up to the work done by the Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) in the US where they petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ‘regulate caffeine’”.

Bate wanted to show that the regulation of nicotine “has nothing to do with the science and a lot to do with empire building by the FDA”. In his carefully prepared notes, he warned that the article “needs careful handling”.

The ESEF then published a monograph attacking the scientific warnings that environmental tobacco smoke could cause cancer in March 1998. In August, Bate appeared on the BBC’s Today programme to attack the “junk science” of passive smoking.

But the charity was in danger of being accused of acting as a public relations company for tobacco and other industry interests.

‘Maintain independence’

According to the corporate responsibility campaigners Lobbywatch, the original ESEF website stated: “To maintain its independence and impartiality, the ESEF does not accept outside funding from whatever source, the only income it receives is from the sale of its publications.”  

Promotional material sent to a tobacco company was only slightly different, saying: “To maintain its independence and impartiality, ESEF accepts funding only from charities, and the income it receives is from the sale of its publications.”

Bate approached the second largest tobacco firm in the US, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, asking for £50,000 in cash for a book about environmental risks including a chapter on passive smoking. But the company turned him down and the money was never paid.

That, however, did not slow Bate down. Over the next two years he would recruit the coal-funded sceptic scientists Robert Balling and Patrick Michaels to the academic board of ESEF, as well as renowned climate denier Fred Singer in the United States.

IEA lobbying

There has been an assumption among environmentalists that the tobacco industry deliberately created think tanks that would attack regulations and the restrictions on smoking.

But one former industry insider who agreed to speak to me said the relationship was often the other way around. Bate and his colleagues at the IEA were actively lobbying the tobacco companies to do more to attack regulation and saw their apparent inaction as short-sighted and a betrayal of principle.

Moreover, it was the IEA and other think tanks that were seeking funding from tobacco, not the other way around.

Bate attended several meetings at the offices of British American Tobacco in Staines, Surrey to discuss the work of the Environment Unit and his own forum. He worked closely with Keith Gretton in British American Tobacco’s corporate communications department, who sent out an internal memo: “Should the [Risk Assessment (RA)] programme take off fully in the UK or EU, the IEA is a good ally. A current thrust of its work is on RA (initially re global warming etc, widening its net later in 1996).”

It continued: “An RA publication is planned to which we could input. When a decision is made on the appropriate strategy for going forward on RA, we should meet Roger Bate head of IEA Environment Unit.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

Pollination by insects, particularly bees, is vital to food production and humans because it affects the yield or quality of 75 percent of globally important crop types. In recent years there has been increasing concern about the long-term stability of this service due to widespread declines in some species.

Despite the negative impacts of agricultural intensification on plants and insect pollinators, researchers at Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and the University of Reading found the species that remain in parts of the UK with a higher proportion of farmed land are more likely to survive a variety of potential environmental changes.

However, the research suggested that this was because these landscapes have already lost their most vulnerable species, retaining those insect and plant species that are more able to take whatever is thrown at them.

Ecological networks

The study drew on six million records from more than 30 years of citizen science data from thousands of volunteer naturalists, relating to sightings of species and visits to plants by pollinators such as bees, hoverflies and butterflies.

The latter records enabled researchers to identify 16,000 unique interactions between plants and pollinators across Great Britain and, for the first time, the extent of how these ecological networks vary with different types of landscapes across the country.

John Redhead of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, the lead researcher of the new study, said: “We think that the plants and pollinators that remain in these landscapes represent the toughest species that can handle the stresses of intensive agriculture – the vulnerable ones are already long gone.

“This means that they’re also able to cope with many future changes, so although we hear about reported declines our wildlife, this may buy conservationists some time before we start to see the remaining plants and pollinators in agricultural areas really suffer.”

The plants that have survived intensive agriculture include common weed species like brambles and thistles, which can cope with increased soil fertilization and reduced water availability.

Restoring biodiversity

The insects that have fared better are ‘generalist’ pollinators that can feed on a wide variety of plant species, including crops and weeds, plus can cope with fewer and more scattered floral and nesting sites.

Professor Tom Oliver of the University of Reading, one of the co-authors of the paper, said: “It is good news that the catastrophic loss of all species is less likely, but we still need to work hard to restore biodiversity to give these ecosystems the best chance under growing threats of climate change and pollution.”

