The Precautionary Principle – great theory, lousy practice.

What happens when the Precautionary Principle collides with ‘the Market’? Here’s a clue: the wheels don’t come off the Market bus.

The Precautionary Principle is a brilliant idea. If you’re old enough you may remember the early days of computers when, after hours of word-processing input, the very large and very slow p.c. would freeze. After trying every key you could think of to no effect, in the end you pressed delete and lost it all – no warning, no back-up, no ‘Are you sure?’ No Siri to help, just a day’s work lost.

The Precautionary Principle is supposed to stop us pressing delete when to do so might threaten a lot more than a day’s work. ‘Might’ is the big word here. We don’t have to be sure it’s the wrong thing to do, we just have to have sufficient doubt. And then there’s this thing called ‘corporate might’.

Here’s a definition of the Principle:

When human activities may lead to morally unacceptable harm that is scientifically plausible but uncertain, actions shall be taken to avoid or diminish that harm. Morally unacceptable harm refers to harm to humans or the environment that is:
*        threatening to human life or health, or
*       serious and effectively irreversible, or
*       inequitable to present or future generations, or
*       imposed without adequate consideration of the human rights of those affected.
Source: UNESCO COMEST report The Precautionary Principle

In theory the principle operates in almost all spheres. In medicine for example there is an ancient principle of ‘First do no harm’ which seems to be a pretty good starting point. In an environmental context, where it might be thought the precautionary principle offered vital protection, it is backed up by the ‘understanding’ that ‘the polluter pays’. So it’s a great theoretical underpinning to human activity in areas as diverse as farming, medicine, commerce, science and ……. Armegeddon.

How does it work in practice? Well, it’s hard to come up with a useful measure of the principle’s application but, if I say,

“it’s as effective as the UK’s Brexit negotiating team was!”

The UK team had fewer notes than the EU one (but seemed not to be very bovered!) PA Images

you’ll get a general idea of how good a shield it provides against leaping without looking.

A couple of examples (from many):

1) over 30 years after Bhopal adequate compensation was still being pursued by victims and their relatives. Union Carbide claimed 3,800 people died. Survivors and ICJB (International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal) conservatively claim at least 8,000 died in the first week.

People look awfully alike when they’re dead, but each of these people once had a name, a face, a life, a family. (ICJB)

2) the catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill and reparation claims saw a similar willingness by the polluter to spend a fortune on legal costs rather than on reparations.

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5312363

“I could ……….. point out how long and hard ExxonMobil has fought (successfully) to reduce fines and avoid payment while enjoying record profits. It’s the cost of doing business, written off, while they drag things along for decades with appeals and backroom deals.“
Kate McLaughlin, Anchorage Daily News, March 18, 2015, Updated: June 29, 2016

What could possibly explain the gulf between principle and practice? Well, it’s a bit of a tenuous link but I think it might have something to do with money. What gets in the way might just be the targets identified within CEOs’ and senior managers’ pay and remuneration packages, which, I’m guessing, highlight short and medium-term performance related to growth and profits. Who gets a bonus for prioritising possible consequences above profits? Nobody gets rich saving the planet do they? which is a pity because, if they did we’d not have a great deal to worry about.

precautionary principle my a*** — Global Warming and Going Green – Randy Glasbergen

Off the top of my head I came up with some of the areas where the principle should be making a difference – they’re scaled up from ‘look both ways before you cross the road’ which is one of the few areas where we generally get it right:

antibiotics,
nano technology,
genetically modified organisms and systemic insecticides,
gambling,
alcohol consumption,
mining and fracking,
logging,
sugar levels in food,
plastics,
air quality,
housing,
global warming,
education,
privatisation………

Oh my goodness!

Anyone can build a much bigger list in five minutes and fill a side of A4 in, say, half an hour.

We might expect that science and research would inform practice when the stakes are high and that our governments would legislate when there is, not just a possibility of damage, but hard evidence of damage. Why doesn’t it work like that?

