The most popular TV show of all time, Game of Thrones, has been interpreted by many as an allegory for the existential threat posed by fossil fuel-driven ecological breakdown.

While we must band together to address the common threat of ecological breakdown, characters in Game of Thrones must reckon with the mysterious and deadly White Walkers and their frozen Army of the Dead.

The show tells a familiar story about how the urge to keep playing the “game of thrones” remains strong even in the face of impending doom. But the way in which the story unfolds reveals more parallels than are immediately obvious.

Ice and fire

If you look, it’s easy to see: Game of Thrones holds many lessons for climate justice movements around the world.

Like the Westerosi, we are living through a mass extinction event, the gravity of which most of us don’t really appreciate. Concerns on Earth are more about heat than cold – there’s a 95 percent chance that average global temperatures rise 2°C by 2100 – but just as in Game of Thrones, the crises enveloping our world can be heard as a song of ice and fire. 

Droughts have combined with heat waves, leading to out-of-control wildfires in locations as unlikely as Greenland. Permafrost is no longer permanent: in Siberia, summer heatwaves are thawing the tundra, leading to explosions of methane bubbles big enough to rival Cersei’s dragonfire bombing of the Sept. 

The Sept of Baelor blast took out a lot of people, but if the carbon bomb under the permafrost goes off we are all screwed. Permafrost is thought to contain about twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere.Watching it thaw is genuine torture. 

Big bubbles of gas aren’t the only thing lurking in what’s left of our icy north. In 2016, anthrax returned to Siberia after a dead reindeer thawed, releasing its zombie disease into an unsuspecting village. The night is certainly dark and full of terrors.

Winter is coming

Everybody knows winter is coming. The Starks have been beating their drum about it forever. It’s literally their motto. Yet nobody seems to care. Sound familiar? 

The challenge in both our world and Game of Thrones is that existential threats don’t automatically unite the realms behind a common cause. Especially when said threats are seen to be far-off, either temporally or geographically.

Naive notions that logic would prevail doomed both Jon Snow’s and liberalism’s approach to communicating the problem. 

For some, seeing is believing and it is enough. But not for everybody, and certainly not for the likes of Cersei. Jon and friends go to extraordinary lengths to secure proof that the threat is real in the hope that this will convince Cersei to abandon her agenda and call a truce. In a better world it would. But neither we nor Jon live in that world. 

For Cersei, it doesn’t really matter that winter is coming to the north. All that matters is maintaining the power of her house and the pursuit of a narrow self-interest. If she can use the fact that winter is coming to her advantage, all the better. That should definitely sound familiar. 

Inequitable worlds

In Westeros, as on Earth, the existential threat isn’t a future problem. It is a now problem which is already claiming lives.

They just happen to be the wrong kind of lives. North of Westeros’ border ice-wall the various Wilding peoples have been forced to abandon their homelands.

In our inequitable world poor, racialized people already fleeing the impacts of devastating extreme weather and climate change are also met largely with indifference and inaction. 

Those in the centres of power in both worlds are as unmoved by faraway destruction as they are by the suffering of the people at their feet – be that in Fleabottom or the left-behind places of the industrialised world.

We would do well to remember that there’s no point appealing to the better natures of the Cersei Lannisters of this world. 

Chaos is a ladder 

Cersei isn’t the only one who sees opportunity in crisis. The late, great, Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish summarised it best: “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.” It is a self-evident truth: power always profits from disaster and from our suffering. 

This principle is what drives most of the drama in Game of Thrones, especially in earlier seasons. Those who can deceive their enemy, hide their motive, and sow confusion stand to benefit.

While for most of the world climate chaos is a death pit, for climate villains like Trump and the Koch brothers – or, in Westeros, for villains like Cersei – it is a ladder of opportunity.

The thing is that climate breakdown will not only drive up the death count – predominantly of poor people in the global South. It will also reduce the ability of social movements – the principal agents of system change – to organise. 

Climate breakdown will likely provide a chance for authoritarians to seize more power as things fall apart. It will certainly present ample opportunities for our world’s versions of the mercenary Golden Company, the private security firms such as G4S, as well as other pimps of misery, to grow ever richer as they either enforce or flog stupid ideas like geoengineering to desperate people.

Global justice

Season 8 of Thrones kicks off with Jon and Dany’s united front of Northern houses, Unsullied, and Dothraki amassing in Winterfell for the mother of all battles. In a few weeks we’ll know the result of that battle – who lives and who dies. 

But, in a way, it doesn’t matter. In the game of thrones “you either win or you die.” If the allied forces win against the Night King, the fight in the south resumes. The game of thrones continues. Kings come and go, even Night Kings, but the game remains. 

While the likes of Littlefinger want to keep playing the rigged game, others want to end it. 

We, too, live under a system that seems hegemonic, where the sufferings of the many pay for the luxuries of the few, and where cold-hearted bankers mimic their fictional counterparts in the Iron Bank and pour their money not into what is right but into what they mistakenly think will give them a return. 

So what’s to be done? Daenerys has an answer in line with the movements for global justice: change the system. 

System change 

Breaking the wheel requires power. And, as we know, knowledge isn’t power – power is power. Dany is lucky in that she has 2 dragons (RIP, Viserion). Those of us fighting to break the wheel in our world don’t have any dragons. Nobody is coming to save us in the nick of time with a convenient cache of dragonglass. 

What we have instead are the earthly equivalents of the Northmen, Dothraki, Wildlings, and Unsullied. People who have decided to shake off their chains, break with convention, say “fuck the king,” fuck their kingdoms, and fuck the games they play.

In our own fight for life, the real heroes are those who history tends to forget. Peoples who have already lived through the end of the world. The countless people who have given their own lives in defence of all life.

The choice now facing elites in both worlds is clear, and Daenerys put it best when talking about the Masters of Meereen during her slave liberation crusade: “they can live in my new world or they can die in their old one.” 

It’s system change or armageddon. 

Building coalitions

If Game of Thrones teaches us anything it is about the importance of building coalitions. Whether it is Mance Rayder bringing the wildlings together, or Jon and Sansa uniting the houses of the North, many characters come to realise that collective action is the only way to achieve collective liberation, or even collective survival. 

Davos puts it simply when he tells Daenerys “if we don’t put aside our enmities and band together, we will die. And then it doesn’t matter whose skeleton sits on the Iron Throne.”

Similarly, one of the key life lessons that the Stark girls took from their father is that “when the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.”

Movements for system change must also put these wise words into practice. We have so little time to make such large-scale and fundamental transformations that we cannot fight alone in our silos. We must be more than the sum of our parts. 

This is not to say that everyone is part of the solution – clearly some, our world’s “masters”, are not – but it is to say that the eternal in-fighting and ego-driven purity politics of the Left must be kept to an absolute minimum.

Universal fellowship

A wise man in this world once said that “to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” Our movements must inspire many people to join a fight we have very poor odds of winning.

The logic of strategy can only take us so far in this regard. We have to speak to people’s hearts and conjure up a kind of commitment that can usually only be born out of a sense of belonging. 

As the white winds sweep across our own world and ecological breakdown intensifies, we will need to take care of each other. Now is a time for community, for universal fellowship, rather than the identity politics of either liberalism or nationalism. 

Conventional wisdom tells us to choose our battles wisely because we can’t do everything at once. Yet this is precisely what our movements for system change must do. We must fight, and win, everywhere.

Obviously, prioritization is a part of strategy. But ultimately we must win on all of the many connected fronts in our fight for life. Some of us might take on thankless tasks of “damage control” in arenas of struggle that are toxic in themselves (I think of my comrades in the international climate negotiations.)

Imperative of hope

Others may be propagandists, educators, recruiters, or foot soldiers on the streets, in workplaces, and online. Many will play several roles. Just as each army in Thrones has archers, chefs, medics, as well as strategists, we all have a role.

Sometimes we fail to recognise this just as we fail to recognise a basic fact which every character in Game of Thrones knows to be true even if they sometimes forget: different terrains require different tactics. We must play to our strengths, and to our enemies weaknesses. 

We don’t yet know how things pan out in Game of Thrones. And while we have a very good idea of our own future should we fail to tackle climate change and ecological breakdown, ultimately we don’t know what will come to pass. That’s a good thing. 

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.” This isn’t a quote from a Game of Thrones character, but from author Rebecca Solnit. As Littlefinger says, “a lot can happen between now and never.” It is up to us to make it happen. 

Perhaps it was the now-forgotten Ygritte who best captured the essence and imperative of hope. Having already seen the Army of the Dead, and knowing the fate of anyone who gets in the way, she still knew that the point of life is to live. “If we die, we die. But first we’ll live.” 

