Politicians and vested interests, when avoiding taking responsibility for failing in the coronavirus crisis, or facing up to the climate emergency, will inevitably bring on the tactic of "shifting the blame"!
Peter Beaumont asks some question, and comes up with some answers, based on scientific methods and evaluations (Fri 1 May 2020):
Why are the origins of the pandemic so controversial?
How Covid-19 began has become increasingly contentious, with the US and other allies suggesting China has not been transparent about the origins of the outbreak.
Donald Trump, the US president, has given credence to the idea that intelligence exists suggesting the virus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, although the US intelligence community has pointedly declined to back this up. The scientific community says there is no current evidence for this claim.
This follows reports that the White House had been pressuring US intelligence community on the claim, recalling the Bush administration’s pressure to “stove pipe” the intelligence before the war in Iraq.
What’s the problem with the Chinese version?
A specific issue is that the official origin story doesn’t add up in terms of the initial epidemiology of the outbreak, not least the incidence of early cases with no apparent connection to the Wuhan seafood market, where Beijing says the outbreak began. If these people were not infected at the market, or via contacts who were infected at the market, critics ask, how do you explain these cases?
The Wuhan labs
Two laboratories in Wuhan studying bat coronaviruses have come under the spotlight. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is a biosecurity level 4 facility – the highest for biocontainment – and the level 2 Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, which is located not far from the fish market, had collected bat coronavirus specimens.
Several theories have been promoted. The first, and wildest, is that scientists at WIV were engaged in experiments with bat coronavirus, involving so-called gene splicing, and the virus then escaped and infected humans. A second version is that sloppy biosecurity among lab staff and in procedures, perhaps in the collection or disposal of animal specimens, released a wild virus.
Is there any evidence the virus was engineered?
The scientific consensus rejecting the virus being engineered is almost unanimous. In a letter to Nature in March, a team in California led by microbiology professor Kristian Andersen said “the genetic data irrefutably shows that [Covid-19] is not derived from any previously used virus backbone” – in other words spliced sections of another known virus.
Far more likely, they suggested, was that the virus emerged naturally and became stronger through natural selection. “We propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of Sars-CoV-2: natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic [animal to human] transfer; and natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.”
Peter Ben Embarek, an expert at the World Health Organization in animal to human transmission of diseases, and other specialists also explained to the Guardian that if there had been any manipulation of the virus you would expect to see evidence in both the gene sequences and also distortion in the data of the family tree of mutations – a so-called “reticulation” effect.
In a statement to the Guardian, James Le Duc, the head of the Galveston National Laboratory in the US, the biggest active biocontainment facility on a US academic campus, also poured cold water on the suggestion.
“There is convincing evidence that the new virus was not the result of intentional genetic engineering and that it almost certainly originated from nature, given its high similarity to other known bat-associated coronaviruses,” he said.
What about an accidental escape of a wild sample because of poor lab safety practices?
The accidental release of a wild sample has been the focus of most attention, although the “evidence” offered is at best highly circumstantial.
The Washington Post has reported concerns in 2018 over security and management weakness from US embassy officials who visited the WIV several times, although the paper also conceded there was no conclusive proof the lab was the source of the outbreak.
Le Duc, however, paints a different picture of the WIV. “I have visited and toured the new BSL4 laboratory in Wuhan, prior to it starting operations in 2017- … It is of comparable quality and safety measures as any currently in operation in the US or Europe.”
He also described encounters with Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist at the WIV who has led research into bat coronaviruses, and discovered the link between bats and the Sars virus that caused disease worldwide in 2003, describing her as “fully engaged, very open and transparent about her work, and eager to collaborate”.
Maureen Miller, an epidemiologist who worked with Shi as part of a US-funded viral research programme, echoed Le Duc’s assessment. She said she believed the lab escape theory was an “absolute conspiracy theory” and referred to Shi as “brilliant”.
Problems with the timeline and map of the spread of the virus
While the experts who spoke to the Guardian made clear that understanding of the origins of the virus remained provisional, they added that the current state of knowledge of the initial spread also created problems for the lab escape theory.
When Peter Forster, a geneticist at Cambridge, compared sequences of the virus genome collected early in the Chines outbreak – and later globally – he identified three dominant strains.
Early in the outbreak, two strains appear to have been in circulation at roughly at the same time – strain A and strain B – with a C variant later developing from strain B.
But in a surprise finding, the version with the closest genetic similarity to bat coronavirus was not the one most prevalent early on in the central Chinese city of Wuhan but instead associated with a scattering of early cases in the southern Guangdong province.
Between 24 December 2019 and 17 January 2020, Forster explains, just three out of 23 cases in Wuhan were type A, while the rest were type B. In patients in Guangdong province, however, five out of nine were found to have type A of the virus.
“The very small numbers notwithstanding,” said Forster, “the early genome frequencies until 17 January do not favour Wuhan as an origin over other parts of China, for example five of nine Guangdong/Shenzhen patients who had A types.”
In other words, it still remains far from certain that Wuhan was even necessarily where the virus first emerged.
If there is no evidence of engineering and the origin is still so disputed, why are we still talking about the Wuhan labs theory?
The pandemic has exacerbated existing geopolitical struggles, prompting a disinformation war that has drawn in the US, China, Russia and others.
Journalists and scientists have been targeted by people with an apparent interest in pushing circumstantial evidence related to the virus’s origins, perhaps as part of this campaign and to distract from the fact that few governments have had a fault-free response.
What does this mean now?
The current state of knowledge about coronavirus and its origin suggest the most likely explanation remains the most prosaic. Like other coronaviruses before, it simply spread to humans via a natural event, the starting point for many in the scientific community including the World Health Organization.
Further testing in China in the months ahead may eventually establish the source of the outbreak. But for now it is too early.
Tim Adams, writing for the Guardian/Observer (Sun 26 Apr 2020) says:
The attacks on phone masts and the spreading of anti-vaxx conspiracies are all part of the same strain of misinformation. But is evidence-based reality going to make a comeback?
There have not been too many encouraging graph lines in recent weeks. One that does offer a breath of optimism, however, is the slight downward curve that implies one of the most toxic trends of our times – the anti-vaxx movement – might just be in retreat. The shift is incremental, but in a UK-wide survey in mid-March, 7% of people insisted they would refuse to have a coronavirus vaccine if one were available. By early April, with hospital wards and mortuaries filling up, that number had dropped to 5%. Perhaps vaccine conspiracy cannot bear too much pandemic reality.
As with the strategies against the virus itself, however, the response to any likely “cure” seems likely to vary from country to country. A similar survey in France, also conducted by the London-based Vaccine Confidence Project, suggested 18% of people would refuse a vaccine, while in a poll in New York, the city worst affected by the pandemic, 29% insisted they would not consent, a number that may render any programme ineffective.
The depth of misplaced fear about vaccination – which remains one of the unambiguous triumphs of global public health – has been further illustrated in widely shared remarks from lockdown. Novak Djokovic last week volunteered that he would have to think seriously about whether he could even carry on playing tennis if a vaccine were to become mandatory to travel. The rapper MIA went further in informing her 650,000 Twitter followers melodramatically, that “if I have to choose the vaccine or a [location-tracking] chip, I’m gonna choose death”.
The most prominent American anti-vaxxer, Robert KennedyJr, meanwhile, amplified an unhinged conspiracy that believes Bill Gates is using the virus as part of a supposed plot to control the world’s population through immunisation.
All pandemics trail a ready market in superstition, quackery and prejudice – a sense of powerlessness generates in some the need for catch-all theories, however deranged. At the time of the great plague in London, the spread of miracle cures and scapegoating prophecy was almost harder to contain than the infection itself. As part of its strategy the government was moved, Daniel Defoe reported in his A Journal of the Plague Year, to “suppress the printing of such Books and Pamphlets as terrify the People”. The efforts to prevent the spread of damaging conspiracies across our own media have shared a similar profile – and often a similar success rate – to the efforts to curb the disease.
In this respect, the pandemic is something of a test case for the social media monopolies of Silicon Valley to deliver on their widely trumpeted commitment to slow the spread of dangerously false information. After being confronted with the evidence of manipulation in the elections of 2016, and the spread of such vile conspiracies as that which argued that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, Facebook and Google and the rest have been forced to step up efforts to monitor and block extreme misinformation campaigns on their various platforms. Arguably, that effort is finally starting to show some effect.
Counterintuitively, some evidence for that might be found in the response to the most pernicious of the current conspiracies which has, entirely without scientific foundation, sought to link the spread of coronavirus with the rollout of the 5G data network. The real-world effects have been the acts of vandalism and arson against mobile phone masts in the past weeks. Up to 50 such attacks have been reported, mostly on Merseyside and in the West Midlands, including the burning of the 5G mast adjacent to the new Nightingale hospital outside Birmingham.
A report from the independent verification charity Full Fact last week revealed how this copycat campaign was only the most dramatic expression of a conspiracy theory with different strains, which include “that all the symptoms [of the virus] are actually caused by 5G… [and] that there is no disease at all, and the outbreak is a gigantic hoax to enable the government to install 5G under the cover of lockdown”. It should go without saying that there is no possible connection between the 5G radio waves and the spread of a virus. Even so, the government was forced to address the fears, calling them “dangerous nonsense”.
Thinking about contagious ideas now, I recall interviewing Daniel Dennett, the philosopher of evolution, back in 2006, just before the launch of Twitter. Dennett was talking excitedly of a word that he and Richard Dawkins had coined to describe how Darwinist idea-germs could be sent into battle against the politicised viruses of creationism. He called these idea-germs “memes”. Nah, I thought at the time; it will never catch on.
In the 14 years since, it has become second nature to trace the originators of particularly incendiary memes. A story in Wired magazine located the origin of the 5G conspiracy in an interview of 22 January in a Belgian newspaper with Kris Van Kerckhoven, a general practitioner from Putte, near Antwerp. He was quoted as saying that “5G is life-threatening”, but then added a speculative comment (“I have not done a fact-check”) that linked that falsehood to the virus then confined to China. The “link” became an ill-advised clickbait headline. (The piece, in Het Laatste Nieuws, was subsequently withdrawn.)
If these words marked the moment when the 5G conspiracy established its RNA, however, the “wet market” for those ideas to jump species and spread human to human was a conference given on 11 March at the Health and Human Rights Summit, in Tucson, Arizona. The headline act was the original anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield, the discredited English doctor, who was struck off by the GMC after being shown to have deliberately falsified evidence to make bogus claims of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Wakefield was in this case upstaged by a Californian, Thomas Cowan, author of Cancer and the New Biology of Water, who is serving a five-year suspension from medical practice for prescribing unlicensed drugs to cancer patients. Cowan claimed, entirely falsely, that Covid-19 was caused by electromagnetic waves and, also incorrectly, that Wuhan, where it originated, had been the guinea-pig city for 5G.
Videos of this talk were viewed 1.8 million times on YouTube and widely shared on Facebook before the sites moved to take the posts down.
In their book A Lot of People Are Saying, their study of conspiracism in the Trump era, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum classify people such as Cowan as “conspiracy entrepreneurs”. Once he had seeded his conspiracy virus, multiple other wilder mutations followed, some linking it to an Illuminati plot, others to the “blood sacrifice” of Kobe Bryant in a helicopter crash.