Well in the UK we have a government that believes that it is much better to encourage business to voluntarily address areas identified as of concern; they are committed to ‘working in partnership’, not to requiring or legislating to ensure compliance. This is an article of faith for the Conservative party which, entirely co-incidentally, is largely funded by business and intensively lobbied whenever legislation is mooted. This week it transpired that

‘One in 10 Tory peers have given more than £100,000 to party’ – 27 members of House of Lords have donated almost £50m in total to Conservatives’
Guardian 29.12.22

There was a slightly different approach from new-old labour under Jeremy Corbyn and is now from new-new labour under Kier. The ‘spawn of Satan’ EU also lacked faith in the benign intentions of the private sector. Hence the EU is condemned by the Daily Wail and the rest for its suffocating bureaucracy and new-old and new-new for being in the pay of the commies or in hock to union barons (as opposed I guess to Tory barons as above. I expect that’s different though…)

In the US, when it was Trumpworld and all great again, all bets were off. Trump appointees to federal agencies seem to be carefully chosen to disable any protection for the public or the environment – ‘Let it rip’ was the administration (surely not the right world for Trump’s White House) approach to everything from mining, big oil, nuclear war and too many Big Macs. If you haven’t seen it, have a look at the clip of Trump’s Environmental nominee Kathleen Hartnett White explaining her credentials to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Under Biden and the woke democrats all sorts of terrible rowing back which can only damage the ‘good old USofA’ has been allowed. Biden ‘even’ appointed Deb Haaland to lead the Department of the Interior, making her the first ever Native American Cabinet Secretary, and Mohegan Indian Tribe Lifetime Chief Marilynn Malerba as U.S. Treasurer, the first time a Native woman’s signature will appear on U.S. currency. Imagine appointing people who have real experience of the issues to government posts. And it is quite hard to argue that Native Americans aren’t really American though I expect there’ll be no shortage of people trying..

But, to return to Westminster, how do voluntary codes work in the UK? Here’s an example.

Alcohol

The government line on alcohol consumption is that minimum pricing would penalise the vast majority who, like themselves are sensible social drinkers. Oddly, Scotland, where they know a thing or two about alcohol consumption, has taken a different line and gone for minimum pricing. In England we have ‘Drinkaware’ (a charity largely funded by UK alcohol producers, retailers and supermarkets) as our secret weapon against alcohol abuse, coupled with savage cuts in education and support programmes available to ‘problem drinkers’. Essentially we provide milder warnings about the danger of alcohol than we get when we buy a new electric toaster.

Toasters, by the way, are estimated to cause around 700 deaths world-wide a year. There is some evidence that this statesmanlike approach, which essentially assumes that business is benign and always has the public good at heart, is not hugely effective. For example:

Alcohol is estimated to cost the NHS around £3.5bn per year, which amounts to £120 for every taxpayer, ( HSCIC). Overall, treating alcohol-related conditions costs the NHS about 3.6% of its annual budget. The total cost of alcohol harm to society is estimated to be much higher, if the direct healthcare costs are combined with those of crime and lost productivity in the workplace.

£3.5bn is a tad more than is contributed to the Conservative Party by brewing and distilling companies. It’s not that easy to get a full picture of how much is given to political parties and by whom; a list of individual donors is quite revealing but hardly a complete picture. What is a fair bet though is that donors are buying a bit more than the chance of a knighthood. Essentially, not doing more to control the sale and consumption of alcohol is costing £3.5bn but benefiting the current party in government, which, of course, consists entirely of social drinkers.

There were 3,744 drug related deaths in England and Wales in 2016 according to the ONS. There were 7,327 alcohol-specific deaths in the UK in the same year. So maybe it’s time the voluntary approach was applied to the illegal drugs ‘industry’ as long as it results in an increased contribution to you know who?

Beer Street and Gin Lane, William Hogarth

What is it about industry and commerce that drives it to buy off politicians rather than ensuring that they ‘first do no harm’?

Well the defined duties of company directors in the UK seem to require more obligations than just ‘chase the money’. The relevant duty is to Promote the success of the company.