As our movements start to face up to the horrifying reality of climate breakdown and accept the near impossibility of achieving the necessary transformations, we must hope harder, love more, and defy the predictions. In my opinion this is the most important lesson we could possibly learn. 

This Author 

Nathan Thanki is co-coordinator of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, a network of over 250 groups around the world struggling for system change. He also coordinates the climate justice constituency at the United Nations climate change negotiations and is a co-founder of The World of 1℃, a communications initiative which aims to improve ecological literacy and promote climate justice framing.

Image: BagoGames, Flickr. 

Environmental protesters have threatened to bring London to a standstill as they attempt to disrupt some of the capital’s busiest areas and force the Government to declare a climate emergency.

Activists have pledged to block five central locations including Parliament Square in a non-violent act of resistance and rebellion that campaigners say could go on for weeks.

Thousands of people will converge on Marble Arch, Oxford Circus, Waterloo Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, as well as near Parliament, peacefully blocking traffic and creating a “festival” of action including people’s assemblies, performances, talks, workshops and food, campaign group Extinction Rebellion said.

International

The movement, which is demanding the government takes urgent action on climate change and wildlife declines, has received support from actress and activist Dame Emma Thompson and former archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams.

Speaking at a meditation on the eve of the protests Dr Williams said humans had declared war on nature.

He said: “We are here tonight to declare that we do not wish to be at war. We wish to make peace with ourselves by making peace with our neighbour Earth and with our God.”

Thompson has previously said of the demonstrations: “It is time to stand up and save our home.”

Organisers said: “The International Rebellion begins and Extinction Rebellion will be bringing London to a standstill for up to two weeks.

Camp

“They will be blocking five of the city’s busiest and most iconic locations in a non-violent, peaceful act of rebellion where they invite people to join them for several days of creative, artist-led resistance.”

Demonstrators arrived at London’s Hyde Park on Sunday, some having journeyed to the city on foot in recent weeks from various parts of the UK for what is described as an “International Rebellion”.

Monday will see people in at least 80 cities in more than 33 countries hold similar demonstrations on the same environmental issues, campaigners said.

While organisers encouraged people to set up camp in Hyde Park overnight into Monday, they have been warned they could be breaking the law by doing so is an offence under Royal Parks legislation.

Disruption

A spokeswoman for The Royal Parks said Extinction Rebellion had not asked for permission to begin the protest in the park and that camping is not allowed.

Police said their operational response to camping “would be dependent on what if any other issues might be ongoing at the time”.

Scotland Yard said they have “appropriate policing plans” in place for the demonstrations and that officers will be used from across the force “to support the public order operation during the coming weeks”.

Police advised people travelling around London in the coming days to allow extra time for their journey in the event of road closures and general disruption.

This Author

Aine Fox is a reporter for the Press Association. Image (c) Press Association. 

Humans have declared war on nature and put progress before the planet, the former archbishop of Canterbury said as environmental protests aim to bring London to a standstill.

Dr Rowan Williams said the world is in a crisis which could be called “being at war with ourselves”.

He spoke at a meditation event outside St Paul’s Cathedral in the capital yesterday attended by activists preparing to take part in mass demonstrations organised by the Extinction Rebellion group.

War

Sitting on the ground amid protesters who held flags and banners, he said: “We have declared war on our nature when we declare war on the natural world.

“We are at war with ourselves when we are at war with our neighbour, whether that neighbour is human or non-human.

“We are here tonight to declare that we do not wish to be at war. We wish to make peace with ourselves by making peace with our neighbour earth and with our God.”

Non-violent

Praying at the all-faith gathering, he added: “We confess that we have polluted our own atmosphere, causing global warming and climate change that have increased poverty in many parts of our planet.

“We have contributed to crises and been more concerned with getting gold than keeping our planet green. We have loved progress more than the planet. We are sorry.”

Extinction Rebellion, which describes itself as a non-violent direct action and civil disobedience group, said the protests at major central London locations including Parliament Square and Oxford Circus from Monday “will be bringing London to a standstill for up to two weeks”.

This Author

Aine Fox is a reporter for the Press Association. Image (c) Press Association. 

ExxonMobil’s record of spreading doubt about climate science, despite internally recognising the impact of its fossil fuel products, was the focus of a public hearing on climate denial recently held in the European Parliament.

The event was informative and shed light on climate denial tactics by big polluters. But ExxonMobil did not bother to show up and face questions from elected representatives.

Such flagrant disregard for a democratically elected institution, added to the corporation’s history of devastating climate denial, must now mean an end to the company’s access to policymakers.

Destructive impact

ExxonMobil declined an invitation to the first hearing by a public institution into the company’s climate duplicity, saying it was prevented from participating by ongoing court cases in the US.

The litigation in question alleges that ExxonMobil knew about the destructive impacts of fossil fuels on the climate and worked to cover them up.

The fossil fuel giant said in its response to parliament: “Public commentary, such as would be solicited at the hearing, could prejudice those pending proceedings”.

Despite claiming that it cannot engage in commentary on this topic, ExxonMobil runs a website devoted to defending itself against the charges they face in these very court cases. 

At the hearing, climate denial expert Geoffrey Supran described the company’s system of deceiving the public and policymakers to shelve action that could hurt their profit margins.

Supran has studied 200 internal company documents going back 50 years, most of which acknowledge the science that burning fossil fuels would lead to climate change.

Meanwhile, the company continued a decades-long campaign of paid ads in US media casting doubt on that same science and contending that the role of greenhouse gases in climate change was unclear.

Climate misinformation

Other reprehensible tactics were also employed. For instance, ExxonMobil was a member of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a corporate alliance that lobbied against emissions regulation from 1989 to 2002.

The GCC spent $30 million campaigning against the Kyoto protocol and was so successful that the White House told them that President Bush “rejected Kyoto in part based on input from you.”

This calculated campaign of deliberate climate misinformation was very successful – and it’s not over. Still today, big oil and gas companies continue to fund climate denial groups and fight against solutions like renewable energy and strict emissions reduction targets.

According to a report by influence map, the world’s five largest oil and gas companies spend around $200 million a year on lobbying against climate action. 

A recent report by lobby watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory showed that in Brussels ExxonMobil spends an estimated €3.5m on lobbying every year and enjoys regular access to top-level policymakers at the European Commission.

Access denied

ExxonMobil also sits on several key EU expert groups and advisory panels. Indeed, the company’s influence in Brussels is such that the Commission tried to enlist its help in EU-US trade talks in 2013, considering ways to smooth the firm’s expansion in Africa, Russia and South America.

There can be no doubt that this company is a behemoth of corporate influence with tentacles that stretch into all areas of EU policymaking.

However, as the teenagers of the inspirational climate strike movement have been showing us from the streets recently, the fightback to protect the planet needs to tackle powerful forces if it is going to be effective.

Despite the treacherously greedy record of ExxonMobil, six of its 12 Brussels lobbyists have badges allowing them direct access to the European Parliament. This must end.

My political group in the European Parliament will propose ExxonMobil be stripped of its access badges and become only the second corporation, after Monsanto in 2017, to lose access to MEPs.

Safeguarding

In 2017, Monsanto (now a division of chemicals giant Bayer) refused to attend a hearing about the effects of its weed-killer glyphosate. It faced consequences, so should ExxonMobil.

While not enough to curb the influence of these dodgy companies on decision-making in the EU, such a move would be a step towards ending the fossil fuels industry’s capture of climate policy and would send a signal to other big businesses that this institution is no longer their playground.

Ultimately, it’s a question of accountability. If the fossil fuels industry does not want to hear what we have to say, fine, there’s the door.

We cannot accept that these nefarious, two-faced organisations have representatives on the inside weakening and delaying crucial legislation, while the young people outside are screaming the truth about what needs to be done to safeguard the planet. It should be the other way around.

This Author 

Lynn Boylan is an Irish MEP from Sinn Féin and the European United Left–Nordic Green Left group.

Right of Reply 

Following the publication of an earlier article on this subject, Richard Scrase, media adviser at ExxonMobil, commented: “We … believe that market-based systems that place a uniform, predictable cost on greenhouse gas emissions are more effective policy options than mandates or standards. Market-based policies more effectively drive consumer behaviour and technology innovation, while mandates and standards limit consumer choice and can perpetuate ineffective technologies.”

Demands for an unprecedented transformation of society have moved from the fringe ideas of eco-socialists to the mainstream debate in the Global North in the past year.

The “Green New Deal” is gaining traction both among US Democrats and the UK’s Labour Party. There’s a growing desire for positive and visionary ideas, and a growing recognition of the scale and time frame of the challenge.

