In the first part of his new book, Peter Taylor scrutinises the scientific research that underpins concern about global warming and finds that it is unconvincing. This extract, taken from the second part of the book, looks at the political dynamics that have promoted global warming to the top of the international agenda. As a life-long environmental campaigner Peter is well placed to consider the role that activist organisations have played in this process.
Many thanks to Peter for allowing Harmless Sky to use this material. Click on the image to find out more about Chill.
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In addition to the world of science institutions, governmental influence and media bias, there has also been a growing and powerful environmental lobby pressing for an unequivocal commitment from the scientists. NGOs well appreciated that governments will not move when there is major uncertainty and a lobby has evolved out of a coalition of interests on the part of environmental campaigners and those industries standing to gain from a shift in policy. Naturally, there is also an opposing lobby from oil, gas and coal interests. The nuclear lobby has remained somewhat hidden, but has benefited enormously from the climate issue. Some campaign groups have allied directly to renewable energy interests, especially wind turbine manufacturers and solar collectors, whereas others have remained independent of commercial interests but used the projections of technology and capability to underpin their campaigns.
In addition to these straightforward political alliances, there has been a growing corporatisation of the environmental sector. NGOS have grown from a few small back-street offices into a multi-million dollar international organisation – in the case of Greenpeace, with a fleet of ships, modern office suites, staff and pension funds. Such organisation requires a steady income stream and does not have the option, as for example at the end of a successful ocean pollution campaign to simply pack up and go home. When an organisation’s ethos is essentially combative, it seeks out problems and threats.
Which is fine, as long as there really are serious threats that cannot be dealt with by trusted government. But in my view, as a seasoned campaigner, the game changed significantly after Rio in 1992. The ‘enemy’ metamorphosed from being the dumpers and polluters ably supported by a science- industry alliance (including the modellers), to a more subtle menace. As a result of the shift to the Precautionary Principle, industry and the regulators began to move in another direction – Clean Development Mechanisms were set in motion and large amounts of money shifted toward preventative strategies. This shift required a different type of environmental organisation, and although the campaign groups made significant efforts to provide ‘solutions’, they were still ruled by the old ethos of campaign and combat.
The problem with combat is that there always has to be a threat, an enemy, something to be fought against. And such was the demand that campaigners became professionals, with books and manuals drawing from the expertise of the advertising industry and the experience of political lobby groups. Image and simplicity, together with achievable targets were essential tools of the trade. A corporate organisation answers to the shareholders, but an environmental pressure group answers to subscribers who need to feel something is being achieved, otherwise they remove their subscription.
This dynamic is not talked of openly and any suggestion that it has played a role in the climate debate is met with hostility. But to discuss this issue is not to impugn the integrity of any organisation, it is to draw attention to how a powerful and unacknowledged force can distort judgement. As in the case of Mark Lynas, if you have published a best-selling book on global warming and achieved some status as an environmental correspondent, you are not motivated to seek out those scientists who disagree with the IPCC orthodoxy. Likewise, if you are a large multi-national campaigning organisation with a decade long commitment to fighting climate change, you are going to listen more to the views of Mark Lynas and Al Gore, than to Dr Akasofu, Professor Christy and Professor Lindzen. And it helps that all of the world’s science institutions also (now) speak with one voice.
Thus, the environmental lobbyists become defenders of the orthodoxy, ably supported by all liberal-thinking environmentally conscious laypeople and journalists. And that leaves only the conservative, business-as-usual, economic optimists and free marketers to espouse the cause of the climate model’s dissenters!
It is with great sadness that I now witness the level of collusion operating within environmental NGOs. They had finally begun making an impression on the international process of environmental protection in the lead-up to the Rio Summit in 1992 and helped produce the ground-breaking Agenda for the 21st Century that supported connectivity and inter-dependence – a true ecology that included all aspects of human well-being and in particular, steps toward a global equity. Given the competitive nature of the world economy and the massive scale of inequity in wealth and economic power, these steps were never going to be easy, but I at least felt that environmental NGOs would be at the forefront of thinking.
