A Conservative Approach to Climate Change

By John Gustavsson

Thursday, October 06, 2022

 

Margaret Thatcher once said that climate change “provides a marvelous excuse for worldwide, supranational socialism.” This has largely proven true, with climate change reviving some of the Marxist elements of the left that had largely died out after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The environmentalist movement, dominated by the far left, has a tendency to propose solutions to climate change that were always on their political wish lists. But that is no reason to disregard the science behind climate change.

 

Instead, climate change needs conservative solutions. Modern environmentalism is all too willing to toss aside people’s traditions, habits, and lifestyles for the “greater good.” 

 

We live during a time in which ordinary people can fly to other parts of the world, eat generous amounts of meat, and in which cars give us a level of freedom that was unimaginable just a few generations ago. Those on the left tend to see these parts of our current civilization as a moral failing and proof of the capitalistic system’s inherent decadence. This gives conservatives an opportunity to ground climate policy in a way that preserves as much of our modern lifestyle as possible.

 

Fortunately there are options—backed by science and already in use in some places—that allow us to combat climate change without asking anyone to eat bugs, go vegan, or stop flying. 

 

First, there’s geoengineering. This term refers to a set of technologies that artificially change the environment by, for example, lowering temperatures or creating rain. One of the best-known examples is cloud seeding, a technology to create artificial rain clouds and prevent droughts. It is already being used in the United Arab Emirates. 

 

Solar radiation management is another class of geoengineering technologies aimed at directly reducing global temperatures. The most famous and also most maligned method is the use of stratospheric aerosols. These aerosols cool the earth in a manner similar to a volcanic eruption: Spraying them in the upper atmosphere can reflect sunlight away before it reaches the earth (space reflectors work in a similar way). The catastrophic use of aerosols is the premise behind the Snowpiercer novel and Netflix series, in which humanity, wanting an easy fix for global warming, attempts to use stratospheric aerosols but ends up accidentally miscalculating the quantity needed, an error that causes a new global ice age that sets the stage for the story. 

 

While a great work of fiction, the Snowpiercer scenario is extremely unlikely to play out in the real world. There are certain unresolved issues with stratospheric aerosols, including how they would be paid for and how one would ensure a constant supply of aerosols to prevent temperatures from suddenly skyrocketing once the original aerosols expired (they don’t stay up forever), but there is no reason to believe they are impossible to resolve.Albedo enhancement is another less extreme, localized form of solar radiation management, the aim of which is to increase the surface reflectivity of objects (most commonly streets and houses) on the ground to reduce solar radiation absorption and, in the end, reduce temperatures. 

 

Secondly, there is carbon capture, which is technically a subset of geoengineering. Carbon capture takes many forms, including planting more trees to bind more carbon, but tree planting clearly won’t be enough, especially as we are bound to have to cut down more trees in the future to replace more environmentally harmful building materials and fuel sources. 

 

Ocean fertilization and alkalinity enhancement can complement the tree-planting, allowing the oceans to store even more carbon. These technologies are not without potential adverse side-effects. Yet it is strange how “tampering with the oceans” is considered such a no-go that it is hardly even allowed to be explored while tampering with millions of people’s quality of lives is not. With proper research and careful, gradual application, ocean fertilization has the potential to greatly slow global warming.

 

Finally, there is air capture. Machines capable of removing carbon from the air already exist. However, this can only be done at a small scale right now, and it is prohibitively expensive. But renewable energy also used to be small-scale and prohibitively expensive. Massive R&D investments changed that, and it could change this too, making ambient air capture a viable way of significantly reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

 

If we are serious about climate change being an impending global crisis, there is no reason not to turn geoengineering in general and carbon capture in particular into a “Man on the Moon” project for the 2020s, investing in the research and development of these technologies to fight climate change without interfering with the lives of our citizens.