Read ‘System change and internationalism’ tomorrow.

We can see the same desire in the explosion of “Extinction Rebellion” and the phenomenal School Strike 4 Climate. These initiatives have emerged in different ways and represent different, and internally diverse politics, but they all speak to the same tendency: a profound sense of panic among people in the Global North.

Strategic value

There is much to praise and be heartened by in these shifting politics, but there are is a danger of missteps which could roll back the modest advances climate justice movements have made in the past few decades, and even contribute to the political forces we oppose.

We need to debate the strategic value of the choices being made. We cannot afford to be uncritical, nor nihilistic.

For years, while climate justice movements fought to show climate change as a real and present danger resulting from a rigged economic system, and to build people power to change the system, NGOs from the Global North used their superior access, resources, and media connections to call for pragmatism and reform.

But the breakdown of climate and other natural systems is occurring faster and with worse impacts than predicted, including in Europe and North America. And we are starting to see more urgency in the words of those same northern NGOs and more coverage in the media generally.

The IPCC’s Special Report on the Global Warming of 1.5℃ broke through in the north, with newspapers carrying headlines like “12 years left to save the world” (although the report itself did not say that).

Equality

Amid the resultant clamour for “climate action”, demands for “climate justice” have sometimes been drowned out.

“Climate justice” is usually divorced from the international context in which it was born, and stripped of its specific principles and demands – developed in democratic processes such as the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth – that make climate change a question of justice rather than a quibble about emissions.

To her credit, Greta Thunberg does speak about equity and is clear that the “sufferings of the many” in the south underwrite the “luxury of the few” in the North.

She has said that to avoid the end of human civilisation will require a massive overhaul of the dominant economic logic, and in particular the logic of consumerism that has developed over the past century in the north and is now being exported worldwide.

But her points in this regard are frequently overlooked and it is often only the urgency in her message that gets picked up. This is no fault of Greta.

Rather, it is the fault of the Global North’s mainstream NGOs who have conditioned mainstream media to ignore the need for just and systemic responses in favour of unhelpful, sensationalist “X years to save the world” headlines.

Clear heads

History shows us that far-right movements have experience in mobilising the idea of ecological preservation alongside nationalist exceptionalism.

A recent Buzzfeed exposé suggested the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) had been willing to “get into bed” with paramilitary human rights violators to help their vision of preserving an ahistorical and dehumanised “nature”.

With these tendencies in mind, it would be extremely irresponsible to demand an urgent and robust response to climate change without qualifications as to what kind of action is it to be carried out, on what terms, and by whom.

We might feel a growing sense of panic but we need to keep cool heads. Declaring a state of ecological emergency can provide another excuse for making “tough choices” about who lives and who dies and who must sacrifice.

State of emergency

Others have pointed out how many countries, including the US, have been in a constant “state of emergency” for decades. 

As Casey Williams writes in The Outline: “The history of such emergencies shows that they result in the expansion of repressive state power, short-circuiting political debate in favor of urgent, often militarized action to protect narrowly national interests, permitting governments to selfishly marginalise affected people even further.”

It may seem far-off, but we can already see, amid the clamour for climate action, support for dangerous distractions such as geoengineering and Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS).

These unproven technologies are likely to profit corporations while hurting people, driving biodiversity loss, and contributing to chronic hunger.

They are vigorously opposed by climate justice movements who point out that “net-zero emissions” as a demand leaves the door open to such false solutions and creates perverse incentives to carry on with extractivism as normal.

The threat of the current moment is that we end up reinforcing a dangerous “action at any cost” dynamic.

Systemic issues

One of the slogans of the climate justice movement is “system change, not climate change” because climate change is but one expression of wider and deeper systemic issues which need addressing. Climate breakdown makes changing the system even more necessary of course.

The fight for climate justice is not only about cutting carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases, it is about the fundamental transformation of the systems that govern and underpin our lives.

The fossil fuel-dominated energy system leaves one billion people with little or no electricity. It’s not enough to change the fuel source of such a system. We need a people’s owned and controlled, decentralised energy system, based on sources of energy that are not only clean and renewable, but also safe.

Though we might not want to grapple with this emergent reality, even large scale solar and wind rely on the extraction of materials, and sometimes the coercion and displacement of communities.

So it’s time to rethink the entire system of producing and consuming energy, including the question of ownership.

Inequality and exploitation

Our current and cruel food system is another major source of greenhouse gas emissions – and it sees roughly one third of all food produced go to waste while close to a billion people go hungry each year.

Transport, housing and urban design are comparable in that they don’t actually serve the real needs of the majority of people while at the same time being incredibly polluting.

Our entire economic system fosters inequality between and within nations while exploiting natural resources in a manner and rate that is leading to ecological collapse.

All these sectors must be radically restructured through a rapid, just transition to systems that serve the needs of peoples rather than profit.

There’s not really any choice: we must live within the limits of local ecosystems and ultimately with the whole Earth system. We can’t just swap coal for solar and beef for soya and carry on with business as usual. 

Fair share

A Green New Deal tied to economic growth is useless to us. As thinkers such as Jason Hickel constantly remind us, resources must be more fairly shared between the many and the few, while consumption itself must be scaled down. 

Fundamentally we require different ways of relating to each other and the world, and many such alternatives already exist in the traditional knowledge of Indigenous Peoples, as well as in the sub-cultures and movements for alternatives of people living in industrial civilisation.

It is important and encouraging that the new climate politics, embodied in the Green New Deal and School Strike For Climate, is not talking narrowly about “environmental” issues, but rather speaks as to many interrelated issues which cannot be addressed in isolation.

There are no environmental issues which are not also social issues, and vice versa.

The new climate politics must make no accomodation to those who seek to preserve the system intact, with either the fuel source changed, or some minor stops put on the most extreme vulgarities. The emperor has no clothes, as even striking school children now say, and no amount of fig leaves will make it otherwise.

This Author 

Nathan Thanki is co-coordinator of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, a network of over 250 groups around the world struggling for system change. He also coordinates the climate justice constituency at the United Nations climate change negotiations and is a co-founder of The World of 1℃, a communications initiative which aims to improve ecological literacy and promote climate justice framing.

A version of this article was first published on Open Democracy. Read System change and internationalism tomorrow. 

Image: Climate justice activists from Nepal, Peru, Germany, the USA and the Philippines marching in Bonn during COP23. © Claire Miranda, Asian People’s Movement on debt & Development. 

A surcharge on UK energy bills is funding subsidies for biomass electricity generation that is making climate change worse, polluting communities, destroying forests and harming wildlife.

In 2017, the UK Government granted around £1 billion in renewable subsidies to power stations – including Drax Power Station in Yorkshire – to burn millions of tonnes of wood for electricity. 

Drax alone received £729 million – around £2 million per day – in subsidies to burn wood pellets and is now the world’s largest biomass burner. 

Biodiversity hotspots

Despite claims by the biomass industry that they mostly burn “low-grade wood residues”, US conservation NGOs have proven that a significant proportion of wood pellets for Drax and other UK power stations comes from the clearcutting of whole trees from wetland forests in the Southern US.

These forests are at the heart of a biodiversity hotspot and are home to many endangered species, including salamanders, the Louisiana black bear and the Venus flytrap. 

Meanwhile, new subsidies for onshore wind and solar power have been scrapped while the government is only planning to allocate £60m for the next round of renewable energy funding in May. 

However, with a fixed amount of government money available for renewable energy under the Levy Control Framework, ending the generous biomass subsidies would automatically release around £800m for genuinely low-carbon wind, wave and solar power.

This would make a huge difference in reducing both our air pollution and our greenhouse gas emissions.  

Sustainable?

Why are biomass power plants receiving these huge renewable subsidies for burning wood?

Governments and the biomass industry argue that converting old coal power plants to burn wood is ‘green energy’ which can help reduce our carbon emissions. 

This argument is based on the mistaken belief that burning wood is ‘carbon neutral’ because there is an assumption that new trees will absorb the carbon emissions produced by the burning. 

This has allowed the biomass industry to present itself as a ‘low carbon’ and ‘sustainable’ alternative to fossil fuels, with the Minister of State for Climate Change and Industry describing biomass as “a cost-effective and transitional means of decarbonising the electricity grid”. 

Drax’s Chief Executive, Will Gardiner, claimed that the power station is: “the biggest decarbonisation project in Europe” and a “key part of the climate change solution.”

Green deserts 

However, the truth is that there is nothing renewable or sustainable about biomass burning. By contrast, biomass comes at an enormous cost for communities, wildlife, forests and the climate. 

