Philosophy

UCD Doctor Makes Numerous False Claims About COVID-19

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First Published in UCD College Tribune

In an interview released on the 11th of May, UCD Professor Dolores Cahill claimed that the global lockdown in response to the COVID-19 crisis was unnecessary. Cahill also repeatedly made the controversial claim that once you have the virus, you are immune for life; a claim for which there is very little evidence as of yet. Indeed, the interview was packed full of misleading and inaccurate statements about the virus. The trusted fact-checker Health Feedback rated the interview as “based on inaccurate and misleading info”. 

Both YouTube and Facebook removed the video from their platforms for violating their misinformation policies after Business Insider reported that the video was “filled with misleading claims about COVID-19”. John Quinlan, co-founder of the independent fact checker Infotagion was quoted in that article as saying, “when we fact-checked this video we found there was no scientific evidence to support any of her claims”.

A History of Misinformation

First, let us take a look at who Dolores Cahill actually is. Cahill has impressive academic credentials and is considered a leading figure in proteomics: the study of how proteins function and interact with each other. Cahill has been involved in a number of impressive projects, and in 1997 co-founded a company called ‘Protagen AG’, which exists to this day under the name ‘Protagen Protein Services’. Strangely, however, there is no mention of her name on the Protagen website. The College Tribune approached Protagen for comment on Professor Cahill’s claims, but received no response. 

Cahill also worked at the prestigious ‘Max Planck Institute’ in Germany from 1995 to 2003. When Business Insider contacted the Institute for their article, they were told that “The work [Prof Cahill] performed at our Institute has no relation to the claims she has made with regards to the pandemic. The Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics distances itself very clearly from them, and we do not want to be associated with any of her claims in any way”. 

Cahill has not been publishing scientific papers for several years, with the last paper she co-authored in 2016 being retracted by Oxford University Press “due to the discovery of significant errors relating to methods and presentation of results”. Cahill has instead focused on politics. She is currently the chairperson of the fringe political party known as the ‘Irish Freedom Party’. The far-right party’s platform revolves around support for ‘Irexit’; the idea that Ireland should follow the UK in leaving the EU. Cahill’s ‘Which Candidate’ profile lists one of her main priorities as being “to stop Political Correctness being used to intimidate people from speaking the truth.” The party is yet to win a seat in an election. 

The Irish Freedom Party arose from a meeting in the RDS which was addressed by conservative brexiteer Nigel Farage. Party leader Hermann Kelly has repeatedly warned about the ‘Great Replacement’, a xenophobic conspiracy theory which claims that people are being intentionally replaced by immigrants. According to the New York Times, this ‘theory’ was cited by the shooters in both the El Paso and New Zealand mass shootings. Kelly also achieved widespread disdain in 2007 when he wrote a book which claimed that Magdalene Asylum victim Kathy O’Beirne had lied about her experiences. 

I mention these political affiliations only because they may be relevant to the claims Cahill has made surrounding the virus. It is important to remember when reading her claims, that far-right parties around the world have been opposing lockdowns on the basis that the ‘nanny-state’ is unjustly depriving people of their freedom. It is also important to remember that such governments, like those in the US, Brazil and Russia, have proven far less capable of slowing the spread of the disease, since they generally prioritise the health of the economy over the health of their citizens.

So, What Did Cahill Actually Say? 

Straight off the bat, Dolores came in hot with the claim: “There should be a lot of hope that this virus isn’t as dangerous as it has been shown to be, and also there’s major issues like the media are reporting the number of cases, when actually someone who has had the virus (like me, I had this virus in January and February), your immune system clears it after 10 days and then you are immune for life. So, you’re not a case. You’re immune for life. And so that is very important because the way it has been done in the media is as if a case is something dangerous.”

Ok, so a lot to unpack there already. First thing to say is that there is no evidence that someone who has had the virus is immune for life. To use the WHO’s words, “There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection”. Our best guess, which is based on knowledge of other coronaviruses, is that someone who has been infected may be immune for a few months to 2 years, but that is very much still an unproven estimate. It all depends on the rate of mutation and the type of mutations which occur. 

When the media report the number of cases, they are not reporting the number of immune people. They are reporting the number of infected people. Whether or not those people will become immune after clearing the virus is unclear, but what is certain is that those people are likely to be infectious, and that their lives are at risk, particularly if they are elderly or have underlying conditions. So yes, a case is something dangerous. The media did not invent the approximately 400,000 people who have died globally at the time of writing. 

Cahill goes straight on to say: “we can see that in Ireland, as globally, half of the people who die are over 80 and that children and anyone under 50, unless they have chronic conditions like cystic fibrosis they will have no issue. So, what I am saying is there is no need for the lockdown and that we could actually all go back to work.”

The lockdown is indeed necessary. We all know already that elderly people are more vulnerable to this virus. In the absence of a lockdown, the virus would have spread through the population like wildfire, with low-risk people acting as a stepping-stone for the virus to reach vulnerable people like the elderly and those with underlying conditions. Our best shot at avoiding the mass deaths of vulnerable people, like we saw in Italy and now the US, was to stop the virus in its tracks. According to the vast majority of experts, the best way to do that was a lockdown.

Many people have made the mistake of thinking that because the virus has not been quite as catastrophic as predicted for Ireland, that the lockdown was thus unnecessary. This fails to take into account the cause-and-effect relationship between the strength of the lockdown and the severity of the outbreak. Had we failed to lock the country down, things could have gone much, much worse. It is like landing an airplane, then saying ‘well, it turns out we didn’t need the pilots after all because we landed safely’. If the pilots had not been present, then the outcome would have been drastically different. 

Over 1,000 academics and scientists have now called on the government to revisit its stance on the lockdown, suggesting that the restrictions should continue until the virus is eliminated. 

Other claims made by Cahill include that between 7 and 15% of Irish people were already immune to COVID-19 before the current pandemic began. She claims this on the basis that people have developed immunity to diseases like the 2003 SARS outbreak or subsequent MERS outbreak. This is simply false. Based on her wording, it seems that Cahill is claiming that 7-15% of people worldwide have SARS and MERS antibodies, and then extrapolating to Ireland. WHO records show that between 1st November 2002 and 7th of August 2003, during the height of the outbreak, only 1 person in the Republic of Ireland contracted SARS. No cases of MERS have ever been reported in Ireland. It is extremely unclear, then, how between 343,000 and 735,000 Irish people could have developed immunity to these diseases as Cahill claims.

Cahill even claims that “practically everyone in the world” is immune to SARS, a claim which Health Feedback calls “baseless, […] as the vast majority of the world’s population has not been exposed to the SARS virus and therefore cannot have developed immunity to the virus.” Further, while it is possible that immunity to SARS could to some extent protect people from developing the more severe symptoms of COVID-19, these antibodies are likely to be localised around east Asia where SARS actually took hold. Moreover, we have yet to prove that SARS antibodies actually provide significant protection against COVID-19. There is preliminary evidence that this kind of ‘cross-reactive immunity’ can also occur in people who have had related coronaviruses like some of the viruses we call the ‘common cold’, but the jury is still out on that too. 

Cahill also claims that if we had quarantined people with underlying conditions and people over 80, then told them to take vitamins C and D and zinc for a few weeks, there would have been “no deaths”. According to Health Feedback, vitamin C has been shown to reduce the risk of respiratory infection, “but this effect has been observed only in individuals experiencing severe physical stress, such as marathon runners, and not in the general community”. 

It is also true that vitamin D protects against respiratory infection, but this is likely to only be the case if you already have a vitamin D deficiency. A significant amount of people do have such a vitamin D deficiency, so taking supplements (or getting more sun) can’t hurt. It would not, however, stop the virus dead in its tracks as Cahill claims. A recent study has found that vitamin K helps to protect against COVID-19 specifically, but again only if you already have a vitamin K deficiency

Cahill also claims that wearing face masks can lead to hypoxia which weakens the immune response. In other words, she is saying that the decreased amount of oxygen you inhale makes you less able to fight off the virus. Again, this has been thoroughly debunked. The use of masks does not result in hypoxia in healthy people, nor does it weaken the immune response. It is recommended that masks are not used on children under 2 with respiratory problems, but that is it. 

Enter Judy Mikovitz

Cahill cites an American scientist named Judy Mikovitz as one of her heroes. Mikovitz came under significant fire in 2011, when a ‘breakthrough’ study she had conducted on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) fell apart under scrutiny. The results Mikovitz found could not be replicated by other researchers, leading many to believe that there had been a contamination. Mikovitz has been in the news more recently for attacking US disease expert Anthony Fauci and claiming that face masks ‘activate’ COVID-19. Sound familiar? 

It may seem strange that Professor Cahill’s hero is a researcher who was not well-known in the scientific community prior to her breakthrough study being discredited. Mikovitz, however, has become a martyr for the ‘anti-vax’ movement and has called for an immediate moratorium on all vaccines. Mikovitz has also recently repeated the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 did not naturally jump from animals to humans; a theory that has been extensively debunked in the scientific literature. 

Both Mikovitz and Cahill are public supporters of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, despite some initial studies suggesting that it could, in some cases, be fatal to patients. In the interview, Cahill claims that hydroxychloroquine is the “most efficient treatment” and that there is an “oversupply” of the drug globally. While it remains somewhat unclear whether the drug will prove to be effective, we categorically do not have an ‘oversupply’ of it, with malaria running rampant across Africa. A study published in the journal Medicine in Drug Discovery in March states that “clinically justified or not, the current shortage for HCQ [hydroxychloroquine] is acute”.

