Once again BBC’s Channel 4 sets the cat among the eco-pigeons with a documentary where Green Movement luminaries old and new recant their views, eat humble pie and espouse nuclear energy, GM food and hi-tech solutions to save the world from Global Warming.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: climate change is a fact, and anyone who disagrees is a wilfully ignorant Twit. Now we’re agreed, let’s dispense with the name-calling, climb down from the barricades and take a look at the issue in a calm, productive fashion.
….that in a genetically modified nutshell was the message in a provocative BBC Channel 4 documentary “What the Green Movement Got Wrong”, aired a fortnight ago when a gaggle of prominent environmentalists denied the articles of faith they once professed.
You don’t need to be a red-in-tooth and claw Republicancrypto-fascist fundamentalist to enjoy the spectacle of a parade of ageing hippies and NGO young thrusters, who’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives, eating their words and finding God in the verities of corporatism and capitalism. And yet…. good viewing though it might be, this was another flawed, if not dishonest offering from the BBC’s Channel 4, the folks who brought you the controversial The Great Global Warming Swindle (2007), a piece of polemic film-making, subsequently found following legal action, to have misled and misrepresented the views of various of its participants, as well as containing major errors of fact, requiring parts of the film to be re-edited and re-shot.
It appears Channel 4 have gone and done it again. Before it was even aired, Adam Werbach, a leading US environmentalist and former President of the Sierra Club, complained the makers had lied about the polemical nature of the film, that his views were not accurately represented and he wanted his contribution edited out. Greenpeace also claimed the makers lied to them when soliciting archival footage of environmental protests in the 1960s.
Along with the former President of the Sierra Club, celebrated former hippy Greens, directors of Greenpeace, a chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council all queued up to confess their past error. None of them repudiated their fundamental belief we face serious environmental threat to life on earth. But, as the iconic and veteran hippy environmentalist Stewart Brand, former ‘Merry Prankster’ and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, put it “over the past 40 years, we failed to achieve the main task, which was to protect the planet. We went about it all wrong”.
Why we Failed
Three reasons for this failure were advanced:
Misanthropy: To paraphrase Orwell, too many Greens believe “Nature Good - Humans Bad”. Unsurprisingly this is ultimately unpersuasive since it is humans and not Nature you are trying to persuade. The film included a clip of Mark Lynas, an environmental consultant and one of the repenters, shown in earlier days shoving a custard pie in the face of environmental sceptic Bjorn Lomborg. Now, he admits with shame he was motivated by a sense of self-regarding righteousness. Interestingly, a month or so back, Lomborg himself confessed his error in denying global warming.
Exaggeration: If you keep on saying, the end of the World is nigh - Right Now! Then don’t be surprised if people start to disbelieve you. Green activists have claimed 93,000 people died as a result of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster when the UN investigation puts the figure at 95. Paul Ehrlich spoke rubbish when he said the world would starve in the 1970s and authoritative commentator of the same era, Magnus Magnusson, warned a new Ice Age was upon us. The idea that we have but a few months to save ourselves is so untrue and so disempowering it is utterly counter-productive. Heretically, Tim Flannery of the Copenhagen Climate Council states, “We have got time”.
Damage: Possibly the most telling argument of the program was that the Green obsession with banning and preventing things has done actual harm. The refusal to contemplate nuclear power has encouraged the use of fossil fuels (three decades of more coal-fired power generation) leading to much greater Co2 emissions. The banning of pesticides, most notably DDT, has lead to the deaths of millions of Africans from malaria. The obsessive hatred of GM food has already led to unnecessary deaths from starvation in a world wondering how it will feed its increasing billions.
All of the above appears, on the face of it, to make sense. But as we should know by now, little is simple and seldom are things as they appear. That became readily apparent in a 45-minute debate among scientists and environmentalists that followed the airing of the film.
The men (no women were included), who appeared in this film, were all in one way or another environmental consultants, who made their living advising governments, international organizations & corporations, including acting as advisors to the nuclear energy and bio-engineering industries. These men, while admitting their earlier error, now espoused high-cost, high-tech methods of global engineering as the key to solving climate change. Controlled volcanic eruptions, was one suggestion. One does not have to be an utter cynic to wonder at a connection between their new convictions and source of income.
The eagerness to adopt new and innovative solutions is double-edged. New technology is good, when it works, but how much money is wasted on dead-ends foisted on us by industrial lobbyists. We need to know a lot more about the upside and downside of new technology to feel we are not being railroaded by bent or inept politicians in the pay of greedy corporations.
And yes, who would not want to use GM food to feed a hungry planet? But it is quite another thing for the world to be held to ransom by Monsanto and their one-off seedlings. The corporate record in this respect is not reassuring. Same goes for nuclear energy. Why wouldn’t we use it if we can do so cleanly, safely and economically? Capitalism and big corporations are not always the enemy of the greater good. But often are. We are right to be careful. And yet they are also a necessary part of the solution.
Too Much Polemic
By the same token, Greenies and tree huggers are not all loony lefty eco-zealots. Some are actually quite sane and have held the line against the short-sighted politicians and unprincipled corporations, who would turn our last forests into toilet paper, our last whales into sushi, our seas and skies into open sewers. If they do not immediately rally to nuclear energy and GM food it is often because they believe there may be better and more viable scientific and social approaches to power and feed our world. They have a point.
It is questionable, if not absurd, to blame the green movement for banning DDT and GM foods. NGOs can’t ban anything, only governments can. Corporations have much more lobbying power than NGOs do. So who benefits? Follow the money trail and then take a view. If you truly believe a bunch of tree-hugging kids, freeloading NGO-types and superannuated hippy anarchists combined with grant-hungry scientists have more political clout than the corporate honchos that fill the world’s boardrooms and dominate the levers of government, then dream on.
Alas, it seems increasingly clear that the more people talk the less clear the issues become. Whether it’s the blogosphere, probably the biggest panderer to bias and prejudice since time began, the partisan tripe from a financially stellar Fox News, or the quest for viewers by a cash-strapped BBC Channel 4, it is clear the media add little to this debate and are more part of the problem than a solution.
Call for Clarity & Commonsense
A last word of clarity and common sense then, from Prof. Howard Atkinson, a plant scientist from the University of Leeds in the UK speaking on GM food, but whose words could just as well apply to the many other environmental challenges we face:
By 2030 our warming world will have 50% more mouths to feed. We have to come up with solutions soon. Redistribution of wealth and food is vital, but might not be possible in the time available. No one advocates GM as a magic bullet against world hunger, but to reject the technology before we know what it is capable of would be morally wrong. A reliable, sustainable food supply is the common goal of both plant scientists and the green movement; climate change and growing population are our common concerns.
We cannot afford the luxury of fighting over individual technologies such as GM; to succeed we must work together with every tool at our disposal. Let us do the research…..
Amen to that. But first, we do have to agree that we have a problem. I’m not altogether sure we’ve even gotten that far…
