The BBC’s fixation on ‘balance’ skews the truth

Catherine Bennett in The Guardian

As any young Earth creationist will confirm, the BBC occasionally fails in its objective of due impartiality. Only last week, it reported on a fossil find in Greenland, without bothering to balance this with a contribution from a fundamentalist Christian, such as Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence.

If the US might seem like a long way to go for comment, the BBC’s referendum coverage demonstrated that, when balance is at stake, a contributor’s passion can be quite as compelling a qualification as his or her expertise, reputation or, even, connection with the subject under discussion. Moreover, Pence has a long acquaintance with creationism.

It was never clear, at least to this listener, why Steve Hilton, a US resident who once fell out with the last prime minister, became one of the anti-EU stars of the BBC’s Brexit coverage, to the point of assisting with analysis on referendum night. But in line with BBC impartiality guidelines that are enforced, arguably to the point of misrepresentation, when the corporation feels threatened, he was no doubt balanced by a yet more embittered – but pro-Remain – ex-Cameron adviser with a similarly touristic stake in the outcome.

To be fair to Mr Hilton, he could hardly be blamed for embracing a dazzling career in EU punditry when the BBC pressed it upon him, nor was his inexplicable prominence the most bizarre or regrettable aspect of the coverage which, according to polling by the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), played the biggest part in the referendum in keeping the British public informed. Throughout a debate the ERS describes as “dire”, the BBC was the source of information most commonly cited as important. The final level of public understanding, after a four-month campaign, is well illustrated, says its new report, by the great spike on 24 June in the number of people googling “What is the EU?” “We would argue,” say the authors, “that the levels of knowledge reported by members of the public were too low throughout.” This, despite demonstrably high levels of public interest and lavish airtime for the individuals they describe as “big beasts”.

Among their recommendations for better informed plebiscites, as referendums become more commonplace, are longer campaign periods and an independent body empowered to correct misleading statements such as the untruth – holy writ according to Gisela Stuart, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson – that Britain sends a weekly £350m to the EU. Further public understanding might be achieved, it says, if broadcasters attempted more “deliberative” as opposed to tit-for-tat coverage of the type that infuriated complainants to the BBC’s Feedback programme long before they could be written off as sore losers.

If there are pointed lessons here for some BBC programme-makers, who must bear partial responsibility for the final level of public bafflement, maybe they shouldn’t be blamed for submitting to management orders, issued when the now forgotten escort fan and culture secretary, John Whittingdale, was emitting worrying noises. The EU referendum guidelines effectively ordained that BBC coverage would adhere, in the aim of impartiality, to traditional, binary practices, despite this being a non-party political debate to which any number of non-affiliated, non big beasts might have more insights to contribute than Westminster’s in-fighters. In Johnson’s case, these amounted to: “We export French knickers to France... Are the French really going to put tariffs on our French knickers when we buy so much of their cheese and their champagne? Of course they’re not!”

Questioned about the many, normally respected authorities whose research indicated more problematic economic outcomes, Johnson’s ally, Gove, urged voters to shun the Nobel laureates’ paperwork. “We have to be careful about historical comparisons, but Albert Einstein during the 1930s was denounced by the German authorities for being wrong and his theories were denounced and one of the reasons of course he was denounced was because he was Jewish. They got 100 German scientists in the pay of the government to say that he was wrong and Einstein said, ‘Look, if I was wrong, one would have been enough.’”

“For me,” writes Professor John van Reenen, formerly of the LSE, now at MIT and one of the economists thus likened by Gove to an antisemitic, government-owned Nazi, “it simply capped off a frankly disgusting campaign, one where the Leave side simply impugned the motives of ‘the experts’ rather than seriously engaging with the substance of the economic debate.”

But the Leave side might not have got away with this ugliness, nor Remain with prattling about imminent apocalypse, had not the BBC, as well as enabling an often asinine level of argument, allowed its obsession with balance to dictate that any carefully argued observation on Brexit, deserving of analysis, be promptly followed by its formal opponent’s unsubstantiated bluster.

Similarly, no more attention would be devoted to a striking near-consensus of economic opinion than to its negation by a speaker representing a groupuscule of eight. Admittedly, this was tough on the eight. Professor Patrick Minford was working hours to which no elderly economist should be subjected. But that’s just one of the costs of the BBC’s “regulated equivocation”, as its critics call a habit that has previously embarrassed the corporation when applied to climate change and the MMR. Until recently, it considered the climate change denier Nigel Lawson as fine a match for peer-reviewed research as it now believes him a trusted guarantor of post-Brexit glories, possibly forgetting his earlier history of shadowing the deutschmark.

In his 2011 report on BBC science coverage, the geneticist Professor Steve Jones criticised the “over-rigid” insistence on due impartiality that could give “undue attention to marginal opinion”. But once again, in referendum coverage, the corporation actively required its journalists to supply this phony balance, even when that meant, as Jones put it on science, allowing rhetoric – say Gove’s “hostages” in a car – “to give the appearance of debate”.

As with climate change, implicit in extreme BBC impartiality is a distinctly un-BBC like, post-truth proposal that, since all opinions merit equal coverage, the public might as well give up on evidence-based argument. So much was plainly stated by Today’s Nick Robinson when he assured voters who were, in huge numbers, seeking information from the BBC that the debate was all “claims and counterclaims”, “guesswork”. “No journalist,” he declared, “no pundit, no expert can resolve these questions for you.” Whether the imaginary £350m claimed by Johnson and Gove would ever be imaginarily spent on the NHS was not, it presumably followed, a lie for the BBC to repeatedly expose, but “a matter of judgment”.

Whichever side you were on, the BBC’s coverage was not, as the ERS is not the first to point out, such as to create unalloyed confidence in the outcome. Even the winners would discover, shortly after voting, that one big beast (Gove) had never meant it about the NHS’s £350m; that another (Hannan) saw no connection with reduced immigration. That ERS idea, the official fact checker, has already been derided as a “stuck-up quango”. But would the ERS be asking if the BBC had done its job?