The studies which came out in May claiming that the use of hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 patients could increase fatalities were based on data from a small company called Surgisphere. This data is now coming under serious fire, with respected medical journal The Lancet retracting the study. According to The Guardian, Surgisphere has only 6 people in their employ; one of whom is a science fiction writer. The fact that this dataset may be unreliable, however, does not mean that the drug is in fact safe. A subsequent study, which has been hailed as relying on solid data and having a good methodology, found that hydroxychloroquine was “no better than a placebo”. I am not saying that hydroxychloroquine definitely does not work, but only that it is too early to say. 

The interview becomes more political towards the end, with Cahill calling for an inquiry into both RTÉ and the government for presenting the data in a misleading way. She claims that the media and politicians have been “using this as a fearmongering propaganda tool to try and take away rights from people and to make them more sick and to force vaccinations on us”. To respond strongly to a disease that has killed 400,000 people (that we know of) is not fearmongering, it is responsible leadership.

Another of Cahill’s claims is that people who have received a flu vaccine suffer a cytokine storm and more severe symptoms when exposed to COVID-19. This already debunked idea comes straight from the mouth of Judy Mikovitz. Mikovitz put forward the idea in a video called ‘Plandemic’ which has been heavily criticised for containing misinformation. Cytokine storms are an overreaction of the immune system to an infection. They can indeed be a complication of COVID-19 but have in no way been connected to flu vaccines. 

I hope that this information will go some way towards equipping people to refute the claims made by Cahill. Before being removed from YouTube and Facebook for containing misinformation, the video had been viewed over a million times, and it is still available online if you know where to look. These dangerously misleading claims will surely be repeated countless times, with Professor Cahill being cited as the seemingly reliable source. 

The truth is that a university professor with such an impressive background should be a reliable source for information at a time like this. If Cahill has simply made a great number of honest mistakes, then she should have done her research. If, and this is more likely in my view, she made these claims to further her political agenda, the university should investigate Cahill and consider relieving her of her position as a professor in the School of Medicine. 

Prof Cahill was contacted by The College Tribune for a comment but has not responded by the time of publishing. 

Carbon Neutral Lent: Week 1 – Food

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Welcome to the first week of Carbon Neutral Lent! The pancakes are gone, which means the time has come for spreadsheets. This week we will be looking at the messy and complicated topic of the carbon footprint of food. Don’t forget to head over to the CNL landing page to download the tracker spreadsheet which will allow you to estimate your carbon ‘foodprint’ at the end of each week by asking you one simple question! Also, come on down to our event in the Landmark pub in Dublin on the 3rd of March, where CNL founder Darragh Wynne will be joined by a variety of guests to talk about the carbon footprint of food. Come for the information, stay for the music!

Ireland’s carbon footprint is an unusual one. At 34% of the total national emissions, agriculture has a greater impact on our emissions profile than any other European country. For comparison, waste (which includes the footprint of all our plastic) is responsible for just 1.5% of our emissions. Even so, it seems like businesses and well-meaning citizens are far more concerned with ditching plastic straws than they are with reducing the footprint of the foods that we eat.

Our unusually high agricultural footprint is not, however, necessarily a result of our eating habits. It is because we make our money producing extremely high-carbon foods and then exporting them to other countries. To be precise, it is because we produce a whole lot of beef and dairy. Dairy cow numbers increased in Ireland by 27% between 2013 and 2018, in large part due to the removal of the milk quota in 2015.

This goes to show that the types of food we grow and eat can have a massive effect on our emissions. A kilogram of locally grown, in season carrots comes in at 0.25 kgs of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent). The same weight of beef is a whopping 17kg CO2e. In other words, pound for pound, beef produces 68 times more carbon than locally grown carrots.

Of course, the comparison is not so simple as this. A kilogram of beef contains about 5 times more calories and about 25 times more protein than a kilogram of carrots. Still, 5 times the calories for 68 times the carbon is a monster trade-off. Getting 1 calorie from beef produces around 14 times more carbon than one calorie from a carrot. Plus, carrots contain far more fiber and carbohydrates and far less fat than beef.

As for protein, how much you need depends on how much you weigh and how active you are. The rule for a sedentary person is that you need 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. As a 70 kilo man, I would need 56 grams of protein per day. Conveniently, that is exactly the average recommended intake for a sedentary man. That’s about 3.2 Tesco beef burgers of 84 grams each.

Alternatively, you could get that protein from non-animal sources for a fraction of the carbon price. Quorn burgers, for example, contain 18g of protein per hundred grams. In other words, I’d need 3.7 Quorn burgers of 84 grams each to get my daily dose of protein. What’s more, the carbon footprint would be reduced by 90%!

Quorn is far from being the only low-carbon source of protein. We get protein from almost everything we eat. 100 grams of chickpeas, for example will give you 20 grams of protein. Soybeans are also a great source, with 100 grams containing 16.6 grams of protein.  It is easy to see how, over the course of a day, we can take in as much protein as we need without the help of meat.

It is important to note, however, that the recommended protein intake for someone who partakes in a strenuous physical activity like weight lifting or endurance running is considerably higher. Nearly twice as high, in fact, with strength and endurance athletes recommended to take in 1.2 to 1.7 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. If I were to spend all day in the gym, then, I would need 119 grams of protein per day. For active people such as this, protein shakes can provide the rest of the daily protein that you are not getting from food. Plus, there are vegan options available!

That brings us nicely to the question of how much better veganism is for the environment than vegetarianism. One study found that you can cut 1.82 kilograms of CO2e per day by switching from a medium-meat diet to a vegetarian one. The same study found that switching from a vegetarian to a vegan diet would save nearly a kilogram more carbon per day. In other words, going vegan is a fair bit better for emissions.

Cheese is the third highest-emissions food after beef and lamb. That’s right, a kilo of cheese produces more emissions than a kilo of pork or chicken, although it must be said that cheese is usually eaten in much smaller quantities. Vegan food also uses less land and water to produce than eggs and dairy, further reducing a vegan’s impact on the environment. Whether or not food comes from animals is perhaps the best indicator of how high-carbon it will be. If you hadn’t guessed, animal products are almost always worse. But why is meat so bad for the environment?

The simple answer is that growing crops and eating them is a far more efficient process than raising animals for food. That is because you have to grow a lot of crops to feed to the animals while they grow big enough for slaughter. It uses much less land and water and produces far fewer emissions to cut out the middleman and go straight to the source of the nutrition; the plants.

Plants build their bodies using carbon they take from the air, water they take from the ground and energy they take from the sun. They don’t need to move, digest food, pump blood around their bodies or keep themselves warm and that saves them a lot of energy.

Animals, on the other hand, burn up most of the energy they take in from plants by walking around, breathing and keeping warm. If you feed a cow 100 calories in the form of grain, only 3% of those calories will be returned in the meat. That means that you have to feed them a whole lot more over their lifetime than you will get back in the end.

In the case of ‘ruminant’ animals like cattle and sheep, there is the added problem of methane. Ruminants are hoofed mammals that have a 4-chambered stomach, one of which is called the rumen. Microbes break down the ruminant’s food in a process known as ‘enteric fermentation’, which produces a lot of methane. To be precise, it produces 30% of all anthropogenic methane emissions.

Water use is another major consideration, with a 2003 study finding that “Producing 1 kg of animal protein requires about 100 times more water than producing 1 kg of grain protein”. I worked out for a previous article that eating a pound of beef wastes about as much water as leaving your shower on for about 15 hours.

Eating plants is not just low-carbon. It is also gives a much higher yield per hectare than producing meat. In a much-cited study from 2013, Emily Cassidy et al. found that “given the current mix of crop uses, growing food exclusively for direct human consumption could, in principle, increase available food calories by as much as 70%, which could feed an additional 4 billion people”.

In other words, if it were not for the fact that we waste plant nutrition by feeding it to livestock, the population could grow to 10 billion by 2050 (as projected) and we could still feed every person on earth with ease. According to the same study, “36% of the calories produced by the world’s crops are being used for animal feed, and only 12% of those feed calories ultimately contribute to the human diet”. That is a huge amount of waste considering how many people do not have enough to eat.

That brings us very neatly to the incredibly important topic of food waste. In Ireland, over a million tonnes of food are wasted each year. The excellent Climate Queens podcast figured out that that’s enough to fill Croke Park with food waste twice each year. Globally, one third of all food produced goes to waste. That is more than enough to feed the roughly 11% of people in the world who are chronically malnourished.

If food waste were a country, it would have the third highest emissions of any country on earth after the US and China. That is because approximately 10% of all carbon emissions globally come from food waste, costing the world about €550 billion per year.

Food waste is a win-win area in which we can both seriously cut emissions and increase the total food available for consumption. Try keeping a journal of which foods you are throwing out. If you find that you are regularly throwing out half a tub of coleslaw, for example, you can start buying a smaller tub. It really is that simple!

There is so much more we could say about the carbon footprint of food. I haven’t even touched on the emissions from fertilizers, how different types of feed affect the emissions profile of livestock or the very important topic of animal cruelty in agriculture.

