Friedrich von Hayek died in Freiburg, Germany, aged 92, on 23 March, 1992 – a few months after the Soviet Union voted for its own dissolution.

The funeral was attended by around one hundred family members and invited guests. It was a overcast and windy day. Vaclav Klaus, the finance minister and future prime minister of the former communist Czech Republic arrived late.

Hayek, the recipient of the Nobel Prize, had lived a fascinating life during a tumultuous period of history. He remained convinced of the “spontaneous order” of the free market and that inequality was an inescapable feature of human existence.

From his deathbed he told a reporter: “I believe in general that the idea of justice is more closely met by a freely competitive market than by any deliberate allocation of income to some imagined ideal of the kind”.

The Right Circumstances

His life is evidence of what a single man can achieve in the right circumstances, and as fellow neoliberal Antony Fisher would have said, the embodiment of the fact that ideas have consequences. He was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom by President George Bush Senior in 1991, for example, but had been too frail to attend in person.

In 1947, Hayek founded the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), an international group of economists, historians and philosophers; he was convinced the MPS was crucial to the triumph of neoliberalism around the world.

However, as his biographer Alan Ebenstein would note: “Hayek was virtually forgotten in England during the 1950s and ’60s. The London-based Institute of Economic Affairs [IEA]…became almost the only organisation that continued to promote him and his work in the country during this period.”

In the United States, Hayek would also be directly involved with the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute.

These think tanks, each tied to the Koch family’s fossil fortune, would each play a role in the rise of climate denial during the 1980s and ‘90s.

Not For All Men

Hayek’s free market philosophy did not mean total freedom for all men though.

He was, during his life, a keen supporter of General Augusto Pinochet, whose death squads tortured and murdered thousands of citizens following the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile during a military coup in 1973.

“Don’t confuse totalitarianism with authoritarianism,” Hayek said of Pinochet. “I don’t know of any totalitarian governments in Latin America.

“The only one was Chile under Allende. Chile is now a great success. The world shall come to regard the recovery of Chile as one of the great economic miracles of our time.”

Communism, therefore, was not despised because of the violence of revolution but instead because it posed a real threat to the private property of the wealthy.

Hayek believed that only people who were over the age of 45 should be allowed to vote, and that people receiving benefits should have the right withdrawn.

Neighbourhood Effects

However, Hayek also considered himself an environmentalist: he supported the World Wildlife Fund and the National Trust in the UK.

He had argued that it is “often impossible to confine the effects of what one does to one’s own land to this particular piece; and hence arises those ‘neighbourhood effects’ which will not be taken into account so long as the owner has to consider only the effects on his property. Hence also the problems which arise with respect to the pollution of air or water and the like.”

This statement should light the way for those who now claim to carry his flame.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

Following a long slump, crude prices have rebounded to about US$70  per barrel. That may make 2018 the most profitable year for oil and gas companies in at least four years.

Will oil and gas executives reap big rewards as well?

As energy economists, we’ve wondered how much the top oil and gas executives earn, particularly when their companies are earning large profits. To spot the patterns, we analyzed data on the compensation of more than 900 U.S. oil and gas executives between 1992 and 2016.

Critical decisions

Before getting to the evidence, it is worth considering what executives do in general, and how they get compensated.

Chief executive officers, chief financial officers and other C-level executives make important strategic decisions. If they act wisely, their companies are more likely to succeed and earn bigger profits. Oil and gas executives, for example, make critical decisions about where, when and how much to invest.

In many industries, the decisions executives make can also impact the prices their companies can charge.

For example, Apple’s ability to charge $1,000 (US dollars) for an iPhone X reflects in part the skills of CEO Tim Cook and other Apple executives at developing a desirable product and marketing it. But in a global commodity market like oil, executives have zero control over price. No matter how talented CEOs are, or how hard they work, they can’t singlehandedly make oil prices rise.

In economic parlance, hiring an executive is a principal-agent problem. The board of directors, the principal, hires an executive, the agent, to act on its behalf. The principal wants the agent to work hard and to make good decisions, but it is hard to measure this effort.

Instead, executive compensation typically includes incentives like bonuses, stock options and other forms of pay, designed to align the interests of the executive with the interests of the company.

Paying for luck

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Bengt Holmstrom pointed out, however, that it makes no sense for executive compensation to depend on what other scholars have since called “observable luck.” 