UK Floods: What have we done to make the flooding worse?

By Camila Ruz and Jon Kelly in BBC News Magazine


Image copyrightGetty Images


Floods have caused havoc across much of the UK. Have decisions made by the public and politicians alike made things worse?

Thousands of homes are without power after Storm Frank as people brace themselves for more flooding.

Dozens of flood warnings remain in place with north-east Scotland at risk of heavy rainfall on Sunday and Monday.

Here are some of the things that it has been suggested have contributed to the problem.

Building on flood plains

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Some four million residential properties in England currently sit on places with a one in 1,000 risk of flooding each year.

After floods in 2007 that affected 55,000 homes, the government commissioned a review chaired by Sir Michael Pitt to ensure it didn't happen again. The review said it wasn't possible to prevent all building on floodplains but recommended that there should be a strong presumption against it. It also said buildings should avoid creating flood problems for themselves or their neighbours.

But large-scale building on floodplains has continued. In fact, according to the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), housing in areas where flooding is likely has grown at a rate of 1.2% per year since 2011, while the building of residential properties in areas of low risk has risen by just 0.7% over the same period.

Policy-makers are often keen to see brownfield land used for residential development, but these areas are often most vulnerable to flooding. Demand from buyers has fuelled this growth, too.

You might assume that there would be huge drops in property prices after highly publicised floods. But in places like Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, and Cockermouth, Cumbria, which experienced heavy flooding in 2007 and 2009 respectively, prices have remained largely unaffected in the long run.

Dredging

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The argument over dredging has been going strong since floods in Somerset in 2013-14. At the time, farmers claimed that lack of river dredging had been making the problem worse. "Somerset is suffering from the impacts of two decades of underinvestment with the cessation of dredging along the lowland rivers Parrett and Tone," said the National Farmers Union in their Flooding Manifesto.

Dredging removes the silt that builds up at the bottom of rivers and deepens the channel. Some people say that it helps prevent flooding by making the water flow faster and more efficiently. Supporters of dredging have complained that the European Water Framework Directive prevents it being carried out.

But others have argued that it's not a good idea because the river can still be overwhelmed. When this happens it can cause faster and more dangerous floods downstream. "We've tended to straighten rivers, to canalise them, to embank them and all that rushes the water down to the nearby urban pinch point," explains environmentalist and writer George Monbiot, adding that the flow of water should be slowed down and the rivers lengthened instead.

River straightening

Image copyrightiStock

One way of encouraging a river to take its time in getting to its destination - and therefore reduce the risk of flooding - is to allow it to make large bends called meanders or to braid itself into a network of smaller channels. These twists and turns can help prevent flash floods from racing their way down at full force.

"There still has to be somewhere for that rain to go, you are not going to be able to hold it all back in the hills," explains Monbiot.

Reconnecting a river with its flood plain can also help prevent extreme events downstream. This allows the river to flood in certain areas, storing water in fields until it can be released slowly once the danger has passed. But this has to be controlled.

"If it's not managed carefully, obviously that flooding can have a serious impact on the farming business," says Rob Howells, the NFU's Water Quality Adviser. "The protection of the urban area has to be planned in conjunction with the protection of rural areas to make sure that everything is joined up and to make sure that you are not having unintended consequences elsewhere," he adds.

Destruction of upland habitats

Image copyrightScience Photo Library

Trees can act as a natural flood defence. They have roots that reach deep into the soil, loosening it and allowing water to drain down more easily. A hillside covered in thick vegetation tends to release water more slowly than a bare hill. The compacted soil of farmland can also make the problem worse by reducing the ground's ability to hold water.

This is especially important upstream. Planting woodlands at a stream's upper reaches could help delay the water from reaching the main river. Trees can also end up providing small dams, although this needs to be managed with care.

Beavers would do this work for free, adds Monbiot. "They could be a very useful tool in preventing floods."

The Environment Agency has said that large areas of trees would need to be replanted for them to really make a difference. Flood defences on farmlands upstream might also not have had much effect in preventing the current flooding. "The levels of rainfall in the North West on already saturated ground were unprecedented," says a spokesman from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). "It is unlikely flood protection on farmland would have made a material difference in such an exceptional flood."

Blanket bogs also play a key role in soaking up rainfall upstream. The peaty soil of a bog can be up to 90% water. Sphagnum mosses growing there can also hold water like a sponge. But many blanket bogs have been drained and their peat cut out which can increase the risk of flooding downstream.

Some people argue that there is not much incentive for farmers to keep land covered in thick vegetation because of EU rules. Land covered with "permanent ineligible features" such as ponds, dense scrub and some woodland can be disqualified from farm subsidies.

Woodland cover has increased in the UK since its lowest point during World War One but the UK is still one of the least wooded countries in Europe. "Planting trees can help to slow the flow of rivers and has an important role to play in reducing flood risk but they need to be located carefully to make sure that they are actually being beneficial," adds Howells.

Flood defences

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Critics have focused on the effectiveness of existing barriers. Carlisle's £38m flood-defence scheme was breached despite having been constructed only five years before, with an additional half-metre (1ft 8in) added on top to allow for the effects of climate change. There was anger at the decision to lift York's Foss Barrier, a key part of the city's flood defence system, because its pumps were at risk of electrical failure.

During its first year in office, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition announced it was cutting spending on flood defences by 8% compared with previous yearly spend - though the Environment Agency said at the time that the budget had actually been reduced by 27% in cash terms.

Critics have said reductions in maintenance budgets have worsened the problem. Judith Blake, the leader of Leeds City Council said there was a "north-south divide" in efforts to prevent flooding. She said the north of England had not seen "anywhere near the support that we saw going into Somerset", which flooded in 2014, and pointed out that the government had cut funding for a flood defence project in Leeds in 2011. She said there was now a "real anger growing across the North".