In Britain, some of those contagious fantasies found a population in which they could move as easily as coronavirus among Cheltenham Festival racegoers. Their combination with media attention around the decision to allow Huawei to supply some of the UK’s 5G infrastructure, and the fact that telecoms engineers were designated key workers, appears to have ignited dangerous lockdown fears. Challenges were laid down in Facebook groups and Reddit threads for “firestarters” to “take the 5G out”.
Social media platforms, fearing sanction, took long overdue action. Facebook has accepted a responsibility to remove false claims that 5G technology causes Covid-19, while promising a modification that will direct people who look for such content toward accurate information from the NHS and the WHO.
Some of the belated efforts to police “alt-right” conspiracy content in the past couple of years are also helping to contain the spread of the madness. There has been no more virulent “conspiracy entrepreneur” than Alex Jones and his web channel, InfoWars. Jones has predictably loud-hailered the 5G and anti-vaxx lines: “This is the plan, folks,” he grunted at his viewers. “They plan – if they’ve fluoridated you and vaccinated you and stunned you and mesmerized you with the TV and put you in a trance – on killing you.” Meanwhile, “they” were determined “to make sure you don’t learn about the known antivirals”. Prominent among these, apparently, were Jones’s own “wellness” products: SuperSilver Whitening Toothpaste and ABL Nano Silver Gargle which, he claimed, “kills the sars-corona family at point-blank range”. (The only scientifically proven effect of the active ingredient in these products, colloidal silver, is that it turns your skin blue.)
Up until last year Jones’s vicious untruths would have been spread by millions of followers on YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. However, with trials pending involving the bereaved Sandy Hook parents he repeatedly called “actors”, his platforms were finally shut down for “hate speech”.
Having curtailed some of the spread of the most noxious threads, social media platforms apparently hope to rely, at least a little, on herd immunity to contain the conspiracy. When celebrity “super-spreaders” of the 5G claims have emerged in recent weeks – including the actor Woody Harrelson, the boxer Amir Khan and the breakfast show host Eamonn Holmes – they have experienced the chill of immediate social media isolation and distancing.
It is still early days in this ongoing battle between fact and fantasy, but perhaps the general global compliance with lockdown measures, and the increasing appetite for verifiable facts and figures, indicates that rational voices might yet be in the ascendancy.
Even those on the frontline of protest against distancing measures in the southern American states have looked conspicuously conflicted. Several have marched under “coronahoax” banners while wearing face masks, hedging bets. Perhaps they have listened to the snake-oil “hunches” and tantrums of their president while the bodies pile up, and wondered. Perhaps they fear, privately, the tragic irony in the story of John McDaniel, 60, of Ohio, who spent March posting conspiracy – “Does Anybody Have The Guts to Say This Covid-19 is a Political Ploy? Asking For A Friend. Prove Me Wrong” – before, last week, becoming the first person in his county to die from the disease.
History shows that pandemics change things in surprising ways. Much has been made of the superstition that has attended other epidemics, but they have also generated great advances in public health, including vaccination; even the wildest conspiracy entrepreneur probably knows deep down that the only way out of the current tragedy is careful application of the scientific method.
In the past few weeks we have been exposed to a reality that all human generations before ours – and many millions in our own times in less advantaged parts of the planet – have known as a fact of life: that we exist in a precarious world of rapidly transmitted infectious diseases without an obvious cure. Though the sight of mass graves being dug and economies floundering has caused some to double-down on their pet grievances, to set fire to phone masts and indulge their fantasies about the Illuminati, it may yet cause more to think about getting back in touch with reality.
Very superstitious Writing's on the wall Very superstitious Ladder's about to fall Thirteen month old baby Broke the looking glass Seven years of bad luck The good things in your past
When you believe in things That you don't understand Then you suffer Superstition ain't the way
The study looked at the comments made in response to a previous paper linking science denial and conspiracy theories. Motivated rejection of science
This previous paper was published in 2013 by social scientists Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac, in the journal Psychological Science titled NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science.
The paper detailed the evidence the scientists found that, using survey data provided by visitors to climate blogs, those exhibiting conspiratorial thinking are more likely to be skeptical of scientists’ conclusions about vaccinations, genetically modified foods, and climate change. This result was replicated in the follow-up study, reported on in this Guardian story, using a representative U.S. sample that obtained the same result linking conspiratorial thinking to climate denial.
Dana Nuccitelli (Wed 8 Jul 2015) writes:
Of course science denial and conspiracies go hand in hand
This shouldn’t be a terribly shocking result. When confronted with inconvenient science, those in denial often reject the evidence by accusing the experts of fraud or conspiracies. We saw a perfect example of this behavior just a few weeks ago. When scientists at NOAA published a paper finding that there was no ‘pause’ in global warming, one of the most common responses from those in denial involved the conspiratorial accusation that the scientists had somehow fudged the data at the behest of the Obama administration.
Nevertheless, nobody likes being characterized as a conspiracy theorist, and so those in the denial blogosphere reacted negatively to the research of Lewandowsky and colleagues. Ironically, many of the attacks on the study involved conspiratorial accusations, which simply provided more data for the social scientists to analyze. For example, the authors were accused of everything from faked data to collusion between Lewandowsky and the Australian government.
Recursive Fury
As a result, a year later Lewandowsky, Cook, Oberauer, and Marriott published Recursive fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation. The paper analyzed blog comments that mentioned the Moon Landing paper. It became the most-read paper ever published by the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
However, the study was subsequently accused of being defamatory because the public blog comments had not been made anonymous in the paper. At the request of Frontiers, the authors anonymized the comments, but the journal still withdrew the paper out of fear of legal action. Its failure to stand behind sound scientific research led to the resignation of three of Frontiers’ editors: Ugo Bardi, Björn Brembs, and Colin Davis.
Subsequent to the withdrawal of Recursive Fury, Frontiers published an article that denied the link between HIV and AIDS. Despite widespread protest from the scientific community, the journal declined to withdraw the paper and instead classified it as an “opinion” piece. More recently, Frontiers fired 31 Editors in the medical arena, who expressed concern that Frontiers’ publication practices are designed to maximize the company’s profits, not the quality of papers, and that this could harm patients.
The latest study: Recurrent Fury
Lewandowsky, Cook, Oberauer, Brophy, Lloyd, and Marriott have now published Recurrent fury: Conspiratorial discourse in the blogosphere triggered by research on the role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial in a different journal - the Journal of Social and Political Psychology.
In this latest study, university undergraduate students (mainly psychology majors) were given the comments from denial blogs, together with genuine scientific critiques of the Moon Landing paper provided by 3 psychology PhD students at the University of Bristol.
In order to make this a blind test, participants were told the comments related to an unnamed scientific paper. The participants were asked to classify the comments, for example as types of conspiratorial thinking (e.g. questioning the motives of the authors of the paper) or as reasonable scientific critiques.
In the end, the participants clearly identified the comments from science-denying blogs as conspiratorial in nature, and the comments from the 3 PhD students as genuine scientific critiques. In fact, the results were quite strong.
Normally we might expect the data to have a shape similar to that of a Bell Curve, with some of the comments mentioning the Moon Landing paper exhibiting a moderate level conspiratorial thinking, but few to an extreme degree. On the contrary, the results were heavily skewed, with most denial blog comments about the paper being heavily suspicious and questioning the motives of the authors.
In June 2019 DESMOGUK published this interactive mapping tool for their Who's Who of Brexit and Climate Science Denial, and which is a revelation. The exceptionalism that characterizes many of national myths that are peddled in political discourses is exposed as a network of lobbyists, politicians and campaign groups, that has been pushing the UK towards a hard-Brexit, with the aim of axing environmental protection in the name of free-market ideology.
This project by Chloe Farand, Matt Hope and Richard Collen White, published Mon 10 Jun 2019, shows the active connections in this network, that you can explore for yourself using this interactive mapping tool designed by Chloe Farand. What this mapping tool reveals is how:
Powerful vested interests are at play, with a network of decision-makers and companies that profit from climate inaction overlapping with a cabal of climate science deniers eager to limit global action to cut emissions.
Over the past four years, DeSmog has been tracking this network. We’ve now mapped over 2,000 connections between its actors operating at the highest levels of political and corporate life in the UK, US and Europe.
The new interactive map shows:
How frontrunners for the Tory leadership including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Raab are tied to a network of thinktanks and lobbyists pushing disinformation on the climate crisis, while promoting policies that could harm the environment in the name of a no-deal Brexit;
How a network of free-market thinktanks and organisations based at offices in and around 55 Tufton Street are tied to major US funders of climate science denial including the Koch brothers and Robert Mercer, who also bankrolled Donald Trump;
How this network is influencing UK politics at the highest level, and pushing for a hard or no-deal Brexit.
Global Warming Policy Foundation and associates & Tufton Street Network
The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is the UK’s main climate science denial campaign group. It gives a platform to fringe climate science deniers, and gets credibility within the political world through its high-profile Westminster connections.
Its influence outside the right-wing fringe of UK politics and the media has significantly diminished in recent years, but it remains the climate science denial wing of a wider network pushing for greater deregulation and opposing action on climate change based around 55 Tufton Street.
The GWPF was established in November 2009 by Lord Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lawson remains the UK’s most visible climate science denier. It is run by a small team, none of whom have expertise in climate science.
Its Director, Benny Peiser, was previously a senior lecturer in social anthropology and sport sociology at Liverpool John Moores University. Andrew Montford, best known for his climate science denial blog Bishop Hill, is Deputy Director. John Constable, who also ran the anti-renewable energy campaign group the Renewable Energy Foundation, is the GWPF’s Energy Editor, while former BBC journalist David Whitehouse is Science Editor. The GWPF also employs Harry Wilkinson as a junior researcher.
The GWPF relies on a small pool of self-described experts to write its reports. Most prominent among these are Judith Curry, a former Georgia Tech professor, Ross McKitrick, an associate professor of economics at the University of Guelph, and Viscount Matt Ridley.
Ridley is a Conservative hereditary peer who was chairman of Northern Rock when the bank crashed and was rescued by the government in 2007. He promotes himself as an evolution expert. His Blagdon Estate hosts a coal mine.
Ridley’s brother-in-law is North Shropshire MP and former Environment Secretary Owen Paterson, who gave the GWPF’s annual lecture in 2014 (later discovered to have been written by Ridley).
Labour peer Lord Bernard Donoughue has also been on the GWPF’s board since its inception in 2007, and took over from Lawson as chair in January 2019. Donoughue, a former Minister for Farming and the Food Industry, has numerous investments, including in seven funds that hold shares in fossil fuel companies.
Former Tory MP Peter Lilley is another GWPF advisor sitting in the House of Lords. Lilley has a record of consistently voting against policy measures to tackle climate change, including in 2008 when he was one of only five MPs to vote against the UK’s Climate Change Act.
Lilley was been a non-executive board member of Tethys Petroleum, a Cayman Island-based oil and gas company with drilling operations in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. In 2018, Lilley was involved in a Channel 4 sting over politicians being offered cash to advise on Brexit. Lilley denied the allegations and reported Channel 4 to Ofcom over the programme.
Labour MP Graham Stringer is also a GWPF trustee. Stringer was a leading voice in Labour Leave, the party’s main pro-Brexit group.