The biomass industry claims that it is actually helping to increase forest growth in America by felling large areas of forest and replanting them with new trees.

Yet, this supposed forest growth disguises the fact that when new trees are planted in these areas, they are often monoculture plantations which cannot support biodiverse species and are little more than ‘green deserts’ for wildlife. 

The destruction of forests to provide fuel for biomass burning is also harming communities who live near the US wood pellet production sites and the UK biomass power stations. 

Wood pellet production causes noise and water pollution for local communities in the Southern US, while both pellet mills and biomass power stations produce dangerous air pollution, including small particulates which can enter the bloodstream and cause cancer, heart disease and neurological problems.

Climate impact

The fact that biomass burning is increasing climate change is equally alarming. Far from being carbon neutral, burning wood actually emits more CO2 than coal per unit of energy generated because the higher moisture content means that burning it is less efficient.

In 2017, Drax alone emitted 11.7 million tonnes of CO2  from burning wood. This is more than the total amount by which the UK should be reducing emissions every year in order to meet its carbon budgets. 

Biomass proponents claim that these emissions will be reabsorbed by forest regrowth or by planting new trees, but new trees will take decades or even longer to reabsorb the emissions, if they ever can. This is time which we do not have if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate breakdown. 

The climate impact of burning wood for energy was highlighted by 800 scientists in a letter to the European Parliament in January 2018: “Even if forests are allowed to regrow, using wood deliberately harvested for burning will increase carbon in the atmosphere and warming for decades to centuries […] even when wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas. The reasons are fundamental and occur regardless of whether forest management is “sustainable.” 

Burning wood not only adds to carbon emissions, but it also destroys the very forests which we need to absorb our greenhouse gases.

Bhis technology has not been tried in large power stations and many experts regard it as unfeasible, but the biomass industry argues that new carbon capture and storage technology will allow it to remove its emissions from the atmosphere.

Climate solutions 

We already have the most powerful means to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and reduce climate breakdown – forests. 

Protecting and restoring the world’s forests is as important as phasing out fossil fuels if we are to keep global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees, as 40 international scientists argued in response to the IPCC report in October: “While high-tech carbon dioxide removal solutions are under development, the “natural technology” of forests is currently the only proven means of removing and storing atmospheric CO2 at a scale that can meaningfully contribute to achieving carbon balance.”

In the light of the IPCC report’s dire warning that we are running out of time to save the planet from the worst effects of climate breakdown, it is essential that we stop wasting our money on the false solution of biomass burning and instead redirect subsidies to genuinely renewable wind, wave and solar power.

Over 120 international environmental groups emphasised in their position statement on forest biomass energy in October 2018: “Subsidies for forest biomass energy must be eliminated. Protecting and restoring the world’s forests is a climate change solution, burning them is not.”

Taking action

It is more urgent than ever that we call for an end to subsidies for burning wood, as Drax prepares to hold its AGM in London this coming week.

If you would like to take action to save forests and our climate from biomass burning, Biofuelwatch has launched a new campaign for people to ask their MPs to help redirect subsidies from biomass power stations to genuine renewables. 

Last year, the government made a positive first step by effectively ruling out future subsidies for large-scale biomass electricity. This sends a strong message that biomass burning is not part of the solution to climate change.

However, the change in the subsidies rules only applies to new projects and existing biomass power stations are currently set to continue receiving many billions of pounds in subsidies between now and 2027, unless we can redirect them to wind, wave and solar power. Fortunately, this could be done easily through secondary legislation. 

This is why we urgently need your help to contact your MP and if you’re in London on Wednesday, we’d love to see you at our protest outside the Drax AGM.

Please feel free to get in touch with Biofuelwatch if you have any questions or would like to organise a workshop or screening of the award-winning documentary: “Burned: are trees the new coal?”

Together, we can persuade parliament to tackle climate change, save forests, reduce pollution and combat environmental injustice by ending subsidies for burning wood.

This Author 

Sally Clark is a bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch. Biofuelwatch will be outside the Drax AGM in Grocers’ Hall in London on Wednesday 17 April between 12 and 1.30pm to protest at Drax’s biomass burning and its plans to build the UK’s largest ever gas power station. Everyone is welcome – visit the campaign’s Facebook page here. 

Regulations that disallow human exposure to pesticides that are classified as mutagenic, carcinogenic, reprotoxic (toxic for reproduction), persistent or capable of disrupting endocrine systems within the European Union are under threat.

 These EU regulations are considered the gold standard in public protection by virtue of these and other protective measures.

But industry-linked experts and supporters of anti-regulation pressure groups have ‘taken control’ of the EU’s new Science Advice Mechanism (SAM) process. These experts have contributed to a report commissioned to reevaluate the EU’s authorisation of pesticides.

Public exposure

The report – called “EU authorisation processes of Plant Protection products“, and published in late 2018 – recommends dramatically weakening the EU regulatory system.

The adoption of many ideas previously proposed by the chemical industry is especially notable. For example, the EU currently deems the acceptable level of public exposure to mutagenic pesticides – those that damage DNA – to be zero. The new report recommends scrapping this standard of protection.

Vytenis Andriukaitis, the EU health commissioner, originally committed the new SAM report. Its purpose was to determine how to act in cases of so-called ‘diverging views’; that is, when media and interest groups get publicly involved.

The request follows a series of major controversies over EU regulatory decision-making. One such controversy was over the herbicide glyphosate (originally marketed by Monsanto as Roundup).

A “European Citizens Initiative” delivered more than a million signatures to the EU Commission asking for a ban on glyphosate. Several cities banned glyphosate. Even a dairy company banned the use of glyphosate by their farmers.

With this pressure from all over Europe, the EU Commission had difficulty reaching a decision since many EU member states -Bulgaria, Denmark, Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Spain, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Finland and the UK -opposed a ban.

Ultimately, a very unusual five-year extension for glyphosate was agreed – but soon the discussion will start again.

Major controversies

Issues with neonicotinoids have also pushed the EU Commission into a corner. 

Neonicotinoid insecticides are linked by much research to bee colony collapse and, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature “represent a worldwide threat to biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem services”.

This again placed the EU Commission in the crossfire since many EU member states and their ministries of agriculture wished to keep neonicotionids on the market.

Waves of scientific publications and media attention about dying bees and empty beehives forced the EU Commission to finally ban them. Nevertheless, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Lithuania still resist the ban by using derogations.

A third big controversy has been endocrine disruption. Public concern about hormone-mimicking chemicals forced politicians to address endocrine disruption concerns in the regulations and ban endocrine disrupting pesticides in 2009.

An enormous lobbying effort from industry, the US chamber of commerce, the EU Directorate General (DG) Enterprise, and EU DG Growth, tried to stop the implementation of the new rules, especially during the TTIP trade negotiations with the US. 

EU DG Environment was isolated and in the end DG SANTE (health) was willing to do the dirty work of undermining the rules. Again, waves of bad publicity from the public and scientists harmed the credibility of the EU Commission. This debate here is also far from over.

Stifling regulation 

The SAM report is important since it will soon be used by the EU Commission as an input for its REFIT programme to evaluate pesticide regulation. This is an event that the chemical industry sees as a major opportunity for a regulatory roll-back.

Some of the experts invited to help SAM and listed on the SAM website, however, are not independent.

Instead, they have strong links to the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). ILSI is a world wide network, a federation of non-profits funded by many industries, including the pesticide industry, and which provides expertise in regulatory issues.

ILSI global includes more than 400 company members and ILSI Europe includes 88. Among them are every pesticide multinational.

Sourcewatch writes of ILSI that: “The interests of food, pharmaceutical, tobacco, energy, and other industries have become even more entwined. They have learned to cooperate (rather than blaming each other for the cancer epidemic) and they now form coalitions to fight health and environmental regulations. 

“It is notable that they [ILSI members] generally employ the same lawyers, lobbyists and PR companies, and use essentially the same tactics.”

Behind the scenes

ILSI has negligible public profile, and claims not to be a lobby group, but is very active behind the scenes in obtaining seats for ILSI-associated scientists on regulatory panels.

These include the EU Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and international organisations like WHO, the World Health Organisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN, and the International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS ) of the WHO.

Experts generally do not seem to disclose their links to ILSI publicly and can therefore appear to be independent academic scientists.

A recent example of ILSI members successfully getting seats on an EFSA-panel concerned the risk assessment idea of a Threshold of Toxicological Concern (TTC).

This idea assumes chemicals are safe at low doses without (expensive) testing. It has been an important goal of the chemical industry to establish TTCs in European and other jurisdictions.