However, the prime minister said the government had spent more per head of the population on flood defences in the north than in the south and that £2.3bn would be spent on flood defences by 2020. The government has ordered a major review of flood prevention strategy.

A Defra spokeswoman said £1.7bn of investment into new or expanded flood defences in the previous parliament was an increase on spending from the previous administration. The spokeswoman added that a new six-year spending programme - replacing an annual bidding process for flood defence schemes - has allowed the government to make a long term commitment to protect the £171m spent each year on maintaining defences in real terms.

The concentration of Britons in urban areas - 82% live in towns and cities - has made them especially vulnerable to flooding because concrete surfaces, unlike soil, are almost completely impenetrable to water.

And even when new flood defences are built to protect homes in one area, there are complaints that they often simply cause flooding elsewhere. When the Berkshire town of Wraysbury flooded in 2014, residents said they were being used as "sacrificial lambs" to prevent Maidenhead from being flooded.
Climate change

Cameron has made a link between the floods and climate change. The government anticipates trends which have seen drier summers and wetter winters in the UK to continue. The UK Climate Projections of 2009 estimated a sea-level rise of between 13cm and 76cm for the UK by 2095.

The prime minister has said climate change is one of the biggest challenges the country faces and the government has announced plans for the UK's coal plants to be phased out within 10 years. The Environment Secretary recently announced a National Flood Resilience Review that would look again at flood risk, including the future impact of climate change.

Labour have said climate change should be treated as a national security issue and urged the government to do more. Environmental campaigners have criticisedministers for cutting support for green energy sources.

The climate change summit in Paris agreed a deal to attempt to limit the rise in global temperatures to less than 2C. However, Monbiot says "we have to take urgent action on climate change and go a lot further than the Paris agreement proposed".

The India that says no

Tunku Varadarajan in the Indian Express

 Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing during the International Solar Alliance in Paris on Monday. (PTI Photo)

These last days have seen a fascinating demonstration of righteous assertiveness by Indians. In Paris, Narendra Modi was at the world climate conference defending India’s right to burn coal, it being the cheapest and most profuse of the country’s present sources of energy, entirely mined at home (unlike oil, imported from the world’s volatile hell-holes, and over whose price India has little positive control).

Back in smoggy India, another leader, India’s Test cricket captain Virat Kohli, was defending the country’s repeated resort to slow, turning pitches in the series against South Africa, this type of pitch being the most reliable source of victory at home for the spin-focused Indian cricket team.

In both cases, what we were seeing was a species of indignant, nationalist pushback against standards set by the West, and Western expectations of “fair play” that work to India’s apparent disadvantage.

Modi was blunt and eloquent. Having “powered their way to prosperity on fossil fuel when humanity was unaware of its impact”, he wrote in an op-ed in the Financial Times, it was “morally wrong” of the industrialised West to deny India the right to use the same sources of energy today to pull its people out of poverty. “Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn, developing countries are allowed to grow.”

The message embedded here was that the West is guilty of double-standards in seeking to deny India access to the very fuels that had served the occident so well for centuries — and for doing so just as India is primed for a Great Leap Forward.  In response to his assertion of India’s transitional developmental rights, Modi earned patronising lectures from the usual suspects, including the tirelessly sanctimonious The New York Times.

Double-standards were also the theme of the Indian cricket complaint. Responding to the barrage of English and Australian criticisms of the Nagpur pitch — where South Africa were spin-dried in just three days — the captain, manager and players of the Indian team took a leaf out of Modi’s book. Why are your standards the norm, they said to Western critics, and our standards — Indian standards — the aberration?

At issue is the belief, rife in English and Australian cricket circles, that green pitches that seam and bounce are fair and manly, the proper surfaces on which to play a game of cricket. These are the pitches one encounters in England and Australia because they are the natural products of local conditions. They also suit the style of play of teams from these countries, while cramping the style of visiting Indian players.

In contrast, Indian pitches are bereft of grass and turn early in a Test match. They are described by foreign cricket writers — often the loudest promoters of the too-much-spin-is-immoral school of thought — as Dust Bowls, conjuring images of famine, and of hardscrabble conditions unsuited to civilised cricket.

As foreign pundits took aim at India, the director of the Indian cricket team was quick to shoot back. “Which rule tells me the ball can’t turn on Day One?” said a mouthy Ravi Shastri. “Where does it tell me in the rulebook it can only swing and seam?” India has to sink or swim when playing abroad, so touring teams should expect no different in India.

As with cricket, so with carbon. “The lifestyles of a few must not crowd out the opportunities for many,” said Modi in Paris. Hands off our coal. And hands off our pitches. This is the India that can say No. 

Stop using China as an excuse for inaction on climate change

George Monbiot in The Guardian


 

Workers walk near wind turbines for generating electricity, at a wind farm in Guazhou, 950km (590 miles) northwest of Lanzhou in China. Photograph: CARLOS BARRIA/Reuters

China is the world’s excuse for cruelty and barbarism. If we don’t behave atrociously, politicians and columnists assure us, China will, so we had better do it first, before we are outcompeted.

You want holidays, collective bargaining rights and fair conditions in the workplace? Forget it. When Chinese workers have none, such fripperies would “hamper British/US/Australian/Canadian industry”, making it uncompetitive.

Columnists like Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, gleefully regaling us with tales of Chinese workers being turfed out of their dormitories at midnight, marched to a workstation and obliged to perform a 12-hour shift to meet a last-minute order from Apple, insist that we either compete on these terms or perish. France, he once claimed, is doomed if it seeks to preserve a 35-hour week, while people in Asia “are ready to work a 35-hour day.”