Tying compensation to luck just makes compensation more volatile, which in turn makes both companies and executives worse off. Holmstrom and others have found it easy to remove luck from compensation by, for example, basing compensation on a company’s performance relative to its competitors.

Oil prices are the classic example of observable luck. We looked, in particular, at U.S. oil and gas production companies, because these are the ones most impacted by oil prices. We excluded companies engaged partially or exclusively in oil refining – including Valero Energy, Chevron and Exxon Mobil, because the impact of oil prices is less clear and direct on that line of business.

We found that a 10 percent rise in oil prices increases the market value of these oil and gas production companies by 9.9 percent – almost a 1-for-1 relationship. Perhaps in no other industry are so many companies’ fortunes driven by a single global price.

More surprising, however, we determined that executive compensation follows a similar pattern. In particular, a 10 percent rise in oil prices increases executive compensation by 2 percent.

Asymmetrical pattern

That is, we find strong evidence of a “pay-for-luck” dynamic, with large rewards to executives who happen to be in the industry at the right time. 

We found this pay-for-luck pattern to be widespread across the different individual components of compensation for the top five executives at oil and gas companies. This includes not only stocks and options, but also bonuses and long-term cash incentives. 

We also noticed that this pattern is asymmetrical.

Executive compensation rises more with increasing oil prices than it falls with decreasing oil prices. This is consistent with anecdotal evidence that the criteria used for executive compensation changes over time. And that they are more quantitative during “boom” times and more qualitative during “bust” times.

In other words, U.S. oil and gas executives reap big rewards, when prices go up and they aren’t punished that much when prices fall.

Rent extraction

Everyone in the industry understands that oil prices are highly variable and completely out of the control of individual executives. So why do executives earn more when oil prices go up? 

The most likely explanation is that these CEOs and other top executives have co-opted the pay-setting process. Economists call this “rent extraction.”

That is, at least to some degree, executives are exercising influence over the board of directors – extracting compensation packages that exceed what would be expected in a competitive labor market. 

And the compensation of all oil and gas executives in our sample, all told, totals almost $1 billion (US dollars) per year, making the money at stake substantial. 

With median pay for U.S. CEOs nearly $12 million (US dollars) per year, executive compensation has become more complicated and important to understand than ever. Understanding pay-for-luck dynamics in the oil and gas industry can also shed light on what happens in other businesses where luck plays a less obvious, but often equally important, role.

This Author 

Catherine Hausman is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economics Research. Her work focusses on environmental and energy economics.

Lucas Davis is the Jeffrey A. Jacobs Distinguished Professor in Business and Technology at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and faculty director of the Energy Institute at Haas.

 This story was first published by The Conversation.

Ever since I watched Robin Hood riding through a black-and-white cardboard glen, the BBC has enriched my life.

As an adult I grew to admire the technical artistry of wildlife programmes, and the remarkable courage of news correspondents like John Simpson and Kate Adie reporting from war zones. I cooked and cleaned while genuinely learning from Radio Four.

The respect for which viewers and listeners like me had for the BBC was earned through detailed research, fairness and expertise. 

Losing support

David Attenborough, arguably the world’s most respected presenter, has for decades exemplified the highest standards of integrity on which the nation has depended.

In recent years Professor Cox has enhanced our understanding of what it means to be human in a mysterious and fascinating world.

Yet now the Corporation responsible for such excellence has lost my admiration and support. It is with sadness, anxiety and growing anger that I ask why values so embedded in the BBC’s raison d’être have been compromised and abandoned.

The political bias is unmissable, risible, almost the stuff of satire – and that’s dangerous. It threatens democracy.

The rise of the Far Right began with the BBC platform that made Nigel Farage ubiquitous (see Question Time panel statistics). News often constitutes misinformation as the BBC takes its agenda and even its vocabulary from the predominantly right wing press.

Climate chaos

But I am writing about something even more serious, so dangerous as to threaten the future of life on earth.

Our most prestigious national broadcaster fails to acknowledge the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists. It almost never finds it necessary to share the causes, nature and potential outcomes of climate change these experts identify.

Calls for change to mitigate climate chaos are apparently banned. Instead, I observe a persistent and perverse determination to give a voice to climate deniers in spite of their statistical isolation, and a blithe or strategic head-in-sand approach to programming.

Weather presenters have smiled about sunshine through this summer, while new temperature records have been set in Africa and Australian cities, Taiwan, Georgia and the west coast of US, heat stroke or forest fires have killed (at least 119 in Japan).