If you take two things away from this piece, however, let them be that
a) you should cut down on meat and dairy as much as possible and
b) you should eat the food that you buy.

If we all made these two simple rules a priority when it comes to which food we choose to buy, we could massively cut emissions of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. In the process, we would also increase the land available for crop production, forests, wetlands and renewable energy projects. Plus, we would save a whole lot of money and water.

What are you waiting for?

Carbon Neutral Lent: Individual and Systemic Action

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How do we solve climate change? Do we eat less meat? Turn off the lights? Fly less? ‘No!’, I hear you say, ‘we need systemic action!’ To a large extent this is true, but as with all things related to climate change, it is not quite so simple. In this piece, I will be playing devil’s advocate and putting forward some of the arguments for why individual action is also important. Please do not take this to mean that I am a puppet of the corporations.

Depending on who you ask, climate change is a policy problem, an engineering problem, a communications problem, an ethical problem; the list goes on. At its heart, however, it is a physical problem. Carbon is carbon. Climate change does not care about fairness. It will react to the quantity of greenhouse gases which are cumulatively released into the atmosphere, regardless of whether those emissions come from Exxon Mobil or from your meat, lights and planes.

The Guardian recently reported that just 20 companies are responsible for a third of all emissions since 1965. Those numbers can easily make one feel that individual action is a fool’s errand. Surely we can just shut down these companies and we’ll be fine? Again, it is somewhat more complicated than that. What does it mean for a company to be ‘responsible’ for emissions? Those who read past the headline of that Guardian article will have seen that while 10% of those emissions came from the extraction and transport of the fossil fuels, 90% of the emissions came from us, the consumer, burning the fuel for energy. The fossil fuel industry facilitates the burning of fossil fuels but we are the ones to pull the trigger.

Would these companies have produced those emissions if there was no one there to buy their oil and coal? Even now, would they be raking in the cash if we didn’t need their fuel for our cars or their energy for our homes? If there’s a market for it, then someone’s selling. If there’s no market for it, it stays in the ground where it belongs. That’s capitalism. Supply and demand. Don’t worry, I don’t like it either.

Of course, petrochemical companies like Shell do bear a disproportionate share of the blame, not least because they have between them spent vast sums of money trying to obscure the facts about climate change by funding right-wing think tanks, factually inaccurate media campaigns and the ‘research’ of a select few ethically suspect scientists. Think of the solar panels they could have built with that money.

Another major consideration is the massive gap in per capita emissions between the developed and developing world. There is a huge number of people in the developing world who emit next to nothing. The average emissions for the group of 47 countries categorised by the UN as ‘Least Developed Countries’ (LDCs) is 0.3 tonnes per person per year. The average for the rich 35 ‘Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’ (OECD) countries is 9.6 tonnes. That’s one hell of a difference.

The difference becomes even more stark when you look at individual nations. Per capita, the average annual carbon emissions in the US are about 20 metric tonnes. Burundi, on the other hand, are listed by the ‘World Bank’ as emitting 0.0 tonnes per person per year. In my view, there is no possible argument to be made that could justify that level of inequality.  

The fossil fuel industry is particularly culpable, yes, but so are normal people in the developed world. Our vast over-consumption precludes the possibility of an equitable redistribution of resources to the global south. We have gained a massive advantage over the developing world through colonialism and the burning of fossil fuels. We must now right those wrongs by fighting to restore some semblance of global equality. Perhaps that means sacrificing some of the things that we only have as a result of exploitation.

If we don’t reduce our individual footprints in the developed world, the very act of pulling people out of poverty in the developing world will lead to incredibly dangerous levels of emissions. The question is whether we should ask the rich kids to stop eating beef or ask the poor kids to stop eating at all. I know which seems fairer and more ethical to me.

Don’t get me wrong, individual action is not enough by itself. Not by a long shot. We do need systemic change. Among other things, we need governments to build renewable energy infrastructure and provide funding to retrofit houses. We need them to expand and green public transport, impose quotas on cattle herds, set targets for reforestation and protect marine habitats. Unfortunately, this all takes time that we don’t have. Especially at the pace we are going at. Again, climate change is a physical problem. While we argue over the wording of a document, carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere faster each year. Climate waits for no man.

While we fight for systemic change, we must also reduce our individual consumption in the developed world if we are to give people in the developing world time to improve their socioeconomic conditions. If you have quit the meat or stopped flying, that is a good thing. Your efforts have not been for nothing. You have reduced the global average per capita emissions, giving the developing world more time to reduce poverty before it has to start worrying about the resulting emissions.

In philosophy, a distinction is often drawn between necessity and sufficiency. While bread is necessary for a sandwich, for example, it is not sufficient. You also need a filling. I would argue that while both individual and systemic action are necessary in the fight against climate change, neither are sufficient in their own right. Systemic change takes time that we don’t have, and individual change does not give us the emissions reductions that we need. Together, they might have a shot.

In the developed world, we must fight the powers that be and force widespread systemic change. That is the most important thing we can do. In the meantime, however, we must also reduce our own footprints. That is the only way I can see for us to achieve a truly just transition. We cannot be expected to live carbon-free lives in a carbon-rich system. We can, however, be expected to try. Why? Because the alternative is so much worse.

For Peat’s Sake: Bogs, Bord na Móna and the Climate

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My skull hibernated
in the wet nest of my hair.

Which they robbed.
I was barbered
and stripped
by a turfcutter’s spade

who veiled me again
and packed coomb softly
between the stone jambs
at my head and my feet.

-Seamus Heaney

Abbeyleix bog in Co. Laois is a rare example of a bog that has not been utterly destroyed by industrial peat extraction. Many of the peatlands I saw from my window on the bus down here were not so lucky. The barren and lifeless landscape of bogs that have been stripped bare is a common sight in the Irish midlands, and it is becoming more common every day. Abbeyleix very nearly met the same fate back in 2000. If it were not for the dedication and quick thinking of the community, the thousands of species in the bog would be homeless and hundreds of thousands of tonnes more carbon would be in the atmosphere instead of in the ground where it belongs. 

Bogs and Irish culture have been intimately linked for centuries, cropping up in everything from our traditional songs to the work of our most beloved poets. They have provided us with energy, clean water, jobs and a home for our wildlife. Globally, degraded peatlands account for a quarter of all carbon emissions from the land-use sector despite covering only 3% of the land. They also contain 30% of the world’s soil carbon; that’s twice as much carbon as is stored in all the world’s forests. It is estimated that more than 80% of Irish peatlands have been damaged in some way.

Peat forms because the water-logged and acidic conditions of a bog significantly slow the decomposition of bog mosses, also called sphagnum, causing a build-up of organic matter. Emissions from peatlands don’t just come from the burning of the peat; they also come from drainage. When the level of water in a bog (known as the water table) is reduced, this exposes more of the peat to the air. In this dry, oxygen-rich environment, the peat decomposes, releasing all that carbon back into the atmosphere.

Despite owning only 7% of Irish peatlands, the organisation primarily responsible for the industrial extraction of Irish peat is Bord na Móna, a semi-state company which was set up by the government in 1934 under the name ‘the Turf Development Board’. Since the inception of Bord na Móna proper in 1946, the company has been responsible for the development of 80,000 hectares of Irish bogs. Back in 2016, Bord na Móna rebranded themselves with the slogan ‘Naturally Driven’ and tried to position themselves as environmental stewards. The journalist John Gibbons called this campaign “profoundly, irredeemably dishonest” and “an exercise in cynicism”. He also quoted An Taisce as saying “We suggest they drop their new ‘Naturally Driven’ slogan and replace it with the phrase ‘Profit Driven’. Then Bord na Móna would at least be able to sell its business plan with a straight face”.

Abbeyleix bog had been owned by the De Vesci family since the early 1700s. In 1987, Tom De Vesci, who had previously attempted to have the bog designated as a heritage site, was coerced by Bord na Móna into selling the bog. “I was approached many times by Bord na Móna to sell it after my father died in 1983 and I always refused” Tom said in an interview. “But eventually I was informed that Bord na Móna would be taking ownership via a compulsory purchase order at a somewhat lower level of compensation than I would get if I sold it ‘voluntarily’ a few weeks earlier”. In 1989, Bord na Móna cut 66km of drains into the bog in preparation for future peat harvesting.

On Thursday, 20th of July 2000, Chris Uys, a member of the Heritage Company and now development officer for the Community Wetlands Forum, met with Jimmy Dooley of Bord na Móna to discuss plans for a walkway through the bog and to inform Jimmy of concerns regarding its development. The following day, locals noticed unfamiliar pieces of machinery on the bog, which had been delivered to the site by Bord na Móna overnight. Chris Uys raised the alarm in the community that development of the bog was about to begin. That Sunday, local resident Gary O’Keeffe parked a crane in the entrance to the bog under the guise that it had broken down during a bird-watching session in order to keep the rest of the machines out of the bog. By Monday morning, at least 50 people had gathered at the entrance to protest the development, with numbers swelling to around 100 by lunchtime.

After much pressure from the community, Bord na Móna finally agreed to carry out an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) in April of 2001. They found that the Abbeyleix site was of “little or no conservation value”, an assessment which both the Abbeyleix community and the Irish Peatlands Conservation Council (IPCC) considered “incomplete and inaccurate”. An ecologist by the name of Doug McMillan was invited to carry out an independent assessment of the bog. Having only surveyed 20% of the land, Doug had already found over 500 species, and could reasonably conclude that the bog was home to thousands of species, including a butterfly which was protected by the EU. If Bord na Móna really had carried out an EIA, they had either done a poor job or they had lied about the results.