In fact French workers are doing fine: it turns out that European countries with shorter working hours (France, the Netherlands and Denmark for example) have higher productivity per hour than those whose workers have to spend longer at their desks (such as Germany and Britain). And a country whose people have both decent wages and time to relax can support millions of jobs – in leisure and pleasure – that don’t exist where workers are treated as little more than slaves.
You want your rivers, air and wildlife protected? What planet are you on? China, we are told, doesn’t give a damn for such luxuries, with the result that if we don’t abandon our own regulations, it will take over the world.

On no topic are these claims made more often than on climate change. What is the point of limiting our greenhouse gas emissions, a thousand bloggers (and a fair few politicians) insist, if China is building a new power station every two weeks (or days or minutes or whatever the latest hyperbole suggests)? Taking action on climate change is useless and stupid in the face of the Chinese threat.

China is not just a country. It is whatever powerful interests want us to be. It is, they suggest, a remorseless, faceless, insuperable threat to civilisation, to which the only rational response is to abandon civilisation. So often is the threat invoked to justify the latest round of inhumane proposals that it needs a name. Perhaps we could hijack one: China Syndrome.

China Syndrome is the 21st century extension of the Yellow Peril myth. First formulated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose extreme militarism, racism and anti-Semitism prefigured the rise of Nazism in Germany, the term reflects a long-standing apprehension about the people of Asia, dating back perhaps to the Mongol invasions of eastern Europe. It invokes an uncaring, undifferentiated horde of philistines, possessed perhaps with supernatural powers, but without moral limits or human qualities like empathy, pity, love or self-restraint. Unless we took extreme measures to defend ourselves against this threat, Wilhelm and others insisted, this human swarm would outbreed and overrun the nations of the west.

The myth became a staple of schlock literature and films, spawning such characters as Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless. The idea that the people of China might “steal our jobs” is also deep-rooted. It triggered a number of pogroms in the United States during the later decades of the 19thcentury, during which many Chinese immigrant workers were murdered.

It is, of course, true that China contributes substantially to the threat of climate breakdown: it is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It is also true that its diplomats often prove to be a hindrance during international negotiations on the subject. That was certainly the case at the UN climate conference in Bonn that ended on Thursday, where they refused even to discussthe crucial issue: how much global warming the policies adopted by each nation will cause.

This stands in apparent contrast to the agreement struck this week, as a result of Angela Merkel’s diplomacy, at the G7 meeting, calling for “a decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of this century”.

But to suggest that China is an inherent and insuperable threat, as many of my correspondents do (mostly those who alternate between insisting that man-made climate change isn’t happening and insisting that we can’t do anything about it anyway), is grievously to misrepresent the people of that nation.

First, of course, much of its energy use is commissioned by other nations. As manufacturing has declined in countries like the US and Britain, and the workforce is mostly engaged in other activities, the fossil fuel burning caused by our consumption of stuff has shifted overseas, along with the blame. Even so, when China’s total greenhouse gas production is divided by its population, you discover that it is still producing much less per head than we are.

Partly as a result of a massive investment in renewables, the Chinese demand for coal dropped for the first time last year, and is likely to drop again this year. Perhaps because of the bureaucratic chaos of China’s centralised, unwieldy government, there is a gulf between the energy transition rapidly taking place within China and its negotiating positions in international meetings, which are “in the hands of completely different sets of bureaucrats.”

But perhaps the biggest surprise for those who unwittingly invoke the old Yellow Peril tropes is that the Chinese people care more about climate change than we do. A survey released on Monday reveals that 26% of respondents in the UK and 32% in the US believe that climate change is “not a serious problem”, while in China the figure is only 4%. In the UK, 7% don’t want their government to endorse any international agreement addressing climate change. In the US the proportion rises to 17%. But in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, only 1% want no action taken.

Of course, the question that arises in undemocratic countries like China is the extent to which public desires can shape government policy. But what’s clear is that China’s failure to act decisively on climate change does not arise from any national characteristic.

The paternalistic assumption that only the rich nations can afford to care is also based on myth: a myth that – like the Yellow Peril story – dates back to the colonial era. As the Greendex survey of consumer attitudes shows, people in poorer countries tend to feel much guiltier about their impacts on the natural world than people in rich countries, even though those impacts might be far smaller. Of the nations surveyed, the people of Germany, the US, Australia and Britain felt the least consumer guilt; while the people of India, China, Mexico and Brazil felt the most. The more we consume, the less we feel.

There is no scope for moral superiority in the climate talks, least of all a moral superiority based on unfounded national stereotypes. Collectively, we are wrecking the delicate atmospheric balance that has allowed human civilisation to flourish. Collectively, we have to sort this out. And it will happen only by taking responsibility for our impacts, rather than by blaming other nations for what we don’t want to do.

Climate crimes: Naomi Klein on greenwashing big business

Soon after reporting on the 2010 BP oil spill, Naomi Klein found she was pregnant – and miscarried. Was there a connection? She looks at the 'greenwashing' of big business and its effects

• 
• • Naomi Klein
  • The Guardian, Saturday 13 September 2014

Naomi Klein: 'My doctor told me that my hormone levels were too low and that I'd probably miscarry, for the third time. My mind raced back to the Gulf.' Photograph: Anya Chibis for the Guardian

I denied climate change for longer than I care to admit. I knew it was happening, sure. But I stayed pretty hazy on the details and only skimmed most news stories. I told myself the science was too complicated and the environmentalists were dealing with it. And I continued to behave as if there was nothing wrong with the shiny card in my wallet attesting to my "elite" frequent-flyer status.

 

A great many of us engage in this kind of denial. We look for a split second and then we look away. Or maybe we do really look, but then we forget. We engage in this odd form of on-again-off-again ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything.

And we are right. If we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to rise year after year, major cities will drown, ancient cultures will be swallowed by the seas; our children will spend much of their lives fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and extreme droughts. Yet we continue all the same.