We have seen freak blazes in Lapland and elsewhere in the Arctic Circle.

Informing and educating 

It became clear, after Blue Planet’s shocking exposé of plastic pollution, that the truth inspires in many of us immediate and committed changes of attitude and behaviour. By informing and educating us about climate change the BBC could be instrumental in our very survival.

Instead its silence sends out a clear message that there’s no problem. If we were at risk on this earth, the BBC would be telling us! 

Of course the government is guilty of pursuing an energy policy that accelerates climate crisis. It continues to subsidise fossil fuels, pursues fracking despite medical opinion as well as earth science. All this in spite of ever-mounting opposition, low and declining support and the rejection of proposals by local Councils.

Indeed no MP would support fracking in their constituency because every community would resist it. Yet, as the government threatens to push ahead and frack our countryside, we hear next to nothing of the reasons other countries and states have thought better of this reckless idea and agreed a moratorium or ban.

Presenters seem more interested in challenging Jeremy Corbyn on every move he makes and breath he takes than in challenging a government about to begin a hugely damaging practice that will destroy our chances of achieving the less-than-ambitious targets agreed in Paris.

Peace and justice

I am a Green Party member, but my interest is much less in party politics than in the survival of humanity, in peace and justice. I’m a Quaker and a grandma; I believe in acting on what love requires of us.

Visiting schools as an author, I’m acutely aware that the young who grow up in the knowledge of climate change wonder why the adults in charge – in government, but also in the media – ignore the truth and in doing so, jeopardise their future. 

I therefore suggest that in order to fulfil its responsibility at this crucial time in human history, the BBC needs to:

• Stop crediting climate deniers with a reasonable position when climate scientists are virtually unanimous in the expert conviction that climate change is real, dangerous and exacerbated by human activity;
• Stop referring to climate change as though it’s no more important than football, if somewhat inconvenient for gardeners, and as if nothing can be done to address it;
• Look into the political allegiances of key figures behind and on screen and ensure that there is no unrepresentative imbalance of opinion. While I’m tempted to ask that climate deniers make up no more than three percent of BBC staff, I would happily settle for minimum science qualifications for all those representing or presenting scientific data, news, weather or political debate. 
• Challenge government policies that endanger future generations with the same unshifting focus currently applied to Labour’s difficulties.
• Invite David Attenborough, Brian Cox and Chris Packham, all of whom agree on the vital need for action, to present the truth and inspire change.

Nothing has ever mattered more.

This Author 

Sue Hampton is an author writing fiction for children, teenagers and adults, all underpinned by green values. She lives in Berkhamsted, Herts, where she is a Trustee for People not Borders supporting refugees, a Green Party member and a co-founder of Plastic-Free Berko. 

Right of Reply 

A BBC spokesperson told The Ecologist: “The BBC is committed to covering all subjects, including climate change, with due impartiality. The term ‘due’ means that the impartiality must be adequate and appropriate to the output, taking account of the subject and nature of the content, the likely audience expectation and any signposting that may influence that expectation. This does not meant that there has to be equal balance between opposing views and the BBC is mindful of the findings of the 2011 BBC Trust review of impartiality in science coverage and its recommendations on due weight of opinion.

“In the case of climate change the BBC acknowledges the weight of scientific consensus around climate change and this underpins our reporting of the subject and we always seek to make this clear. This does not mean, however, that we should never interview someone who opposes this consensus and there are times when it is editorially appropriate to hear from a dissenting voice. The BBC is committed to reporting the facts and most recently has covered a range of climate change based [stories] such as the ‘Hothouse Earth’ scenario, pioneering climate change resistant farming and a study from the Nature Communications journal about rising temperatures.”

Friedrich von Hayek died in Freiburg, Germany, aged 92, on 23 March, 1992 – a few months after the Soviet Union voted for its own dissolution.

The funeral was attended by around one hundred family members and invited guests. It was a overcast and windy day. Vaclav Klaus, the finance minister and future prime minister of the former communist Czech Republic arrived late.

Hayek, the recipient of the Nobel Prize, had lived a fascinating life during a tumultuous period of history. He remained convinced of the “spontaneous order” of the free market and that inequality was an inescapable feature of human existence.

From his deathbed he told a reporter: “I believe in general that the idea of justice is more closely met by a freely competitive market than by any deliberate allocation of income to some imagined ideal of the kind”.

