Misleading reporting on organic benefits

A report on the BBC website caught my attention and had me fuming about one-sided reporting again. The article titled 'Organic has no health benefits' claims that there are no additional nutritional benefits to people who eat organic food instead on non-organic food. The title, however, is misleading.

The clues lie in the small apparently unimportant statements that come later in the article.

This sentence irritated me immensely: "The Food Standards Agency who commissioned the report said the findings would help people make an 'informed choice'." It irritated me because it assumed that this single faceted and myopic view of what the issues are is the only view that really counts. It implies that a narrow view is sufficient for people to be able to make "informed" decisions.

The following quote is the one that conveniently stepped over the real issue as if it was negligible: "She added that the FSA was neither pro nor anti organic food and recognised there were many reasons why people choose to eat organic, including animal welfare or environmental concerns." Actually, the environmental concerns are the important ones. Face it food is food and you're going to get the same nutrition from it regardless of how it was grown. The really important thing is how much good or damage are you doing in the process?

My view is that organic practices are there to ensure the health of the entire system involved in producing that food. Things do not exist in isolation they are surrounded by ecosystems which rely on interdependencies. Similarly our health depends on a complex web of interdependencies with nature that even we do not fully understand.

I take a holistic systems thinking view of things. There is never just one issue. Most things have knock-on effects on other things because that's just the nature of the world we live in. As much as I welcome the work of specialists I detest the laziness of those who report on their work without putting all the issues into context. This makes me wonder whether there is something wrong with the ethics of journalism. Maybe the problem lies with society where not enough of us question the content deeply enough?

There is also this little disclaimer.
"Also, there is not sufficient research on the long-term effects of pesticides on human health,"

For those who have seen "Thank you for smoking" will understand this because it has the same context of the punch line at the end of the film, where the now-independent-consulting activist says to his concerned clients: "Repeat after me: There is no conclusive evidence linking brain tumours to mobile phone use."

There are serious problems out there and there are essentially three types of people:
1. Those who are negligent, or who are exploiting things,
2. Those who are ignorant, and
3. Those who have insight and are trying to do something about those problems.

I sincerely hope you are in category three.

Climate change policy makers need much more vision

One of the reasons I moved to the EU was to get closer to the action on the climate change front. The UK is demonstrating scintillating leadership in driving the renewable energy and response to climate change agenda. But as noble and courageous as this leadership appears to be there are some serious shortfalls. The most glaringly obvious area is that of transport. Policy seems to be driven by the EC directive on biofuels.

I find this policy to be sadly short on vision. This policy only focuses on vehicles, internal combustion engines and standard fuel types. There is no incentive what so ever to make radical changes. We need radical changes. True, significant change requires step changes in orders of magnitude. The scale of the breakthroughs we need are something like a 90% reduction in current emissions per passenger mile.

One of the most important elements of Leadership is that of vision. A biofuels based policy assumes that there will be no changes to transport technology or fuel systems. It addresses the how and not the why. Why, I ask, not develop policy that enables us to address the core problem? I believe the primary objective should be to reduce emissions per passenger mile (by an order of magnitude).

Here is some vision for the future. I wear my futurist cap with pride. Imagine wave machines compressing air into cylinders and these cylinders being ferried to service stations where vehicles running on compressed air can change "fuel canisters" of compressed air. The first generation of these vehicles would be hybrid electrical vehicles with retrogenerative braking systems that maximised efficiency by storing "waste energy". Have a look at innovative companies like MDI. With the exception of the initial energy investment in the wave machines, infrastructure and all the other supporting technology, this approach would result in negligible emissions of ghg's to atmosphere.

The current policy doesn't help these innovations at all. On the contrary, it looks more as if the current policy was designed to entrench the existence of oil companies, and their massive record profits (at the expense of the environment) and the tax revenues that they generate, and the existing jobs they support. Having worked for one of these massive oil companies I understand the thinking. I made a choice, for better or for worse, to make a difference and align my skills and talents and passion to supporting the sustainability agenda.

I'd like to see much more support from governments. Governments appear to be the only one's in the current philospophical order of civilisation who can make the difference and break the short sighted and myopic view that many businesses have. Businesses are driven by profit and it doesn't help when the only policies in place are supporting their old and outdated ideas, just because they make money out of them - while everyone gasps and asks "why, oh, why, is no one doing anything serious about stopping climate change?"

Has Facebook crashed and burnt?