The GWPF does not declare who funds it, but a few donors have been exposed — all of whom are major Conservative party and pro-Brexit donors.
Australian hedge fund manager Michael Hintze has been dubbed the “godfather of Tory donors”, and was revealed to be a GWPF donor in 2012. He also donated £225,000 to the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum.
City currency manager Neil Record is likewise a major Tory donor and GWPF supporter. He donated over £450,000 to the Conservative Party, including £32,000 to Tory leadership hopeful Matt Hancock between 2010 and 2017. In 2014, he confirmed he donated to the GWPF but declined to disclose the amount.
Lord Nigel Vinson, a former Barclays Bank director, was also confirmed as a GWPF donor. He donated at least £50,000 to the GWPF through his charity, the Nigel Vinson Charitable Trust, according to accounts submitted to the Charity Commission. He has also donated to the Renewable Energy Foundation and Institute for Policy Research — an organisation that supports many of the Tufton Street network’s organisations.
Another major donor, the Atkin foundation, pulled its GWPF funding in 2018. The foundation did not explain its decision not to renew the £20,000 donation it had made to the GWPF each year between 2012 and 2016.
Edward Atkin made his money through selling his baby-feeding business Avent for £300 million in 2005. He sits on the GWPF’s board, and has also donated around £230,000 to the Conservative party, according to Electoral Commission data.
The Tufton Street network takes it name from the offices in and around 55 Tufton Street and home to the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) and many of the UK’s leading pro-Brexit campaign groups and thinktanks.
The offices act as a hub for thinktanks, campaign groups, and specialist media outlets that push arguments for a hard or no-deal Brexit.
All of these groups portray themselves as experts in free-market libertarianism pushing for market deregulation post-Brexit, which could lead to “gaping holes” in environmental regulation, according to a parliamentary report.
In July 2018, the GWPF and eight other groups based in offices in and around Tufton Street were accused by whistleblower Shahmir Sanni in court documents of mounting a coordinated campaign to push for a hard Brexit.
The Taxpayers’ Alliance, founded by Matthew Elliott, who would become chief executive of Vote Leave, is based in the office. Vote Leave itself was also originally a resident of 55 Tufton Street but moved to bigger offices several months before the referendum. Leave Means Leave, a campaign group set up after the EU referendum to campaign for a hard Brexit, also operates out of the offices.
The European Foundation, a high-profile Eurosceptic thinktank chaired by Conservative MP Bill Cash, works out of the office. Civitas, an educational charity and publisher specialising in health, education, welfare, and economics, is also based in 55 Tufton Street. Sir Alan Rudge and Lord Nigel Vinson are both Civitas trustees.
UK2020, a thinktank described as the “UK version of the American Tea Party”, set up by Owen Paterson, is also registered at the address.
The Initiative for Free Trade (IFT), a campaign group set up by Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, was until recently registered at 57 Tufton Street, and the Centre for Policy Studies — another libertarian free market think tank that also runs the CapX news and analysis website — continues to operate out of the office.
A few doors down from number 57 is 7 Tufton Street, home to Open Europe, a Eurosceptic policy thinktank with offices in Brussels. And just down the road is the Adam Smith Institute, one of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s favourite thintanks, which has published articles casting doubt on climate science and indirectly opposed green energy.
Around the corner from Tufton Street is another of Thatcher’s favourites, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), based in offices on Lord North Street. The IEA is a free-market thinktank and “educational charity” whose trustees include Nigel Vinson, Neil Record, and Michael Hintze — who all also fund the GWPF.
Record gave the IEA £36,000 to support a seminar featuring Nigel Lawson in November 2009 — the same day Lawson launched the GWPF.
The IEA was embroiled in controversy last July after a sting by Greenpeace’s investigative unit, Unearthed, showed the group was willing to offer access to ministers for donations, and allow donors to influence the contents of its reports.
US funders of climate science denial and Donald Trump
The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) is one of many London-based organisations that is helping US groups push for market deregulation in a post-Brexit trade deal.
The main coordinating force behind such pressure is the Atlas network. Atlas is a Washington DC-based non-profit organisation that works to support more than 450 organisations in more than 90 countries promoting what it describes as individual liberty and free-market ideals. Members from the UK’s Tufton Street network include the IEA, Taxpayers’ Alliance, Centre for Policy Studies, Adam Smith Institute, and Civitas, among others.
Fossil fuel magnates and infamous funders of climate science denial the Koch brothers are major donors to Atlas through the Donors Trust and the Charles Koch Foundation.
Koch Industries is the US’s largest private fossil fuel company, and its owners - brothers David and Charles Koch - have multiple ties to UK organisations pushing libertarian free-market ideologies and climate science denial.
Along with ExxonMobil, the Kochs fund the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), one of the main US peddlers of climate science denial. CFACT employee Marc Morano regularly makes headlines at the annual UN climate talks for loudly criticising the process and casting doubt on climate science.
The group also supports prominent British climate science denier Christopher Monckton, a former advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the third Viscount Monckton of Brenchely who has been formally warned to stop falsely telling people he is a member of the House of Lords.
Monckton and Morano are two of the most visible members of a niche global group known as Clexit, which opposes the Paris Agreement, pushing for a “climate exit”. According to Clexit's founding statement: “The world must abandon this suicidal Global Warming crusade. Man does not and cannot control the climate.”
Piers Corbyn, an astrophysicist who regularly speaks at climate science denial events, has advised Conservative leadership candidate Boris Johnson on the subject and is the brother of UK Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, is listed as one of Clexit’s members.
The Kochs also fund the US thinktank the Competitive Enterprise Institute, whose director of energy and environment, Myron Ebell, has been hosted by the GWPF.
The Cato Institute, which has close ties to Tufton Street’s Initiative for Free Trade, also receives Koch support, as does the Heritage Foundation, which regularly hosts UK politicians including Owen Paterson, Labour MP and Brexit campaigner Kate Hoey, and the current Secretary of State for International Trade, Liam Fox.
The Heritage Foundation is also an official partner organisation of the pro-Trump youth-focused US group, Turning Point USA (TPUSA). Founders Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens toured the UK in 2019 trying to drum up support for its new UK outpost.
TPUSA previously produced a video that claims NASA scientists are “wrong about climate change”, and founder Charlie Kirk has publicly supported President Trump’s assertion that he will take the US out of the Paris Agreement. Turning PointUK’s chair George Farmer was a Brexit Party candidate in the 2019 European Parliament elections.
Two of the Koch’s main lobbying vehicles are Americans for Prosperity and Americans for Tax Reform, of which Sarah Elliott — the wife of Taxpayers’ Alliance founder and Vote Leave Chief Executive Matthew Elliott — was once an employee. Matthew Elliott credits Americans for Tax Reform and its chief Grover Norquist for inspiring the Taxpayers’ Alliance and his approach to politics.
Matthew Elliott remains an important figure in Tufton Street, with his ties to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, the Politics and Economics Research Trust, Business for Britain, Legatum Institute, and New Culture Forum. He also retains strong links to groups pushing for a hard Brexit, including Brexit Central and The European Foundation. Elliott is currently an advisor to current Home Secretary and Tory leadership hopeful Sajid Javid.
Another US funder with close ties to hard-Brexit campaigns and UK climate science deniers is Robert Mercer.
He was a major investor in Cambridge Analytica, the technology company credited with reaching millions of Brexit voters through social media, and was allegedly approached by Arron Banks on behalf of Leave.EU. Mercer is also a key funder of Donald Trump, whose national security advisor John Bolton used to work for the company.
Mercer also funds outfits that spread climate science denial, including Breitbart, the Freedom Institute and the Cato Institute, as well as through the Donors Trust.
The network that has grown around Atlas, the Kochs, and the Mercers isn’t the first attempt to bridge the gap between groups pushing for market deregulation on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1997, Liam Fox, the UK’s International Trade Secretary, founded Atlantic Bridge.
With Margaret Thatcher as its president, the neoconservative thinktank’s aim was to promote a “special relationship” between the UK and US. In 2007, the group established a special partnership with free-market lobby group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is known for producing template pieces of legislation that reduce protections for the environment, as well as other anti-regulation efforts.
Many former ministers in Theresa May’s cabinet were involved with Atlantic Bridge, including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, and William Hague. Michael Hintze was one of the organisation’s donors.
Government and Conservative Party
Many of the candidates in the Conservative party’s leadership contest to replace Theresa May have connections to the Tufton Street network.
Former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson helped to launch the Initiative for Free Trade, and has spoken at the fossil-fuel funded American Enterprise Institute. Michael Hintze — who also funds the GWPF — donated to Johnson’s 2008 mayoral election campaign. Johnson has also admitted consulting climate science denier Piers Corbyn on the links between climate change and weather.
Former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab was on the advisory board of the pro-Brexit campaign group Leave Means Leave and has written several articles for the Taxpayers’ Alliance.
Environment Secretary Michael Gove, like Johnson, was one of the faces of the Vote Leave campaign. He is a board member for Tufton Street’s New Culture Forum and has regularly met with the Institute of Economic Affairs’ director of international trade and competition, Shanker Singham.
Singham is a self-described Washington lobbyist who has become a go-to expert for Brexiteer politicians. He has ties to multiple US organisations known for promoting climate science denial including the Koch-funded Heartland Institute and Heritage Foundation.
Andrea Leadsom also met Singham while in government. She was backed by Leave.EU and Nigel Farage’s benefactor Arron Banks in the 2016 Tory leadership contest. She has ties to the Tufton Street network through her affiliation to the pro-Brexit group Open Europe. She was also a guest speaker for the anti-climate policy group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Steve Baker also regularly met Singham while Brexit minister, and is perhaps the candidate pushing for the hardest Brexit. Baker is one of the figureheads of the European Research Group, a cabal of Tory MPs pushing the government towards a no-deal Brexit.
The ERG has a number of climate science deniers in the group, including Owen Paterson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has claimed it is unrealistic for scientists to project future climate changes as meteorologists struggle to correctly predict the weather. Rees-Mogg’s sister, Annunziata Rees-Mogg, was recently elected as a Brexit Party MEP.
Whoever wins the leadership contest will inherit a party currently propped up by the votes of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), for which long-time climate science denier Sammy Wilson is Brexit spokesperson.
Pro-Brexit media
Outright climate science denial has a rapidly shrinking platform in the UK’s mainstream press. However, many of the Tufton Street organisations pushing to cut environmental protection continue to argue for market deregulation in the media — and the authors often don’t declare their connections to organisations in the network.
Perhaps the most prominent journalist still peddling climate science denial in the mainstream press is David Rose, who writes for the Mail on Sunday.
Rose regularly publishes articles casting doubt on mainstream climate science about which the press regulator IPSO often subsequently requires the paper to issue corrections. He has previously described the GWPF as “friends”.
Dominic Lawson, son of GWPF founder Nigel Lawson, also regularly publishes anti-environmental columns in the Mail on Sunday.
The Sunday Telegraph’s columnist Liam Halligan is a member of Tufton Street’sEconomists for Free Trade (EFT) — and has written columns suggesting a ‘no deal’ Brexit is nothing to fear (the EFT’s position) without declaring his affiliation.