What is wrong with us? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things needed to cut emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have struggled to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck, because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and benefit the vast majority – are threatening to an elite minority with a stranglehold over our economy, political process and media.

That problem might not have been insurmountable had it presented itself at another point in our history. But it is our collective misfortune that governments and scientists began talking seriously about radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in 1988 – the exact year that marked the dawning of "globalisation". The numbers are striking: in the 1990s, as the market integration project ramped up, global emissions were going up an average of 1% a year; by the 2000s, with "emerging markets" such as China fully integrated into the world economy, emissions growth had sped up disastrously, reaching 3.4% a year.

That rapid growth rate has continued, interrupted only briefly, in 2009, by the world financial crisis. What the climate needs now is a contraction in humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature.

What gets me most are not the scary studies about melting glaciers, the ones I used to avoid. It's the books I read to my two-year-old. Looking For A Moose is one of his favourites. It's about a bunch of kids who really want to see a moose. They search high and low – through a forest, a swamp, in brambly bushes and up a mountain. (The joke is that there are moose hiding on each page.) In the end, the animals all come out and the ecstatic kids proclaim: "We've never ever seen so many moose!" On about the 75th reading, it suddenly hit me: he might never see a moose.

I went to my computer and began to write about my time in northern Alberta, Canadian tar sands country, where members of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation told me how the moose had changed. A woman killed one on a hunting trip, only to find the flesh had turned green. I heard a lot about strange tumours, which locals assumed had to do with the animals drinking water contaminated by tar sand toxins. But mostly I heard about how the moose were simply gone.

And not just in Alberta. Rapid Climate Changes Turn North Woods into Moose Graveyard read a May 2012 headline in Scientific American. A year and a half later, the New York Times reported that one of Minnesota's two moose populations had declined from 4,000 in the 1990s to just 100. Will my son ever see a moose?

In our desire to deal with climate change without questioning the logic of growth, we've been eager to look both to technology and the market for saviours. And the world's celebrity billionaires have been happy to play their part.

In his autobiography/new age business manifesto Screw It, Let's Do It, Richard Branson shared the inside story of his road to Damascus conversion to the fight against climate change. It was 2006 and Al Gore, on tour with An Inconvenient Truth, came to the billionaire's home to impress upon him the dangers of global warming."It was quite an experience," Branson writes. "As I listened to Gore, I saw that we were looking at Armageddon."

As he tells it, his first move was to summon Will Whitehorn, then Virgin Group's corporate and brand development director. "We took the decision to change the way Virgin operates on a corporate and global level. We called this new approach Gaia Capitalism in honour of James Lovelock and his revolutionary scientific view" (this is that the Earth is "one single enormous living organism"). Not only would Gaia Capitalism "help Virgin to make a real difference in the next decade and not be ashamed to make money at the same time", but Branson believed it could become "a new way of doing business on a global level".

 

'For two years after I covered the 2010 BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I couldn't look at any body of water without imagining it covered in oil.' Illustration: Noma Bar for the Guardian

Before the year was out, he was ready to make his grand entrance on to the green scene (and he knows how to make an entrance – by parachute, by jetski, by kitesail with a naked model clinging to his back). At the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York, the highest power event on the philanthropic calendar, Branson pledged to spend $3bn over the next decade to develop biofuels as an alternative to oil and gas, and on other technologies to battle climate change. The sum alone was staggering, but the most elegant part was where the money would be coming from: Branson would divert the funds generated by Virgin's fossil fuel-burning transportation lines.

In short, he was volunteering to do precisely what our governments have been unwilling to legislate: channel the profits earned from warming the planet into the costly transition away from these dangerous energy sources. Bill Clinton was dazzled, calling the pledge "ground-breaking". But Branson wasn't finished: a year later, he was back with the Virgin Earth Challenge – a $25m prize for the first inventor to figure out how to sequester 1bn tonnes of carbon a year from the air "without countervailing harmful effects". And the best part, he said, is that if these competing geniuses crack the carbon code, the "'doom and gloom' scenario vanishes. We can carry on living our lives in a pretty normal way – we can drive our cars, fly our planes." The idea that we can solve the climate crisis without having to change our lifestyles – certainly not by taking fewer Virgin flights – seemed the underlying assumption of all Branson's initiatives. In 2009, he launched the Carbon War Room, an industry group looking for ways that different sectors could lower their emissions voluntarily, and save money in the process. For many mainstream greens, Branson seemed a dream come true: a media darling out to show the world that fossil fuel-intensive companies can lead the way to a green future, using profit as the most potent tool.

Bill Gates and former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg have also used their philanthropy aggressively to shape climate solutions, the latter with large donations to green groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund, and with the supposedly enlightened climate policies he introduced as mayor. But while talking a good game about carbon bubbles and stranded assets, Bloomberg has made no discernible attempt to manage his own vast wealth in a manner that reflects these concerns. In fact, he helped set up Willett Advisors, a firm specialising in oil and gas assets, for both his personal and philanthropic holdings. Those gas assets may well have risen in value as a result of his environmental giving – what with, for example, EDF championing natural gas as a replacement for coal. Perhaps there is no connection between his philanthropic priorities and his decision to entrust his fortune to the oil and gas sector. But these investment choices raise uncomfortable questions about his status as a climate hero, as well as his 2014 appointment as a UN special envoy for cities and climate change (questions Bloomberg has not answered, despite my repeated requests).

Gates has a similar firewall between mouth and money. Though he professes great concern about climate change, the Gates Foundation had at least $1.2bn invested in oil giants BP and ExxonMobil as of December 2013, and those are only the start of his fossil fuel holdings. When he had his climate change epiphany, he, too, raced to the prospect of a silver-bullet techno-fix, without pausing to consider viable – if economically challenging – responses in the here and now. In Ted talks, op-eds, interviews and in hisannual letters, Gates repeats his call for governments massively to increase spending on research and development, with the goal of uncovering "energy miracles".