I was trying to get into my facebook account today. I kept getting the same error message indicating the server wasn't available. Thinking it was a temporary glitch I went back later, and again even later to discover the problem was a persistent one. So I tried to find a discussion forum to see if others were having the same problem. What I did find was that there seemed to be a issue between FB and the Canadian law makers. See the article here: Facebook breaches Canadian Law

Now I am wondering just how sustainable something like Facebook is...

Has this woman poked Facebook in the eye?

Could Fool's Gold become Fool's Green?

The credit crisis has revealed cracks within the internal structures of capitalism and economics. I read Donald MacKenzie's review of the book, Fool's Gold with much interest. Having studied business and finance I can understand the desire for people who work with financial instruments to want to reduce and sell "risk" in an effort to make money out of it and reap handsome bonuses.

I shudder to think what would happen if these innovative people where given an opportunity to sell environmental risk for profit. Imagine selling environmental debt neatly packaged in a Bistro or a CDO.

The reality is that there is a lot of environmental or ecological debt out there and there is a lot of risk associated with it. Banks can be recapitalised by creating more debt (thanks to the governments and tax payers) but unfortunately there is no way to bail out the planet when it's natural capital is spent or squandered.

If the financial systems collapsed we could always go back to the land to survive on a subsistence basis. However, if the land fails then our bones, and our cars, and our mobile telephones will become part of the fossil record.

Capitalism is not perfect

For a long time I have suspected that there is a fundamental problem with Capitalism. My conclusion of the years is that like any other system it has it's advantages and disadvantages. Nothing is ever perfect. We can't live without it, but at the same time we find it has it's inevitable problems.

The real question to me is whether capitalism is sustainable in the very long term? Imagine if life expectancy could be boosted significantly and the pensionable age was lifted to 175 years. Would we want to change the current rules or unspoken guidelines between what's okay and what isn't?

One of my little pet fears is that capitalism in it's current guise drives unsustainable behaviour.

The problem with Capitalism is that it drives decision making based on making profit and practically nothing else. The philosophical and moral reasons for doing things become overwhelmed by the profit motive, or at the bottom of the inequality pyramid, by the essential need to survive in a system that threatens people's very livelihoods and survival. Injustices and imbalances are sometimes addressed by financial mechanisms, the best example being the cap and trade system, which was first successfully used to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions to atmosphere (which was causing acid rain).

I have reasons to believe that the link between the environment and capitalist costing models is fundamentally wrong. The continued increase in greenhouse gas emissions is a testament to this. Mechanisms like CDM and carbon trading have been put in place in an attempt to start addressing the problem but the mechanisms are too simplistic and not adequately cross linked to all the elements of Capitalism that come into contact with the environment.

The most significant problem is that the true value of environmental services are not built into the costs of goods and services that take them for granted. Examples like the work that bees do for us to pollinate our food. The work that algae and bacteria do to help us clean our water. The work that trees do to recycle carbon dioxide and regenerate oxygen. The value of biodiversity is not fully understood and is certainly not valued in Capitalism.

I use the term Capitalism synonymously with economics, in the hope that those who are fastidious about semantics will forgive me for the general references to anything that involves money, cash, credit, debt etc.

I will elaborate more on this in the days and months ahead.

New Blog requires a packaging of ideas

It was obvious that I need to start a blog. I've done it before but other things kept getting in the way. Now that I am writing on a much more regular basis it makes sense to have the blog support I need.

The next problem was trying to package the expected content so that it's easier to market. I bumped into Laurence (http://www.laurenceborel.com/) at a networking function in London a few days ago and she listened to me and came to the obvious conclusion that I should be blogging. Looking at her site I saw the elegant packaging that is required. She describes the content as "

A cocktail of advertising, social media, and technology". She describes herself as a "London-based Social Media Strategist".

So if I had to think about me, what would I describe myself as? A strategist? Definitely. With a focus on? Well the future of the planet and humans. That includes about everything, which isn't helpful. The interaction between human technology and the environment is what interests me. My primary concern is looking back on the planet's history and seeing a string of extinctions and wondering whether we (as humans) are heading the same way. So sustainability is what I am really interested in. I have worked in the energy industry and have gained a lot of insight into problems like climate change and future resource shortages. There are some serious sustainability problems, which many people are ignoring. I don't understand all of them but I have gained some insight into some of them and will share this journey as I discover new things along the way.

So I you can call me a sustainability strategist and philosopher.

Along the way I will also dance on the edge of fact and fiction, science and science-fiction because the dabbling in the future inevitably draws us into this grey area of speculation. While I am at it I will also fragrantly splash out on the sci-fi stuff because I believe it contains the seeds of new ideas, insights and philosophical questions that grapple with the essence of the issues at hand.

I hope you'll enjoy the journey with me. I look forward to it.