This requires directors to have regard to (my bold):

the likely consequences of any decision in the long term
the interests of the company’s employees
the need to foster the company’s business relationships with suppliers, customers and others
the impact of the company’s operations on the community and the environment
the desirability of the company maintaining a reputation for high standards of business conduct
the need to act fairly as between members of the company.

It’s worth repeating this I think:

Who gets a bonus for prioritising possible consequences above profits? Nobody gets rich saving the planet do they? which is a pity because, if they did we’d not have a great deal to worry about.

Let’s look at two more items in the list: it could be any there but I’ve gone for antibiotics and sugar, just to underline how generalised the problem is.

Antibiotics: Most of us are now aware of the dangers associated with the widespread, inappropriate over-prescription of antibiotics. Infections are becoming antibiotic resistant and diseases we thought we had under control are becoming difficult to treat. In the UK health professionals have recognised, and are tackling, the problem. Some of the resistance though is developed when farmed animals are treated with antibiotics. Antibiotics are routinely given to whole flocks and herds to prevent the onset of disease rather than to treat disease. Up to ¾ of the total consumption of antibiotics is by animals rather than humans. Here’s a cheerful quote for you:

“Chickens for sale in Britain’s supermarkets are showing record levels of superbugs resistant to some of the strongest antibiotics, research from the government has found.”

Guardian 16.1.18, pp6

Why have antibiotics been overused and abused? It’s not really because GPs are a soft touch and patients want something to make them better now. It’s because it’s really hard to sell an obviously sick chicken and it’s expensive to keep them in conditions that mean they don’t get sick. We want cheap food and there’s a photoshopped friendly, ruddy-cheeked farmer somewhere in the world who is happy to provide it.

When antibiotics stop working so will a lot of us.

The WHO tells us antibiotic resistance can spread rapidly among herds and flocks and can also be spread by the consumption of affected food products. In the US, where farming is even more industrialised than in the UK, antibiotics seem to be used more frequently and in far larger doses. According to the Guardian (8.2.18) beef cattle get between nine and sixteen times the dose of antibiotics given in the UK; US beef imports are banned in Europe at the moment because of the free use of growth hormones on US ‘farms’. Trump’s Undersecretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs was ”sick and tired” of hearing UK concerns about chlorinated chicken and US food standards. Roll on a post-Brexit trade deal with the US which should help bacteria to take back control. And, if you’re visiting the US at all, it might be worth taking sarnies and bottled water just to be on the safe side.

“According to US-Food standards this fruit is very healthy, dear!”

2) Sugar: When I was in my twenties a fairly regular contributor to Radio 4 in the mornings was John Yudkin. He warned of the danger to health of refined white sugar. He was treated with some condescension and regarded as eccentric. Generally, ‘to ensure balance’ he was opposed by someone from the sugar industry. So, on one side:

a disinterested scientist raising what turned out to be wholly justified concerns (diabetes treatment now costs the health service an estimated £14 billion a year, with the cost of treating complications representing the much higher cost. The prevalence of diabetes is estimated to rise to 4 million by 2025.) Diabetes.co.uk

and on the other:

the corporate sugar lobby.

He had this thing about sugar. He kept on saying it was bad for us. This was not popular with the food industry. It preferred fat to be the culprit and developed lots of low-fat products which we are still consuming; low in fat but high in sugar.

“Instead of laying the blame at the door of fat, John Yudkin claimed there was a much clearer correlation between the rise in heart disease and a rise in the consumption of sugar. Rodents, chickens, rabbits, pigs and students fed sugar and carbohydrates, he said, invariably showed raised blood levels of triglycerides (a technical term for fat), which was then, as now, considered a risk factor for heart disease. Sugar also raised insulin levels, linking it directly to type 2 diabetes. The British Sugar Bureau put out a press release dismissing Yudkin’s claims as “emotional assertions” and the World Sugar Research Organisation described his book as “science fiction”.