Though this movement started out with great integrity of purpose, something has been lost. NGOs have embraced science to a greater extent but in the climate debate at least, have come to rely upon and uncritically accept the authority of scientific institutions. In no other area have NGOs been so uncritical – there is a long history of former critical analysis – on the risks of low level radiation; nuclear reactor hazards and waste disposal options; toxic discharges to the marine environment; incineration of toxic wastes at sea; the impact of acid rain; the deployment of GMO technology – in all these areas science institutions were part of the problem rather than the solution.
It was precisely the collusion between government, corporations and the science establishment that motivated NGOs to develop critical science expertise. The institutional science community has proven all too willing to accommodate government and business agendas and suppress or distort scientific assessments (there are many examples from pesticide studies, pharmaceutical trials, impact of GMOs, nuclear accident hazard analysis, the modelling of ocean dumping of nuclear waste and discharges of toxic chemicals such as PCBs). It was critical science, funded by the NGOs and supported by a very few progressive governments, that led to the crucial changes in the ‘burden of proof’ that led to the ‘precautionary principle’ being written in to international conventions.
I played a role in that work – and had the privilege to work closely with some of the best environmental scientists of our day. I hope therefore that the assessment I now make of the current situation will cause some reflection among my former allies. I have always held that we should work with the cutting edge of scientific truth – that whatever the short-term goals or campaign advantages, truth would ultimately serve our cause.
I am concerned now that – a ‘corporate creep’ has taken place whereby environmental NGOs have begun to behave like the large corporations we hitherto held to account. It is not hard to understand why this might happen – NGOs have grown in size and now command considerable resources. This requires a whole suite of corporate skills – from professional personnel management to accounting and investment, the handling of press, media, publicity and public relations, as well as lobbying and strategic development of policies. This requires specialist training and hence recruitment of staff from business schools and organisational realms not known for being well-attuned to the ethos of sustainability, nor for a commitment to scientific truths. Such specialists have to be represented at many levels of decision-making within the organisation – and it would be an act of naivety or denial to pretend this creeping effect cannot or does not now influence policy. This is not to say that anyone recruited from professional management and business circles lacks integrity, or feeling for the natural world, or concern for the overall well-being of humanity, rather it is a question of how these concerns are transformed into action and whether professional training can create blind-spots, particularly with regard to the ‘group-mind’ that evolves within corporate entities.
Corporate ‘creep’ and the culture of targets
I would argue that this corporate creep affects the kind of targets chosen and the simplicity of the messages put out by the campaigners. Targets are selected that are visibly achievable and because they convey a simple message that can have effect in the ‘market place’ of parliaments and government policy. Complex issues are avoided.
One such complexity can be illustrated by renewable energy developments – almost all of which require industrial development in the countryside. These locations affect rural communities, national recreational resources, and are often in wildlife rich and remote places. At present, almost all such operations are ‘developer-led’ – that is, the industrial developer selects the technology and the site. No alternatives or strategic assessments are available to the communities that must assess the proposal. This situation has changed little from the 1970s when the drive for more nuclear stations, chemical installations and motorways all benefited from the lack of strategic planning and the piecemeal approach to the great disadvantage of communities that bore the impact. In this age, environmentalists should be embracing a paradigm that supports and empowers local communities, not the same old developer-biased ‘trade-off’ that operated in the past – yet this would require campaigning for planning reforms and the empowerment of local communities – not an easy sell to the subscribers, nor welcomed by government agencies with whom modern NGOs do a lot of business.
In the latest proposals for ‘planning reform’ in the wake of the UK government’s most recent White Paper on energy policy there are disturbing announcements of the curtailment of individual and local democratic rights to both question government policy and, most disturbingly the appropriateness of the sites chosen by developers. Thus, the apparent urgency of tackling climate change is used as an argument to give developers greater power to select sites and technologies that reflect their reduced costs and profitability rather than considering the impact upon local communities.
Linguistic truth
The linguistic manipulation of ‘climate change’ has been an astute campaign-move for any organisation dependent upon public concern and support or government funding for research or implementation of solutions, because clearly, anything the climate now does can be interpreted as human induced. The issue of how much of the change is caused by greenhouse gas emissions hardly ever arises in any of the media treatments, nor in the alerts from the campaign groups. In the IPCC’s fourth assessment report, the authors even note that whereas in the Third report ‘climate change’ meant human-induced, it should now be taken to mean both human induced and natural. – the note, however, was barely visible.