By miracles, he means nuclear reactors that have yet to be invented (he is a major investor and chairman of nuclear startup TerraPower), machines to suck carbon out of the atmosphere (he is a primary investor in at least one such prototype) and direct climate manipulation (Gates has spent millions funding research into schemes to block the sun, and his name is on several hurricane-suppression patents). At the same time, he has been dismissive of the potential of existing renewable technologies, writing off energy solutions such as rooftop solar as "cute" and "noneconomic" (these cute technologies already provide 25% of Germany's electricity).

 

In 2006, after meeting Al Gore, Richard Branson pledged £3bn to battle climate change over the following decade. He has since spent just £230m. Photograph: Bruno Vincent/Getty Images

Almost a decade after Branson's epiphany, it seems a good time to check in on the "win-win" crusade. Let's start with his "firm commitment" to spending $3bn over a decade developing a miracle fuel. The first tranche of money he diverted from his transport divisions launched Virgin Fuels (since replaced by private equity firm Virgin Green Fund). He began by investing in various agrofuel businesses, including making a bet of $130m on corn ethanol. Virgin has attached its name to several biofuel pilot projects – one to derive jet fuel from eucalyptus trees, another from fermented gas waste – though it has not gone in as an investor. But Branson admits the miracle fuel "hasn't been invented yet" and the fund has since moved its focus to a grab-bag of green-tinged products.

Diversifying his holdings to get a piece of the green market would hardly seem to merit the fanfare inspired by Branson's original announcement, especially as the investments have been so unremarkable. If he is to fulfil his $3bn pledge by 2016, by this point at least $2bn should have been spent. He's not even close. According to Virgin Green Fund partner Evan Lovell, Virgin has contributed only around $100m to the pot, on top of the original ethanol investment, which brings the total Branson investment to around $230m. (Lovell confirmed that "we are the primary vehicle" for Branson's promise.)

Branson refused to answer my direct questions about how much he had spent, writing that "it's very hard to quantify the total amount… across the Group". His original "pledge" he now refers to as a "gesture". In 2009, he told Wired magazine, "in a sense, whether it's $2bn, $3bn or $4bn is not particularly relevant". When the deadline rolls around, he told me, "I suspect it will be less than $1bn right now" and blamed the shortfall on everything from high oil prices to the global financial crisis: "The world was quite different back in 2006… In the last eight years, our airlines have lost hundreds of millions of dollars."

Given these explanations for falling short, it is worth looking at some of the things for which Branson did manage to find money. In 2007, a year after seeing the climate light, he launched domestic airline Virgin America. From 40 flights a day to five destinations in its first year, it reached 177 flights a day to 23 destinations in 2013. At the same time, passengers on Virgin's Australian airlines increased from 15 million in 2007 to 19 million in 2012. In 2009, Branson launched a new long-haul airline, Virgin Australia; in April 2013 came Little Red, a British domestic airline.

So this is what he has done since his climate change pledge: gone on a procurement spree that has seen his airlines' greenhouse gas emissions soar by around 40%. And it's not just planes: Branson has unveiled Virgin Racing to compete in Formula One, (he claimed he had entered the sport only because he saw opportunities to make it greener, but quickly lost interest) and invested heavily in Virgin Galactic, his dream of launching commercial flights into space, for $250,000 per passenger. According to Fortune, by early 2013 Branson had spent "more than $200m" on this vanity project.

It can be argued – and some do – that Branson's planet-saviour persona is an elaborate attempt to avoid the kind of tough regulatory action that was on the horizon when he had his green conversion. In 2006, public concern about climate change was rising dramatically, particularly in the UK, where young activists used daring direct action to oppose new airports, as well as the proposed new runway at Heathrow. At the same time, the UK government was considering a broad bill that would hit the airline sector; Gordon Brown, then chancellor, had tried to discourage flying with a marginal rise in air passenger duty. These measures posed a significant threat to Branson's profit margins.

So, was Branson's reinvention as a guilt-ridden planet-wrecker volunteering to solve the climate crisis little more than a cynical ploy? All of a sudden, you could feel good about flying again – after all, the profits from that ticket to Barbados were going to help discover a miracle green fuel. It was an even more effective conscience-cleaner than carbon offsets (though Virgin sold those, too). As for regulations and taxes, who would want to hinder an airline supporting such a good cause? This was always Branson's argument: "If you hold industry back, we will not, as a nation, have the resources to come up with the clean-energy solutions we need." It is noteworthy that his green talk has been less voluble since David Cameron came to power and made it clear that fossil fuel-based businesses faced no serious threat of climate regulations.

There is a more charitable interpretation of what has gone wrong. This would grant Branson his love of nature (whether watching tropical birds on his private island or ballooning over the Himalayas) and credit him with genuinely trying to figure out ways to reconcile running carbon-intensive businesses with a desire to help slow species extinction and avert climate chaos. It would acknowledge, too, that he has thought up some creative mechanisms to try to channel profits into projects that could help keep the planet cool.

But if we grant him these good intentions, then the fact that all these projects have failed to yield results is all the more relevant. He set out to harness the profit motive to solve the crisis, but again and again, the demands of building a successful empire trumped the climate imperative.

 

Oil on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico in an aerial view of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the coast of Mobile, Alabama. Photograph: Reuters

The idea that only capitalism can save the world from a crisis it created is no longer an abstract theory; it's a hypothesis that has been tested in the real world. We can now take a hard look at the results: at the green products shunted to the back of the supermarket shelves at the first signs of recession; at the venture capitalists who were meant to bankroll a parade of innovation but have come up far short; at the fraud-infested, boom-and-bust carbon market that has failed to cut emissions. And, most of all, at the billionaires who were going to invent a new form of enlightened capitalism but decided, on second thoughts, that the old one was just too profitable to surrender.