The Right Circumstances

His life is evidence of what a single man can achieve in the right circumstances, and as fellow neoliberal Antony Fisher would have said, the embodiment of the fact that ideas have consequences. He was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom by President George Bush Senior in 1991, for example, but had been too frail to attend in person.

In 1947, Hayek founded the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), an international group of economists, historians and philosophers; he was convinced the MPS was crucial to the triumph of neoliberalism around the world.

However, as his biographer Alan Ebenstein would note: “Hayek was virtually forgotten in England during the 1950s and ’60s. The London-based Institute of Economic Affairs [IEA]…became almost the only organisation that continued to promote him and his work in the country during this period.”

In the United States, Hayek would also be directly involved with the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute.

These think tanks, each tied to the Koch family’s fossil fortune, would each play a role in the rise of climate denial during the 1980s and ‘90s.

Not For All Men

Hayek’s free market philosophy did not mean total freedom for all men though.

He was, during his life, a keen supporter of General Augusto Pinochet, whose death squads tortured and murdered thousands of citizens following the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile during a military coup in 1973.

“Don’t confuse totalitarianism with authoritarianism,” Hayek said of Pinochet. “I don’t know of any totalitarian governments in Latin America.

“The only one was Chile under Allende. Chile is now a great success. The world shall come to regard the recovery of Chile as one of the great economic miracles of our time.”

Communism, therefore, was not despised because of the violence of revolution but instead because it posed a real threat to the private property of the wealthy.

Hayek believed that only people who were over the age of 45 should be allowed to vote, and that people receiving benefits should have the right withdrawn.

Neighbourhood Effects

However, Hayek also considered himself an environmentalist: he supported the World Wildlife Fund and the National Trust in the UK.

He had argued that it is “often impossible to confine the effects of what one does to one’s own land to this particular piece; and hence arises those ‘neighbourhood effects’ which will not be taken into account so long as the owner has to consider only the effects on his property. Hence also the problems which arise with respect to the pollution of air or water and the like.”

This statement should light the way for those who now claim to carry his flame.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

Following a long slump, crude prices have rebounded to about US$70  per barrel. That may make 2018 the most profitable year for oil and gas companies in at least four years.

Will oil and gas executives reap big rewards as well?

As energy economists, we’ve wondered how much the top oil and gas executives earn, particularly when their companies are earning large profits. To spot the patterns, we analyzed data on the compensation of more than 900 U.S. oil and gas executives between 1992 and 2016.

Critical decisions

Before getting to the evidence, it is worth considering what executives do in general, and how they get compensated.

Chief executive officers, chief financial officers and other C-level executives make important strategic decisions. If they act wisely, their companies are more likely to succeed and earn bigger profits. Oil and gas executives, for example, make critical decisions about where, when and how much to invest.

In many industries, the decisions executives make can also impact the prices their companies can charge.

For example, Apple’s ability to charge $1,000 (US dollars) for an iPhone X reflects in part the skills of CEO Tim Cook and other Apple executives at developing a desirable product and marketing it. But in a global commodity market like oil, executives have zero control over price. No matter how talented CEOs are, or how hard they work, they can’t singlehandedly make oil prices rise.

In economic parlance, hiring an executive is a principal-agent problem. The board of directors, the principal, hires an executive, the agent, to act on its behalf. The principal wants the agent to work hard and to make good decisions, but it is hard to measure this effort.

Instead, executive compensation typically includes incentives like bonuses, stock options and other forms of pay, designed to align the interests of the executive with the interests of the company.

Paying for luck

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Bengt Holmstrom pointed out, however, that it makes no sense for executive compensation to depend on what other scholars have since called “observable luck.” 

Tying compensation to luck just makes compensation more volatile, which in turn makes both companies and executives worse off. Holmstrom and others have found it easy to remove luck from compensation by, for example, basing compensation on a company’s performance relative to its competitors.

Oil prices are the classic example of observable luck. We looked, in particular, at U.S. oil and gas production companies, because these are the ones most impacted by oil prices. We excluded companies engaged partially or exclusively in oil refining – including Valero Energy, Chevron and Exxon Mobil, because the impact of oil prices is less clear and direct on that line of business.

We found that a 10 percent rise in oil prices increases the market value of these oil and gas production companies by 9.9 percent – almost a 1-for-1 relationship. Perhaps in no other industry are so many companies’ fortunes driven by a single global price.

