Campaigners on important but
complex issues, annoyed by the length of time required for public
deliberations, often react by exaggerating their claims, hoping to force a
single solution to the forefront of public debate. But, however well
intentioned, scaring the public into a predetermined solution often backfires:
when people eventually realize that they have been misled, they lose confidence
and interest.
Last month, there were two
examples of this in a single week. On September 19, the French researcher
Gilles-Eric Séralini attempted to fuel public opposition to genetically
modified foods by showing the public how GM corn, with and without the pesticide
Roundup, caused huge tumors and early death in 200 rats that had consumed it
over two years.
Supplying an abundance of pictures of rats with tumors the size of ping-pong balls, Séralini certainly captured the public’s attention.
France’s health, ecology, and agriculture ministers promised a prompt
investigation and threatened to ban imports of Monsanto’s GM corn to the
European Union. Russia actually did block imports of Monsanto corn.
But Séralini’s research posed
many problematic issues. For starters, the Sprague-Dawley strain of rats that
he used is naturally prone to tumors. Studies of Sprague-Dawley rats show that 88-96%
of those that serve as experimental controls develop tumors before they reach two years of
age. But the public saw only pictures of tumorous rats that had consumed GM corn
and Roundup. If the public had seen the similarly grotesque tumors that grow on
untreated rats, officials most likely would not have acted so hastily.
Séralini used only 20 rats as
a control group to be fed ordinary corn with no Roundup. Of these, five died
within two years, which is unusual, because studies of thousands of untreated
Sprague-Dawley rats show that about
half should have died in that period. Using his low death rate as a base, Séralini claimed
– with no statistical analysis – that the higher death rate (just below 40%) for
the remaining 180 rats fed with GM corn and Roundup was suspicious.
Moreover, Séralini’s results
contradict the latest meta-study of 24 long-term studies (up to two years and
five generations), which found that the data do “not suggest any health
hazards” and display “no statistically significant differences” between GM and
conventional food.
Oddly, Séralini permitted
access to his paper to only a select group of reporters, and demanded that they
sign a confidentiality agreement preventing them from interviewing other
experts about the research before publication. But, while the first round of
articles read like press releases, the scientific community has since spoken
out forcefully. The European Food Safety Authority, for example, has now
concluded that the “design, reporting, and analysis of the study, as outlined
in the paper, are inadequate.”
The study was partly funded by
CRIIGEN, a group that campaigns against biotechnology. CRIIGEN’s scientific
board is headed by none other than Séralini, who has also just released a book
(in French) and a documentary film decrying GM food.
This debacle matters because
many GM crops provide tangible benefits for people and the environment. They
enable farmers to produce higher yields with fewer inputs (such as pesticides),
so that more food can be produced from existing farmland. That, in turn,
implies less human encroachment into natural ecosystems, enabling greater biodiversity. But, of course,
Séralini’s pictures of cancer-addled rats munching GM corn have instead been
burned into the public imagination.
The Séralini fiasco was only a
week old when, on September 26, the Climate Vulnerability Forum, a group of
countries led by Bangladesh, launched the second edition of its Global Vulnerability Monitor. Headlines about the launch were truly alarming: Over
the next 18 years, global warming would kill 100 million people and cost the
economy upwards of $6.7 trillion annually.
These public messages were
highly misleading – and clearly intended to shock and disturb. The vast
majority of deaths discussed in the report did not actually result from global
warming. Outdoor air pollution – caused by fossil-fuel combustion, not by
global warming – contributed to 30% of all deaths cited in the study. And 60%
of the total deaths reflect the burning of biomass (such as animal dung and
crop residues) for cooking and heating, which has no relation to either fossil
fuels or global warming.
In total, the study
exaggerated more than 12-fold the number of deaths that could possibly be
attributed to climate change, and it more than quadrupled the potential
economic costs, simply to grab attention. But it will be used as a cudgel by
those who claim that electric cars or solar panels – technologies that will
make only a marginal contribution, given their huge incremental costs – are the
solution to climate change.
The technologies that can really make a difference
quickly and at lower cost are scrubbers that clean smokestack emissions,
catalytic converters that reduce tailpipe emissions, and many others. By
focusing purely on cutting CO2, we neglect to help many more people, much
faster, and less expensively.
Likewise, overcoming the
burden of indoor air pollution will happen only when people can use kerosene,
propane, and grid-based electricity. If the Global Vulnerability
Monitor’s recommendation to cut back on fossil fuels were taken seriously,
the result would be slower economic growth and continued reliance on dung,
cardboard, and other low-grade fuels, thereby prolonging the suffering that
results from indoor air pollution.
When confronted with their
exaggerations, the authors claimed that “if you reduce hazardous air pollution, it is difficult to
not also reduce warming emissions.” But, for both indoor and outdoor air pollution,
the opposite is more likely true: lower carbon emissions would mean more air
pollution deaths.
When scare tactics replace
scientific debate, whether about GM crops or climate change, nothing good can
come of it. We all deserve better.
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