Roger Bootle, founder of Capital Economics and also a member of the EFT, is another Telegraph columnist described by the paper as “one of the City’s leading economists”. Bootle’s short biography on the Telegraph’s website does not disclose his affiliation with the pro-Brexit group. Boris Johnson is also a well-paid columnist for the Telegraph.
The Times continues to employ GWPF advisor Matt Ridley as a columnist. Ridley remains one of the most prominent climate science denial voices in the mainstream media after Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker retired earlier this year.
There are also a number of specialist publications that are tied to and regularly provide a platform for members of the Tufton Street network.
Christian May, editor-in-chief of City AM, is a member of the Institute of Economic Affairs’ advisory council. At the time of his appointment in 2015, the newspaper — free to read for millions of London Tube users — was understood to want to adopt a more Eurosceptic tone, according to the Guardian. May came from the PR industry and had no senior editorial experience before his appointment.
Kate Andrews, newly appointed associate director at the IEA, writes a fortnightly column for City AM. Graeme Leach, CEO and chief economist at Macronomics and a member of Tufton Street’s Economists for Free Trade (EFT), also writes a weekly column for the paper.
Matthew Elliott is the editor-at-large of Brexit Central (as well as being a regular columnist at City AM).
Hugh Bennett, former deputy editor at Brexit Central and correspondence officer at Vote Leave, and Tom Harwood, who led the student Leave campaign, have both joined Guido Fawkes as news editor and reporter respectively.
All are familiar with Darren Grimes, who has moved the other way — the former deputy editor at Brexit Central is now digital manager at the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Brexit Central’s editor Jonathan Isaby was formerly a Daily Telegraph columnist before moving to ConservativeHome. The website’s founder and former Times Comment Editor Tim Montgomerie is a columnist for CapX, a political website owned by Tufton Street’sCentre for Policy Studies. The Centre for Policy Studies’ director, Robert Colvile, is also CapX’s editor-in-chief.
Other far-right political blogs continue to be home to some of the most prominent climate science denial voices.
Occasional Spectator and Daily Mail contributor James Delingpole now mainly plies his trade at the UK outpost of former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon’s Breitbart website. And the editor of the Arron Banks-funded far-right political blog Westmonster, Michael Heaver, was recently elected as a Brexit Party MEP.
There is also a trans-Atlantic element to the Tufton Street network’s appropriation of the UK’s right-wing media.
An investigation by DeSmog and the Guardian previously revealed that Spiked, a libertarian website with previous connections to the Revolutionary Communist Party and which regularly publishes climate science denial comment articles, was funded by the oil billionaire Koch brothers. Spiked’s former writer Claire Fox was recently elected as a Brexit Party MEP for the North-West.
British and European Populist Parties
While the Tufton Street network, with its strong ties to the Conservative Party, represents the more mainstream end of lobbying against climate action, other previously fringe groups are becoming more prominent.
Most notably, the pro-Brexit groups and individuals that coalesce around Nigel Farage have recently gained a mainstream platform. Farage’s Brexit Party won the most seats in the UK’s European Parliament elections in May, with the party fielding many candidates who doubt mainstream climate science.
Farage himself has a history of spreading misinformation about climate science, telling an interviewer in 2013: “I'm all for pollution controls but to obsess with carbon dioxide, which as I understand it, is a perfectly natural occurring phenomenon, strikes me as strange.”
Two major players in pro-Brexit organisations based out of Tufton Street, Richard Tice and John Longworth, were both elected as Brexit Party candidates.
New Brexit Party MEP for the South West, Ann Widdecombe, who retired from the UK Parliament in 2010, relinquishing her safe Tory seat, was one of only five MPs to oppose the 2008 Climate Change Act. The following year she told the Daily Express: “There is no climate change, hasn’t anybody looked out of their window recently?”
Another Brexit Party MEP, former UKIP leader for Wales Nathan Gill, once told BBC Wales it was “ridiculous” to think humans could change the climate.
The Brexit Party all but wiped out Farage’s old party UKIP thanks to defections like Gill’s, and with it went an old guard of climate science deniers pushing their views on European platforms such as John Stuart Agnew and Roger Helmer.
But the Brexit Party’s new crop of MEPs will be joining lots of other European politicians pushing climate science denial in the corridors of Brussels and Strasbourg.
Germany’s far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) denies human-induced climate change. In its election manifesto it claims that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has meant “world food harvests have increased significantly”.
Likewise, the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom, fronted by Geert Wilders, argues that there is no independent evidence that humans cause climate change and slams the work of the IPCC as unable to prove that relationship.
The Brexit Party MEPs will also find allies in two representatives of the Freedom Party of Austria: Heinz-Christian Strache has argued that it is a natural phenomenon that cannot be prevented, and Harald Vilimsky, who has been an MEP since 2014, voted against the ratification of the Paris Agreement.
Fossil Fuel Companies and the PR Industry
The Tufton Street network is generally very secretive about where it gets its cash, but a few donors are known.
ExxonMobil is a major funder of climate science denial and the most prominent Big Oil donor to the extended Tufton network.
It has donated to the American Friends of the IEA, a US fundraising vehicle for the London group. It has also donated to Marc Morano’s CFACT, Myron Ebell’s Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Heartland Institute, the US group that lists the IEA’s Shanker Singham as an expert.
Exxon is a member of the American Petroleum Institute (API), an industry lobby group of which Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron are also members. The API has donated to Koch vehicles including Americans for Prosperity and Americans for Tax Reform, which Vote Leave chief and Taxpayers’ Alliance founder Matthew Elliott cites as an inspiration.
BP and Exxon were also business partners of the now-dissolved small Californian coal company Phi Energy. One of Phi Energy’s directors was Julian Wheatland, a former CEO of the now-dissolved Cambridge Analytica. Wheatland remains CEO of SCL Elections, the parent company of the SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica.
BP is also a corporate donor to Tufton Street’sInstitute of Economic Affairs (IEA). In a video from an undercover reporter from Greenpeace’s Unearthed, IEA chief Mark Littlewood explains how BP uses the IEA’s work to lobby for deregulation.
The Tufton network also has some ties to UK fossil fuel companies through PR companies. Conservative Party donor James Bethell was co-founder of Westbourne Communications, which has represented the Centre for Policy Studies and Brexit Central. Westbourne Communications has also worked with fracking company Cuadrilla.
Q. Is this a capitalist (i.e. vested interests in fossil fuels and farming practices) conspiracy, to "fool the people all of the time"?
A. Re:LODE Radio refers the reader to Fat Freddy's Cat! But, it's NOT too late NOW!
At the Lincoln Memorial Donald Trump told the Fox News interviewers on Sunday: “I don’t think it’s ever been done, what we’re doing tonight, here, and I think it’s great for the American people to see.”
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
This is probably the most famous of the apparently apocryphal remarks attributed to President Abraham Lincoln. Despite being cited variously as from an 1856 speech, or a September 1858 speech in Clinton, Illinois, there are no known contemporary records or accounts substantiating that he ever made the statement.
The earliest known appearance is October 29, 1886 in the Milwaukee Daily Journal. It later appeared in the New York Times on August 26 and August 27, 1887. The saying was repeated several times in newspaper editorials later in 1887.
In 1888 and, especially, 1889, the saying became commonplace, used in speeches, advertisements, and on portraits of Lincoln. In 1905 and later, there were attempts to find contemporaries of Lincoln who could recall Lincoln saying this. Historians have not, generally, found these accounts convincing.
The inversion that "You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time" has also been attributed to Lincoln, amongst others."
There is a certain irony in this extraordinary set up, arranged for the Fox News town hall event (Sun 3 May 2020) by the White House, and ending up with Donald Trump dwarfed by the Lincoln Memorial sculpture, as if . . .
The New York Times (Mon 4 May 2020) take on this "event" begins with a headline and explanation:
Most Events in the Lincoln Memorial Are Banned. Trump Got an Exception.
Citing the “extraordinary crisis” of the coronavirus, the interior secretary relaxed the rules so the president could hold a Fox News interview in one of the nation’s most hallowed spaces.
“Look, I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen,” Mr. Trump said. “The closest would be that gentleman right up there. They always said Lincoln — nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.”
The New York Times story by Katie Rogers (May 4, 2020) begins:
As President Trump’s aides ran down the list of possible backdrops for his latest Fox News event, they eventually landed on their favorite: the Lincoln Memorial, an iconic tribute to an American life, and one of Mr. Trump’s preferred places to add a prime-time touch of drama to his presidency.
There was just one catch: While Mr. Trump and many other presidents have hosted inauguration concerts and gatherings on the memorial’s steps, any event meant to draw an audience inside the interior near Daniel Chester French’s sculpture of a seated Lincoln is prohibited. The area beginning with the marble staircase where the columns start constitutes a boundary protected by federal law.
So on Sunday, when the president sat down with two Fox News anchors at Lincoln’s marbled feet during a coronavirus-focused virtual “town hall,” it was because a directive issued by David Bernhardt, the secretary of the interior, had allowed them to do so.
Mr. Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist whose Senate nomination was contested by Democrats who pointed to multiple accusations of conflicts of interest and ethical violations, ordered the memorial temporarily closed for the event, citing the coronavirus.
Q. A former oil lobbyist?
A. Do bears shit in the woods?
Sometimes a question can be answered by asking another question.
Katie Rogers' story continues:
And though one of the nation’s most hallowed spaces had been opened up to him, Mr. Trump did little to keep the politics surrounding his response to the coronavirus out of the interview, which was watched by about four million viewers.
He predicted that the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the country may reach as high as 100,000 in the United States, twice as many as he had forecast just two weeks ago, even as he has been pressing states to reopen the economy.
Nor was he questioned by the moderators about some familiar claims he has made in connection to the virus. The president again said his Democratic rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., had written him a letter of apology after criticizing the president’s decision to close the country’s borders to travelers from China. “Never happened,” T.J. Ducklo, a spokesman for Mr. Biden, said Monday.
In claiming that he had been uniquely prescient in closing the border to Chinese visitors in late January, he also said that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, one of his administration’s lead advisers on the crisis, had publicly downplayed the threat as late as a month later. While Dr. Fauci had advised against Americans changing their daily activities at the time, he also warned that the virus could become “a major outbreak.”
Mr. Trump also mischaracterized what he had actually done to keep travelers from entering the United States from China, claiming that he had “closed down the country to China,” when really the borders were closed only to Chinese travelers, not to everyone traveling from China.
At one point, Mr. Trump compared his treatment as president to Lincoln’s.
“Look, I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen,” Mr. Trump said. “The closest would be that gentleman right up there. They always said Lincoln — nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.”
The president’s performance incensed Democratic lawmakers.
“What the American people want to see is their president rising to the moment and providing real leadership during this crisis, not using our sacred national monuments as brazenly political backdrops,” Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee for the Interior Department and the environment.
“Instead, President Trump chose to sit inside the Lincoln Memorial — a solemn and hallowed place in our national heritage — to berate the press, play the victim and spread falsehoods during a global emergency,” he said. “The National Mall belongs to the American people, and continuing to give the president free rein to use it for political grandstanding is a terrible mistake.”
In a statement, Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, called the event a “moment of national unity” that brought Americans together.
“President Trump spoke to millions of Americans on television from the Lincoln Memorial, one of the most iconic and unifying symbols in the world, with a message of hope and optimism about the American dream,” Mr. Deere said.