PAN Europe has analysed the process of developing guidelines for the TTC at the European Food safety Authority EFSA. We discovered that the chair of the EFSA working group was Sue Barlow, who worked for ILSI and the cigarette industry. She had volunteered to be chair of the EFSA working group. 

From this position Barlow installed an ILSI network in the EFSA working group. This working group then more-or-less copy-pasted the ILSI proposal, making it into an EFSA-opinion. 

Conflicted scientists 

ILSI has been imposing its ideas on many other current EU risk assessment methods too, intending to weaken protections for the public and ease access of pesticides to the market. 

A PAN Europe survey showed that out of 12 EU pesticide risk assessment methods analysed, eight were designed and promoted by ILSI. Industry is being allowed, under the radar, to “write its own rules”.

In the case of the SAM, a prime example of these conflicts is UK professor Alan Boobis who is listed on the SAM website as a contributor to the SAM report.

Boobis has been active in ILSI for decades and, until January 2018, was the chair of its Board of Trustees. Due to his conflicts of interest Boobis left the new expert panels convened by EFSA in 2012.

French professor Dominique Parent-Massin is mentioned alongside Boobis as working on the SAM report. Parent-Massin has previously worked with ILSI-member Aspartame companies including Coca-Cola and Ajinomoto – the world’s biggest Aspartame producer.

Also listed on the SAM website is Joergen Schlundt, former director of the Danish National Food Institute. Schlundt is also a former ILSI board member and is now part of several ILSI research programs.

All three are listed on the SAM website as contributors to the report, or as providers of evidence through another report written by a new network called Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA), or being part of a ‘sounding board’ and fact-checking process. 

Pressure groups

Another expert used by the SAM is German professor Daniel Dietrich, editor-in-chief of the journal Chemico-Biological Interactions. 

He has been very vocal in trying to stop the regulation and banning of endocrine disrupting pesticides (in EU Regulation 1107/2009), along with a group of editors of journals of pharmacology and toxicology. 

Dietrich published editorials in several scientific journals that triggered highly critical responses from other scientists such as members of the ‘Endocrine Society‘.

Ties between the Dietrich group of authors and industry were exposed by Le Monde journalist Stephane Horel who found 17 out of the 18 experts of Dietrich group have past or current ties to industry. 

The Dietrich group has been prolific, publishing articles like ‘Endorcrine disruption: fact of urban legend?’ that disputes the health risks of endocrine disruption.

Anne Glover, an EU science advisor, found that toxicological thresholds below which chemicals are safe were unproven and probably unlikely – achieving a hard won consensus between opposing groups. But Dietrich and his group (along with Boobis) still claimed their opponents used ‘pseudoscience‘.

Dietrich also opposed the EU ban of bee-harming neonicotinoids: both Dietrich and Boobis criticised the IARC report on the genotoxicity of glyphosate.

Industry objectives

The EU has mechanisms to prevent conflicts of interest from derailing its scientific decisions. The SAM website currently presents Declarations of Interest (DoI) for its members – including for Boobis, Parent-Massin, Dietrich, and Schlundt.

The SAM website states that: “The Commission found that none of the interests declared constituted a conflict of interest.”

But one might wonder whether procedures to report conflicts of interest are even functioning. DoIs were not available online when the SAM-report was published in June 2018 and one was not signed until considerably after publication, in August 2018.

The efforts of ILSI have so far been effective. Several of its campaigning targets are included in an important “SAPEA evidence review report”. 

SAPEA (Science Advice for Policy by European Academies) is a new body set up by European science academies. Their report is intended to feed into the SAM report and featured many of the conflicted scientists above.

SAPEA’s report promotes many industry objectives, such as the use of historical control data. The great importance of this is that, since many potential historical controls exist, their use makes it easier to ascribe toxic effects observed in animal testing as being simply noise and therefore irrelevant.

Another industry goal is to promote inexpensive (in vitro) mode-of-action assessment in preference to expensive adverse outcome testing. A third goal is to drop the obligation for chronic mouse testing.

The aims of PAN Europe and the Endocrine Society, on the other hand, are

1) to recognise the reality of low dose effects which are currently not tested at all for pesticides;

2) the recognition that chemicals may cause non-linear toxicity responses over a wide range of doses. These are called non-monotonic dose-effect responses whereas regulators presently acknowledge only linear dose-response curves of toxicity and even dismiss effects entirely if they are not linear;

3) mandatory testing for endocrine disruption;

4) to dispute the current regulatory assumption that chemicals have safe thresholds.

All are missing from the SAPEA report.

Hazard approach

In a further blow to precaution, the SAM report proposes to change EU rules by exchanging the acceptable level of citizen protection from “do not have any harmful effects on humans” for an undefined level, to that of “acceptable risk”.

This is the change of regulation that would make human harm legal, since it would stop the EU’s much-detested-by-industry “hazard approach“, that aims to avoid any exposure of humans to classified pesticides.

SAM proposes that the EU should re-examine this “hazard approach”, which has been under attack by industry for many years; and so it seems that SAM might prove to be the instrument by which industry finally achieves successes for which they have campaigned so long.

The EU has shown itself sensitive to public pressure. What is now needed is for that pressure to be redoubled.

These Authors

Hans Muilerman is chemicals coordinator at Pesticide Action Network and is based in Brussels. Dr Jonathan Latham, a former genetic engineer, is executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project and editor of Independent Science News.

Regulations that disallow human exposure to pesticides that are classified as mutagenic, carcinogenic, reprotoxic (toxic for reproduction), persistent or capable of disrupting endocrine systems within the European Union are under threat.

 These EU regulations are considered the gold standard in public protection by virtue of these and other protective measures.

But industry-linked experts and supporters of anti-regulation pressure groups have ‘taken control’ of the EU’s new Science Advice Mechanism (SAM) process. These experts have contributed to a report commissioned to reevaluate the EU’s authorisation of pesticides.

Public exposure

The report – called “EU authorisation processes of Plant Protection products“, and published in late 2018 – recommends dramatically weakening the EU regulatory system.

The adoption of many ideas previously proposed by the chemical industry is especially notable. For example, the EU currently deems the acceptable level of public exposure to mutagenic pesticides – those that damage DNA – to be zero. The new report recommends scrapping this standard of protection.

Vytenis Andriukaitis, the EU health commissioner, originally committed the new SAM report. Its purpose was to determine how to act in cases of so-called ‘diverging views’; that is, when media and interest groups get publicly involved.

The request follows a series of major controversies over EU regulatory decision-making. One such controversy was over the herbicide glyphosate (originally marketed by Monsanto as Roundup).

A “European Citizens Initiative” delivered more than a million signatures to the EU Commission asking for a ban on glyphosate. Several cities banned glyphosate. Even a dairy company banned the use of glyphosate by their farmers.

With this pressure from all over Europe, the EU Commission had difficulty reaching a decision since many EU member states -Bulgaria, Denmark, Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Spain, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Finland and the UK -opposed a ban.

Ultimately, a very unusual five-year extension for glyphosate was agreed – but soon the discussion will start again.

Major controversies

Issues with neonicotinoids have also pushed the EU Commission into a corner. 

Neonicotinoid insecticides are linked by much research to bee colony collapse and, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature “represent a worldwide threat to biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem services”.

This again placed the EU Commission in the crossfire since many EU member states and their ministries of agriculture wished to keep neonicotionids on the market.

Waves of scientific publications and media attention about dying bees and empty beehives forced the EU Commission to finally ban them. Nevertheless, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Lithuania still resist the ban by using derogations.

A third big controversy has been endocrine disruption. Public concern about hormone-mimicking chemicals forced politicians to address endocrine disruption concerns in the regulations and ban endocrine disrupting pesticides in 2009.

An enormous lobbying effort from industry, the US chamber of commerce, the EU Directorate General (DG) Enterprise, and EU DG Growth, tried to stop the implementation of the new rules, especially during the TTIP trade negotiations with the US. 

EU DG Environment was isolated and in the end DG SANTE (health) was willing to do the dirty work of undermining the rules. Again, waves of bad publicity from the public and scientists harmed the credibility of the EU Commission. This debate here is also far from over.

Stifling regulation 

The SAM report is important since it will soon be used by the EU Commission as an input for its REFIT programme to evaluate pesticide regulation. This is an event that the chemical industry sees as a major opportunity for a regulatory roll-back.

Some of the experts invited to help SAM and listed on the SAM website, however, are not independent.

Instead, they have strong links to the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). ILSI is a world wide network, a federation of non-profits funded by many industries, including the pesticide industry, and which provides expertise in regulatory issues.

ILSI global includes more than 400 company members and ILSI Europe includes 88. Among them are every pesticide multinational.