In 2002, An Bord Pleanála found that Abbeyleix bog was not exempted from the requirement for planning permission. This was the first time in Irish history that a peat development went through the planning permission process. Bord na Móna, in true form, took high court action against both the Laois County Council and An Bord Pleanála. In 2008, an ecologist by the name of Jim Ryan carried out another survey, finding that only 1% of the raised bog was still intact and forming peat. I am stunned when Chris tells me that, like in Abbeyleix, only 1% of active raised bog in the country remains. In other words, we have degraded 99% of carbon-rich raised bog nationwide through drainage and peat extraction. In April of 2009, more than 20 years after they were cut, work began to block the drains in Abbeyleix. In April of 2012, the Abbeyleix community signed a lease agreement which meant that the bog would be in their control for the next 50 years, provided that it was primarily used for habitat restoration. David had beaten Goliath.

I met with Chris Uys in the lobby of the picturesque ‘Abbeyleix Manor Hotel’ on the outskirts of the bog. He has brought with him a textbook on peatlands and a folder packed to the brim with documents. When I ask him why peatlands are so important for biodiversity, he tells me that “the interesting thing about the biodiversity in peatlands is that the combination of plants and… the way they interact has a wider role to play than just purely the biodiversity that is there because it helps to retain water content, it has to do with carbon sequestration, and it supports other ecosystems”. He tells me that bogs are very important for breeding birds and that they link different ecosystems together like a natural corridor.

A walk through Abbeyleix bog feels like a walk through the history of this country. There is a calm here that soothes your aching bones like a hot bath. This is what is known rather robotically as a ‘cultural service’; one of many ‘ecosystem services’ provided by bogs like Abbeyleix. These somewhat stomach-churning terms are used by some environmentalists as an attempt to reframe the ecological crisis we have caused in the parlance of capitalism and thus convince business and industry to act. Gazing out over the endless beauty of this ancient landscape, I can’t help but think that it is downright insane to try and put a price on something that existed for so very long before our self-centred species ever dreamed up the concept of money.

Back in 1997, peat fires forced both Singapore and Kuala Lumpur to close their airports for several days. The peat in question was burning over 1,000km away in Indonesia. Scientists have estimated that the CO2 released during this one fire was equivalent to 13-40% of the mean annual global emissions from fossil fuels. The carbon is not the only issue; the vast quantities of smoke released by the fire had serious effects on health, with studies showing decreased lung function in children who were present during the event. According to a study in Archives of Environmental Health, 527 people died in 2 months as a result of the smoke, with 58,000 cases of bronchitis and 1 and a half million cases of acute respiratory infection reported.  Fires like this have happened periodically over the last few decades, with one 2010 event in Russia leading to carbon monoxide levels in the capital that were 6 times the maximum acceptable level.

To the Irish, this all may seem like a distant threat, but were the Wicklow bogs to catch fire, the prevailing wind would carry all that lethal smoke right into the heart of Dublin. John Reilly, the head of the renewable energy branch of Bord na Mona, told me in an interview that “the biggest risk of wildfires is not posed by active peat production areas on drained peatlands, but rather the risk is high on virgin peatlands which are generally covered in vegetation such as gorse and heather”. He said that the major concern when it comes to fires was actually stockpiles of cut peat.

DCU-based peatlands expert John Connolly tells a slightly different story. “In one way he is right that the risk of fire (i.e. fire starting) on a drained industrial peatland may be less if all vegetation is removed. However, a lightning strike could start a fire and in that case drained peatlands are much more vulnerable than virgin (i.e. wet) peatlands”. Dr Connolly sent me a link to a 2016 study in ‘Nature’ which states that “the high burn severity of drained tropical/temperate peatland fires suggests that large-scale peatland drainage and mining in northern peatlands over the last century has also likely made managed northern peatlands more vulnerable to wildfire than natural (undrained) peatlands”. While there is an element of truth in what John Reilly told me, then, it seems that it was not the whole truth.

In 2006, an area of dried and cut peat the same size as Abbeyleix bog caught fire in the Irish midlands, leading to the evacuation of several Longford residents. While it was the stockpiles that caught fire rather than a bog itself, the incident shows how damaging peat fires can be. Smoke from the fire travelled 10 miles north. One Rooskey resident who had suffered from respiratory problems in the past was quoted in the Irish Times as saying “at the moment I am closing my windows and hope that will be enough”. A 2002 study of the Indonesian haze disaster, however, suggests that staying indoors only gets you so far in a situation like this.

They found that indoor concentrations of particulate matter were about half of what they were outside. That was a form of particulate matter known as PM10 because the individual particles are 10 micrometers or smaller in diameter. They could not find any difference, however, in the concentrations of fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, which are particles 2.5 micrometers or less. The researchers said that “perhaps the size of particulates was so small as to travel and intrude into any space; the concentration of pollutants was extremely high, and the indoor environments of buildings in Indonesia were rarely exempt from these pollutants”.

When asked about Mr Reilly’s claim that the presence of vegetation increases the risk of wildfires, Chris Uys replies that “from that point of view yes, that is so. But if you are talking degraded peatlands, degraded means that you have dried. For me, there is a higher risk… when the peat below the surface is dry and there is an ignition of anything above, it starts to smoulder underground as well”. Chris tells me that Abbeyleix has suffered from this very problem; “we had a fire at one stage, and you could just see smoke. On nearer investigation it was actually starting to simmer underground. It just keeps going”. While vegetation fires on the surface are manageable, the dried peat below can keep burning for a very long time and release a lot of carbon before it is extinguished.

Thankfully, Bord na Móna have been trying to get out of the peat business for over a decade, with over half of their revenue coming from non-peat-related activities in 2019. John Reilly, who has been doing excellent work building renewable energy infrastructure with the company, tells me that “Bord na Móna developed the first commercial wind farm in Ireland back in 1992, on a joint venture basis with the ESB, so we have some considerable experience in the sector”. They also announced last year that they were closing 17 of their active bogs, with the remaining 45 bogs to be closed within 7 years. However, some have said that this amounts to greenwashing, since the planned closures are of bogs that have been exhausted and are no longer profitable. As UCD peatlands expert Dr Florence Renou-Wilson put it in an interview with the Guardian, ““It’s a bit of a smokescreen. It’s all revenue-driven… they’re are all done and dusted”.

Bord na Móna is not the only company extracting Irish peat, though it is the largest. A company called Harte Peat has come under fire recently for carrying out large-scale peat extraction without a license in the Derrycrave bog in Westmeath. Photos released last year by ‘Friends of the Irish Environment’ showed that Harte had been cutting the peat right down to the mineral layer below, leaving almost no possibility of recovery. Peat that had formed at a rate of about 1 millimetre a year until it was several meters thick was stripped down to the bone in the geological blink of an eye, depriving animals of their homes and future humans of their right to security. This tragedy has played out countless times across the country over generations, leaving us with little more than a silhouette of the beautiful and important landscapes which once dominated the Irish midlands.

The degradation of Ireland’s peatlands doesn’t just threaten our health, it also threatens our wallets. New regulations require that we start reporting the emissions from our peatlands to the EU from 2021. Ireland is already facing hundreds of millions of euro in fines for failing to meet our emissions targets and this will bring us further off target. Chris tells me that “We were fined 150 million for this already… and we’re gonna be fined again until these people stop… Bord na Móna don’t get fined. It’s the government that gets fined. They merrily go on. They can go on for another 30 years if the government allow them. But we get that fine”.

When asked to what extent Ireland will be able to cope with these changes to EU law, Dr Connolly tells me that “the government and the EPA have made some investments in funding research and research infrastructure over the past few years. These investments will allow scientists to provide some of the detail that is required in the legislation, however much more investment is needed in research, infrastructure and rewetting/restoration as peatlands in Ireland are severely degraded and emissions are unknown in many areas”. But does this mean more fines for the Irish government? “It depends. If peatland emissions can be reduced to zero by the start of the 2026 reporting period, then no. However, current emissions are estimated to be about 11 million tonnes of CO2 … The reduction of these emissions to zero over the next six years will be very challenging.”

I ask Chris if Abbeyleix bog became a net source of emissions following the drainage and, if so, if it is back to being a net sink. “Possibly we are not a net sink yet… the higher the water level the less carbon emissions,” he tells me. “Then it gets to a point where it changes and it starts to give out methane emissions. There is a sweet spot where you have the least emissions. The other problem with degraded peatlands is that if you don’t have vegetation formation, (sphagnum), then it does not negate the methane”. The blocking of the drains has not been in vain, however. Whereas only 1% of the active raised bog remained in 2009, Chris reckons that as much as 10-15% has recovered in the intervening decade.

It takes time for peatlands to regenerate; all the more reason to block as many drains as we can as soon as we can. The light is beginning to fade from the grey clouds overhead as I slip and slide across the wet wooden walkways. The first few drops of rain begin to fall once more on the mounds and ditches of Abbeyleix. This beautiful landscape serves as both a cautionary tale and a beacon of hope. It showcases the terrible consequences of degrading our bogs, but is also a reminder that with elbow-grease, dedication and time we can undo some of the wrongs we have inflicted on the natural world.