The weekend of his inauguration, Mr. Trump used the Lincoln Memorial as a backdrop to bask in what he thought was the singular nature of his inauguration concert: “I don’t know if this has ever been done before,” he remarked, though it had. Then last July, there was the “Salute to America” celebration, complete with tanks and a flyover by military jets.
In two months, Mr. Trump is expecting to reprise that event, a day after traveling to Mount Rushmore to see the fireworks. He has promised that attendees will be spread six feet apart: “We’ll have to do that in a very interesting way. Maybe we’ll even do it greater. Leave a little extra distance,” Mr. Trump told reporters last month.
Interview . . .
. . . you can not fool all the people all of the time!
Fact check . . .
However, Fox News does a great job in fooling some of the people all of the time.
The release of Gallup's annual survey in 2018 on American perceptions about global warming (March 28 2018) was indicative of this critical state of affairs.
Dana Nuccitelli, reported for the Guardian (Thu 5 Apr 2018) on this, and referencing the impact of Fox News, under the the headline:
While 85–90% of Democrats are worried about global warming, realize humans are causing it, and are aware that most scientists agree on this, independents and Republicans are a different story. Only 35% of Republicans and 62% of independents realize humans are causing global warming (down from 40% and 70% last year, respectively), a similar number are worried about it, and only 42% of Republicans and 65% of independents are aware of the scientific consensus – also significantly down from last year’s Gallup poll.
The Trump administration’s polarizing stance on climate change is probably the main contributor to this decline in conservative acceptance of climate change realities. A recent study found evidence that “Americans may have formed their attitudes [on climate change] by using party elite cues” delivered via the media. In particular, the study found that Fox News“is consistently more partisan than other [news] outlets” and has incorporated politicians into the majority of its climate segments.
Americans are gradually becoming better-informed
Nevertheless, public awareness about climate change realities has improved over the long-term. For example, about two-thirds of Americans now realize that most scientists agree global warming is occurring, up from less than half in 1997.
However, as Dana Nuccitelli says directly, there has been a concerted campaign to misinform people about the consensus among scientists on climate change. But scientists have taken up the challenge, as she reported, in the publication of The Consensus Handbook:
It’s a concise and definitive summary of everything related to the expert climate consensus, including how we know 90–100% of climate scientists agree on human-caused global warming, efforts to manufacture doubt about the consensus, its role as a gateway belief, its neutralizing effect on political ideology, and how to inoculate people against misinformation.
An "inoculation" against the "dis-ease" of misinformation?
This seems like a powerful idea, an idea that requires plans of action, especially in a world now in the grip of a viral pandemic, and where the health of the "information environment" is as crucial to human survival as the quality of the air we breathe.
Dana Nuccitelli continues:
Those last points are particularly important in light of the Gallup survey data. There’s an intense battle over public opinion on climate change, with cues from political elites having a polarizing effect that’s largely offset when people become aware of the expert consensus.
Thus, there’s been a concerted campaign to misinform people about the consensus. That was a key issue that major oil companies accepted in a recent court case, while their fossil fuel-funded supporters denied the consensus in briefs submitted to the court.
Q. Why are the major global oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, all members of the American Petroleum Institute (API), an industry lobby group that supports climate change deniers, but in court Chevron explicitly accepted the 97% scientific consensus on climate change?
A. Does the Pope shit in the woods?
Sometimes a question is best answered by another question, but not in this case. The answer to the first question can be explained by the fact that the unsubstantiated arguments of climate denial do succeed in a court of law, where "alternative facts" do not stand up to scrutiny.
Dana Nuccitelli also reported (Fri 23 Mar 2018) on the court case referenced in her report on the Gallup survey and The Consensus Handbook. The plaintiffs involved in this case were the coastal cities of San Francisco and Oakland. They’re suing five major oil companies (Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips and BP) to pay for the cities’ costs to cope with the sea level rise caused by global warming.Dana Nuccitelli writes:
Chevron’s lawyer presented the science for the defense, and most notably, began by explicitly accepting the expert consensus on human-caused global warming, saying:
From Chevron’s perspective, there is no debate about the science of climate change
Deniers filed briefs in support of the defense, but they contradicted Chevron’s tutorial. For example, one brief filed by a group led by Christopher Monckton and Willie Soon began by stating, “The “consensus” about global warming is 0.3%, not 97%” (this is obviously incorrect). Another brief filed by William Happer, Steve Koonin, and Richard Lindzen argued that “It is not possible to tell how much of the modest recent warming can be ascribed to human influences.” Chevron and the IPCC disagree.
While it’s normal for climate deniers to deny the 97% expert consensus that humans are driving global warming, those submitting briefs on behalf of Big Oil were clearly not on the same page as its lawyer. Perhaps the oil companies should have sent the deniers a memo to stay out of this case. Clearly these groups are accustomed to denying climate science on the oil industry’s behalf.
Two-faced oil companies
The judge mandated that those submitting briefs detail their funding sources, and they listed a litany of oil companies and fossil fuel-funded think tanks. Among those listed by Monckton and Soon’s group were ExxonMobil, the Heartland Institute, and the Charles G. Koch Foundation. Among those listed by Happer, Koonin, and Lindzen were the Heritage Foundation, Peabody Coal, the Cato Institute, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
It’s a perfect example of the oil industry’s two-faced behavior. For decades their own scientists quietly published peer-reviewed research concluding that humans are causing global warming. That was the face we saw from Chevron’s lawyer. But at the same time, oil companies were funding contrarian scientists and think tanks to spread denial and doubt about that same science. That was the face revealed in the denier briefs.
What Exxon knew, and what Exxon did . . .
Chevron’s lawyer modified the tobacco playbook
Although they accept the expert climate consensus, the oil companies obviously don’t want to be held liable for the costs of the climate damages their products cause. In addition to emphasizing and exaggerating climate science uncertainties, Chevron’s lawyer noted that the IPCC states that climate change is caused “largely by economic and population growth,” not fossil fuel extraction. In other words, the oil industry’s strategy is to argue that individual climate impacts are difficult to pin down, and in any case, the blame lies not with the producers, but with the consumers of their products. It’s eerily similar to an argument made by tobacco industry lawyers:
Those who decide to start smoking or continue smoking should assume responsibility for a choice they make -- because no one can say they don’t know about the dangers associated with smoking
In short, the industry lawyers argue that the consequences are the fault of smokers and energy consumers, not the companies producing the dangerous products.
That argument didn’t work for the tobacco industry in the past, because they knew of the health risks associated with consuming their products, yet engaged in campaign to manufacture doubt to convince people to keep smoking. Ultimately, a federal judge found the tobacco industry guilty of fraud to further a conspiracy to deceive the American public about the dangers of their products.
It’s a more difficult case to make against the oil industry because their scientists published climate research in peer-reviewed journals available to the public, and their campaign to manufacture doubt about human-caused climate change was waged through intermediaries. They funded think tanks to do their dirty work, as we saw in the denier briefs.
Tobacco industry executives continued publicly denying their own scientists’ findings to the very end, even under oath.
Poor health outcomes are all the fault of smokers, not the tobacco industry . . .
On April 14, 1994, the presidents and CEOs of the seven largest American tobacco companies were subpoenaed to testify before Rep. Henry Waxman’s House committee.
Dana Nuccitelli continues in her report to explain how the oil industry has modified the tobacco playbook by accepting the scientific consensus:
Chevron’s lawyer argued that as a complex global problem, any climate remedies should be addressed through government policy rather than via the legal system.
Since it effectively owns the Republican Party, Big Oil can afford to accept the science to avoid legal ramifications, without fearing any such legislative consequences unless the Democratic Party takes full control of the US government, which won’t happen until 2021 at the earliest.
It’s a brilliant strategy, and until Democrats take power and pass a carbon tax or other similar climate legislation (or enough Republican lawmakers stop denying the science and start finding bipartisan policy solutions), it might just work.
But even if they lose this lawsuit, at least the cities of San Francisco and Oakland forced the oil companies’ hand. In a high-profile case, they accepted the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming. These companies have employed scientists researching climate change for four decades, and as the world’s biggest and most profitable producers of carbon-polluting products, have the strongest motivation to deny climate science. If even Big Oil accepts the reality of human-caused climate change when pressed in court, it’s difficult for anyone else to deny it from here forward.
Climate misinformation threatens the health and safety of our societies and our planet. Protecting citizens around the world from fake news designed to confuse and poison the debate about climate change must be a key priority for governments, advertisers and social media platforms.
The point is that fabricated stories on climate change generate audience numbers and revenue from advertising. It is business! As usual!
However, as the Consensus Handbook discusses, research has shown that inoculating people against misinformation can largely offset its influence.
The bad news is that misinformation can totally offset the influence of facts on topics like the expert consensus on human-caused global warming. The good news is that people don’t like being fooled, so when they’re additionally informed about the tactics used to trick them with misinformation, they’re more likely to accept the facts.
Some are polarized, but many are simply unaware
The challenge is that politicians on Fox News and other media outlets are able to reach a wide audience with their polarizing messages about climate change. Reaching a similarly sized audience not only with facts but also inoculation against the misinformation is a daunting task. However, as John Cook notes:
People always ask me “how do you convince conservatives” or “how do you convince Trump voters” and I answer, “the question isn’t how to convince conservatives, it’s who should we be targeting - our audience is the large, undecided majority”.
One key point from the Gallup polling data is that consistently over the past 20 years, less than 10% of Americans have believed that most scientists don’t think global warming is happening. The vast majority of Americans are either aware or unaware of the expert consensus, but few have it backwards. Data from Yale and George Mason universities tells a similar story – only about 10% of Americans think less than 50% of climate scientists agree on global warming. While Americans badly underestimate the expert consensus – just 13% are aware there’s over 90% expert agreement, and the average American thinks the consensus is just 67% – despite growing polarization, few believe that most scientists reject global warming.
Most Americans are simply unaware about and thus underestimate the expert climate consensus. While a number of people can’t be convinced by the facts due to their polarized views, many more in that undecided, uninformed group remain open-minded and reachable.
We could solve the problem if conservative politicians and media outlets would simply stop spreading misinformation about and polarizing the subject of climate change. Sadly, the rise of this ‘tribal epistemology’ has done lasting damage to America, and nobody seems to have any good ideas how to stop or reverse it. But the Consensus Handbook provides some important information about the importance of consensus messaging and tools to help it take hold.
Good stories, rumors and gossip, and the social platforms we use, and that in an age of instant information transfer, and of social exchange in our global village, provide a rich resource for creative and appealing shams and shamans.
Our vulnerability as the inhabitants of a global village, to conform in our inner life to a collective profile, plus the normal gullibility quotient, is very high. This is especially the case as a result of the cultural shifts experienced as a result of the new media, from the light within and through the illuminated TV screen, to the smartphone. The feel and texture of this information is the driver, not the factual and critical content of the story. When identity begins to disintegrate, in the maelstrom of a booming and buzzing blizzard of information, then to grab onto something that seems to make sense of things, is a predictable, but often random response.
Umberto Eco identified some of the features of this recent period of turbulent social, cultural and psychic transformation, as being akin to features of the European so-called "middle" ages.
In 1967 Umberto Eco gave the influential lecture "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare", which coined the influential term "semiological guerrilla", and influenced the theorization of guerrilla tactics against mainstream mass media culture, such as guerrilla television and culture jamming. Among the expressions used in the essay are "communications guerrilla warfare" and "cultural guerrilla". The essay was later included in Eco's book Faith in Fakes.