As in all wars at whatever level of reality- truth is the first casualty – and we are now encouraged to join the ‘war on climate change’. It is not that I believe scientific truth can be totally pure, objective and unaffected by political worlds – but that it should strive to be so. If that aim is not there, then it begins to sink into the world of propaganda and persuasion, a mere tool in a wholly other agenda.
A polarised political environment now surrounds modern climate science – with even fellow scientists referring to their critics as sceptics rather than critical scientists engaged in one of the most fundamental aspects of the scientific method – that of questioning and testing prior assumptions. In this political world, it is easy to forget that global warming and ‘climate change’ are inventions of science – such is the level of propaganda and the implicit meaning of terms that many people assume the issue is self-evident. It was a scientific group that set the alarm and it is science that is charged with identifying the changes, predicting the future, and advising on what to do. This places scientists in a position of some power and influence.
There is virtually no debate now within the NGOs on the social and environmental sustainability issues raised by the expansion of renewable energy supplies. The WWF, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have a website, for example, that urges factions who support wind turbines to write letters to the planning departments in areas where turbine clusters are proposed. The site does not discriminate and assumes all proposals should be supported. There is no comparable website urging community consciousness, responsibility and choice, and no data on the downside of applications in wild places – even sites where their organisations have balked at supporting proposals, such as the massive development that threatened the Hebrides.
There is an absence of the balance required by the principle of sustainability. This is an area in which I have first hand experience. I wrote the first political assessment of renewable energy strategies with Ian Sanderson way back in 1980 – for the Group of Independents in the European Parliament. With my fellow scientists and analysts we gave educative seminars to the European Commission – who at that time were still wedded to an expanding nuclear future. In the 1990s I wrote much of the Countryside Commission’s input to government’s consultations on energy policy, and until recently sat on the joint Department of Trade and Industry – Countryside Agency ‘Community Renewables Initiative’. The latter was a hard slog – to get the DTI to appreciate that a myriad small-scale initiatives would lead to greater sustainability than would a smaller number of mega-technologies such as turbine ‘farms’, tidal barrages and carbon capture from power stations.
It was readily apparent in those corridors of power that the industrial progressives had little comprehension of the 1970s ‘ethos’ of community, scale and appropriate technology. Nor had they any working knowledge of the ‘clean production’ and ‘waste minimisation’ methodologies developed in the 1980s and implemented, eventually in the 1990s. These were the models that worked: auditing and awareness, community responsibility (e.g. river-catchment based ‘identity’ for collective action to reduce wastewater, discharges and resource use) – all under what could be called ‘good housekeeping’. When the UN set up its Clean Production offices in Paris, the lead staff were female – and many of us reflected that the male ego was ill-suited to the task – for men there was not enough glamour, not enough ‘power’, not enough kudos for whatever ambitions they might have other than to clean up the mess.
Whilst our efforts to clean up rivers, estuaries, and coastal discharges have proven successful over time – and nuclear expansion held at bay, the renewable energy front seems to have lost all sense of balance and purpose. I have heard representatives of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Centre for Alternative Technology argue that the division of local communities, the over-riding of local democracy, the degradation of wildland and beauty – all of these should be sacrificed in the cause of renewable energy targets. When pressed, reasoning for this sacrifice is that we must save the ‘Bangladeshis’ of this world – those more vulnerable to climate change than ourselves, and then ultimately, to prevent ‘dangerous climate change’ – meaning the prospect of a runaway global warming driven by our excessive emissions of carbon dioxide.
Thus, in the name of ‘preventing climate change’ it now possible for large corporations to move in on Iceland’s pristine river-wilderness to harness the ‘renewable’ power for aluminium production with metalllic ores being shipped from Australia, or hydro-schemes pressing into SE Asia’s remote and highly biodiverse cloud-forest uplands, which also are refuge to indigenous tribal peoples. In Britain, the Hebrides, islands of ethereal beauty and home to endangered and recovering populations of sea eagles, are being mooted as the ‘renewable energy’ power house of Europe with 700 MW of wind turbines – far in excess of local needs and requiring long distance transmission to Scotland’s industrial belt. Similarly, the Greek island of Skyros, fabled for its wild beauty, indigenous ponies, sea eagles and Eleanora’s falcons, is threatened with a 300 MW turbine installation.