Kant Stop, Won’t Stop: Climate Action and the Categorical Imperative

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Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who is now famous for his concept of the ‘categorical imperative’. Similar to the ‘golden rule’ found in many religions (do unto others as you would have them do unto you), the categorical imperative works as a kind of handbook for determining whether an action is moral or immoral. The idea is that you should consider an action moral only if you could sensibly wish that all people in that situation would act in the same way. In other words, before you make a moral decision, you should ask yourself whether it would make sense for everyone to make the same decision.

This is known as the ‘test of universalisation’. If you can wish that a ‘maxim’ (a rule of conduct) be universalised, then that maxim is moral. If the universalisation of the maxim results in a logical inconsistency, however, that maxim should not be followed. This sounds like a complex idea, but once you start to analyse a few examples it becomes very clear. In this piece, I’ll be looking at some lifestyle decisions which are relevant to climate change through the lens of this rule to find out what Kant might have thought about climate action.

Consider the open-and-shut case of the maxim ‘I should kill people who irritate me in order to better society’. So what happens when this maxim is universalised? If everyone who was irritated resorted immediately to murder, society would break down. If irritation were a just cause for murder, I would’ve already killed several people today and I’m sure several people would’ve killed me. This is a society that is in no one’s best interests. More than that, it is the disintegration of society itself. The universalisation of the maxim ‘I should kill people who irritate me in order to better society’, then, is self-defeating, since it results in the breaking-down of the very thing it originally sought to improve; society.

Another example is that of lying. Kant thought that if everyone lied all the time, then truth itself would become meaningless. This generated what he thought of as a logical inconsistency. Usually people lie to gain some sort of advantage over the person they are lying to. If everyone lied all the time, that advantage would disappear and the reason you were lying in the first place would become null and void. A common criticism of Kant is that his rule is too strict and emotionless. People take the categorical imperative to mean that no one can lie at any time for any reason, since lying fails the test of universalisation. I think that this is a misinterpretation of Kant’s views. Consider this example:

Your friend knocks on your door, terrified. They tell you that a murderer is after them and ask for somewhere to hide. You agree. Sure enough, moments later a man wielding an axe shows up at the door and asks if you know where your friend is. People say that according to Kant, it is immoral to lie to the murderer because the categorical imperative forbids it and you must therefore tell the murderer where your friend is. I disagree with this interpretation. For me, the categorical imperative can be more specific than ‘should I lie’ or ‘should I kill’.

Consider the maxim ‘I should lie if it saves my friend’s life from a murderer’. I don’t think Kant would have any problem saying that a sensible person could wish that maxim to be a universal law. If everyone lied all the time, a logical inconsistency would be generated since truth would become meaningless. If everyone lied only to divert murderers from their victims, however, the only result would be a better world. Even if this interpretation misrepresents Kant’s actual views, I see no reason why this simple revision should not silence many of his critics.

Ok, now that we have a basic understanding of Kant’s idea, let’s try to apply it to climate action. Consider the maxim ‘I should drive to work every day’. Let’s universalise that. If everyone drove to work every day, the resulting emissions would have catastrophic consequences for the planet. Climate change would soon reach a tipping point and set off feedback loops that we would be powerless to halt. This would cause the economy to collapse, likely leading to the loss of your job.

As in the case of lying, the universalisation of this maxim defeats the purpose of what the maxim was trying to achieve in the first place. It is not helpful to get to work quickly and hassle-free if your job no longer exists. What’s more, if everyone drove every day then we would soon run out of petrol and then nobody would be able to drive to work at all. Those sound like logical inconsistencies to me.

What about ‘I should eat meat every day’? This falls into the same problem. If everyone ate meat every day, the resources and land required to supply all this meat would most likely exceed the resources and land available on planet earth. Already, one third of all ice-free land is used to raise livestock and we are nowhere near everyone eating meat every day. More than that, the methane emissions from the livestock would greatly accelerate climate change, leading to desertification of land and rising sea-levels, further reducing the land available to raise livestock. The ultimate effect of everyone eating meat every day is that it would quickly become impossible to eat meat every day, thus defeating the original purpose of the maxim.

I think you probably get the point but I’ll do another one anyway. What about the maxim ‘I should leave my lights on when I’m not in the room’? The net result of universalising this maxim is that the resources required to generate the electricity to keep that light on would quickly run out. In addition, the increase in the severity and frequency of natural disasters that would occur would greatly increase the chance that your home would be destroyed by a hurricane or flood, thus rendering your lightbulbs kaput. The effect of everyone leaving their lights on is that pretty soon no one will be able to turn their lights on at all.

You may be thinking at this point that universalising any maxim at all will lead to logical inconsistencies. Not true. If you go back and try to universalise the opposite maxim to the examples above, you will find that none result in such an inconsistency. I can wish that no one drives to work every day, since this would only result in cleaner air, less global warming and ultimately a better world.

Universalising the maxim ‘I should not drive to work every day’ is logically consistent, since the maxim can still be followed in the world brought about by the universalisation. In other words, in a world in which no one drives to work every day, it still makes perfect sense to say ‘I should not drive to work every day’. This does not mean that there can’t be exceptions made for people with disabilities or no other means of transport. As in the case of the murderer at the door, we can simply alter the maxim to be more specific. For example; ‘I should not drive to work every day if a viable alternative is available to me’.

What about the maxim ‘I should not eat meat every day’? If no one ate meat, the planet would be far better for it. We would increase the food available to us, since crop agriculture is far more efficient than animal agriculture when it comes to land and resource use. If you give 100 grams of protein to a cow, the meat that you get back will contain only 10 grams of protein, since the cow will use up the rest by walking, breathing and maintaining its body temperature. In a world in which no one eats meat, it still makes perfect sense to say ‘I should not eat meat’. There is no logical inconsistency there, since the universalisation of the maxim does not cause it to fall apart.

I won’t bother re-analysing the last example, since I’m sure you have the gist by now. I will, however, take this time to head-off an objection that I’m sure people will have. You may argue that it is not the actions of normal people which are causing global warming, but rather the actions of a select few who are producing emissions on an industrial scale. It is true that 70% of all emissions since the industrial revolution have been produced by just 100 companies, but this line of reasoning only gets you so far. Who do you think corporations are producing the emissions for?

Corporations only stand to profit from polluting the earth because we continue to pay them for it. To go back to Kant for a second, if everyone made a conscious effort to reduce their energy usage, then the companies who generate that electricity from fossil fuels would have no reason to continue ramping up their operation. It’s really very simple; supply and demand. So long as the demand for things like electricity and beef remains high, it is still profitable to burn as much fuel and raise as many cattle as you possibly can.

If the demand were to drop by, say, 50%, then the only way to keep the operation profitable is to reduce the supply by 50% too. This is because it is expensive to produce electricity and beef, and there is no financial incentive to make that initial investment if no one is willing to pay for the finished product. So while corporations carry the responsibility for producing the emissions, every individual in the western world has facilitated these crimes against humanity by providing a financial motivation for their continuation. It is for this reason that we cannot simply dismiss the impact of individual actions.

Anyway, my point here is that according to one of the greatest moral philosophers who ever lived, every action which contributes to or accelerates climate change should be considered immoral. To be clear, I am not saying that everyone who drives to work every day, eats meat or leaves their lights on is a terrible person. Necessity, cultural norms and misinformation have created a world in which climate-damaging actions are seen as morally-neutral standard practice. What I am saying is that given some reflection, those people should come to the conclusion that taking the bus, eating plants and turning the lights off would be better moral choices. No one is inherently good or bad. Our moral value is determined not by who we are, but rather by the thousands of tiny choices we make day to day.

People have a tendency to become defensive when it comes to their morality. They are not willing to accept that what they have been doing their whole lives was immoral, since the implication would be that they themselves are an immoral person. Consider the person who does and says blatantly racist things, but recoils in anger and disgust when they are accused of racism. The truth is that there is something wrong with the way we have been living our lives in recent decades, as evidenced by the fact that if we continue on our current path, life will become a daily struggle for survival before you can say ‘drive-thru cheeseburger’. What is needed now is for us to put our pride aside and accept that we fucked up, rather than retreating into a tortoise-shell of denial. Why? Because by the time we finally come out of our shells, it may be too late to change course.

Money for Nothing: The Advantages of Universal Basic Income

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The idea that we could pay everyone enough money to live on with no strings attached has been around for hundreds of years. With income inequality and job automation on the rise in recent years, however, the idea has started to make more and more sense.

UBI and Income Inequality

Universal Basic Income (UBI) means that each person is paid (by the government) enough money that they can afford food, shelter and even a carefully budgeted social life without the need for work. The extremely poor would be paid exactly the same weekly wage as the extremely rich. Where would this money come from? A tax on the obscenely rich of course. A 40% tax on Jeff Bezos’ wealth would yield around 61 billion USD, leaving him with a measly $91 billion for himself. The $61 billion that comes from taxing one man could be used to pay someone else $500 dollars a week for 2 million, 346 thousand, 153 years. That’s nearly 12 times longer than our species (homo sapiens) have existed.