 

Third, we have genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This is another technology vilified for no good reason. Nuclear power, stratospheric aerosols, carbon capture, and GMOs: None of them have been proven to be dangerous, all of them have huge (and in the case of nuclear and  GMOs, proven) potential to stop or mitigate the impact of climate change, and supporting any one of them will make you persona non grata at any environmentalist gathering. This shows that, while climate change is a real thing, the threat is being exaggerated and promoted by people who have always wanted to expand  government and force people to abandon the (capitalistic) lifestyles that they’ve always viewed with disdain. 

 

The benefits of GMOs are twofold: First, mitigation. Genetically modified crops can be bred to have drought-resistant qualities, offering a way to secure our future food supply. The developing world will be hit even worse by global warming, but does not have the  resources to develop GMOs, and so the burden falls on us. 

 

Second, herbicide-tolerant GM crops increase soil carbon sequestration by reducing the need for tillage, preventing carbon from being released into the atmosphere. Furthermore, GM crops have higher yields and thus require less land, which again reduces the carbon emissions produced from cultivation (mainly by reducing the amount of deforestation resulting from clearing land to grow crops).

 

While there are certainly legitimate discussions to be had about how GMOs should be regulated (i.e. the issue of patents), anti-GMO regulations and scare propaganda are harmful to the environment and to our prospect of fighting climate change.

 

Finally, we need a harm reduction approach. If we’re going to ask people to make lifestyle changes, it’s better to steer them away from the worst options toward the less bad ones—rather than pursuing unattainable perfection.

 

The push for vegetarianism and veganism is pointless and, quite possibly, counterproductive. Giving the impression that you have to stop eating meat to save the environment merely causes consumers to zone out. 

 

We can keep meat consumption constant while still massively reducing the climate footprint of our eating habits. How? By changing which meats we eat. The greenhouse gas emissions from beef or lamb are three times that of pork, and three and a half times that of chicken. If the beef comes from a beef herd—as opposed to a dairy herd—the difference is even greater. 

 

Veganism is kind of like the abstinence-only approach to promoting sustainable lifestyles: It may technically be the best option, but most people won’t do it. They also won’t eat bugs, no matter how much mainstream media outlets attempt to make it a thing. If, on the other hand, you ask Americans to swap their steak for fried chicken, or a nice crispy piece of pork belly, they just might go for it. You could also realistically convince people to eat more fries and smaller burgers (potatoes have a negligible climate footprint). And to go back to using lard instead of vegetable oil when frying.

 

We should also promote hunting. The number of hunters in America has been in a state of decline since the 1960s, which is unfortunate as hunting provides a zero-emission source of meat. In fact, hunting can reduce carbon emissions by killing animals who, if left alive, would have continued to emit greenhouse gasses (mainly methane) as they all do while alive. The majority of Americans (or for that matter Europeans) will never be vegans, and when approaching climate change and the topic of reducing emissions, we need to work with the population we do have, not the one PETA may wish we had.

 

Denying climate change might seem like a political winner, but it does nothing to stop the efforts of leftists and environmentalists to impose costly and draconian measures that serve their anti-capitalist agenda. Working toward practical solutions that allow us to preserve our way of life is the real conservative move.

Sri Lanka’s Collapse Points to Global Gloom

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, July 11, 2022

 

Back in March, as the world was still watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Reuters filed an ominous dispatch from Sri Lanka about the consequences of its government’s attempt to ban the use of artificial fertilizers:

 

“I cannot recall any time in the past when we had to struggle so much to get a decent harvest,” said [W. M.] Seneviratne, a lean 65-year-old with a shock of silver hair, who has been farming since he was a child.

 

“Last year, we got 60 bags from these two acres. But this time it was just 10,” he added.

 

The dramatic fall in yields follows a decision last April by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to ban all chemical fertilizers in Sri Lanka – a move that risks undermining support among rural voters who are key to his family’s grip on Sri Lankan politics.

 

Although the ban was rolled back after widespread protests, only a trickle of chemical fertilizers made it to farms, which will likely lead to an annual drop of at least 30% in paddy yields nationwide, according to agricultural experts.