More surprising, however, we determined that executive compensation follows a similar pattern. In particular, a 10 percent rise in oil prices increases executive compensation by 2 percent.

Asymmetrical pattern

That is, we find strong evidence of a “pay-for-luck” dynamic, with large rewards to executives who happen to be in the industry at the right time. 

We found this pay-for-luck pattern to be widespread across the different individual components of compensation for the top five executives at oil and gas companies. This includes not only stocks and options, but also bonuses and long-term cash incentives. 

We also noticed that this pattern is asymmetrical.

Executive compensation rises more with increasing oil prices than it falls with decreasing oil prices. This is consistent with anecdotal evidence that the criteria used for executive compensation changes over time. And that they are more quantitative during “boom” times and more qualitative during “bust” times.

In other words, U.S. oil and gas executives reap big rewards, when prices go up and they aren’t punished that much when prices fall.

Rent extraction

Everyone in the industry understands that oil prices are highly variable and completely out of the control of individual executives. So why do executives earn more when oil prices go up? 

The most likely explanation is that these CEOs and other top executives have co-opted the pay-setting process. Economists call this “rent extraction.”

That is, at least to some degree, executives are exercising influence over the board of directors – extracting compensation packages that exceed what would be expected in a competitive labor market. 

And the compensation of all oil and gas executives in our sample, all told, totals almost $1 billion (US dollars) per year, making the money at stake substantial. 

With median pay for U.S. CEOs nearly $12 million (US dollars) per year, executive compensation has become more complicated and important to understand than ever. Understanding pay-for-luck dynamics in the oil and gas industry can also shed light on what happens in other businesses where luck plays a less obvious, but often equally important, role.

This Author 

Catherine Hausman is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economics Research. Her work focusses on environmental and energy economics.

Lucas Davis is the Jeffrey A. Jacobs Distinguished Professor in Business and Technology at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and faculty director of the Energy Institute at Haas.

 This story was first published by The Conversation.

Ever since I watched Robin Hood riding through a black-and-white cardboard glen, the BBC has enriched my life.

As an adult I grew to admire the technical artistry of wildlife programmes, and the remarkable courage of news correspondents like John Simpson and Kate Adie reporting from war zones. I cooked and cleaned while genuinely learning from Radio Four.

The respect for which viewers and listeners like me had for the BBC was earned through detailed research, fairness and expertise. 

Losing support

David Attenborough, arguably the world’s most respected presenter, has for decades exemplified the highest standards of integrity on which the nation has depended.

In recent years Professor Cox has enhanced our understanding of what it means to be human in a mysterious and fascinating world.

Yet now the Corporation responsible for such excellence has lost my admiration and support. It is with sadness, anxiety and growing anger that I ask why values so embedded in the BBC’s raison d’être have been compromised and abandoned.

The political bias is unmissable, risible, almost the stuff of satire – and that’s dangerous. It threatens democracy.

The rise of the Far Right began with the BBC platform that made Nigel Farage ubiquitous (see Question Time panel statistics). News often constitutes misinformation as the BBC takes its agenda and even its vocabulary from the predominantly right wing press.

Climate chaos

But I am writing about something even more serious, so dangerous as to threaten the future of life on earth.

Our most prestigious national broadcaster fails to acknowledge the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists. It almost never finds it necessary to share the causes, nature and potential outcomes of climate change these experts identify.

Calls for change to mitigate climate chaos are apparently banned. Instead, I observe a persistent and perverse determination to give a voice to climate deniers in spite of their statistical isolation, and a blithe or strategic head-in-sand approach to programming.

Weather presenters have smiled about sunshine through this summer, while new temperature records have been set in Africa and Australian cities, Taiwan, Georgia and the west coast of US, heat stroke or forest fires have killed (at least 119 in Japan).

We have seen freak blazes in Lapland and elsewhere in the Arctic Circle.

Informing and educating 

It became clear, after Blue Planet’s shocking exposé of plastic pollution, that the truth inspires in many of us immediate and committed changes of attitude and behaviour. By informing and educating us about climate change the BBC could be instrumental in our very survival.

Instead its silence sends out a clear message that there’s no problem. If we were at risk on this earth, the BBC would be telling us! 

Of course the government is guilty of pursuing an energy policy that accelerates climate crisis. It continues to subsidise fossil fuels, pursues fracking despite medical opinion as well as earth science. All this in spite of ever-mounting opposition, low and declining support and the rejection of proposals by local Councils.