Bezos himself would be left with more money than it is possible to spend in a lifetime, even living the most extravagant of lives. What’s more, he would continue to generate huge quantities of wealth through both the profits of Amazon and the monumental interest which accrues when one has $91 billion in one’s pocket. This is not necessarily how UBI would work in practice. Rather than a wealth tax, the money could instead come from taxing the income of the extremely rich. This avoids the problem of trying to tax assets like property and warehouse robots, but the drawback is that it is easier for billionaires to hide their income than it is for them to hide their robots.

Incidentally, working 24/7 with no breaks at the US minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, it would take 2 million, 393 thousand, 324 years to make as much money as Jeff Bezos currently owns. That is also roughly 12 times as long as sapiens have been around (aren’t numbers fun?). The question these figures pose for me is this: What could Jeff Bezos possibly have done in his life that is of equal value to 2 and a half million years of minimum wage work?

The way the system is currently set up necessitates that the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. People working on minimum wage make just enough to get by, leaving them with basically no possibility of saving or investing in education. The super-rich, on the other hand, are actually paid just for being rich (in the form of interest). People who are struggling to make ends meet may be forced to borrow money from the very rich. These loans accrue interest, meaning that the net effect is that money is taken away from the economically disadvantaged people who need the loan and funneled upwards into the bank accounts of the people who could afford to give the loan. These factors, along with automation of jobs and a few others, are why income inequality has been rising and rising and showing no sign of slowing down. Taxing the rich and using the money for UBI would go a long way towards closing that gap.

Many researchers have drawn a negative correlation between income inequality and self-reported happiness. This makes sense in terms of both the numbers and the philosophy. Of course people in more equal societies are happier. Every country has a finite amount of resources, and how fairly those resources are distributed determines how many people are struggling to put food on the table and how many people can comfortably provide for themselves and those who depend on them. Given the link between happiness and inequality, it follows that a system such as UBI which dramatically decreases inequality would also lead to a dramatic increase in happiness.

UBI and Employment

These days, when someone is called a ‘Luddite’, it is typically used to mean that they are opposed to the progress of technology. An example would be someone who refuses to buy a smartphone. However, the word originally referred to a revolutionary group who were active more than 200 years ago. The Luddites were weavers who were famous for smashing spinning jennies, machines that threatened to put them out of work, but they were not necessarily opposed to technology as many people believe. Instead, they were opposed to the obscenely rich upper class who owned the spinning jennies, from which the workers reaped no benefit. Spinning Jennies were not new technology, in fact they were invented 50 years before the first Luddite ever smashed one.

The problem was that when something was woven by hand, the weaver could receive the majority of the profits, whereas if it was woven by a spinning jenny, the majority of the profits would go to whichever wealthy man owned the machine. The Luddites were early trade union activists who protested unfair wages by destroying their employer’s revenue-generating property. This problem has only gotten worse since the protests began in 1811. Many people, like fast food workers or cashiers, make a living by operating machines which belong to extremely rich CEOs who have very little indeed to do with the actual production process. Amazon currently have 45,000 robots operating in its warehouses, generating revenue but paying no tax. A barely related but nonetheless interesting side note is that Amazon’s warehouse robots have accidentally opened multiple cannisters of bear repellent in the last few years, leading to the hospitalisation of dozens of employees.  

About 50% of workers are predicted to lose their jobs to machines by 2050. The number of jobs that are beyond the reach of automation has been shrinking ever since the Luddites banjaxed their first jenny, and the rate at which they are disappearing has become more and more rapid with the passing of time. Before anyone thought to use a dummy, the job of scarecrow was carried out by children, who were paid one penny and a swede for their troubles. For me, it makes perfect sense that jobs like this were lost to time. That is why we build technology; to reduce the amount of work we need to do ourselves. Often the jobs that are taken by machines are ones that we only do because we need the money, not because we find them fulfilling or meaningful. With UBI, we could leave those jobs to technology and focus instead on projects which make the world a better place.

The main issue here, for me, is not that jobs are lost to technology. New jobs are constantly being created to meet new demands. While human scarecrows have gone the way of the dodo, uber drivers and dogwalkers have popped up in their stead. That’s evolution baby. The priority should not be to desperately cling to jobs that we no longer need or want (like coal mining or weapons manufacturing) but rather to provide adequate training to the people doing these jobs so that they may transition to ones which are more useful to society (like building renewable energy infrastructure or vertical farming).

People do not do jobs which harm society because they want to. They do them because it is necessary to put food on the table. By providing food and shelter to everyone, we mitigate the external pressure to work jobs which harm society and encourage people to focus their attention instead on what gives their lives meaning or makes them happy. What they choose to do will be more likely to be in the best interest of society than what they are currently forced to do to survive in a broken system.

Another way that UBI could benefit society is by massively streamlining the welfare process. Right now, huge numbers of people are employed to sign people up to welfare, make sure that people are looking for work and carry out the administration and bureaucracy involved in a system which requires people to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they are starving before it will give them something to eat. These administration jobs could largely be done away with under UBI, since welfare would be replaced by the very simple process of giving everyone exactly the same amount of money regardless of their situation. The money we pay to welfare officers and administrators could be used to help fund UBI, and the people who are doing these jobs would be freed up to pursue more fulfilling goals. Hell, one of them may be the next Jimi Hendrix but they never had the time or resources to pick up a guitar before.

What about the claim that if everyone is paid to do nothing, then no one will do anything? This, in my view, is simply false. People have an innate drive to make something of themselves. I doubt you would last more than a week doing absolutely nothing before you decided to get up out of bed and make your name mean something. In addition, UBI does not mean that there is no reason to get a paying job. Your weekly wage as an unemployed person would be enough to live on, yes, but it would not be enough for a particularly comfortable life. Most people would still work a few days a week to make money for holidays, luxury items and projects which enrich their lives. This idea is supported by preliminary evidence from the most complete pilot study ever carried out in relation to UBI.

From 2017-2018, 2,000 people were randomly selected in Finland to receive €560 per month with no strings attached. Researchers then compared those who participated in the study to a control group of 173,000 people with respect to several factors including employment rates and life satisfaction. For all of 2017, the test group earned, on average, just €21 less than the control group from employment. This extremely small difference tentatively suggests that UBI will not lead to a significant reduction in employment, if any. The difference in trust and life satisfaction between the two groups, however, was far more significant. Basic income recipients reported much higher levels of trust in other people, the legal system and politicians. They also reported much higher confidence in their future, financial situation and ability to influence societal matters. In addition, 54.8% of basic income recipients self-assessed their health as being ‘good’ or ‘very good’, compared to just 46.2% of the control group. The study only ended in December of 2018, so the full report has not yet been released, but the preliminary evidence suggests that under a UBI system, employment rates would stay about the same, whereas happiness, trust and health would benefit hugely. The full report is scheduled for release at the end of 2019.

UBI and Society

To say that UBI is unrealistic because the rich will not allow it to happen is to succumb to a form of brainwashing. There, I said it. There are more of us than there are of them, and yet somehow they have convinced us that they will always have all the money and we will always have none. The most important tool in their arsenal is your belief that they are too powerful to oppose. By arguing that they will not allow it to happen and therefore we should not even try, you are playing right into their hands. If you think that UBI would be good for society (as I do) then you should fight to make it happen. I am not saying that we will not come up against any resistance from the financial elite. We very much will. What I am saying is that one of the ways in which they have resisted change already is by convincing you that they are so firmly in control that nothing can be done.

UBI would give us the freedom to do what we want to do with our lives. It would provide the foundation for an equal society, in which those who were born with nothing can make something of themselves and those who were born with everything get a smaller slice of the global pie. The Luddites thought that it was unfair that people who had inherited enough money to buy spinning jennies were taking all the profits while the people working their fingers to the bone operating those machines were making a pittance. I wholeheartedly agree. The private ownership of revenue-generating technology like tills, deep-fat-fryers and warehouse robots has been a significant factor in the long-term trend toward a top-heavy and unjust society in which some people have mansions to themselves while others share tiny flats or worse, sleep on cold and unforgiving streets.

Automation, inheritance, interest, loans, tax loopholes and unfair wages have created a society in which some people have everything and everyone else has nothing. There are things we can do to alleviate this problem like raising the minimum wage or corporate tax, but none do more to solve the problem than UBI. The disadvantaged majority have always fought for equality and the advantaged minority have always resisted to maintain their advantage. Enough is enough. We are more connected now than ever before in human history, making it easier than ever before to organise ourselves against those in power. We need to elect people who are not afraid to push back against corporations and sign into law measures that will help the 99% and hurt the 1%. For too long the discourse has been controlled by people who benefit from things staying exactly as they are. The new generation has shown time and time again that we want change and it is only a matter of time before that wish is granted. Do not believe for one second that they have all the power. If we do that, they have won. We have the power. We can force change.

Gene Genie: The Scientist who Jumped the Gun on Gene Editing

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First published in the UCD College Tribune

In November of 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui made an announcement that astonished the scientific community. He claims to have helped to make the first ever gene-edited babies with the use of a revolutionary technology called CRISPR. The babies, twins by the names of Lulu and Nana, were born to a father infected with HIV, the virus which causes AIDS. If Dr He’s experiment is successful, the twins will have an immunity to the virus. While this may seem at face value to be a noble goal, many believe that the risks involved outweigh the benefits.

Dr He’s experiments used a type of editing called ‘germline’ editing, meaning that any children that Lulu and Nana may have in the future will also carry this immunity. Germline editing involves making changes to reproductive cells. This means that any changes made to the individual’s genome will be passed on from generation to generation. This can be distinguished from somatic editing, in which the only person affected by the edit is the person who undergoes the procedure.