Further, the immediate imposition of ‘targets’ for biofuels in transport, will hasten the conversion of natural forest areas into agricultural production and compete with land for food (and raise food prices). The NGOs have belatedly awoken to the consequences of the policies they have advocated, and are now taking out full page press adverts saying biofuel development should take place only with appropriate safeguards. Unfortunately, the supply policies are in place well in advance of such safeguards. There is little chance that governments will impose ecological standards on biofuel production and every likelihood that multi-national energy and agribusiness corporations will seek out the cheapest and most profitable sources of production – threatening wildlife-rich marginal land and forests in South America, Eastern Europe and South East Asia.
There are two aspects of this situation that cause me increasing concern – the first is that environmentalists are now using the same language and reasoning of the ‘developers’ of the past. Beauty, feeling, continuity and community are dismissed as ‘subjective’ emotional responses: locality must be sacrificed for the wider good, if not as a national target, then as a global responsibility. And the second is that they have begun acting as corporate players – seeking alliances and moving into markets that generate cash flow for their organisation.
On the question of language, we have already witnessed the agenda of sustainability become hi-jacked by the development lobby – ‘sustainable economic growth’ had been added to the criteria by which any development was to be evaluated, despite the fact that no one had ever defined what that meant or come up with any examples of recent economic growth that were not ultimately dependent upon the exploitation of a cheap and finite source of fossil fuel. Such developers were able to use ‘sustainable economic growth’ as a trump card over all other aspects of sustainability.
The modern corporate NGO does not specifically ally itself to sustainable economic growth, but neither does it pursue rigorously a critique of economic growth in relation to consumption. Instead, the large corporate NGO, mindful of its cash flow and client base, now tailors its campaigns to sets of targets that exist within the current political economy.
This is illustrated most clearly in the uncritical support for onshore wind-farms. The targets and context are accepted and criticism, if it exists at all, is restricted to the choice only of siting. It is as if all of the lessons of the past two decades have been ignored – if the driving force of development and the absence of strategic planning are not tackled, no amount of critique on specific proposals will prevent the inevitable trade-off mentality inherent in corporate and governmental thinking – for example, as is now evident with the proposals for large-scale wind-farms on Lewis in the Hebrides.
In the latter case, the RSPB is now in active opposition to the Hebridean development, only to find its voice competing with powerful corporations offering local economic progress and in the name of global equity and national targets. The RSPB had hitherto rather uncritically supported wind power and even allied itself through corporate finance to renewable energy companies.
How far can corporate NGOs now pursue a strategic critique? Especially when, as in some cases, these groups have forged active business links with wind developers. The ‘green’ bank Triodos now holds substantial investments in wind energy and backs the developer Ecotricity who applied to build a large turbine in the Mendip Hills of England. This was opposed by the local community and voted against by the democratic planning authority on the grounds of damage to local quality of life – only to be appealed by the developer. The local community’s values were over-ruled by central government (such decisions being strongly influenced by the attitude of the DTI) in the name of government policy and national targets. It would appear that local democracy and community feeling – an essential element of sustainability, can be sacrificed in the name of an apparently ecological policy.
The point here is not just the corporate creep of attitudes to community and development, but that other aspect of business mentality – the focus upon goals and targets. These are arbitrary figures set to a timetable whose purpose has less to do with a rational assessment of the environmental dynamic (such as timescale of causes and effects, lead-times of technology and business cycles of capital renewal) – than with the need of the corporate entity (and governments work in this paradigm) to have purpose and goals by which to assess itself – this applies in particular to any corporation that has growth targets, but is applicable to all such entities that must have some measure of their performance.
This leads me to the second of my concerns. Environmentalists are not only adopting the language of corporate power, they have become players in that corporate world. Organisations have grown enormously in the last fifteen years such that they have large central, in some cases, international offices and staff – all of which require professional management. These professionals are recruited either from schools of corporate management or from the ranks of experienced practitioners. The organisation develops a corporate identity and presence. It is not uncommon for Chief Executive Officers to have little grass-roots connection to the environmental movement, little scientific knowledge, little feeling for community development, but a lot of experience in large corporate management. The problem is that the very size of the organisation and its formidable management tasks demands this professionalism. For the more overtly campaigning groups, the CEO may be parachuted in from the ranks of professional lobbyists, political advisors or public relations rather than coming up from the ranks of the organisation itself.