In 2012, Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière published a book of conversations on the future of information carriers. Eco criticized social networks, saying for example that "Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots."
Connectedness in meaning is a quality we find in medieval visual art, reflecting an understanding of the universe, where natural events are signs, plague is a judgement, and superstition reigns. But superstition is not simply a result of irrationality, it is as much about "reasoning" as it is about "ignorance". "Reasoning" can lead to making false connections, just as much as the sleep of reason can produce monsters.
When print was new in the sixteenth century, Hieronymous Bosch painted the new confusion of spaces resulting from the Gutenberg technology invasion of the old tactile world of medieval iconography. His "horror" picture are a faithful artistic report of the pain and misery that result from a new technology. even at the popular level, the confusion and pain created by radio in the twenties was lavishly expressed in the blues. Today, with television, a much more powerful medium, pain has created musical genres from Rock to Beatle . . .
Marshall McLuhan references the art of Hieronymous Bosch to illustrate a sense of "dis-ease", a "surreality" that burst upon the the late medieval world, as it was transformed by invisible forces. One of these invisible forces, that has in our own age become a planetary plague of sorts, was capitalism. Difficult to see and understand until Karl Marx found a way to begin to reveal its processes and consequences.
Face to face in the global village.
Tribal culture
The instant nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing - rather than enlarging - the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences. Particularly in countries where literate values are deeply institutionalized, this is a highly traumatic process, since the clash of the old segmented visual culture and the new integral electronic culture creates a crisis of identity, a vacuum of the self, which generates tremendous violence - violence that is simply an identity quest, private or corporate, social or commercial . . .
But it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly . . .
During a 1977 interview on TV Ontario’s The Education of Mike McManus (incidentally McLuhan’s final television appearance), the host asks: “Way back in the early fifties, you predicted that the world was becoming a global village. We’d have global consciousness. And I’m wondering now, do you think it’s happening?”
After getting a couple of cryptic answers from McLuhan, McManus tries to bring his guest to terra firma.
McManus: But it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly.
McLuhan: Oh no, tribal people, one of their main kinds of sport is butchering each other. It’s a full-time sport in tribal societies.
McManus: But I had some idea that as we got global and tribal we were going to try to——
McLuhan: The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There’s no evidence of that in any situation that we’ve ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage, impatient with each together….The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
This is an age of contradictions, of global awareness and the all-at-once-ness of inter-connected-ness, but also an age of anxiety and multitudinous tribal existences.
Are modern people reasonable or mythological? And what is the "difference"?
This notion of a difference between a "reasonable people" and a "mythological people" occurs in the film of Medea by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The young Jason, as in Jason and the Argonauts, is being brought up by a man/centaur who explains and prophecies Jason's future.
In this sequence the man/centaur speaks to Jason of his birth and parentage, of nature and reality, of the goat and its golden fleece, and the land and people of Medea. They are a "mythological" people, and therefore very realistic.
Pasolini depicts Medea's people as a tribal people who perform rituals and sacrifices to secure their harvests. To perform such a ritual practice in such a belief system as this, is to act practically and realistically.
A young man is offered up as a human sacrifice and his organs and blood are sprinkled over the crops in a ritual sparagmos. The victim is bound to a wooden structure and killed and dismembered, and the villagers fertilize crops with his body and blood.
Jason's man/centaur guardian then remarks that Jason's people, that is a modern people, are a "reasonable" people, but, as a result, therefore, "mythological".
Re:LODE Radio interprets this as Pasolini pointing to his modern audience, an audience that predisposes a view of itself as "reasonable", but this reason is, in fact, unreasonable, ignorant of its own ideological and mythological vulnerabilities.
Re:LODE Radio cites Mythologies by Roland Barthes, as an attempt to analyze a modern "mythological" people.
According to Barthes, myth is based on humans’ history, and myth cannot naturally occur. There are always some communicative intentions in myth. Created by people, myth can easily be changed or destroyed. Also, myth depends on the context where it exists. By changing the context, one can change the effects of myth. At the same time, myth itself participates in the creation of an ideology.
According to Barthes, myth doesn’t seek to show or to hide the truth when creating an ideology, it seeks to deviate from the reality. The major function of myth is to naturalize a concept, a belief.
Myth purifies signs and fills them with a new meaning which is relevant to the communicative intentions of those who are creating the myth. In the new sign, there are no contradictions that could raise any doubts regarding the myth. Myth is not deep enough to have these contradictions; it simplifies the world by making people believe that signs have inherent meaning. Myth “abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences . . .”
Why do people believe in myth? The power of myth is in its impressive character. It seeks to surprise the audience. This impression is way more powerful than any rational explanations which can disprove the myth. So, myth works not because it hides its intentions, but because the intentions of myth have been naturalized. Through the usage of myths, one can naturalize “the Empire, [the] taste for Basque things, the Government.”
Speaking of myth and power, Barthes asserts that myth is a depoliticized speech. He uses the term ex-nomination (or exnomination), by which he "means 'outside of naming'. Barthes' point was that dominant groups or ideas in society become so obvious or common sense that they don't have to draw attention to themselves by giving themselves a name. They're just the 'normality', against which everything else can be judged." For example he says, "[the bourgeoisie] makes its status undergo a real ex-nominating operation: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named".
Myth removes our understanding of concepts and beliefs as created by humans. Instead, myth presents them as something natural and innocent.
Drawing upon Karl Marx, Barthes states that even the most natural objects include some aspect of politics. Depending on how strong the political side of myth is, Barthes defines the strong and the weak myths (des mythes forts et des mythes faibles).
Depoliticization of the strong myths happens abruptly, as the strong myths are explicitly political. The weak myths are the myths which have already lost their political character. However, this character can be brought back by “the slightest thing”.
The Kashmiri goats of the Great Orme, and lately of the quiet streets of Llandudno, have gifted the artist Steve Bell with a new cast of characters for his regular political cartoon strip If . . . in the Guardian.
The publication (Mon 10 Jun 2019) of the four year project by DeSmog that has been tracking this network, provides public information access to the mapping of over 2,000 connections between actors operating at the highest levels of political and corporate life in the UK, US and Europe.
Back in June 2019 this showed how frontrunners for the Tory leadership including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Raab were, and still are, tied to a network of thinktanks and lobbyists pushing disinformation on the climate crisis, while promoting policies that could harm the environment in the name of a no-deal Brexit.
NOW these actors are, to all intents and purposes, the UK government. Their agenda remains as it was, but framed now by a level of incompetence that requires the UK government and its advisers to shift the blame for political failure onto the "science" and the scientists.
There is an emerging narrative of government ministers, as politicians, dissociating themselves from political policy decisions, and shifting the responsibility for how things are turning out to "science", to scientific advice, and to the behaviours of the UK population.
On Thursday 30th April 2020 the Guardian published, in the print edition, the inside story of what is increasingly looking like a fiasco on a grand scale:
This inside story is by David Conn, Felicity Lawrence, Paul Lewis, Severin Carrell, David Pegg, Harry Davies and Rob Evans (Wed 29 Apr 2020):
How herd immunity and delayed lockdown hampered efforts to contain the spread of coronavirus
The health secretary, Matt Hancock, supported by Downing Street, has persistently denied that attaining herd immunity, by allowing the disease to infect most people, was ever a policy, goal, strategy or even “part of the plan”. Well-placed government sources said on the strictest reading of the word “policy” that may be true. But they do not understand how the government can claim that herd immunity was not part of its plan.
The Guardian’s account of the government’s response to the crisis is based on interviews with sources in or close to Downing Street, the Department of Health and Social Care, the Cabinet Office, Cobra and Sage, as well as other advisers and experts. Many asked not to be named, because they were not authorised to speak publicly. Some said that while they had concerns, they were holding back some of their criticism because they did not want to damage public trust in government at such a delicate time. All are wary of being wise in hindsight, and sympathetic to ministers who took decisions they felt were right at the time.
But with Covid-19 having spread virulently, particularly during those first three weeks of March, more than 21,000 people have now died in hospitals alone and Britain is predicted to be possibly the worst affected country in Europe. There are profound questions to be answered, about why Johnson’s government stood alone among the countries of the world, pursuing that herd immunity approach, and why, when they realised stricter measures were needed, the lockdown was still delayed.
Prof Neil Ferguson, the lead scientist on the Covid-19 response team at Imperial College London, whose advice paper of 16 March is credited with convincing the government to change course, responded extensively to questions from the Guardian for this article. He emphasised that one alarming estimate in that paper was not new: that under the “mitigation scenario”, which apparently envisaged herd immunity as one outcome, and included measures then being considered by the government, 250,000 people would die.
Brexit
Viewed from today’s unimaginably changed perspective, this year’s pre-crisis months can seem like a parallel world. Johnson’s media backers were feting him then for winning the “Get Brexit Done” election, and his private life, since criticised by some as a distraction, was portrayed as a cause for national rejoicing when on 29 February he and Carrie Symonds announced their engagement.
Johnson took Britain out of the European Union on 31 January, portraying the moment as an opportunity to “unleash the full potential of this brilliant country and to make better the lives of everyone in every corner of our United Kingdom.” A day earlier, an emergency committee of the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19, which had broken out in China and spread to 18 countries, was a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). The WHO stated then, as it has emphasised throughout, that this highest state of alert required an immediate response. In the absence of a vaccine, the WHO insisted that the virus should be addressed like the operation mounted in South Korea, with extensive testing, tracing people with whom a person testing positive has had close contact, and isolating all of them, “to interrupt virus spread”.
David Nabarro, the WHO Covid-19 envoy, told the Guardian that he and the director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, knew then that the coronavirus was going to become “huge” and would be “really difficult” for governments.
“Coronaviruses are horrible,” Nabarro said. “They’re rather stable and incredibly well designed to wreak havoc among populations because they are very, very easy to transmit and quite tough to contain. You can’t just let this thing go, and let it wash over your society, because it will kill lots of old people, and a few younger people, it will make hospitals into a big mess, and it will endanger health workers.”
On 3 February, Johnson made another triumphal Brexit speech, in which he even sounded a note against responding too strongly to Covid-19, arguing it ran counter to his vision of Britain as a “supercharged champion” of global free trade.
He was labelled a “part-time prime minister” by the Labour opposition on 28 February, after he spent 12 days away at the Chevening country residence in Kent, and did not attend four of the first five meetings of the Cobra committee, convened to consider Britain’s response to Covid-19, until one on Monday 2 March. He did go to a meeting in late February, attended by senior officials, but only very briefly, without making a substantial contribution, which one attendee says seemed strange. Asked about this, a Downing Street spokesperson clarified that Johnson went to be updated on coronavirus, and left after that.
The government’s decision-making on Covid-19 has since become a focus of fierce scrutiny and much criticism, partly for its lack of transparency. Cobra, the forum for considering emergencies, attended by ministers and their officials, meets in secret. It takes scientific advice from Sage, whose membership was not made public until the Guardian revealed the names of participants. They included Johnson’s chief of staff, Dominic Cummings, and another Downing Street adviser, Ben Warner, a data scientist who worked on the Vote Leave Brexit campaign, and is said by one Sage attendee to have “behaved as Cummings’ deputy”.