 

A month later, the Guardian’s correspondent sent back a dispatch with similarly grim warnings:

 

“We are a tropical country full of rice paddies and banana plantations, but because of this stupid fertilizer ban, now we don’t even have enough food to feed ourselves,” said Rajith Keerthi Tennakoon, 52, former governor of the southern province. “We have had past economic crises, security crises, but never in Sri Lanka’s history have we had a food crisis.”

 

But the Guardian being the Guardian, it had to add a paragraph insisting that a ban on artificial fertilizers was good in theory:

 

On the face of it, a push to organic farming would be seen as laudable, given concerns over the use of chemical fertilizers. Yet it was the sudden and obtuse manner in which the ban was introduced — imposed virtually overnight and with no prior warning or training – and the questionable motives behind it, that have left even organic farming advocates furious.

 

Sri Lanka is a small island nation off the coast of India. When Hollywood needs a jungle, it films there. The Bridge on the River Kwai, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and one of the Jungle Book movies all included scenes shot on the island. It is about as far as a country can get from the United States, and when news about the country has reached Americans, it was usually bad news — such as the government’s long battle against the Tamil Tigers terrorist group, or the devastating 2004 tsunami.

 

Yet with the Tamil insurgency defeated, in the past few years, Sri Lanka had begun to look like a success story by the standards of the region. As our Dominic Pino laid out:

 

By 2019 it had been elevated from a lower-middle-income country to an upper-middle-income country by World Bank classifications. Its GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power, is about double that of India, about the same as the poorer countries of Eastern Europe such as Ukraine and Moldova, and only slightly behind Brazil. Its largest city of Colombo had become a tourist destination. It’s not a wealthy country by any stretch of the imagination, but it was doing well for its neighborhood, and its 22 million inhabitants saw a dramatic improvement in their quality of life in the past decade.

 

But everything fell apart fast: Inflation is raging out of control, the government defaulted on its debts, an energy crisis led to rolling blackouts, and the food shortages spurred massive crowds of people to storm into the houses of the country’s wealthy rulers and effectively topple the government. Inflation in Sri Lanka has reached jaw-dropping levels: “Consumer prices rose 54.6 percent in June from a year earlier, with transport surging 128 percent from the previous month and food 80 percent.”

 

Back in May, I noted that the Russian invasion of Ukraine meant that two of the world’s biggest grain exporters were effectively taken out of the market, as well as Russian exports of fertilizer. I also said:

 

The global fertilizer shortage is likely to reduce crop yields in a lot of places, which means we may be dealing with a worse problem in the coming months and years. Using less fertilizer usually translates into fewer crops. . . . Hungry people do things that well-fed people do not. They protest and they riot. Hungry people move across borders as refugees. They are more easily recruited into terrorist or extremist groups. . . . Hungry populaces are more likely to turn to demagogues promising an easy solution. Where there is hunger, there is conflict.

 

Back in early June, when very few Western minds were paying much attention to Sri Lanka, Dominic wrote an unnervingly prescient piece entitled, “Sri Lanka’s Collapse and the End of Globalization”:

 

Coming out of the pandemic, Sri Lanka was counting on the return of tourism, a vital industry to the island country with many beaches on the Indian Ocean. One problem: The first- and third-largest tourism markets for Sri Lanka were Russia and Ukraine. Russia is also a major buyer of Sri Lankan tea. The realities of the war and the sanctions on Russia have upended that plan. . . .

 

Protesters are in the streets, some of them setting politicians’ homes on fire, and police used tear gas to disperse them. Parkin writes that there are miles-long lines for gasoline, and some people are only eating one meal per day.

 

Sri Lanka’s default may just be the start of a wider financial crisis in the developing world as a result of worsening global economic conditions. The country had the disadvantage of exceptionally poor leadership and bad timing of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. But poor leadership is common in the developing world, and less robust economies are especially susceptible to bad luck.

