Meta Meat

With the news that meat might be grown without animals comes a lot of philosophical and practical questions (about the nature of life, feeding the growing population, how our relationship with “livestock” animals might change… Perhaps, after a little thought, you could write your own list of concerns…). The future continues to arrive too soon for us to readily assimilate. However, 30 years ago, the television drama Sapphire & Steel looked at the sort of future that such technology might lead to. If you’re too stingy to buy the DVDs, you can, for the time being at least, spend a few hours watching it on YouTube. You won’t, of course, but, as they say, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t grow it in a petri dish (yet).

Angry Mermaid Award

Six organisations (listed here) have banded together to create the Angry Mermaid Award to “decide which company or lobby group is doing the most to sabotage effective action on climate change”.

You can see a list of their nominees and vote as you see fit. At the very least, it’s quite interesting reading.

Business as usual

The BBC reports one Dr Nina Federoff, “science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007″ (another example of the Obama presidency keeping advisors from the previous administration) as saying that “There are probably already too many people on the planet”.

There’s no “probably” about it. However, Federoff carved out a career in biotechnology and is not so delicate about advocating the dream that GM crops will save the day, going so far as to say that opposition to widespread growing of genetically modified crops indicates that “we want to go back to the 19th Century”.

Funnily enough, Federoff would have as all believe that, by submitting the world to GM experiments, we would be going back to prehistory. Her article ‘Prehistoric GM Corn’ in Science magazine (14th Nov. 2003) followed the traditional GM industry ploy of presenting the technology as spectacularly new whilst somehow also being nothing new at all – whilst confounding terms to serve the mission.

Earth Hour

At 8.30 pm (your local time), you are asked by the World Wildlife Fund to turn off your lights for an hour.

The site (well, one of them – there seems to be some redundancy) also suggests that you “Make a video of your event, upload it to YouTube and add it to our YouTube group” and “Write a live blog post during the event”. Presumably that’s if your video recorder, camera and computer run off pedal power or your own wind turbines in the garden.

Well, it’s only a gesture to those in power, and to each other so you might as well join in.

Good riddance to TVs on trains

Rail travellers in Birmingham will soon be free to read, to converse or to gaze out of the windows free from the noise of televisions, thanks to the decision of train operator London Midland to remove all sets from its carriages.

London Midland still has issues to address (their published bar graphs indicating customer satisfaction appear with the top 20% of blank space omitted) but when a train does arrive, travelling on it should soon no longer be as routinely irritating as it has been.

Good. Very good.

Oliver Postgate

Oliver Postgate leaves behind a wealth of inventive television fantasy. He also leaves behind a world being consumed by political reality.

“Ecology is the stock from which all wealth grows”

George Monbiot urges us to live in the real world and shrug off the fantasies that we are force-fed. And for once, a lot of the comments add further food for thought.

Five more facts about the Large Hadron Collider

5 Facts about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider

Ah, skip that actually. It’s just pornography for statisticians. And you’ve read the rest: blah blah hadron Higgs boson God particle blah…

OK, here are the facts that count.

1) Nobody gives a flying one what you think. Get that straight for a start.

2) Insurance policies consider the probability of loss and the severity of the loss should a disaster occur. Particle physicists working for CERN say that the probability of a disaster is extremely low. Of course, the whole planet will get swallowed up by a black hole if things do go wrong, but there would be no-one around to make a claim, so “hey”.

(3) Taking experiments off-world costs more than building things in Switzerland. It’s that expensive. As you should know by now, the fundamental particle in the Universe is the Dollar (the value of which can go up or down in a strangely charming way).

(4) Careers are at stake here.

(5) Barring that very unlikely yet catastrophic accident, come Thursday everyone will be repeatedly reminded that there was no need to have worried. In future, you will be expected to trust the scientists and the interests they serve, without airing your silly concerns. See point 1.

Ill-bred

It’s sad to see The Guardian giving space to a tantrum by a GM fanatic, even in the interest of balance of coverage to this subject, but it’s also not without its funny side.

A standard GM industry tactic is to pretend that genetic modification of organisms is both brand new and yet at the same time nothing new at all. In his Guardian polemic, one Henry Miller claims that “genetic modification is not new” because “Plants and microorganisms have long been genetically improved by mutation and selection”. Putting aside the issue of what “genetically improved” actually means to anyone who doesn’t think that The Market is all that counts, we are left with a claim that “gene splicing, tissue cultures and the rest” are exactly the same thing as selective breeding. Which makes one wonder why he refers to the “new biotechnology” (Woo! Go team! Go team!) at all, or whether he is at all familiar with the basics of evolutionary science.

As Charles Darwin patiently explained in the very first chapter of On the Origin of the Species, by way of setting out the facts known by breeders to some of the more blinkered scientists (yes, they had them back then too), selective breeding is really just natural selection under human guidance. This is not to say that selective breeding itself is an issue that is free from contention – but Miller’s equating of this harnessing of natural selection to “gene splicing, tissue cultures and the rest” suggests that he is either ignorant of the basic facts or hopes that the rest of us are and is trying to put one over on us.

Either way, he is very, very cross with the Prince of Wales for blowing the whistle so loudly (if not, it has to be said, virtuosically) and opposing the imposition of GM crops. He whines that Prince Charles is feebleminded, inbred, not-so-bonnie (when ad hominem attacks get that bitchy, you know the writer is on unsure ground), misguided and – gasp! – anti-technology.

The writer finishes off by limply tossing off some apologias about “the ability of consumers to cast their votes in the marketplace” (the only place we “consumers” can now “cast our votes” if such people get their way – but then have you tried reasoning with your New Labour MP lately?) and “a real-life struggle for the availability of products that will prolong and enrich lives” (a pale shadow of the discredited claim that GM crops were of any benefit to humanity at all).

The final source of grim merriment appears on another site. The essential resource Lobbywatch quotes an interview with the New York Times by the same writer: “Food biotech is dead. The potential now is an infinitesimal fraction of what most observers had hoped it would be”.

So there we see the defeated mindset that those truly ill-bred remarks sprang from. And it gives us all just a little more hope that maybe we can win this one after all.

Government renews push for GM crops

No surprise – here it is.

“UK.gov serves up GM food as price hike fix (The Register).

Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Government proclaims:
“There is only one technology likely to deliver and that is GM”.

The warnings of those who cared about the environment were ignored for decades, because not to do so might have harmed short-term profits and career prospects. Now the shit is hitting the fan, and climate change is being used to justify the production of mutated, manufactured crops that should never be encountered outside the laboratory, nuclear power and whatever other unpopular measures can be pushed through.

The Friends of the Earth site urges “Tell your MP not to fall for GM hype“. Let them know you’re not going to swallow this.