Julia Llewellyn Smith, Daily Telegraph, 17 Feb 2014

Yudkin was “uninvited” to international conferences. Others he organised were cancelled at the last minute, after pressure from sponsors, including, on one occasion, Coca-Cola. When he did contribute, papers he gave attacking sugar were omitted from publications. The British Nutrition Foundation, one of whose sponsors was Tate & Lyle, never invited anyone from Yudkin’s internationally acclaimed department to sit on its committees.
Ibid

Today, ‘Action on Sugar’ stresses the importance of protecting children from this “public health hazard” and calls for the food industry to “immediately reduce the amount of sugar that they are adding, particularly to children’s foods, and stop targeting children with massive advertising for high-calorie snacks and soft drinks”. ‘Action on Sugar’ is supported by 18 expert advisers. Its chairman is Professor Graham MacGregor, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the Wolfson Institute, Queen Mary University of London.

You can find a more detailed account here (Julia Llewellyn Smith, Daily Telegraph, 17 Feb 2014) .

So here we are:

we’ve got plastic in our seafood, not least because makeup just didn’t do it without microbeads;
we’ve got neonicotinoids in our honey because the likes of Monsanto say they really don’t hurt us (if you want to get a real feel for agrochemical industry’s approach to the precautionary principle have a look at the Monsanto site: “ Seed treatments like neonicotinoids can actually help bees.”;
we’ve got tower blocks clad in combustible materials;
and
we’re into the sixth mass extinction event.

Fortunately, we’re the most intelligent species on the planet and our government is on the case. Why doesn’t that reassure me? Here’s one reason – it’s called Brexit; this is what the Telegraph suggested was needed post-Brexit:

“Cut the EU red tape choking Britain after Brexit to set the country free from the shackles of Brussels

Today, the Telegraph calls on the Conservative Party to promise a bonfire of EU red tape in its 2020 manifesto to put Britain on a radically different course.”

We must lose no time in getting rid of regulations, Lord Lawson said CREDIT: JASON ALDEN/BLOOMBERG

The Cameron/Osborne (oh yes and that nice Nick Clegg) led UK coalition government of 2010 followed the usual Conservative route of having a ‘bonfire of red tape’ and espousing austerity. As a result, today we live with the tragic legacy of Grenfell¹ and public services such as health close to total collapse: and still UK government free marketeers plead for deregulation, a dash for growth and tax cuts made on the back of reduced public spending.

Bhopal, Exxon Valdez and a whole terrible load of other un-natural disasters tell us that businesses competing in world markets cut corners and take risks to turn a profit, because if they don’t someone else will; we really don’t need less red-tape do we? we need more..

On 14 June 2017, a high-rise fire broke out in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower block of flats in North Kensington, West London, at 00:54 BST and burned for 60 hours. 72 people died, two later in hospital, with more than 70 injured and 223 escaping. It was the deadliest structural fire in the United Kingdom since the 1988 Piper Alpha oil-platform disaster and the worst UK residential fire since World War II…..The fire was started by an electrical fault in a refrigerator on the fourth floor. This spread rapidly up the building’s exterior, bringing flame and smoke to all residential floors, accelerated by dangerously combustible aluminium composite cladding and external insulation, with an air gap between them enabling the stack effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire

Sapiens: a brief history of humankind

I’ve just come across this great book by Yuval Noal Harari. Try this excerpt and check it against the election campaign:

Our chimpanzee cousins………The alpha male strives to maintain social harmony within his group…When two males are contesting the alpha position, they usually do so by forming extensive coalitions of supporters, both male and female, from within the group. Ties between coalition members are based on intimate daily contact – hugging, touching, kissing, grooming and mutual favours. Just as human politicians on election campaigns go around shaking hands and kissing babies, so aspirants to the top position in a champanzee group spend much time hugging, back-slapping and kissing baby chimps…..Members of a coalition spend more time together, share food, and help one another in times of trouble.

Sapiens: a brief history of humankind, Yuval Noal Harari, Harvill Secker, London, 2014

Alpha Male, courtesy of the Huffington Post

Clegg — Alpha Male: courtesy of the Daily Telegraph

'Hell Yes!': courtesy of The Guardian — ‘Hell Yes!’: courtesy of The Guardian

Planet, what planet?