 

Countries are economically connected in strange ways. In many cases, those connections only become widely known in hindsight, after a crisis has made them obvious. It would be an overstatement to say that fewer Russians and Ukrainians going on vacation plunged Sri Lanka into crisis, but that seemingly innocuous fact was one of many contributing factors. Those in the prosperous West who are cheering for the end of globalization should be careful what they wish for.

 

And as the Wall Street Journal warns this morning, there are other debt-ridden countries that are probably not too far from Sri Lanka’s dire position:

 

Countries such as Zambia and Lebanon are already in the grip of crises and are seeking international help to provide loans or restructure their debts, while Pakistan’s new government, which came to power in April, says that it narrowly averted a debt default in recent weeks, driven by a soaring fuel-import bill. Foreign-exchange reserves held by the central bank dwindled to cover less than two months’ worth of exports, largely closing off Pakistan’s prospects of tapping international financial markets. China, a close ally, provided a $2.3 billion loan in June to shore up the foreign-currency reserves.

 

Bloomberg News adds El Salvador, Ghana, Egypt, and Tunisia to the troubled list.

 

But Pakistan stands out, as that country has an estimated 165 nuclear weapons. One Indian business publication’s assessment of the Pakistani economy reads like a horror show, and it explicitly compares that country to Sri Lanka: runaway foreign debt; skyrocketing cost of foreign imports; a collapsing currency; falling exports; shortages of food, fuel, and medicines; hoping for rescue from the International Monetary Fund but having no negotiating leverage; and a recovery plan that relies on people drinking less tea and exporting donkeys to China.

 

You would like to think that a country with a large nuclear arsenal would also know how to manage its borrowing, pay its debts, and keep its economy running smoothly. Then again, there’s probably some Pakistani out there wondering how an American could have the nerve to make that criticism.

 

Meanwhile, Down in Georgia . . .

 

It is hard to shake the feeling that Herschel Walker is going to be a disappointing nominee for Republicans in the Georgia Senate race. No one expected that a former college- and pro-football superstar to be a policy wonk fluent in the details of every federal-government decision, but Walker’s answers to policy questions are generic at best, and there are ominous indications that even his own staff is exasperated with him.

 

The Data for Progress survey released last week that found Walker two points ahead of incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock was the first poll to put Walker ahead since April.

 

But if you’re looking for a reason to dismiss or pooh-pooh the Quinnipiac poll from late June that had Warnock ahead by ten . . . look back at the 2020 Senate race in next-door South Carolina. Back then, both Georgia and South Carolina were heavily Republican southern states, but Democrats thought that they had a perfect challenger for long-time incumbent Lindsey Graham in former state-party chair Jamie Harrison. A bunch of polls gave Graham a modest lead of a few percentage points, but Quinnipiac showed a tie three times — in July, in early September, and in late September.

 

On Election Day 2020, Graham won by more than ten percentage points. Either Graham enjoyed a late surge, or Quinnipiac’s sense of the electorate was way off. (Quinnipiac’s last presidential-race poll had Trump leading in South Carolina by just a percentage point, 48 percent to 47 percent. On Election Day, Trump won, 55 percent to 43 percent.)

 

It’s not a perfect comparison — Warnock is an incumbent, Harrison was a challenger — but it does suggest that Quinnipiac consistently includes too many Democrats in their samples. The Georgia Senate race is not a slam-dunk for Republicans, but it isn’t likely that Walker is trailing by double digits.

 

The Civiqs poll currently puts Joe Biden’s approval rating in the state of Georgia at 25 percent, with 63 percent of respondents disapproving.

 

Asking a Senate Democratic incumbent to run 20-some percentage points ahead of the approval rating of the current Democratic president is a really tall order.

Neil Young’s Spotify Boycott Isn’t ‘Brave’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, January 31, 2022

 

Since Neil Young announced that he was pulling his music off Spotify in protest of Joe Rogan’s having a podcast on the platform, figures favorable to the move have been busy mining their thesauruses in search of synonyms for “good.” Thus far, I have seen Young’s decision described as “moral,” “empowering,” “brave,” “ethical,” “inspiring,” and even “imperative.”