Indeed no MP would support fracking in their constituency because every community would resist it. Yet, as the government threatens to push ahead and frack our countryside, we hear next to nothing of the reasons other countries and states have thought better of this reckless idea and agreed a moratorium or ban.

Presenters seem more interested in challenging Jeremy Corbyn on every move he makes and breath he takes than in challenging a government about to begin a hugely damaging practice that will destroy our chances of achieving the less-than-ambitious targets agreed in Paris.

Peace and justice

I am a Green Party member, but my interest is much less in party politics than in the survival of humanity, in peace and justice. I’m a Quaker and a grandma; I believe in acting on what love requires of us.

Visiting schools as an author, I’m acutely aware that the young who grow up in the knowledge of climate change wonder why the adults in charge – in government, but also in the media – ignore the truth and in doing so, jeopardise their future. 

I therefore suggest that in order to fulfil its responsibility at this crucial time in human history, the BBC needs to:

• Stop crediting climate deniers with a reasonable position when climate scientists are virtually unanimous in the expert conviction that climate change is real, dangerous and exacerbated by human activity;
• Stop referring to climate change as though it’s no more important than football, if somewhat inconvenient for gardeners, and as if nothing can be done to address it;
• Look into the political allegiances of key figures behind and on screen and ensure that there is no unrepresentative imbalance of opinion. While I’m tempted to ask that climate deniers make up no more than three percent of BBC staff, I would happily settle for minimum science qualifications for all those representing or presenting scientific data, news, weather or political debate. 
• Challenge government policies that endanger future generations with the same unshifting focus currently applied to Labour’s difficulties.
• Invite David Attenborough, Brian Cox and Chris Packham, all of whom agree on the vital need for action, to present the truth and inspire change.

Nothing has ever mattered more.

This Author 

Sue Hampton is an author writing fiction for children, teenagers and adults, all underpinned by green values. She lives in Berkhamsted, Herts, where she is a Trustee for People not Borders supporting refugees, a Green Party member and a co-founder of Plastic-Free Berko. 

Right of Reply 

A BBC spokesperson told The Ecologist: “The BBC is committed to covering all subjects, including climate change, with due impartiality. The term ‘due’ means that the impartiality must be adequate and appropriate to the output, taking account of the subject and nature of the content, the likely audience expectation and any signposting that may influence that expectation. This does not meant that there has to be equal balance between opposing views and the BBC is mindful of the findings of the 2011 BBC Trust review of impartiality in science coverage and its recommendations on due weight of opinion.

“In the case of climate change the BBC acknowledges the weight of scientific consensus around climate change and this underpins our reporting of the subject and we always seek to make this clear. This does not mean, however, that we should never interview someone who opposes this consensus and there are times when it is editorially appropriate to hear from a dissenting voice. The BBC is committed to reporting the facts and most recently has covered a range of climate change based [stories] such as the ‘Hothouse Earth’ scenario, pioneering climate change resistant farming and a study from the Nature Communications journal about rising temperatures.”

Friedrich von Hayek died in Freiburg, Germany, aged 92, on 23 March, 1992 – a few months after the Soviet Union voted for its own dissolution.

The funeral was attended by around one hundred family members and invited guests. It was a overcast and windy day. Vaclav Klaus, the finance minister and future prime minister of the former communist Czech Republic arrived late.

Hayek, the recipient of the Nobel Prize, had lived a fascinating life during a tumultuous period of history. He remained convinced of the “spontaneous order” of the free market and that inequality was an inescapable feature of human existence.

From his deathbed he told a reporter: “I believe in general that the idea of justice is more closely met by a freely competitive market than by any deliberate allocation of income to some imagined ideal of the kind”.

The Right Circumstances

His life is evidence of what a single man can achieve in the right circumstances, and as fellow neoliberal Antony Fisher would have said, the embodiment of the fact that ideas have consequences. He was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom by President George Bush Senior in 1991, for example, but had been too frail to attend in person.

In 1947, Hayek founded the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), an international group of economists, historians and philosophers; he was convinced the MPS was crucial to the triumph of neoliberalism around the world.

However, as his biographer Alan Ebenstein would note: “Hayek was virtually forgotten in England during the 1950s and ’60s. The London-based Institute of Economic Affairs [IEA]…became almost the only organisation that continued to promote him and his work in the country during this period.”