Sourcewatch writes of ILSI that: “The interests of food, pharmaceutical, tobacco, energy, and other industries have become even more entwined. They have learned to cooperate (rather than blaming each other for the cancer epidemic) and they now form coalitions to fight health and environmental regulations. 

“It is notable that they [ILSI members] generally employ the same lawyers, lobbyists and PR companies, and use essentially the same tactics.”

Behind the scenes

ILSI has negligible public profile, and claims not to be a lobby group, but is very active behind the scenes in obtaining seats for ILSI-associated scientists on regulatory panels.

These include the EU Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and international organisations like WHO, the World Health Organisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN, and the International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS ) of the WHO.

Experts generally do not seem to disclose their links to ILSI publicly and can therefore appear to be independent academic scientists.

A recent example of ILSI members successfully getting seats on an EFSA-panel concerned the risk assessment idea of a Threshold of Toxicological Concern (TTC).

This idea assumes chemicals are safe at low doses without (expensive) testing. It has been an important goal of the chemical industry to establish TTCs in European and other jurisdictions.

PAN Europe has analysed the process of developing guidelines for the TTC at the European Food safety Authority EFSA. We discovered that the chair of the EFSA working group was Sue Barlow, who worked for ILSI and the cigarette industry. She had volunteered to be chair of the EFSA working group. 

From this position Barlow installed an ILSI network in the EFSA working group. This working group then more-or-less copy-pasted the ILSI proposal, making it into an EFSA-opinion. 

Conflicted scientists 

ILSI has been imposing its ideas on many other current EU risk assessment methods too, intending to weaken protections for the public and ease access of pesticides to the market. 

A PAN Europe survey showed that out of 12 EU pesticide risk assessment methods analysed, eight were designed and promoted by ILSI. Industry is being allowed, under the radar, to “write its own rules”.

In the case of the SAM, a prime example of these conflicts is UK professor Alan Boobis who is listed on the SAM website as a contributor to the SAM report.

Boobis has been active in ILSI for decades and, until January 2018, was the chair of its Board of Trustees. Due to his conflicts of interest Boobis left the new expert panels convened by EFSA in 2012.

French professor Dominique Parent-Massin is mentioned alongside Boobis as working on the SAM report. Parent-Massin has previously worked with ILSI-member Aspartame companies including Coca-Cola and Ajinomoto – the world’s biggest Aspartame producer.

Also listed on the SAM website is Joergen Schlundt, former director of the Danish National Food Institute. Schlundt is also a former ILSI board member and is now part of several ILSI research programs.

All three are listed on the SAM website as contributors to the report, or as providers of evidence through another report written by a new network called Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA), or being part of a ‘sounding board’ and fact-checking process. 

Pressure groups

Another expert used by the SAM is German professor Daniel Dietrich, editor-in-chief of the journal Chemico-Biological Interactions. 

He has been very vocal in trying to stop the regulation and banning of endocrine disrupting pesticides (in EU Regulation 1107/2009), along with a group of editors of journals of pharmacology and toxicology. 

Dietrich published editorials in several scientific journals that triggered highly critical responses from other scientists such as members of the ‘Endocrine Society‘.

Ties between the Dietrich group of authors and industry were exposed by Le Monde journalist Stephane Horel who found 17 out of the 18 experts of Dietrich group have past or current ties to industry. 

The Dietrich group has been prolific, publishing articles like ‘Endorcrine disruption: fact of urban legend?’ that disputes the health risks of endocrine disruption.

Anne Glover, an EU science advisor, found that toxicological thresholds below which chemicals are safe were unproven and probably unlikely – achieving a hard won consensus between opposing groups. But Dietrich and his group (along with Boobis) still claimed their opponents used ‘pseudoscience‘.

Dietrich also opposed the EU ban of bee-harming neonicotinoids: both Dietrich and Boobis criticised the IARC report on the genotoxicity of glyphosate.

Industry objectives

The EU has mechanisms to prevent conflicts of interest from derailing its scientific decisions. The SAM website currently presents Declarations of Interest (DoI) for its members – including for Boobis, Parent-Massin, Dietrich, and Schlundt.

The SAM website states that: “The Commission found that none of the interests declared constituted a conflict of interest.”

But one might wonder whether procedures to report conflicts of interest are even functioning. DoIs were not available online when the SAM-report was published in June 2018 and one was not signed until considerably after publication, in August 2018.

The efforts of ILSI have so far been effective. Several of its campaigning targets are included in an important “SAPEA evidence review report”. 

SAPEA (Science Advice for Policy by European Academies) is a new body set up by European science academies. Their report is intended to feed into the SAM report and featured many of the conflicted scientists above.

SAPEA’s report promotes many industry objectives, such as the use of historical control data. The great importance of this is that, since many potential historical controls exist, their use makes it easier to ascribe toxic effects observed in animal testing as being simply noise and therefore irrelevant.

Another industry goal is to promote inexpensive (in vitro) mode-of-action assessment in preference to expensive adverse outcome testing. A third goal is to drop the obligation for chronic mouse testing.

The aims of PAN Europe and the Endocrine Society, on the other hand, are

1) to recognise the reality of low dose effects which are currently not tested at all for pesticides;

2) the recognition that chemicals may cause non-linear toxicity responses over a wide range of doses. These are called non-monotonic dose-effect responses whereas regulators presently acknowledge only linear dose-response curves of toxicity and even dismiss effects entirely if they are not linear;

3) mandatory testing for endocrine disruption;

4) to dispute the current regulatory assumption that chemicals have safe thresholds.

All are missing from the SAPEA report.

Hazard approach

In a further blow to precaution, the SAM report proposes to change EU rules by exchanging the acceptable level of citizen protection from “do not have any harmful effects on humans” for an undefined level, to that of “acceptable risk”.

This is the change of regulation that would make human harm legal, since it would stop the EU’s much-detested-by-industry “hazard approach“, that aims to avoid any exposure of humans to classified pesticides.

SAM proposes that the EU should re-examine this “hazard approach”, which has been under attack by industry for many years; and so it seems that SAM might prove to be the instrument by which industry finally achieves successes for which they have campaigned so long.

The EU has shown itself sensitive to public pressure. What is now needed is for that pressure to be redoubled.

These Authors

Hans Muilerman is chemicals coordinator at Pesticide Action Network and is based in Brussels. Dr Jonathan Latham, a former genetic engineer, is executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project and editor of Independent Science News.

Regulations that disallow human exposure to pesticides that are classified as mutagenic, carcinogenic, reprotoxic (toxic for reproduction), persistent or capable of disrupting endocrine systems within the European Union are under threat.

 These EU regulations are considered the gold standard in public protection by virtue of these and other protective measures.

But industry-linked experts and supporters of anti-regulation pressure groups have ‘taken control’ of the EU’s new Science Advice Mechanism (SAM) process. These experts have contributed to a report commissioned to reevaluate the EU’s authorisation of pesticides.

Public exposure

The report – called “EU authorisation processes of Plant Protection products“, and published in late 2018 – recommends dramatically weakening the EU regulatory system.

The adoption of many ideas previously proposed by the chemical industry is especially notable. For example, the EU currently deems the acceptable level of public exposure to mutagenic pesticides – those that damage DNA – to be zero. The new report recommends scrapping this standard of protection.

Vytenis Andriukaitis, the EU health commissioner, originally committed the new SAM report. Its purpose was to determine how to act in cases of so-called ‘diverging views’; that is, when media and interest groups get publicly involved.

The request follows a series of major controversies over EU regulatory decision-making. One such controversy was over the herbicide glyphosate (originally marketed by Monsanto as Roundup).

A “European Citizens Initiative” delivered more than a million signatures to the EU Commission asking for a ban on glyphosate. Several cities banned glyphosate. Even a dairy company banned the use of glyphosate by their farmers.

With this pressure from all over Europe, the EU Commission had difficulty reaching a decision since many EU member states -Bulgaria, Denmark, Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Spain, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Finland and the UK -opposed a ban.

Ultimately, a very unusual five-year extension for glyphosate was agreed – but soon the discussion will start again.

Major controversies

Issues with neonicotinoids have also pushed the EU Commission into a corner. 

Neonicotinoid insecticides are linked by much research to bee colony collapse and, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature “represent a worldwide threat to biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem services”.

This again placed the EU Commission in the crossfire since many EU member states and their ministries of agriculture wished to keep neonicotionids on the market.

Waves of scientific publications and media attention about dying bees and empty beehives forced the EU Commission to finally ban them. Nevertheless, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Lithuania still resist the ban by using derogations.