Supposed to be impartial and free from political influence, Sage responds to questions passed down from Cobra. Its own makeup has been criticised by some as too narrow, overly reliant on epidemiologists who specialise in mathematical modelling. One participant told the Guardian that Sage lacked diversity and was “way too slow” to consider how other countries, including those in south Asia, were managing to contain the spread of the virus. A spokesperson for Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, rejected those criticisms, saying the scientists are engaged with experts in other countries and “containment strategies form part of those discussions”.
Sage receives advice from three expert groups: Nervtag, which examines the science of the virus itself; SPI-M, which models how it spreads; and SPI-B, which involves behavioural scientists in considering how people may respond to restrictive measures.
The government’s scientific advisers
Following initial criticism, the government has published some details, making public the Nervtag membership and minutes of meetings, and some limited papers from SPI-M and SPI-B. Yet even these few documents do establish that Covid-19’s catastrophic threat to life was communicated clearly to ministers by the scientific advisers.
On 2 March, a brief “consensus statement” from SPI-M reported very stark assessments to Sage. “It is highly likely that there is sustained transmission of Covid-19 in the UK at present,” it said. The coronavirus was noted to be highly contagious, with each infected person infecting two to three more. If “stringent measures” were not imposed, “it would correspond to around 80% of the population [53 million people] becoming infected”. SPI-M’s best estimate of the death rate was 0.5% to 1%: between 250,000 and 500,000 people. Of those requiring hospital treatment, 12% were likely to die. If, like Elsie Sazuze, they needed to be put on a ventilator, they had only a 50% chance of survival.
Yet somehow, the genuine peril and need to act fast was not seized on by the government. The first phase of a plan to contain the virus with testing and tracing was ended on 12 March, and the policy moved to try to delay the peak of the infection. Later, the plan was for “mitigation”, for a series of measures to be gradually brought in: “case isolation” of seven days for somebody who felt they had symptoms, then “household isolation” for everybody living with them to quarantine themselves for 14 days, then at some point, to shield elderly and vulnerable people.
The day after the 2 March Cobra meeting and SPI-M statement, Johnson held the first televised press conference with Vallance and Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer. Whitty did say solemnly that a worst-case scenario estimated 80% of people could become infected, and 1% of those could die, but the message best remembered is Johnson joshingly telling the nation: “I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody.”
Johnson’s advice was: “We should all basically just go about our normal daily lives.” He also advised: “The best thing you can do is to wash your hands with soap and hot water while singing Happy Birthday twice.”
Over the next fortnight, as Italy moved to impose a lockdown, France and Spain began to do the same, and Germany embarked on physical distancing measures coupled with Europe’s most extensive testing and contact tracing operation, Britain did comparatively little. Hand-washing was still the main advice, along with case isolation of people feeling symptoms.
The first official report of somebody dying in hospital having tested positive for Covid-19 caught in the UK came on 5 March. Still, elderly and vulnerable people were not given any advice to shield themselves. A member of one Sage advisory committee said that around this time there was a gap between the scientific advice and political messaging. “The prime minister was going around shaking people’s hands to demonstrate that there wasn’t a problem. There was a disconnect at that point. We were all slightly incredulous that that was happening.”
Some experts believe Britain’s exceptional response arose in part because government preparations for a pandemic were so weighted to a flu outbreak. Prof Graham Medley, a Sage member and the chair of SPI-M – which stands for scientific pandemic influenza – modelling – explains. “Everything – government preparedness, the modelling – was based on pandemic influenza. And that’s not because of lack of awareness on our part, that’s because that got the government attention and the funding. We could persuade them that flu was important.” The group’s terms of reference were eventually broadened to include different kinds of pandemic but the emphasis lingered.
Scientists are used to seeing flu spread through populations very fast, then become milder as it mutates, and to seeing people indeed develop immunity and populations become resistant. Covid-19 is lethally different, new, its properties more uncertain, and the idea of addressing it by allowing it to move through the population and attain herd immunity was widely condemned for risking far too many lives.
Herd immunity
Given the repeated denials, it can be overlooked that the reason the world believes that attaining herd immunity was the government’s approach is largely because Vallance said it was. On Friday 13 March, when the virus was spreading exponentially, he set out publicly to explain the government’s strategy.
“Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely,” Vallance explained on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity, so more people are immune to this disease, and we reduce the transmission. At the same time, we protect those who are most vulnerable to it. Those are the key things we need to do.”
Asked on Sky News what proportion of the population would need to become infected to achieve herd immunity, Vallance replied: “Probably about 60% or so.”
Few mitigation measures were yet put in place. The week is remembered for the mega-events that went ahead: the Cheltenham Festival of horseracing, the Liverpool v Atletico Madrid Champions League tie, the Stereophonics concert in Cardiff. In allowing them, the government was indeed, as it consistently said, following the UK science that, surprisingly to many, considers that “mass gatherings” do not have a major impact on virus transmission. The numbers of people infected will almost certainly never be known, but the pictures of packed stands, particularly at Cheltenham, have become emblems of the government’s delay and inaction.
On 11 March, the WHO formally declared Covid-19 a pandemic. Tedros, the director general, maintained that the virus spread could still be confronted, and criticised “alarming levels of inaction” by some countries.
That same day, a further explanation of the government’s strategy was given by Dr David Halpern, a psychologist who heads the Behavioural Insights Team, a company part-owned by the Cabinet Office, which it advises. “There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows, as we think it probably will do, where you’ll want to cocoon, you’ll want to protect those at-risk groups so that they basically don’t catch the disease, and by the time they come out of their cocooning, herd immunity’s been achieved in the rest of the population.”
At a press conference the following day, Johnson famously said: “I must level with the British public: many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”
Whitty announced then that the initial effort to contain the disease by testing and tracing had been abandoned, yet despite that, and Johnson’s dire warning, the measures discussed for the new “delay” phase were almost negligible. People over 70 were advised not to go on cruises. Johnson said even “household quarantine” would not be required until sometime “in the next few weeks”. The government’s published plan did say that social distancing and school closures could be considered.
That evening, the former health secretary Jeremy Hunt spoke on the BBC, saying he was concerned Britain had become an “outlier”. Hunt says now he became worried that Whitty was too resigned to the virus spreading: “I couldn’t understand why they were so certain that nothing could be done to stop nearly 60% of our population becoming infected, when I had figures showing that even in Wuhan, the centre of the outbreak in China, less than 1% of the population actually became infected.”
Vallance made his media appearances the following day, explaining the herd immunity approach. He was asked on Sky News why in the UK “society was continuing as normal”, and it was put to him that a 60% infection rate would mean “an awful lot of people dying”. Vallance replied that it was difficult to estimate the number of deaths, but said: “Well of course we do face the prospect, as the prime minister said yesterday, of an increasing number of people dying.”
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, issued the first denial that herd immunity was part of the government’s plan, despite Halpern and Vallance having days earlier indicated that it was, in a column in the Sunday Telegraph on 15 March. “We have a plan, based on the expertise of world-leading scientists,” Hancock wrote. “Herd immunity is not a part of it. That is a scientific concept, not a goal or a strategy.”
By then, a dizzying number of experts were sounding the alarm. An open letter issued on 14 March dismissing herd immunity as “not a viable option” and calling for stricter social distancing measures so that “thousands of lives can be spared” was signed by more than 500 UK scientists.
Ultimately, the evidence that appears to have prompted the change of course was contained in the Imperial College paper, published on 16 March.
A political decision
Ferguson’s paper has been greatly reported on but somewhat misunderstood. It did suddenly warn that the NHS would be overwhelmed “eight-fold”, resulting in “hundreds of thousands of deaths” if the government did not change its strategy from mitigation to “suppression”. But the reason was comparatively technical: experience in Italy and of the first UK cases had shown that double the number of intensive care beds was required than previously estimated. The paper sets out the measures that would apparently comprise a mitigation policy, which the government was then planning: “Case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of those at higher risk of severe outcomes (older individuals and those with other underlying health conditions) are the most effective policy combination for epidemic mitigation.”
Ferguson made it clear to the Guardian that the estimate in that paper of 250,000 deaths was not new and was based on “the mitigation scenario”. The paper indicated that, in effect, the virus had to be allowed to spread initially, so that over time people would become infected, recover, and attain immunity: “Introducing such interventions too early risks allowing transmission [of the virus] to return once they are lifted (if insufficient herd immunity has developed).”
Ferguson held a press conference on 16 March to explain the new findings. His colleague, Prof Azra Ghani, said: “Under strategies we were pursuing, we were expecting a degree of herd immunity to build up. If we now realise it’s not possible to cope with that in the current health system, and it may not be acceptable in terms of the numbers, then we need to try and reduce transmission.”
The Guardian asked Ferguson how that policy could be contemplated, if it predicted that 250,000 people would die. He emphasised that he was never sanguine about people dying, and made it very clear that it was the politicians, not the scientists, who decided on policies to pursue. “While policy can be guided by scientific advice, that does not mean scientific advisers determine policy,” he said. “Though I do try to make it clear to policymakers what the potential consequences of different policies might be, to the extent the science allows.”
Prof Graham Medley, another Sage member, and chair of its influential modelling subcommittee, agreed that while the scientists gave their analysis on the epidemic to inform the politicians, deciding what to do was “a political decision”. Medley told the Guardian that Johnson, Hancock and other ministers continually saying they have been guided by the scientists has “sometimes gone a bit past the mark”. Asked if he meant that the politicians were passing the buck, Medley replied: “Yes.”
‘Drastic action’ needed
Even after the stark warning that the NHS would be overwhelmed if the policy did not change, Johnson and his government still hesitated. He made another speech that day in which he advised “drastic action” was now needed, but the measures were advisory and still tentative. People over 70, pregnant women, and those with some health conditions were advised only to “avoid all unnecessary social contact”. Britons were asked “where they possibly can” to work from home, and Johnson told them “you should avoid pubs, clubs, theatres and other such social venues”, although all were permitted to stay open.
The delay to introducing stricter measures, until the lockdown was finally ordered on 23 March, appears to have been at least partly based on a flawed misreading of the government’s own scientific advice. In early March, Whitty mentioned the idea that the government should wait to impose restrictions because people might tire of them, later saying this was based on both “common sense” and “behavioural science”. “What we are moving now to is a phase when we will be having to ask members of the general public to do different things than they would normally do,” he said. “There is a risk if we go too early people will understandably get fatigued and it will be difficult to sustain this over time.”
Hancock supported that, suggesting it was the result of official advice. “The evidence of past epidemics and past crises of this nature shows that people do tire of these sorts of social distancing measures, so if we start them too early, they lose their effect and actually it is worse,” he said. “The social science and the behavioural science are a very important part of the scientific advice that we rely on.”
Yet this concept of “fatigue” was rejected by the behavioural scientists appointed by the government itself to Sage’s subcommittee, SPI–B. “The word was never used in any of our committee reports,” said Susan Michie, a SPI-B member. “It is just not a concept that exists in behavioural science, and it was unhelpful for it to be used.” Four other members of SPI-B also told the Guardian that the committee never advised that people would tire of restrictive measures.