In the United States, Hayek would also be directly involved with the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute.

These think tanks, each tied to the Koch family’s fossil fortune, would each play a role in the rise of climate denial during the 1980s and ‘90s.

Not For All Men

Hayek’s free market philosophy did not mean total freedom for all men though.

He was, during his life, a keen supporter of General Augusto Pinochet, whose death squads tortured and murdered thousands of citizens following the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile during a military coup in 1973.

“Don’t confuse totalitarianism with authoritarianism,” Hayek said of Pinochet. “I don’t know of any totalitarian governments in Latin America.

“The only one was Chile under Allende. Chile is now a great success. The world shall come to regard the recovery of Chile as one of the great economic miracles of our time.”

Communism, therefore, was not despised because of the violence of revolution but instead because it posed a real threat to the private property of the wealthy.

Hayek believed that only people who were over the age of 45 should be allowed to vote, and that people receiving benefits should have the right withdrawn.

Neighbourhood Effects

However, Hayek also considered himself an environmentalist: he supported the World Wildlife Fund and the National Trust in the UK.

He had argued that it is “often impossible to confine the effects of what one does to one’s own land to this particular piece; and hence arises those ‘neighbourhood effects’ which will not be taken into account so long as the owner has to consider only the effects on his property. Hence also the problems which arise with respect to the pollution of air or water and the like.”

This statement should light the way for those who now claim to carry his flame.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

Dolphins learn tricks from each other in the wild – as well as being trained to perform tricks in captivity, a 30 study has revealed.

The research, led by the Universities of St Andrews and Exeter and published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters, focused on a scientific analysis of Adelaide’s famous tail walking dolphins.

It describes how tail walking was learned by a single dolphin called Billie and then copied by other dolphins in the local community, and, much like a pop fad, then faded out.

Social learning

Tail walking involves a dolphin rising vertically out of the water and then moving forward or backwards across it. The behaviour rarely occurs in the wild from this species but is a standard part of the routine in almost all dolphinaria.

Billie was rescued from a polluted creek in January 1988, spending several weeks in a dolphinarium, until released back in to the wild. It seems she learned tail walking by observing the performing dolphins and, when released, began performing this unique behaviour with regularity in the wild.

Billie’s tail walking would be nothing more than an interesting example of individual social learning if she alone had performed it, after having observed it during her short time in captivity. But soon other dolphins in the local community began performing the behaviour.

By 2011 nine dolphins had been observed tail walking in the wild. After 2011 the number of dolphins tail walking in the wild declined with the most prolific tail-walker dying in 2014, leaving only two remaining tail-walkers, both of whom performed the behaviour only sporadically.

Tail walking now seems destined to disappear from the community and thus can be considered a dying fad.

Cultural behaviours

The behaviour was tracked using thousands of hours of observation effort by citizen scientists, and its spread suggests a social function for copying in dolphin communities.

Cultural behaviours arise when individuals learn a specific behaviour from other members of their social group, which then spreads through the community. Sometimes cultural behaviours, such as foraging strategies, are passed between generations.

Fads are short-lived examples of socially learned behaviours which flourish for a short time and then disappear.

Dr Mike Bossley of Whale and Dolphin Conservation, lead author of the paper, noted that it was only because he had been studying the Adelaide dolphins for over 30 years that the significance of tail walking was recognised.

“I knew Billie’s history and was able to track her behaviour and that of the other dolphins in the community over an extended period. This enabled me to observe tail walking spread through the community and then its eventual fade away.”

Dr Luke Rendell, a University of St Andrews researcher and co-author who specialises on researching whale and dolphin cultural behaviour, said: “Once again we see the power of being able to study cetaceans over extended periods that mean something given their lifespans.

“Dr Bossley’s long-term commitment has afforded us a revealing insight into the potential social role of imitation in dolphin communities.”

Rapid spread

The existence of cultural behaviour has important implications for conservation.

Philippa Brakes, a co-author of the paper also from Whale and Dolphin Conservation, explained: “Understanding more about the social transmission of behaviour will help us predict how different species may respond to changes in their environment.

“The rapid spread of socially learnt behaviours can operate much faster than the intergenerational process of natural selection, which can be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on the type of behaviour transmitted.”

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from the University of St Andrews. The full paper can be read here. 