 

I have a word to add into the mix: “Intolerant.”

 

Neil Young doesn’t like Joe Rogan’s podcast. So what? Is it really now Young’s standard that if he dislikes what another person says in public, he won’t share a library with that person? What, one must wonder, does Young believe is going to happen if he hosts his music on the same streaming service as people he personally disdains? Does he worry that the 0s and 1s will mix inside the patch cables and pollute the purity of his art? Does he believe, perhaps, that a shared domain name and a set of common IP addresses might impart guilt by association? If so, one must ask how far he intends to pursue digital immaculacy before the quest becomes self-evidently absurd. Does he want his own data center? His own trunk lines? His own ISPs and cell-phone towers? Once upon a time, tolerance meant sharing physical rooms with people whose views you opposed, and even abhorred. Now, some people can’t even share the Internet.

 

Rogan’s critics say that he lies and facilitates the lies of others. For the sake of argument, let’s agree that he does. One must ask at what point this became an exception to our culture of open speech? Neil Young made an entire album filled with falsehoods about GMOs. Should REO Speedwagon boycott Spotify in response? Epic Records hired Rage Against the Machine and promised never to interfere with their work. Should their cleaner-than-thou label-mates, ABBA, have ripped up their contract as a result? This is a serious question: At what level of platform do we wish to impose ideological segregation? The op-ed page? The newspaper? The newspaper’s comments section? The newspaper’s comment’s section’s web host? Should I boycott Farmers’ Insurance if the guy in their commercials lies on Twitter? Should I refuse to fly Delta if I spot a passenger I disdain? I’ve been on TV with Joy Reid, for goodness sake. Should I have stormed off in high dudgeon the first time she said something false?

 

Where’s the line? For customers who are following Young’s lead, the replacement of choice for Spotify seems to be Apple, which is more acceptable because . . . well, why is it acceptable? True, Apple doesn’t have Joe Rogan’s show. But it distributes almost every podcast under the sun, including those hosted by figures whom progressives have managed to cancel elsewhere. Are we seriously to believe that Apple — which both directly and indirectly “facilitates” the monetization of speech — is less a “vector” for “dangerous misinformation” than is Spotify? And what of Apple’s ties to slave labor? What of its lobbying against legislation that would force it to improve its business practices? Unlike some, I do not think that everyone who uses a MacBook Pro is complicit in Apple’s corporate sins. Unlike some, I’m not tying my consumer choices to the supposed purity of the providers I select. One of the problems with Neil Young’s announcing that he cannot in good conscience work with Spotify is the implication that anyone he continues to work with must be acceptable — or, at least, less bad. So, are they? Is Apple less morally culpable for its reliance on Uyghur Muslim laborers than is Spotify for hosting Rogan’s podcast?

 

Spotify, Apple, Joe Rogan, and Neil Young are all private actors, and they can do as they wish. That is Liberalism 101, and I would not wish to change it if I could. But there are other elements within Liberalism 101, too, and they are no less vital to our political order. I would, of course, have been firmly within my rights to refuse the book offer that Random House made me on the grounds that I find their other authors intolerable. But to have done so would have made me a stupid bigot. I would be fully within my rights if I declined to join any public debate that required me to share a stage with someone being paid to disagree with me. But, again, to do so would make me a stupid bigot. There is nothing “liberal” about regarding artistic platforms or delivery mechanisms as political creatures to be condemned. On the contrary: Such a habit is quite literally totalitarian. I have been asked this week if I’m on the side of Joe Rogan or the side of Neil Young, and my answer is that I favor neither. My preference, instead, is for a world in which I can subscribe to a digital music library without getting caught up in a cauldron of screaming, stupidity, and badly misplaced neo-Puritanism.

The Slow, Welcome Death of the GMO Panic

By Abe Greenwald

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

In the United States, the public panic about the dangers of genetically modified foods is fading fast. This is an amazing—and rare—triumph of reason and science over public hysteria and political posturing.