The publicly available summaries of their conclusions show the group advised that people should be given clear explanations and reasons for social distancing measures, and warn that those measures would affect people unequally, but nowhere do they suggest that people will become “fatigued”. Three behavioural scientists on SPI-B, Stephen Reicher, John Drury and Clifford Stott, even wrote an article for the Psychologist journal, rejecting the notion of “fatigue” and suggesting that delaying stricter social distancing measures on that premise was taking a risk with lives. “Psychological considerations were put at odds with what medical science demanded,” they wrote.
The Guardian understands that Halpern’s Behavioural Insights Team, or “nudge unit”, was also opposed to this view that people would tire of restrictive measures. One senior Whitehall source said Whitty himself was the main advocate of the “fatigue” notion, based partly on his own experience of patients in medical practice who do not see drug prescriptions through to their completion.
A Downing Street spokesperson, responding on behalf of Whitty, emphasised that he was indeed concerned about timing interventions, and their impact on people’s wellbeing if introduced too early, and that Sage had agreed a balance needed to be struck between the impact of measures, and the time the public could feasibly sustain them.
During the week after 16 March, there was a fierce debate within government about whether a stricter lockdown needed to be imposed. “Several of us thought measures needed to be introduced earlier,” one source close to the Cabinet Office said. Hancock appears to have been under great pressure, stretched between that view and resistance elsewhere to taking genuinely drastic action. A senior source at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) recalled discussions about the herd immunity policy continuing, despite Hancock having disowned it, and a senior official still advocating it. “His basic view was that we were all going to develop antibodies, and ultimately the question was how to manage the release of the disease into the population over time.”
The health secretary is said by another well-placed source to have argued forcefully for a lockdown in one Cobra meeting, chaired by Michael Gove, with a junior treasury minister who was resisting due to its huge economic impact and worries that a lockdown would itself kill many people. The source said Hancock kept referring to the modelling that predicted deaths would surge dramatically without a lockdown.
The DHSC source sums up this period soberly: “They knew we would have to go into lockdown; they were debating when. Every single day they wasted, every day we weren’t in lockdown, was resulting in people contracting the disease – people who have since died.”
One source on Sage said there was also nervousness among their group that week, a feeling that the virus was getting out of control and they were not sure the politicians understood its exponential spread. The advice was being communicated, the source said, but they were told that Whitty and Vallance were having to cajole the politicians in the right direction, and there was “friction”.
Reflecting on the presence at Sage of Cummings and Warner, some attendees now say the group’s deliberations were affected by a sense of what could feasibly be done, with a government run by politicians to whom a lockdown looked unthinkable, although others say they were not. Then, that week, when stricter measures were needed, some say it was useful to have Cummings there, because they knew he would communicate that directly to Johnson.
One source in Downing Street who personally urged the prime minister to stop delaying and move into lockdown that week said his reticence was partly down to his “libertarian instinct”. “There was also a bit of ‘rabbit caught in headlights’.”
Incubation
Given the incubation period of Covid-19, Boris Johnson may have contracted the virus that week too. The nation was given the highest profile demonstration of Covid-19’s destructive force, as the prime minister went into hospital days later, then into intensive care. While there was great sympathy for Johnson undergoing that personal ordeal, some experts have argued that the spectacle of Johnson, Cummings, Hancock, Whitty and other advisers contracting the virus indicated that the government was not taking social distancing seriously enough. One source in Downing Street the week before the lockdown said they were surprised to find staff at No 10 still shaking hands with visitors.
A Downing Street spokesperson made clear they do not accept that Johnson should have been more careful, saying that No 10 did enforce social distancing where practical.
Lockdown
On 23 March, the lockdown was finally imposed, Johnson clasping his hands during his televised address to the nation, telling people they must stay at home, to save lives and protect the NHS, and go out only for exercise and to shop for essentials.
In a response to questions about the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, and whether Johnson regrets any elements of it, Downing Street did not accept any criticisms. A spokesperson replied in a statement:
“This is an unprecedented global pandemic and we have taken the right steps at the right time to combat it, guided by the best scientific advice. We are so grateful for the response of the public, who have helped us to slow the spread of the virus and stop the NHS from being overwhelmed. The government has been working day and night to battle coronavirus, delivering a strategy designed to protect our NHS and save lives. Herd immunity has never been a policy or goal. We have provided the NHS with all the support it needs, made sure everyone requiring treatment has received it and taken unprecedented steps to support businesses and workers, to protect the economy.”
The spokesperson for Vallance said: “Herd immunity was a scientific point, that ultimately immunity is an important way to tackle infectious disease, ideally through vaccination.”
What does the science say?
Steve Bell has Dominic Raab giving the daily press briefing. As a free market ideologue, Brexit means Brexit brexiteer, Re:LODE Radio supposes Dominic Raab is pleased at how efficient the free market is (which doesn't actually exist), when putting up the price of scarce medical supplies, while the cost of production stays more or less the same. Re:LODE Radio wonders what kind of "mad rationale" the Taxpayers Alliance is going to come up with on this matter. Someting like the Economist's view of what should be done during the Great Famine in Ireland of 1845-49, that depleted the Irish population, while Irish landowners (many of them absent and English) exported stocks of grain at excellent prices?
A short broadside on this matter can be found, for example, in a piece by Henry Farrell, contributor to the Monkey Cage at The Washington Post, September 5, 2014:
The Economist is going through a firestorm of criticism because it reviewed a book on slavery and suggested it was biased for taking the slaves’ side. The Economist furthermore suggested that slaves’ accounts of cruel treatment from their masters were an unreliable guide to reality because:
Slave owners surely had a vested interest in keeping their “hands” ever fitter and stronger to pick more cotton. Some of the rise in productivity could have come from better treatment.
The Economist has since apologized for this review and withdrawn it. Even so, its extraordinary blindness to how real life economic power relations work is reminiscent of the magazine’s beginnings in the 19th century, when it fulminated at the very idea that the British government should do anything about the Irish famine that was happening on its doorstep. After all, it was the peasants’ own fault that they were starving.
… the people, rapidly increasing, have been reduced, by acts for which they are chiefly to blame, to a sole reliance on the precarious crop of potatoes. It would be unjust to Ireland – it would be a neglect of a great duty which is imposed on us at this time – if we did not point to this calamity, assuming as it does this aggravated form, as in a great measure the natural result of that crime which has precluded the people from other available resources. That the innocent suffer with the guilty, is a melancholy truth, but it is one of the great conditions on which all society exists. Every breach of the laws of morality and social order brings its own punishment and inconvenience. Where there is not perfect security, there cannot be prosperity. This is the first law of civilization.
In both instances, The Economist’s deep-rooted fondness of laissez faire slipped into a shameful tendency to minimize the human costs of those at the wrong end of the system, whether it was those who suffered and were murdered beneath the whip of slavery or those who starved to death, in part thanks to The Economist’s own vigorous advocacy.
Meanwhile . . .
The slump in the demand for oil, in the wake of coronavirus pandemic lockdowns across the world, is putting pressure on the profits of Big Oil. The two faces of this same Big Oil, one that supports the science, and the other that supports, de-regulation and climate denial, is setting two different faces to the recent phenomenon of plunging profits.
Jillian Ambrose, Energy correspondent for the guardian reports (Thu 30 Apr 2020) under the subheading:
First-quarter payout from FTSE 100’s biggest dividend payer to fall by two-thirds amid coronavirus crisis
Shell’s decision to cut its dividend for the first time in almost 80 years breaks with a decades-long taboo among major oil companies against cutting shareholder returns. Shell will also stall plans to buy back the shares which it paid to shareholders in lieu of dividends during the previous oil market downturn in 2015.
Earlier this week, BP’s new chief executive, Bernard Looney, said the company’s board had decided not to cut its dividend for the first quarter despite plunging to a loss.
BP has cut its dividend only twice in the last 30 years, most recently in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy in 2010, which led to 11 fatalities and a bill topping $65bn. He did not rule out future cuts to manage a slow oil market recovery.
The cumulative consequences of continued emission of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the biosphere, by the capitalist vested interests in the fossil fuel industries and modern agriculture, is that:
Jonathan Watts reporting for the Guardian (Tue 5 May 2020) writes:
The human cost of the climate crisis will hit harder, wider and sooner than previously believed, according to a study that shows a billion people will either be displaced or forced to endure insufferable heat for every additional 1C rise in the global temperature.
In a worst-case scenario of accelerating emissions, areas currently home to a third of the world’s population will be as hot as the hottest parts of the Sahara within 50 years, the paper warns. Even in the most optimistic outlook, 1.2 billion people will fall outside the comfortable “climate niche” in which humans have thrived for at least 6,000 years.
The authors of the study said they were “floored” and “blown away” by the findings because they had not expected our species to be so vulnerable.
“The numbers are flabbergasting. I literally did a double take when I first saw them, ” Tim Lenton, of Exeter University, said. “I’ve previously studied climate tipping points, which are usually considered apocalyptic. But this hit home harder. This puts the threat in very human terms.”
Instead of looking at climate change as a problem of physics or economics, the paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examines how it affects the human habitat.
The vast majority of humanity has always lived in regions where the average annual temperatures are around 6C (43F) to 28C (82F), which is ideal for human health and food production. But this sweet spot is shifting and shrinking as a result of manmade global heating, which drops more people into what the authors describe as “near unliveable” extremes.
Humanity is particularly sensitive because we are concentrated on land – which is warming faster than the oceans – and because most future population growth will be in already hot regions of Africa and Asia. As a result of these demographic factors, the average human will experience a temperature increase of 7.5C when global temperatures reach 3C, which is forecast towards the end of this century.
At that level, about 30% of the world’s population would live in extreme heat – defined as an average temperature of 29C (84F). These conditions are extremely rare outside the most scorched parts of the Sahara, but with global heating of 3C they are projected to envelop 1.2 billion people in India, 485 million in Nigeria and more than 100 million in each of Pakistan, Indonesia and Sudan.
This would add enormously to migration pressures and pose challenges to food production systems.
“I think it is fair to say that average temperatures over 29C are unliveable. You’d have to move or adapt. But there are limits to adaptation. If you have enough money and energy, you can use air conditioning and fly in food and then you might be OK. But that is not the case for most people,” said one of the lead authors of the study, Prof Marten Scheffer of Wageningen University.
An ecologist by training, Scheffer said the study started as a thought-experiment. He had previously studied the climate distribution of rainforests and savanna and wondered what the result would be if he applied the same methodology to humans. “We know that most creatures’ habitats are limited by temperature. For example, penguins are only found in cold water and corals only in warm water. But we did not expect humans to be so sensitive. We think of ourselves as very adaptable because we use clothes, heating and air conditioning. But, in fact, the vast majority of people live – and have always lived – inside a climate niche that is now moving as never before.”
We were blown away by the magnitude,” he said. “There will be more change in the next 50 years than in the past 6,000 years.”
The authors said their findings should spur policymakers to accelerate emission cuts and work together to cope with migration because each degree of warming that can be avoided will save a billion people from falling out of humanity’s climate niche.
“Clearly we will need a global approach to safeguard our children against the potentially enormous social tensions the projected change could invoke,” another of the authors, Xu Chi of Nanjing University, said.
Q. A global approach?
A. Yes, we have no choice!
Q. But what need to be done NOW in order to reduce carbon emissions?
A. How about developing an inoculation against the plague of capitalism?
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