I caught a little of the first election debate last night which may well be more than most people in the country did. I was struck by a couple of things:

it’s apparently o.k to break election promises, which makes we wonder why we should believe our esteeemed PM.

no top down reorganisation of the health service

The organisational changes contained in the Act have been both damaging and distracting. Damage is evident in the serious fragmentation of commissioning, the bewildering complexity of regulation, and the loss of continuity as leaders have been replaced and organisations have been restructured. Distraction has resulted from a requirement to undertake fundamental restructuring when there ought to have been a focus on improving patient care and delivering greater efficiency at a time of constrained budgets.

The government’s record on NHS reform: our verdict: Kings Fund, February 2015

immigration ‘in the tens of thousands

In the year to June 2014, net migration was 260,000 – and that was well above the Conservative target of getting it down to tens of thousands by the 2015 general election.

For 20 years, the UK has seen more immigration than emigration – reaching a peak in 2005. Net migration began to drop in the wake of the credit crunch economic crisis and then again from 2011 after the government restricted entry for some people from outside of Europe. But now net migration is on the rise again.

BBC News, November 2014

The second thing I noticed was that not much was said or asked about the environment and global warming. A two degree rise is going to mean some fairly significant population movement (and immigration unless we put up a very high fence!) and a tad more stress on the health service but it doesn’t seem to be an election issue. Oh well it’s just the future of the planet, nothing we need to worry about!

What a Piece of Work is Man –

I’m not that young any more – in fact I’m knocking on a bit and I’ve never subscribed to the view that age inevitably brings wisdom, not least because it also brings senility and a certain narrowing of perspectives. I’ve spent most of my sentient life trying to get a better understanding of three things: me, the world I live in (in a planetary rather than a local sense) and what my species is really like. I think, belatedly, I’ve realised something quite important about the latter.

I’ve known for a long time that western man (and woman) has, over a thousand years or so, felt free to exterminate native peoples encountered as we explored and pillaged the globe; we have followed something very unlike the Star Trek Prime Directive that there can be no interference with the internal development of alien civilizations. The work which illuminated this understanding for me was “ Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples” by Mark Cocker.

Generally, the driving force behind extermination was greed; either ‘they’ were on land we wanted, or they were on land on top of gold, silver, diamonds – you name it – we wanted. Our perception of native peoples shifted from innocents living in an earthly paradise to sub-humans who would be better off Christianised and doing the work we needed doing if we were to prosper. Whether it was offering a bounty for every native ear or scalp (depending on the continent involved), selling wallets made from the breasts of native women or just sending the army in to protect our civilising missionaries, we were good at genocide for profit and saved their souls along the way – a bit like the Auschwitz I, slogan “Arbeit macht frei” (Work Makes Free)’ made by prisoners with metalwork skills and erected by order of the Nazis in June 1940 – a strange kind of freedom and a strange kind of saving.
So, you’ll understand, I haven’t a particularly high opinion of my kind, although some of my best friends are human. Of course we are capable of amazing things, including goodness and self-sacrifice as well as great evil or irresponsibility. I’m less sure now, though, that it is western humanity that carries the guilt, since other cultures seem not to be immune. I’m also not as sure that it’s entirely our fault or that it represents some kind of moral struggle we are destined to run and re-run until the second coming. I think there’s another paradigm which explains what we have done and continue to do; it has to do with ideology if not morality. It’s called free market economics.
My new learning came from another book, not this time about the extermination of native clans and races: this one is about the extermination of any living thing which we encountered. It turns out that when indigeneous Americans, Tasmanians and Africans were killed, it really wasn’t personal.
The book is “The Unnatural History of the Sea: the past and future of humanity and fishing” by Professor Callum Roberts. It makes for desperate reading, not only, or even largely, because he keeps trying to place Grimsby in Yorkshire. It tells the story of our pollution and overfishing of inland waters, of our turning to coastal sea waters, then to distant western waters, then to distant world waters, then to distant deep waters. It speaks of the extermination of colony after colony and species after species of water creatures. As ‘limitless’ fish stock diminished we improved our technology so that we could hoover up (often literally) the few that were left and then moved on to another species until we pretty well ran out of species. If we bumped into otters, dodos, auks, lobsters, shrimps (again you name it) we hunted them to the brink too. Along the way we transformed the sea bed, trawling much of it into flat, near lifeless sludge supporting only bacterial life.