The study was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. 

The meeting on the future of sustainable farming held last week by Waveney Green Party in Beccles, Suffolk, had been planned for many months. We didn’t know it would be the day Michael Gove unveiled the long awaited Agriculture Bill, setting out the government’s plans for replacing the Common Agricultural Policy if we leave the European Union.

I was joining a panel of two farmers and a wholesaler, chaired by an agricultural journalist, to see where we could find common ground on views of the future of our food supplies. The aim was to talk philosophy and practices, rather than political detail, and I was a little concerned that the timing meant we might get derailed into the detail of the Bill rather than the broader issues.

I needn’t have been. As the National Farmers’ Union has also been pointing out, the Bill so failed to engage with the issues that it hardly featured in last night’s discussion, after general agreement was quickly reached that it didn’t represent any kind of vision for the way forward.

Disneyland countryside

Some of this, it might be fairly said, isn’t Mr Gove’s fault. As Green MEP Molly Scott Cato has said, “access to market has a far greater impact on the viability of farms than the subsidies they receive”. With a total lack of clarity about what could happen if we Brexit in March, the way forward cannot be clear.

And there is some good in the bill. Moving away from payments based on area towards rewards for how the land is managed and cared for is something the Green Party has long called for, as is capping CAP payments (although something that always could have been, and still could be, achieved as a member of the EU).

There’s also value in suggestions of support for farmers getting together to research and develop new methods and practices, to provide an alternative to one agribusiness giant being the chief source of information, and of talk of providing access to new entrants to farming (although none of the reform of land ownership that is only way to genuinely open up the opportunity for a flood of new entrants into the business of farming).

But overall, the picture the Bill represents is of a kind of Disneyland countryside, being managed a bit better for wildlife, soil and flood prevention, but not as the location for thriving small businesses producing the healthy, diverse foods their communities need in an increasingly food-insecure world. It entirely fails to even acknowledge that we’re talking about a food system – in which farming practices, distribution, education and training for farmers, workers and consumers, poverty and health are all interlinked.

As chair Jez Fredenburgh said, food appears to be almost entirely missing from the Bill. Professor Tim Lang has described it as a “finance plus land-management bill”.

Sustainable and diverse

So the discussion last night quickly moved on to the issues facing farmers and food consumers (ie all of us) not covered in the Bill.

The wonderful possibilities for change towards a system producing healthy food in sustainable ways with decent rewards for its producers were on display for all to see. There were Hodmedod’s pulses and grains – reflecting the move to produce diverse vegetable proteins in the UK to replace unsustainable factory farmed meat. There was a fine selection of local fruit and vegetables (which can be delivered to locals’ door in a box scheme), high-welfare dairy products and grass-fed local meats, all supplied by small independent producers.

And there was general agreement at the meeting that making food primarily local – a word seemingly lacking in Mr Gove’s vocabulary – has to be key. That means local producers, supply chains, retailers and other distribution systems – not our food supply dominated by a handful of supermarkets wielding their market dominance against producers with a severely underpowered regulator doing her best to introduce a modicum of fairness). 

There was also agreement that our food needs to be far more diverse. With more than half of the calories in the human diet coming from just four crops from an extraordinarily narrow range of varieties, as Josiah Meldrum from Hodmedod’s pointed out. We need to vastly expand that range, in the interests of human health and resilience against shocks caused by disease or crop failure. And this is also very much what the ecology of our countryside needs.

Another point of broad agreement was on the need for far better education about food – growing, cooking and eating — for students and the general population. “Bring back home economics” was the cry – but as I pointed out that would require the pressure to be taken off schools to be exam factories, to allow them to return to providing education preparing their pupils for life.

Transforming practices

And there was, if not always agreement about the detail, an understanding of the need to transform agricultural practices, away from a heavy reliance of pesticides and the plough, towards approaches such as agroecology, permaculture and no- or minimum-till, that rely on nature, and particularly healthy soil, to produce the healthy food we need.

Those are the foundations the Green Party believes are needed for a proper Agricultural Bill – or perhaps more properly for clarity, a Food, Health and Agriculture Bill. 

And then we need to make sure that everyone in our society has the income to buy high quality food at a decent return to the producer – and to have the time to cook it.

This Author 

Natalie Bennett is a member of Sheffield Green Party and former Green Party leader.