At some point about seven years ago, I realised I had become so convinced we were headed toward a grim ecological collapse that I was losing my capacity to enjoy my time in nature. The more beautiful the experience, the more I found myself grieving its loss – like someone unable to fall fully in love because she can't stop imagining the inevitable heartbreak. Looking out over British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, at an ocean bay teeming with life, I would suddenly picture it barren – the eagles, herons, seals and otters all gone. It got worse after I covered the 2010 BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico: for two years after, I couldn't look at any body of water without imagining it covered in oil.

This kind of ecological despair was a big part of why I resisted having kids until my late 30s. It was around the time that I began work on my book that my attitude started to shift. Some of it, no doubt, was standard-issue denial (what does one more kid matter?). But it was also that immersing myself in the international climate movement had helped me imagine various futures that were decidedly less bleak. And I was lucky: pregnant the first month we started trying. But then, just as fast, my luck ran out. A miscarriage. An ovarian tumour. A cancer scare. Surgery. Month after month of disappointing single pink lines on pregnancy tests. Another miscarriage.

It just so happened that the five years it took to write my book were the same years my personal life was occupied with failed pharmaceutical and technological interventions and, ultimately, pregnancy and new motherhood. I tried, at first, to keep these parallel journeys segregated, but it didn't always work. The worst part was the ceaseless invocation of our responsibilities to "our children". I knew these expressions were heartfelt and not meant to be exclusionary, yet I couldn't help feeling shut out.

But along the way, that feeling changed. It's not that I got in touch with my inner Earth Mother; it's that I started to notice that if the Earth is indeed our mother, then she is a mother facing a great many fertility challenges of her own.

I had no idea I was pregnant when I went to Louisiana to cover the BP spill. A few days after I got home, though, I could tell something was off and did a pregnancy test. Two lines this time, but the second strangely faint. "You can't be just a little bit pregnant," the saying goes. And yet that is what I seemed to be. After more tests, my doctor told me my hormone levels were much too low and I'd probably miscarry, for the third time. My mind raced back to the Gulf – the toxic fumes I had breathed in for days and the contaminated water I had waded in. I searched on the chemicals BP was using in huge quantities, and found reams of online chatter linking them to miscarriages. Whatever was happening, I had no doubt that it was my doing.

After a week of monitoring, the pregnancy was diagnosed as ectopic - the embryo had implanted itself outside the uterus, most likely in a fallopian tube. I was rushed to the emergency room. The somewhat creepy treatment is one or more injections of methotrexate, a drug used in chemotherapy to arrest cell development (and carrying many of the side-effects). Once foetal development has stopped, the pregnancy miscarries, but it can take weeks.

It was a tough, drawn-out loss for my husband and me. But it was also a relief to learn that the miscarriage had nothing to do with the Gulf. Knowing that did make me think a little differently about my time covering the spill, however. As I waited for the pregnancy to "resolve", I thought in particular about a long day spent on the Flounder Pounder, a boat a group of us had chartered to look for evidence that the oil had entered the marshlands.

Our guide was Jonathan Henderson of the Gulf Restoration Network, a heroic local organisation devoted to repairing the damage done to the wetlands by the oil and gas industry. As we navigated the narrow bayous of the Mississippi Delta, Henderson leant far over the side to get a better look at the bright green grass. What concerned him most was not what we were all seeing – fish jumping in fouled water, Roseau cane coated in oil – but something much harder to detect without a microscope and sample jars.

Spring is the start of spawning season on the Gulf Coast, and Henderson knew these marshes were teeming with nearly invisible zooplankton and tiny juveniles that would develop into adult shrimp, oysters, crabs and fin fish. In these fragile weeks, the marsh grass acts as an aquatic incubator, providing nutrients and protection from predators. "Everything is born in these wetlands," he said.

The prospects for these microscopic creatures did not look good. Each wave brought in more oil and dispersants, sending levels of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) soaring. And this was all happening at the worst possible moment in the biological calendar: not only shellfish, but also bluefin tuna, grouper, snapper, mackerel, marlin and swordfish were all spawning. Out in the open water, floating clouds of translucent proto-life were just waiting for one of the countless plumes of oil and dispersants to pass through them like an angel of death. Unlike the oil-coated pelicans and sea turtles, these deaths would attract no media attention, just as they would go uncounted in official assessments of the spill's damage. If a certain species of larva was in the process of being snuffed out, we would likely not find out about it for years, and then, rather than some camera-ready mass die-off, there would just be… nothing. An absence. A hole in the life cycle.

As our boat rocked in that terrible place – the sky buzzing with Black Hawk helicopters and snowy white egrets – I had the distinct feeling we were suspended not in water but in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multi-species miscarriage. When I learned that I, too, was in the early stages of creating an ill-fated embryo, I started to think of that time in the marsh as my miscarriage inside a miscarriage. It was then that I let go of the idea that infertility made me some sort of exile from nature, and began to feel what I can only describe as a kinship of the infertile.

 

Oil is deposited along dead marsh land near Bay Jimmy in Port Sulphur, Louisiana, in January 2011, 10 months after the spill. The clean-up is ongoing. Photograph: Getty Images

A few months after I stopped going to the fertility clinic, a friend recommended a naturopathic doctor. This practitioner had her own theories about why so many women without an obvious medical reason were having trouble conceiving. Carrying a baby is one of the hardest physical tasks we can ask of ourselves, she said, and if our bodies decline the task, it is often a sign that they are facing too many other demands – high-stress work, or the physical stress of having to metabolise toxins, or just the stresses of modern life. Most fertility clinics use drugs and technology to override this, and they work for a lot of people. But if they do not (and they often do not), women are frequently left even more stressed, their hormones more out of whack. The naturopath proposed the opposite approach: try to figure out what might be overtaxing my system, and then remove those things. After a series of tests, I was diagnosed with a whole mess of allergies I didn't know I had, as well as adrenal insufficiency and low cortisol levels. The doctor asked me a lot of questions, including how many hours I had spent in the air over the past year. "Why?" I asked warily. "Because of the radiation. There have been some studies done with flight attendants that show it might not be good for fertility."