One reason why somatic editing is seen as more acceptable than germline is that people who undergo somatic editing have given informed consent prior to the procedure. While the parents of Lulu and Nana have given consent, the children themselves and any future children the twins may conceive have not consented to the potentially high risks. While HIV immunity could potentially be inherited by the descendants of these CRISPR babies, so could a myriad of unwanted and possibly even deadly side-effects.

Another concern that has been raised is that it is not clear whether Dr He’s treatment fulfilled an ‘unmet medical need’. With modern HIV treatments, someone who is carrying the virus can have the same expected lifespan as someone who is not and their chance of transmitting the virus to their children can be brought down to just 5%. Hence, geneticists worldwide have called for a moratorium on human germline trials. Critics say that gene editing technology has not yet been developed or tested sufficiently for use on human embryos. We simply do not yet know the long-term effects of genetic modification using CRISPR.

Despite a myriad of imaginable ethical hazards, CRISPR has the potential to revolutionize the biomedical sciences. CRISPR allows biologists to edit genetic information by using an enzyme called Cas9, which has the ability to cut strands of DNA. The process was pioneered in bacteria as a defence mechanism against viruses. Geneticists use CRISPR to target specific areas of genetic code and cut it in a specified region. Cutting a strand of DNA in the right place can cause a certain gene to be disabled, activated or replaced by one introduced by scientists. The possible applications of CRISPR range from curing cancer to eliminating malaria from mosquitos. One team at Harvard led by Prof. George Church even famously claimed that they will be able to ostensibly resurrect the woolly mammoth in the next year or two using the technology.

Some scientists, including mammoth-man George Church, have come out in defence of He. While Church had reservations regarding He’s level of transparency, he suggested that enough studies had been carried out that maybe it was the right time to end the moratorium anyway. While he accepted the risk of off-target mutations, he said that the risk ‘may never be zero’ and that Dr He had done enough to minimise it. This contradicts the views of most scientists and institutions, including a statement released by Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health. Collins denounced He’s work, saying, among other things, that ‘the possibility of damaging off-target effects has not been satisfactorily explored’.

Genes are extremely complex things. Locating a single gene and modifying it requires an extraordinary level of precision and even when it is successfully targeted it is impossible to fully predict the consequences. Though we have been studying certain genes for a very long time, we still do not know what the indirect effects of certain edits may be as no long-term studies of how edits affect the human body have been carried out as of yet. Such unintended effects are known as ‘off-target mutations’.

The final concern is perhaps the most serious. While CRISPR may in the future be used to treat some forms of cancer, it is possible that premature germline editing like the kind He carried out may actually increase the risk of cancer in people like Lulu, Nana and their descendants. Two recent studies have raised concerns about an off-target effect that CRISPR may have on a gene for a protein known as the ‘guardian of the genome’: p53. This protein is responsible for repairing or destroying damaged DNA. A mutated or ineffective p53 gene has been shown to be responsible for nearly half of all ovarian cancers and a significant portion of many other types of cancer too. CRISPR interventions activate p53, since DNA has been cut and must be either repaired or destroyed and p53 undoes the work CRISPR has done. The worry is that this could result in a kind of artificial selection on the cellular level, as CRISPR is more successful in cells with ineffective copies of the p53 gene, which are more at risk of becoming cancer cells. So far, only certain forms of cells have shown evidence of raising the risk of cancer when modified using CRISPR and no company is attempting clinical trials using CRISPR on these cells. Some scientists have called the recent studies concerning p53 a ‘cautionary tale’ since they may affect future CRISPR trials that are yet to begin.

CRISPR is an incredible technology that will surely be responsible for many breakthroughs in biological and medical science. It may someday give us powers that we cannot even conceive of today. However, that time has not yet come. It is imperative that we do not jump the gun. Dangerous, premature experiments like Dr He’s harm the public perception of gene editing and, in turn, harm the funding available for important research. While we should not give up on gene editing, we should also not use it to play with human lives until we know more about the benefits and the risks.

Opting Out- The Future of Organ Donation

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First Published in UCD College Tribune

Organ donation has long been considered an important and cost-effective treatment for a variety of conditions which lead to organ failure. For many patients suffering from such conditions, transplantation is the only chance for survival. Since 2010, approximately a million organs have been donated worldwide. Despite both the effectiveness of the treatment and the general public support for organ donation, there is a persistent global shortage of transplantable organs. In recent years, governments and regulatory bodies have been exploring a variety of ways to decrease this shortage, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

This article summarises the most significant regulatory and technological developments around the world and evaluates their effectiveness in increasing the availability of transplantable organs, focussing on the move from an ‘opt-in’ to an ‘opt-out’ system. The importance of informing the public on how states can legislate to increase the efficiency of their donation system cannot be underestimated in the fight to improve a system which saves countless lives but is capable of saving many more.

In an opt-in, or ‘informed consent’ system, organs cannot be harvested unless the donor has given explicit consent during their life. The presumption is that nobody has consented until we know otherwise. Countries which use this system include Ireland, America, the UK, Germany and Australia. Last year Ireland announced that it will join the long, and ever-growing, list of countries which use an opt-out system. By contrast, in an opt-out, or ‘presumed consent’ system, the presumption is that everyone has consented unless they have explicitly refused. Countries which use this system include Spain, Belgium, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Sweden and Turkey.

A highly regarded 2006 study in the Journal of Health Economics showed that countries with opt-out systems have donation rates 25-30% higher than those which require explicit consent. This makes perfect sense, especially considering evidence from the same study, which states that while 85% of US adults support organ donation, only 28% are registered donors. An opt-out system could bring those numbers much closer together.

The same pattern of widespread support for donation but low numbers of registered donors seen in the US appears around the globe. Busy lives and lack of motivation mean that many people who would consent if formally asked simply do not specify that they would like to donate, and this contributes to the shortage of transplantable organs. Would it not be better if inertia and busy lives resulted in more organs for transplantation rather than fewer?

Given that far more people support donation than not, an opt-out system also means that the presumption of the law is in line with the majority wish. A simple legislative shift has the power both to save lives and make the law more representative of how people actually feel about organ donation. Spain has been the world’s leader in organ donation for 25 years running by a significant margin. The most cited reason for this is their efficient opt-out system. Spain’s success can also be linked to better hospital protocols and the fact that they do not cap the age at which donor organs will be considered. High public awareness may also contribute to Spain’s edge over other opt-out countries.

Governments have also tried to increase the availability of organs by applying the ‘priority rule’, where people who are on the donation register are given priority when organs are being allocated. If there are two potential recipients who are in the same stage of organ failure, but only one of them is on the register, then that person will receive the organ first. The idea is that people will consent to donation on the basis that it will increase their chance of survival if they are ever in need of a transplant themselves.

While on the surface this tactic seems to appeal to self-interest, it can also be seen as a reminder of the hypocrisy of benefitting from a system to which you do not contribute. You cannot expect others to donate their organs to you if you refuse to donate your organs to others. This tactic for decreasing the shortage of transplantable organs has also proved, usually alongside an opt-out system, to be an effective tool for saving lives.

The final policy I address is controversial; in almost all organ donation systems worldwide, the family of the deceased has the power to veto the consent given by the deceased during their life. Even Spain gives families the power of veto, though high public awareness means that very few families actually do so. There is no reason, in my view, that families should be given this power. It is a violation of the donor’s autonomy and yet another obstacle between a potential recipient and the organs that could save their life. If my family has a problem with organ donation, they can choose not to donate their own organs, but what happens to my body is my call and mine alone.

According to UNOS, around 20 people die every day in the US alone due to a lack of transplantable organs. By making simple legislative changes like removing the family’s power to veto and introducing opt-out donation and the priority rule, they could in theory cut that number in half. This is not some elevated ethical debate to be discussed in classrooms. What legislators decide with respect to this issue has incalculable effects on normal people.

None of us know if and when we may require an organ transplant. We are all vulnerable to the dangers of disease, age and injury. By doing everything in our power to increase the number of organs available, not only do we save the lives of others, but we also ensure that if the time comes when we are in need ourselves, we can rest assured that there is an efficient and sensible system in place to save us.

As White as Coal: The Subjectivity of Colour Perceptions

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First Published in UCD College Tribune  

Imagine two young children are being taught the names of the primary colours. They are each presented with a tomato. One child sees a blue object and the other sees a yellow object. Both, however, are told that tomatoes are red. Once the children have internalised this label, if you present them with a series of objects of different colours, they will both be able to pick out which objects are red, even if they don’t see the same thing.

So how do you know that the red you see is the same as the red I see? This is an old philosophical question. Descartes, the ‘father of modern philosophy’, denied that colours were objective qualities of objects. He thought that when we perceive an object as being red, we are not given evidence that the object is red, but only that it produces a particular sensation in us. This is by no means just a question for dead philosophers. To this day, scientists are still attempting to find an answer.

Broadly speaking, the scientific view of colour perception relies on three key factors: the wavelength of light reflected, the apparatus whereby we gather a signal from light, and the processing of that signal by the brain. Different wavelengths of light are said to correspond to different colours. At the high energy end of the spectrum we have red light (short wavelength) and at the low energy end, we have blue light (long wavelength). This, of course, is not the full electromagnetic spectrum but only the tiny section that we can see. Different objects appear to be different colours because their surfaces reflect different wavelengths of light into our eyes. However, this does not tell us how our bodies perceive these differences.