I am concerned that such corporate entities develop their own internal agenda that has as much to do with their own position in the ‘market place’ or the ‘political world’ as it does with the issues they were set up to tackle. The danger is that these internal process begin to direct the thinking and mentality of the organisation and it loses contact with its origins. It does not, however, lose sight of its ‘mission’ because in the position in which it operates that would obviously diminish its power – but it now occupies the dangerous political and corporate world where appearances are often as important as substance. It is a world of marketing and image. And it is in this new world that the ‘mission’ is redeveloped, packaged and marketed.
Thus, ‘climate change’ becomes a simple slogan – apparently meaningful, but in scientific terms quite vacuous. By absorbing the complexity of anthropogenic causation and its less than certain signal into a single phrase that now implies all such change is man-made, the propagandist pre-empts debate on uncertainties. The mission is taken further when any such critics are branded as ‘deniers’ of climate change itself – an apparently obvious reality, on a par with ‘flat-earthers’.
I see little sign that these processes are recognised or understood. On the contrary, NGOs are in knee-jerk reaction to any hint of collusion or criticism of their targets and general approach.
Deception: hidden agendas and marketing strategy
In this century we have become much more aware of how the political world has embraced shallow image and marketing to the point of blatant deceit. Many countries, including my own, have embarked upon a world-wide game of power and control of resources under a smokescreen of ‘the war on terror’ with such infamously doctored analyses as the ‘dodgy dossier’ on weapons of mass destruction.
This one single and unstoppable act of collusion with an obvious corporate agenda related to oil, armaments and reconstruction contracts has sequestered vast resources that could have been used effectively to secure clean water, sustainable communities, protected forests and wildlife across the globe. The ‘war on terror’ that ensued is widely criticised for creating more terror, as if its protagonists would not have been aware of this propensity at the outset. They were indeed so advised and chose not to listen and to fabricate and doctor evidence in a global drama that was disturbing in terms of how few intelligent politicians, civil servants and scientists raised issues concerning the truth. It was a classic example of ‘the emperor’s new clothes’, but with the further step that there were plenty of voices crying ‘he is naked’ only to be ignored by the masses of courtiers.
The ‘war on’ mentality
One could conduct similar analyses of collusion and intention in the ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘war on poverty’. In the former case, despite massive investment in military-style operations involving navy, airforce, army and police around the world, drug supply increases and prices fall. And a lot of uniforms, guns, helicopters and consultant contracts get sold and suitably conservative voting people empowered by the uniformed salaries. In the war on poverty, policies are pursued on the basis of a ‘trickle-down’ theory where the rich get richer – but poverty increases even in those countries where the overall wealth is still growing. The ‘war on climate change’ should be seen in the context of all ‘war on’ mentalities – the paradigm is military, and the military mind is not the best solution to any of these problems.
Firstly, the military mode of thought focuses on combat to deal with a symptom not a cause. It creates for itself unquestioned and simplistic goals and targets relating to control. It does not question the context. In particular, it does not question the nature of its alliance with the corporate business world that benefits from its ‘solutions’ to whatever problem it is directed, whether in relation to security, armaments or reconstruction. Such vested interests have no obvious commitment to outcomes that would lessen their business, but the military mind accepts the goals that are in large part derived from business agendas. Governments thus readily adopt the military mentality with its language of war and simple targets and excuse themselves any deeper analysis of causes and any real commitment to solutions. The real agendas – which relate to economic power, security and control, are not addressed.
There is now no question in my mind that environmental organisations have engaged in this global war game of markets, interests, power and propaganda with some considerable purpose, but not a lot of awareness or experience. They have sought to ally with other players – both government, inter-governmental and corporate. What I do not see is any kind of self-reflection and analysis regarding their role, their goals and their successes. What is far more visible is their adoption of corporate goals, the mentality of the market place and most disturbingly, the uncritical acceptance of political and economic realities. I call this collusion where others might use the term conspiracy. It is not a conspiracy because that implies conscious intent and manipulation. It is collusion from self-interest, lack of self-awareness, ignorance and naivety – and this is not to gainsay a genuine caring and desire to change the world in a better way.
just noticed that Peter Taylor has commented on the THES story…