A third big controversy has been endocrine disruption. Public concern about hormone-mimicking chemicals forced politicians to address endocrine disruption concerns in the regulations and ban endocrine disrupting pesticides in 2009.

An enormous lobbying effort from industry, the US chamber of commerce, the EU Directorate General (DG) Enterprise, and EU DG Growth, tried to stop the implementation of the new rules, especially during the TTIP trade negotiations with the US. 

EU DG Environment was isolated and in the end DG SANTE (health) was willing to do the dirty work of undermining the rules. Again, waves of bad publicity from the public and scientists harmed the credibility of the EU Commission. This debate here is also far from over.

Stifling regulation 

The SAM report is important since it will soon be used by the EU Commission as an input for its REFIT programme to evaluate pesticide regulation. This is an event that the chemical industry sees as a major opportunity for a regulatory roll-back.

Some of the experts invited to help SAM and listed on the SAM website, however, are not independent.

Instead, they have strong links to the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). ILSI is a world wide network, a federation of non-profits funded by many industries, including the pesticide industry, and which provides expertise in regulatory issues.

ILSI global includes more than 400 company members and ILSI Europe includes 88. Among them are every pesticide multinational.

Sourcewatch writes of ILSI that: “The interests of food, pharmaceutical, tobacco, energy, and other industries have become even more entwined. They have learned to cooperate (rather than blaming each other for the cancer epidemic) and they now form coalitions to fight health and environmental regulations. 

“It is notable that they [ILSI members] generally employ the same lawyers, lobbyists and PR companies, and use essentially the same tactics.”

Behind the scenes

ILSI has negligible public profile, and claims not to be a lobby group, but is very active behind the scenes in obtaining seats for ILSI-associated scientists on regulatory panels.

These include the EU Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and international organisations like WHO, the World Health Organisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN, and the International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS ) of the WHO.

Experts generally do not seem to disclose their links to ILSI publicly and can therefore appear to be independent academic scientists.

A recent example of ILSI members successfully getting seats on an EFSA-panel concerned the risk assessment idea of a Threshold of Toxicological Concern (TTC).

This idea assumes chemicals are safe at low doses without (expensive) testing. It has been an important goal of the chemical industry to establish TTCs in European and other jurisdictions.

PAN Europe has analysed the process of developing guidelines for the TTC at the European Food safety Authority EFSA. We discovered that the chair of the EFSA working group was Sue Barlow, who worked for ILSI and the cigarette industry. She had volunteered to be chair of the EFSA working group. 

From this position Barlow installed an ILSI network in the EFSA working group. This working group then more-or-less copy-pasted the ILSI proposal, making it into an EFSA-opinion. 

Conflicted scientists 

ILSI has been imposing its ideas on many other current EU risk assessment methods too, intending to weaken protections for the public and ease access of pesticides to the market. 

A PAN Europe survey showed that out of 12 EU pesticide risk assessment methods analysed, eight were designed and promoted by ILSI. Industry is being allowed, under the radar, to “write its own rules”.

In the case of the SAM, a prime example of these conflicts is UK professor Alan Boobis who is listed on the SAM website as a contributor to the SAM report.

Boobis has been active in ILSI for decades and, until January 2018, was the chair of its Board of Trustees. Due to his conflicts of interest Boobis left the new expert panels convened by EFSA in 2012.

French professor Dominique Parent-Massin is mentioned alongside Boobis as working on the SAM report. Parent-Massin has previously worked with ILSI-member Aspartame companies including Coca-Cola and Ajinomoto – the world’s biggest Aspartame producer.

Also listed on the SAM website is Joergen Schlundt, former director of the Danish National Food Institute. Schlundt is also a former ILSI board member and is now part of several ILSI research programs.

All three are listed on the SAM website as contributors to the report, or as providers of evidence through another report written by a new network called Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA), or being part of a ‘sounding board’ and fact-checking process. 

Pressure groups

Another expert used by the SAM is German professor Daniel Dietrich, editor-in-chief of the journal Chemico-Biological Interactions. 

He has been very vocal in trying to stop the regulation and banning of endocrine disrupting pesticides (in EU Regulation 1107/2009), along with a group of editors of journals of pharmacology and toxicology. 

Dietrich published editorials in several scientific journals that triggered highly critical responses from other scientists such as members of the ‘Endocrine Society‘.

Ties between the Dietrich group of authors and industry were exposed by Le Monde journalist Stephane Horel who found 17 out of the 18 experts of Dietrich group have past or current ties to industry. 

The Dietrich group has been prolific, publishing articles like ‘Endorcrine disruption: fact of urban legend?’ that disputes the health risks of endocrine disruption.

Anne Glover, an EU science advisor, found that toxicological thresholds below which chemicals are safe were unproven and probably unlikely – achieving a hard won consensus between opposing groups. But Dietrich and his group (along with Boobis) still claimed their opponents used ‘pseudoscience‘.

Dietrich also opposed the EU ban of bee-harming neonicotinoids: both Dietrich and Boobis criticised the IARC report on the genotoxicity of glyphosate.

Industry objectives

The EU has mechanisms to prevent conflicts of interest from derailing its scientific decisions. The SAM website currently presents Declarations of Interest (DoI) for its members – including for Boobis, Parent-Massin, Dietrich, and Schlundt.

The SAM website states that: “The Commission found that none of the interests declared constituted a conflict of interest.”

But one might wonder whether procedures to report conflicts of interest are even functioning. DoIs were not available online when the SAM-report was published in June 2018 and one was not signed until considerably after publication, in August 2018.

The efforts of ILSI have so far been effective. Several of its campaigning targets are included in an important “SAPEA evidence review report”. 

SAPEA (Science Advice for Policy by European Academies) is a new body set up by European science academies. Their report is intended to feed into the SAM report and featured many of the conflicted scientists above.

SAPEA’s report promotes many industry objectives, such as the use of historical control data. The great importance of this is that, since many potential historical controls exist, their use makes it easier to ascribe toxic effects observed in animal testing as being simply noise and therefore irrelevant.

Another industry goal is to promote inexpensive (in vitro) mode-of-action assessment in preference to expensive adverse outcome testing. A third goal is to drop the obligation for chronic mouse testing.

The aims of PAN Europe and the Endocrine Society, on the other hand, are

1) to recognise the reality of low dose effects which are currently not tested at all for pesticides;

2) the recognition that chemicals may cause non-linear toxicity responses over a wide range of doses. These are called non-monotonic dose-effect responses whereas regulators presently acknowledge only linear dose-response curves of toxicity and even dismiss effects entirely if they are not linear;

3) mandatory testing for endocrine disruption;

4) to dispute the current regulatory assumption that chemicals have safe thresholds.

All are missing from the SAPEA report.

Hazard approach

In a further blow to precaution, the SAM report proposes to change EU rules by exchanging the acceptable level of citizen protection from “do not have any harmful effects on humans” for an undefined level, to that of “acceptable risk”.

This is the change of regulation that would make human harm legal, since it would stop the EU’s much-detested-by-industry “hazard approach“, that aims to avoid any exposure of humans to classified pesticides.

SAM proposes that the EU should re-examine this “hazard approach”, which has been under attack by industry for many years; and so it seems that SAM might prove to be the instrument by which industry finally achieves successes for which they have campaigned so long.

The EU has shown itself sensitive to public pressure. What is now needed is for that pressure to be redoubled.

These Authors

Hans Muilerman is chemicals coordinator at Pesticide Action Network and is based in Brussels. Dr Jonathan Latham, a former genetic engineer, is executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project and editor of Independent Science News.

Regulations that disallow human exposure to pesticides that are classified as mutagenic, carcinogenic, reprotoxic (toxic for reproduction), persistent or capable of disrupting endocrine systems within the European Union are under threat.

 These EU regulations are considered the gold standard in public protection by virtue of these and other protective measures.

But industry-linked experts and supporters of anti-regulation pressure groups have ‘taken control’ of the EU’s new Science Advice Mechanism (SAM) process. These experts have contributed to a report commissioned to reevaluate the EU’s authorisation of pesticides.

Public exposure

The report – called “EU authorisation processes of Plant Protection products“, and published in late 2018 – recommends dramatically weakening the EU regulatory system.

The adoption of many ideas previously proposed by the chemical industry is especially notable. For example, the EU currently deems the acceptable level of public exposure to mutagenic pesticides – those that damage DNA – to be zero. The new report recommends scrapping this standard of protection.

Vytenis Andriukaitis, the EU health commissioner, originally committed the new SAM report. Its purpose was to determine how to act in cases of so-called ‘diverging views’; that is, when media and interest groups get publicly involved.