Rods and cones have long been known to affect how we see colour. Each cone contains a different photopigment, proteins which change shape in response to light, triggering chemical reactions which send a signal to the brain. Humans have three different types of cones which pick up red, green and blue light. Rods allow us to see in low-light but since there is only one type, we cannot distinguish between colours as easily when it is dark. This is why we see in ‘black and white’ at night but in glorious technicolour during the day.

The final stage of colour perception is the processing of information sent by rods and cones to the brain. Since our cones can only pick up three colours of light, the brain must do most of the work when it comes to distinguishing between colours. When we perceive something as yellow, for example, it is because our cones have picked up red and green light simultaneously and our brain has processed this information to give us the sensation of perceiving yellow.

Colour blindness occurs either when there is a fault in one of the cones or in the pathway to the brain itself. The most common form is a fault in the ‘red’ cone, which leaves sufferers unable to effectively distinguish between red and green. On the other end of the spectrum are ‘tetrachromats’ who have four different types of cone. Birds are tetrachromats. They are sensitive to ultraviolet light which is invisible to the human eye. Some studies have suggested that up to 3% of women are tetrachromats, with their fourth type of cone cell allowing them to differentiate between red and green better than the rest of us. The reason there are more tetrachromat women than men is that the cone cell genes are carried on the X chromosome.

Male squirrel monkeys lack a cone containing red photopigments, meaning that they can’t see red light. In 2009, however, researchers at the University of Washington experimented with using gene therapy to imbue existing cones in the eyes of two monkeys with red photopigment. After the therapy, the monkeys were able to see red, showing how versatile colour perception is, and how crucial our individual biology is to how we see the world.

Now that we’ve had a brief run-through of the mechanisms which allow us to see colour difference, we can begin to ask how the scientific view helps us to answer our original question: how can I know that my red is the same as your red? The short answer, in my view, is that science provides little help in this regard. It can confirm that we all consistently identify the same objects with the same labels, but we knew this already. Though science describes and explains the physical process which allows colour perception to take place, it does not tell us anything about what it feels like to perceive colour. If I show you a tomato, you will tell me that it is red because the colour you see is the colour you call red. I will call it red because the colour I see is the colour that I call red. Even if the colour we see is completely different, this won’t cause us confusion when identifying objects. All that matters is that we use the same label.

It seems to me that we are likely never to find an empirical answer to this question. No amount of science can allow us to see through someone else’s eyes. We will always be confined to our own perception of the world and our own alone. This sensory isolation requires that we can never know the quality of someone else’s experience. Even if a scientist could hook someone’s perceptions up to a computer screen, the colours seen by the scientist on the screen would be processed by the scientist’s eyes and brain in a way that could be radically different to the way the subject is processing them. The only way we could truly know if people perceive colours the same way is if we could become someone else. Unfortunately, outside of Freaky Friday and Quantum Leap, this is not an option.

Is There a Relationship Between Income Inequality and Happiness on a National Scale?

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We’ve all heard Bernie Sanders talk about how the top 1% of earners in the world own more than half of all global wealth. Unfortunately for most, Bernie is not wrong. In recent years, income inequality has been growing globally at an alarming and ever-increasing rate.

It has been growing, however, at vastly different speeds in different countries. It seems that the way in which a country legislates has a real and important effect on inequality. In this piece, I’ll examine the possible relationship between income inequality and happiness by looking at figures from, among others, the World Happiness Report (WHR) and the World Inequality Report (WIR)

It is definitely worth noting that happiness is a subjective and complex notion which surely depends on any number of factors outside of wealth. My aims here are simply to a) showcase some pieces of evidence (in the form of graphs from various sources) which suggest a link between inequality and happiness and b) to provide a largely theoretical discussion of the possible mechanisms for such a correlation and what the implications are if the correlation holds water.

Before I go any further, I’ll tell you a little about the measurements being used. For happiness (or more accurately ‘subjective wellbeing’), the figures come from so-called ‘Cantril ladder’ answers. The Cantril ladder question is simply asking people to rate how happy they are on a scale of 1 to 10. On which rung of the ladder do you think you are? An important point to mention is that the ‘0’ and the ’10’ on the scale are defined by the person being asked the question. One issue with this measurement is that answers may be more or less truthful depending on the culture in which they are being given. For example, it could be the case that Norwegian culture encourages people to exaggerate their happiness, skewing results.

For inequality measurements, the Gini Coefficient is perhaps the most useful here. The Gini Index shows how much inequality there is in a country on a scale of 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality) by measuring the “average distance between the income or wealth of all the pairs of individuals” (WIR). Some graphs included in this report, however, use more tools than just the Gini.

Oishi and Kesebir (Link in Sources)

Back in the seventies, Richard Easterlin, the ‘father of happiness economics’,  formulated what came to be known as the Easterlin paradox. He found that while the rich people within a country were generally happier than the poor, richer countries were not necessarily happier than poor ones. While the US is the wealthiest country on earth, for example, it ranks just eighteenth in the 2018 World Happiness Report. Easterlin also found that an increase in the wealth of a country did not bring with it an increase in happiness. These results were very surprising and seemed to contradict themselves. Some researchers, like Shigehiro Oishi and Selin Kesebir, think that the final missing variable which explains Easterlin’s paradox is income inequality.

From World Happpiness Report – Link in Sources

The above graph from the WHR shows that while average US income more than doubled over the studied period, happiness was the same if not lower in 2016 than it was in the early seventies. 

There could, of course, be any number of reasons for the findings shown in the above graph (WHR figure 7.1). A possible explanation is the idea of diminished returns. This is the concept that as we acquire more and more wealth, the happiness that a given quantity of money brings us diminishes. If most people won fifteen grand on the lottery, for example, the money would transform their lives for the better. If Bill Gates or Donald Trump won the same amount, it is debatable whether they would even notice.

Diminished returns could be one of the theoretical reasons why inequality should affect happiness. If, as the data shows, the majority of global wealth is being accumulated by people who already have plenty to spare, there will not be a huge ‘return’ of happiness. In a perfectly equal world, everybody requires the same amount to be satisfied.  In a perfectly unequal world, the majority of people require little to be satisfied but do not receive even that because all the money is tied up in the bank accounts of people who take their yachts for granted.

From World Inequality Report – Link in Sources

Easterlin’s hypothesis was that our happiness depends not on the absolute wealth of the country we live in, but rather where we rank in the social pecking order within the country. This is the concept of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, which could also be a possible mechanism whereby inequality may affect happiness. In a perfectly equal world, people look around and see that everyone around them has the same amount of money they do. In a perfectly unequal world, the vast majority of people can look around and see some people who own more money than they could make in a million lifetimes at their salary. This is not to say that everyone would be unhappy because of petty jealousy but it is disheartening for someone who is starving to see someone else participating in an eating competition until they make themselves sick. Higher income inequality means more people starving and more people who have enough money to last a hundred lifetimes, lying dormant and useless in an offshore bank account.

From World Inequality Database – Link in Sources

Figures from the World Inequality Database show that while the income of the Russian population grew by a total of 34% between 1980 and 2016, the income of the top 0.001% over the same period in Russia grew by a gargantuan 25,269%. When we look at the global rankings, we see that, for the most part, the most equal countries are also the happiest and the least equal are the least happy. Some readers may question here whether correlation implies causation or if external factors may be influencing the data. Happiness, after all is a slippery and complicated thing to measure. In the US, for example, low happiness levels relative to wealth may be due to such factors as high rates of gun violence, racism and obesity or any number of other problems.

From the Guardian – Link in Sources

However, if we look at the trends over time on a global scale, there seems to be a link and it is important that we explain that link if we are to learn how best to organise society in terms of subjective wellbeing. Perhaps some countries have both high happiness and low inequality because they have effective governments with a knack for social policy. These governments may provide the infrastructure for happiness through effective legislation aimed at increasing public wellbeing. Might it not be their legislation in other areas which increases national happiness, thus making our apparent link redundant?

It makes sense to me to conclude, at least, that part of the effective policy required to increase national happiness is legislation designed to minimise income inequality. Raising the minimum wage. Raising taxes for the wealthy and using that money for social goods. This is what smart governments do. I for one favour going one step further and introducing a universal basic income, a move which would dramatically reduce the wealth gap if carried out correctly. That, however, is a topic for another post. Legislation influences both the happiness of a country and its place in the Gini index. What is good for income equality may also be good for happiness.

Research Sources

Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being – OECD

Income Inequality Explains Why Economic Growth Does Not Always Translate to an Increase in Happiness – Shigehiro Oishi and Selin Kesebir (2015)

Income Inequality and Happiness – Shigehiro Oishi, Selin Kesebir and Ed Diener (2011)

Inequality index: where are the world’s most unequal countries?– The Guardian

Mapping Three Decades of Rising Income Inequality, State by State – Richard Florida

Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction  – Christopher J. Boyce, Gordon D. A. Brown and Simon C. Moore

Purchasing Power Parities – OECD

Richest 1% own half the world’s wealth, study finds – Rupert Neate

The World Factbook – The CIA

World Happiness Report

Word Inequality Report

 Header Image Credit: Prazis Images (via Big Think)