I admit I was far from convinced that this approach would result in a pregnancy, or even that the science behind it was wholly sound. Then again, the worst that could happen was that I'd end up healthier. So I did it all. The yoga, the meditation, the dietary changes (the usual wars on wheat, gluten, dairy and sugar, as well as more esoteric odds and ends). I went to acupuncture and drank bitter Chinese herbs; my kitchen counter became a gallery of powders and supplements. I left Toronto and moved to rural British Columbia. This is the part of the world where my parents live, where my grandparents are buried.

Gradually, I learned to identify a half-dozen birds by sound, and sea mammals by the ripples on the water's surface. My frequent-flyer status expired for the first time in a decade, and I was glad.

For the first few months, the hardest part of the pregnancy was believing everything was normal. No matter how many tests came back with reassuring results, I stayed braced for tragedy. What helped most was hiking, and during the final anxious weeks, I would calm my nerves by walking for as long as my sore hips would let me on a trail along a pristine creek. I kept my eyes open for silvery salmon smolts making their journey to the sea after months of incubation in shallow estuaries. And I would picture the cohos, pinks and chums battling the rapids and falls, determined to reach the spawning grounds where they were born. This was my son's determination, I would tell myself. He was clearly a fighter, having managed to make his way to me despite the odds; he would find a way to be born safely, too.

I don't know why this pregnancy succeeded any more than I know why earlier pregnancies failed – and neither do my doctors. Infertility is just one of the many areas in which we humans are confronted with our oceans of ignorance. So, mostly, I feel lucky.

And I suppose a part of me is still in that oiled Louisiana marsh, floating in a sea of poisoned larvae and embryos, with my own ill-fated embryo inside me. It's not self-pity that keeps me returning to that sad place. It's the conviction that there is something valuable in the body-memory of slamming up against a biological limit – of running out of chances – something we all need to learn. We are built to survive, gifted with adrenaline and embedded with multiple biological redundancies that allow us the luxury of second, third and fourth chances. So are our oceans. So is the atmosphere.

But surviving is not the same as thriving, not the same as living well. For a great many species, it's not the same as being able to nurture and produce new life. With proper care, we stretch and bend amazingly well. But we break, too – our individual bodies, as well as the communities and ecosystems that support us.

It's simple. If we can't change our economic system, our number's up

It's the great taboo of our age – and the inability to discuss the pursuit of perpetual growth will prove humanity's undoing

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 27 May 2014 18.38 BST

'The mother narrative to all this is carbon-fuelled expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots.' Photograph: Alamy

Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham.

Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It's 2.5 billion billion solar systems. It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.

To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues miraculously vanished, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible.

Economic growth is an artefact of the use of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal were extracted, every upswing in industrial production would be met with a downswing in agricultural production, as the charcoal or horse power required by industry reduced the land available for growing food. Every prior industrial revolution collapsed, as growth could not be sustained. But coal broke this cycle and enabled – for a few hundred years – the phenomenon we now call sustained growth.

It was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the progress and pathologies (total war, the unprecedented concentration of global wealth, planetary destruction) of the modern age. It was coal, followed by oil and gas. The meta-trend, the mother narrative, is carbon-fuelled expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots. Now, with the accessible reserves exhausted, we must ransack the hidden corners of the planet to sustain our impossible proposition.

On Friday, a few days after scientists announced that the collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet is now inevitable, the Ecuadorean government decided to allow oil drilling in the heart of the Yasuni national park. It had made an offer to other governments: if they gave it half the value of the oil in that part of the park, it would leave the stuff in the ground. You could see this as either blackmail or fair trade. Ecuador is poor, its oil deposits are rich. Why, the government argued, should it leave them untouched without compensation when everyone else is drilling down to the inner circle of hell? It asked for $3.6bn and received $13m. The result is that Petroamazonas, a company with a colourful record of destruction and spills, will now enter one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, in which a hectare of rainforest is said to contain more species than exist in the entire continent of North America.

 Yasuni national park. Murray Cooper/Minden Pictures/Corbis

The UK oil firm Soco is now hoping to penetrate Africa's oldest national park, Virunga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo; one of the last strongholds of the mountain gorilla and the okapi, of chimpanzees and forest elephants. In Britain, where a possible 4.4 billion barrels of shale oil has just been identified in the south-east, the government fantasises about turning the leafy suburbs into a new Niger delta. To this end it's changing the trespass laws to enable drilling without consent and offering lavish bribes to local people. These new reserves solve nothing. They do not end our hunger for resources; they exacerbate it.

The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious, will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world's diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.

Some people try to solve the impossible equation with the myth of dematerialisation: the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturised, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180% in 10 years. The trade body Forest Industries tells us that "global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow". If, in the digital age, we won't reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?

Look at the lives of the super-rich, who set the pace for global consumption. Are their yachts getting smaller? Their houses? Their artworks? Their purchase of rare woods, rare fish, rare stone? Those with the means buy ever bigger houses to store the growing stash of stuff they will not live long enough to use. By unremarked accretions, ever more of the surface of the planet is used to extract, manufacture and store things we don't need. Perhaps it's unsurprising that fantasies about colonising space – which tell us we can export our problems instead of solving them – have resurfaced.

As the philosopher Michael Rowan points out, the inevitabilities of compound growth mean that if last year'sthe predicted global growth rate for 2014 (3.1%) is sustained, even if we miraculously reduced the consumption of raw materials by 90%, we delay the inevitable by just 75 years. Efficiency solves nothing while growth continues.

The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth's living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence. As a result, they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st century's great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbours. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle-class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.

Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn't worthy of mention. That's how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.