The request follows a series of major controversies over EU regulatory decision-making. One such controversy was over the herbicide glyphosate (originally marketed by Monsanto as Roundup).

A “European Citizens Initiative” delivered more than a million signatures to the EU Commission asking for a ban on glyphosate. Several cities banned glyphosate. Even a dairy company banned the use of glyphosate by their farmers.

With this pressure from all over Europe, the EU Commission had difficulty reaching a decision since many EU member states -Bulgaria, Denmark, Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Spain, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Finland and the UK -opposed a ban.

Ultimately, a very unusual five-year extension for glyphosate was agreed – but soon the discussion will start again.

Major controversies

Issues with neonicotinoids have also pushed the EU Commission into a corner. 

Neonicotinoid insecticides are linked by much research to bee colony collapse and, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature “represent a worldwide threat to biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem services”.

This again placed the EU Commission in the crossfire since many EU member states and their ministries of agriculture wished to keep neonicotionids on the market.

Waves of scientific publications and media attention about dying bees and empty beehives forced the EU Commission to finally ban them. Nevertheless, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Lithuania still resist the ban by using derogations.

A third big controversy has been endocrine disruption. Public concern about hormone-mimicking chemicals forced politicians to address endocrine disruption concerns in the regulations and ban endocrine disrupting pesticides in 2009.

An enormous lobbying effort from industry, the US chamber of commerce, the EU Directorate General (DG) Enterprise, and EU DG Growth, tried to stop the implementation of the new rules, especially during the TTIP trade negotiations with the US. 

EU DG Environment was isolated and in the end DG SANTE (health) was willing to do the dirty work of undermining the rules. Again, waves of bad publicity from the public and scientists harmed the credibility of the EU Commission. This debate here is also far from over.

Stifling regulation 

The SAM report is important since it will soon be used by the EU Commission as an input for its REFIT programme to evaluate pesticide regulation. This is an event that the chemical industry sees as a major opportunity for a regulatory roll-back.

Some of the experts invited to help SAM and listed on the SAM website, however, are not independent.

Instead, they have strong links to the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). ILSI is a world wide network, a federation of non-profits funded by many industries, including the pesticide industry, and which provides expertise in regulatory issues.

ILSI global includes more than 400 company members and ILSI Europe includes 88. Among them are every pesticide multinational.

Sourcewatch writes of ILSI that: “The interests of food, pharmaceutical, tobacco, energy, and other industries have become even more entwined. They have learned to cooperate (rather than blaming each other for the cancer epidemic) and they now form coalitions to fight health and environmental regulations. 

“It is notable that they [ILSI members] generally employ the same lawyers, lobbyists and PR companies, and use essentially the same tactics.”

Behind the scenes

ILSI has negligible public profile, and claims not to be a lobby group, but is very active behind the scenes in obtaining seats for ILSI-associated scientists on regulatory panels.

These include the EU Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and international organisations like WHO, the World Health Organisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN, and the International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS ) of the WHO.

Experts generally do not seem to disclose their links to ILSI publicly and can therefore appear to be independent academic scientists.

A recent example of ILSI members successfully getting seats on an EFSA-panel concerned the risk assessment idea of a Threshold of Toxicological Concern (TTC).

This idea assumes chemicals are safe at low doses without (expensive) testing. It has been an important goal of the chemical industry to establish TTCs in European and other jurisdictions.

PAN Europe has analysed the process of developing guidelines for the TTC at the European Food safety Authority EFSA. We discovered that the chair of the EFSA working group was Sue Barlow, who worked for ILSI and the cigarette industry. She had volunteered to be chair of the EFSA working group. 

From this position Barlow installed an ILSI network in the EFSA working group. This working group then more-or-less copy-pasted the ILSI proposal, making it into an EFSA-opinion. 

Conflicted scientists 

ILSI has been imposing its ideas on many other current EU risk assessment methods too, intending to weaken protections for the public and ease access of pesticides to the market. 

A PAN Europe survey showed that out of 12 EU pesticide risk assessment methods analysed, eight were designed and promoted by ILSI. Industry is being allowed, under the radar, to “write its own rules”.

In the case of the SAM, a prime example of these conflicts is UK professor Alan Boobis who is listed on the SAM website as a contributor to the SAM report.

Boobis has been active in ILSI for decades and, until January 2018, was the chair of its Board of Trustees. Due to his conflicts of interest Boobis left the new expert panels convened by EFSA in 2012.

French professor Dominique Parent-Massin is mentioned alongside Boobis as working on the SAM report. Parent-Massin has previously worked with ILSI-member Aspartame companies including Coca-Cola and Ajinomoto – the world’s biggest Aspartame producer.

Also listed on the SAM website is Joergen Schlundt, former director of the Danish National Food Institute. Schlundt is also a former ILSI board member and is now part of several ILSI research programs.

All three are listed on the SAM website as contributors to the report, or as providers of evidence through another report written by a new network called Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA), or being part of a ‘sounding board’ and fact-checking process. 

Pressure groups

Another expert used by the SAM is German professor Daniel Dietrich, editor-in-chief of the journal Chemico-Biological Interactions. 

He has been very vocal in trying to stop the regulation and banning of endocrine disrupting pesticides (in EU Regulation 1107/2009), along with a group of editors of journals of pharmacology and toxicology. 

Dietrich published editorials in several scientific journals that triggered highly critical responses from other scientists such as members of the ‘Endocrine Society‘.

Ties between the Dietrich group of authors and industry were exposed by Le Monde journalist Stephane Horel who found 17 out of the 18 experts of Dietrich group have past or current ties to industry. 

The Dietrich group has been prolific, publishing articles like ‘Endorcrine disruption: fact of urban legend?’ that disputes the health risks of endocrine disruption.

Anne Glover, an EU science advisor, found that toxicological thresholds below which chemicals are safe were unproven and probably unlikely – achieving a hard won consensus between opposing groups. But Dietrich and his group (along with Boobis) still claimed their opponents used ‘pseudoscience‘.

Dietrich also opposed the EU ban of bee-harming neonicotinoids: both Dietrich and Boobis criticised the IARC report on the genotoxicity of glyphosate.

Industry objectives

The EU has mechanisms to prevent conflicts of interest from derailing its scientific decisions. The SAM website currently presents Declarations of Interest (DoI) for its members – including for Boobis, Parent-Massin, Dietrich, and Schlundt.

The SAM website states that: “The Commission found that none of the interests declared constituted a conflict of interest.”

But one might wonder whether procedures to report conflicts of interest are even functioning. DoIs were not available online when the SAM-report was published in June 2018 and one was not signed until considerably after publication, in August 2018.

The efforts of ILSI have so far been effective. Several of its campaigning targets are included in an important “SAPEA evidence review report”. 

SAPEA (Science Advice for Policy by European Academies) is a new body set up by European science academies. Their report is intended to feed into the SAM report and featured many of the conflicted scientists above.

SAPEA’s report promotes many industry objectives, such as the use of historical control data. The great importance of this is that, since many potential historical controls exist, their use makes it easier to ascribe toxic effects observed in animal testing as being simply noise and therefore irrelevant.

Another industry goal is to promote inexpensive (in vitro) mode-of-action assessment in preference to expensive adverse outcome testing. A third goal is to drop the obligation for chronic mouse testing.

The aims of PAN Europe and the Endocrine Society, on the other hand, are

1) to recognise the reality of low dose effects which are currently not tested at all for pesticides;

2) the recognition that chemicals may cause non-linear toxicity responses over a wide range of doses. These are called non-monotonic dose-effect responses whereas regulators presently acknowledge only linear dose-response curves of toxicity and even dismiss effects entirely if they are not linear;

3) mandatory testing for endocrine disruption;

4) to dispute the current regulatory assumption that chemicals have safe thresholds.

All are missing from the SAPEA report.

Hazard approach

In a further blow to precaution, the SAM report proposes to change EU rules by exchanging the acceptable level of citizen protection from “do not have any harmful effects on humans” for an undefined level, to that of “acceptable risk”.

This is the change of regulation that would make human harm legal, since it would stop the EU’s much-detested-by-industry “hazard approach“, that aims to avoid any exposure of humans to classified pesticides.

SAM proposes that the EU should re-examine this “hazard approach”, which has been under attack by industry for many years; and so it seems that SAM might prove to be the instrument by which industry finally achieves successes for which they have campaigned so long.

The EU has shown itself sensitive to public pressure. What is now needed is for that pressure to be redoubled.

These Authors

Hans Muilerman is chemicals coordinator at Pesticide Action Network and is based in Brussels. Dr Jonathan Latham, a former genetic engineer, is executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project and editor of Independent Science News.