On Monday, for example, the New York Times published an article by Knuvul Sheikh detailing recent advances in genetically modified crops without offering a single word about potential health dangers or environmental concerns. In fact, it seems there’s a rebranding effort on the left to hype GMO foods as a vital response to climate change.

After describing the benefits of growing plants under artificial light conditions, Sheikh writes: “Researchers have also adopted new genetic techniques to optimize flowering times and make plants more resistant to the rigors of a warming planet.” What types of techniques? None other than Crispr-style gene editing: “Unlike older crossbreeding and crop modification techniques, newer tools like Crispr allow scientists to snip out portions of the plant’s own DNA that may make it vulnerable to disease. [Plant geneticist] Dr. [Lee] Hickey and his team are working on adding Crispr machinery directly into barley and sorghum saplings, in order to modify the plants’ genes while simultaneously speed breeding them.”

Scientists are going full Frankenplant and the New York Times thinks it’s just great: “With cheaper, more powerful technology, opportunities are opening up to improve crops around the world.”

At least in recent years, the Times hasn’t been overly concerned with the supposed dangers of consuming genetically modified foods. But it has been skeptical of the benefits that such technology could yield. In 2016, Danny Hakim wrote that “genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides.” (Never mind that, by this point, GMO foods had saved millions of lives worldwide.) And this was only one report in the Times’s “Uncertain Harvest” article series, which examined “the globe-spanning relationship of chemical companies, academics and regulators, and the powerful toxins and genetically modified seeds used to grow food in many parts of the world.”

Apparently, the Times isn’t so uncertain anymore. Monday’s article supports a headline that reads like a promotional pitch: “Grow Faster, Grow Stronger: Speed-Breeding Crops to Feed the Future.” It’s hard to believe now, but not that long ago, the term Monsanto would pop up in apocalyptic headlines daily.

What happened? First, the gap between frightening claims and any evidence to support them became too great to sustain. Virtually all the reputable literature on GMOs has found no indication of increased health or environmental risks from genetically modified foods. The science is conclusive. Second, it helps to have the right people supporting a cause. Bill and Melinda Gates, above all others, have poured hundreds of millions into GMO research and promotion, seeing accurately the good that it does and the promise it still holds.

For those of us who believe that warnings of a ruinous climate crisis are at least overblown, the fading of the American anti-GMO movement is somewhat heartening. GMO hysteria and climate alarmism are similar in a number of ways. They’re issues that allow activists to broadcast their virtue and pose as saviors of the planet. They both fit nicely into an anti-American, anti-capitalist framework. And they’re both fueled by emotion instead of reason.

Climate data is, alas, a bit murkier than reproducible experimental data on genetically modified crops. And there are no broadly esteemed public figures ready to come forth and champion a sober assessment of global-warming claims. But all public panics die out at some point.

Glyphosate Ban: Not about Green. About Greed.

By Julie Kelly

Friday, October 27, 2017

Caving to pressure from environmental activists, the European Parliament voted on October 24 to ban glyphosate, the weed killer commonly sold under the brand name Roundup, by the end of 2022. A subsequent vote to renew glyphosate’s EU license, which expires at the end of this year, failed, and growers in 28 countries are now faced with the real possibility that this safe herbicide used by farmers around the world will be permanently outlawed. The move will have consequences here as activists trumpet the EU glyphosate ban as a reason to enact the same prohibition in the U.S.

Greenpeace EU, the group leading the crusade against glyphosate, cheered the news: “Although the phase out periods are longer than technically needed, the Parliament’s proposal is a breath of fresh air. More than one million Europeans and now the Parliament are calling for a ban on this dangerous chemical.” Against the wishes of his country’s farming interests, French president Emmanuel Macron fought hard to win support for the ban. Hundreds of French farmers blocked the Champs-Elysées last month in protest. “It’s a real pity that members of Parliament allow themselves to be influenced by anti-glyphosate activists who claim to represent public opinion, but only represent hostility toward industry, and more worryingly, hostility toward science,” Graeme Taylor, a spokesman for the European Crop Protection Association, told me. “It ignores the clear and unequivocal opinion of the EU’s own agencies on the safety of glyphosate.” The ban would have a crippling effect on the EU’s agricultural sector and the international grain trade.