Some species of coral can live for over 4,000 years — longer than any other animal that lives in the ocean. Deep sea and cold water corals were once thought an impossibility – prescient rather than mistaken, since they probably soon will be. As for warm water corals, the Caribbean has around 8% left alive it seems. The book doesn’t mention the role coral plays in carbon capture, only its age, incredible beauty and the part it plays in sustaining an ecosystem, a food and life chain of astonishing complexity.
What do I conclude from all this, apart from having my worst fears about the kind of animal I am confirmed?
Well, what could drive people to systematically destroy the environment and the animal life which are vital to our own survival? Why would we industrially fish out in a few years fish stocks which are, potentially, one of the best forms of renewable energy – life itself? You’ve guessed it haven’t you? It’s greed; it’s a competitive market in a finite resource and the scramble for profit now – whatever the cost later. We keep doing it: it’s the nature of the beast. Collectively we will destroy anything inanimate or living if there is money to be made, whatever the medium and long term consequences; all our history tells us that and we can’t change. Some of the most powerful city-based civilisations died out in part because they destroyed their immediate environment, cutting down all the trees to burn or build with. No trees = no city, but that’s tomorrow’s problem. But to get back to this finite resource thing, it’s not just oil or water or rare earths, or fish, or glaciers or whales – it’s the planet.
Free markets don’t make for responsible stewardship – ever. We can’t be trusted to act responsibly if there’s money to be made. Of course we, in our free democracies, elect governments to be responsible for more than their own survival but that doesn’t work either does it? A politician’s time frame is four or five years and, ideally, civilisations should aim for a bit longer. Democracy is about bribing key parts of the electorate every few years, lying or being ‘economical with the truth’ and recognising that the electorate have a short memory; after all, ‘they’re all the same aren’t they’ is probably truer now than in the pre-Blair years, though the Labour Party seems to have rediscovered its value base. Why do politicians do it? because it works of course. They bribe and we respond. We probably get the politicians we deserve. The EU Common Fisheries Policy quotas were framed by scientists, modified by civil servants to placate politicians and then raised by politicians to placate us, so that we could have cheap and plentiful fish now – well then as of 2012. Arguably, a dictator who didn’t have to court popularity would be as likely (more likely?) to rule in a disinterested way as long as some money could be funnelled into Swiss accounts. I have a feeling though, that a party standing on a principled platform of consuming less now so that our children would have a future might do rather well. That’s why the Green Party are prospering and why the Labour Party membership is soaring now its led by someone brave enough to say New Labour was old Conservatism. After all, even the ‘we’re all in it together’ calls of this benighted government have made most people think sacrifices have to be made to save the banks (and bankers). Surely saving the planet is (almost?) as important.
I grew up in Grimsby (on the Lincolnshire coast). I remember the ‘Cod Wars’ when those pesky Icelanders tried to stop us fishing in what they said were their waters. At the time no-one mentioned overfishing. I live near Newlyn now – a tiny place by comparison but the largest fishing port in the country because Grimsby and ports like it stopped catching much fish a long time ago. If only there were a National Trust for the seas.
In his conclusion to “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” published way back in the 1930s, Weber lamented the loss of religious underpinning to capitalism’s spirit.

“This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.

In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.”

So what do we need? We need regulation not untrammelled market freedom. We need supra-national decision making at EU and UN levels (I wonder if this is the real reason why the Conservative Party so hates the EU; not the loss of sovereignty but a brake on the stampede for profit and edge of the cliff mayhem). We also need politicians to be kept out of the loop on regulation. And we need probity and a dedication to public service.
As a senior citizen, I look at the policies of our coalition Conservative government and despair: a free market in education, a free market in health, cutting regulation and freeing the entrepreneurs, limiting employment rights and pouring scorn on EU legislation and bureaucracy. The stakes for us are incredibly high. They only stand to lose money, most of which is ours not theirs in any case. We stand to lose everything.