It is also a major blow to Monsanto, the maker of Roundup, and a huge victory in the decades-long war against that corporation by the misanthropic environmental Left. The anti-glyphosate crusade is a proxy battle against genetically engineered crops, too, because Monsanto has engineered many such crops, especially corn and soybeans, to be “Roundup-Ready” — i.e., to survive the application of Roundup so they don’t die along with the weeds. Since the introduction of genetically engineered crops more than 20 years ago, yields of these grains have soared while pesticide use has decreased. Study after study confirms that glyphosate poses a minimal risk to the environment or human health.

But activists and their lapdogs in the European Parliament are choosing to ignore the large body of evidence supporting glyphosate’s safety and instead rely on an outlier report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer. In March 2015, IARC, which is under the purview of the World Health Organization, issued a report concluding that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen based on “limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans for non-Hodgkin lymphoma,” as well as “convincing evidence that glyphosate also can cause cancer in laboratory animals.” The finding was swiftly rebuked by government agencies and agricultural interests around the world; the scientists who produced the report have been criticized for misrepresenting data, editing drafts to delete contrary evidence, and using the report as propaganda to promote their own anti-glyphosate agenda. Nonetheless, it has been a gift to activists and lawyers seeking to profit off of glyphosate “victims.”

One of these is Christopher Portier, the scientist who initially encouraged IARC to conduct the glyphosate analysis and served as a special advisor to the committee that drafted the final IARC report. In a deposition last month for a court case pending against Monsanto for glyphosate “damages,” Portier admitted he was retained by a law firm representing glyphosate victims less than two weeks after the IARC report was published. Since then, Portier has been a hired gun, giving expert testimony on behalf of cancer-stricken farm workers and their family members who believe glyphosate caused the disease.

It has been a profitable gig. Over the past two years, Portier has banked about $160,000 for his time and has another $30,000 in billable hours now outstanding. (He is earning $450 per hour for his “expertise,” so take that, NRO writers.) During that time, as he pressured EU and U.S. agencies not to publish favorable findings about glyphosate, Portier failed to disclose his conflict of interest; in fact, Portier insisted “nobody has paid me a cent to do what I am doing with glyphosate.”

Portier also had close ties with high-ranking officials in Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, which delayed its own final assessment on whether glyphosate is carcinogenic, although two internal reports concluded it is not. Congress is investigating possible connections between Portier and the EPA on how the IARC report was handled; in an October 25, 2016, letter to then-EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, House Science Committee chairman Lamar Smith accused her of making “misleading and untruthful statements” about EPA’s involvement and interactions with Portier: “Moreover, the increasing amount of evidence depicting the close ties between EPA officials, Christopher Portier, and the IARC study of glyphosate show that there were activists working both inside and outside the agency.” He might have hoodwinked his pals at the EPA, too. In his deposition, Portier admitted communicating with several EPA officials over “concerns about glyphosate” yet not disclosing to them his new gig as a paid consultant on glyphosate-related lawsuits.

Portier has a history of such obfuscations. In a May 5, 2016, email to me objecting to an NRO article I wrote about his involvement in the IARC report, he told me this: “I am no activist. I realize that you will probably not change a word of your article, but felt the need to correct you simply because I believe that by characterizing a scientific debate as activists with an agenda, you are doing a diservice [sic] to your readers.” At that time, he had been getting paid by law firms representing alleged glyphosate victims for more than a year.

Europe’s glyphosate ban is yet another example of weak-kneed politicians’ capitulating to bad science, shady scientists, malevolent environmental activists, and greedy lawyers, and it could have grave consequences. While this cabal cheers its victory over Monsanto, European farmers fear for their livelihood.