This is considered the most important year for international climate diplomacy since 2015 – the year the Paris Agreement was formed. Countries will have too decide on the rules and guidelines that will help to govern and implement the Paris Agreement from 2020 onward.

David Waskow from the World Resources Institute compares the Bangkok session to developing the legislature of a law that has been passed.

“These implementing guidelines, these rules and procedures for the [Paris] Agreement will really breathe life into it in a concrete sense. Without the rules the Paris Agreement stays an empty shell,” Waskow explained in a press conference last week.

Why is there an additional UN climate summit?

Negotiators in Bangkok will be continuing the unfinished discussion from the UN summit in Bonn, Germany, six months ago.

The Bangkok negotiations are a response to the insufficient progress on the Paris rulebook that is supposed to be finalised by the end of this year.

In December, environmental ministers and heads of state will gather in the UN Climate summit in Poland (the so-called COP24). Where they will have to agree on a full set of rules to govern the Paris Agreement. 

Why is this proving to be such a challenge?

Creating the international legal framework to implement the Paris Agreement is a huge task, and many technical issues remain unresolved between negotiating parties.

Therefore an additional week of diplomatic muscle flexing is underway as officials operate on borrowed time to meet the deadline.

Severe heat waves across the Northern Hemisphere this year have ensured that diplomats are definitely sweating as the pressure to achieve results increases.

With insufficient progress during the last climate summit in Bonn, and Poland hosting the upcoming summit this December, concerns have been raised that the coal-loving country might be reluctant to show the diplomatic leadership needed to complete the Paris Rulebook. The additional session in Bangkok hopes to compensate for this lack of leadership.

What are the expected outcomes from Bangkok?

The work on the table at Bangkok is referred to by negotiator as the “COP Package”: since many elements are strongly interlinked, and progress on one element of the Paris Agreement needs to be matched by progress on others, the only way all parties can agree on the Paris Rulebook is when they agree on a clear and full set of rules.

The Key element of this COP24 Package, and the questions that need answering in Bangkok, are:

• The Paris Rulebook: How will countries communicate their national climate plans for Paris? And how can parties design a clear mechanism for providing feedback and monitoring to these climate plans? 
• Finance: Will developed countries manage to gather the promised 100 billion USD in climate financial aid to developing countries by 2020? How will this financial aid be managed and increased over time?
• The Talanoa Dialogue: A mechanism that was set up during the last UN climate summit, the Talanoa Dialogue is an inclusive dialogue between governments, NGO’s, bussinesses and social groups, to ensure that as many voices and concerns from the global community are included to form the Rules for Paris. How this dialogue will be incorporated in the UN negotiations is still unclear.
• Pre-2020 Ambition: The Paris Agreement will effectively take effect from 2020 onward. Are countries doing enough before Paris effectively takes action? And what are the needs of countries before 2020 to implement th Paris Agreement and to increase their ambition over time? 

What if the Paris Rulebook is not agreed on by the end of the year?

There is no reason why we can’t have strong foundational rules to implement the Paris  Agreement by this year.

Some issues, however, won’t get totally resolved at the UN climate summit in Poland. 

“But the foundational dimensions can and ought to be clearly identified and adopted to accelerate the rapid and deep emissions cuts we need to see to transition to a low-carbon economy,” said Harjeet Singh from Action Aid International at the Bangkok conference.

On a practical level, setting the Rules for the Paris Agreement in 2018 is needed to provide direction, clarity, and to create the institutional structures to get it up and running by 2020.

If that happens, the Paris Agreement might actually be able to protect the current and future generations from runaway global warming.

This Author

Arthur Wyns is a tropical biologist and science journalist who writes about climate change, environment and migration. He reports from the UN negotiations and is the program manager of Climate Tracker, an organisation supporting environmental journalists worldwide to bring climate change into their national debates. Arthur tweets from @ArthurWyns

Councils across the UK invest over nine billion pounds in fracking companies through council pension funds, according to a new report.

The Greater Manchester Pension Fund invests the largest amount in the global fracking industry,  almost £1 billion. This is nearly double the amount of the next highest pension fund, West Yorkshire, with just over half a billion.

The councils with the highest percentage of their pension funds invested in fracking are Dumfries and Galloway, Greater Manchester and the London Borough of Merton,  each with about 6-7 percent of the total fund invested in fracking companies.

Lack of support

The news comes as the fracking industry is poised to drill for gas for the first time in seven years in the UK.

With councils ploughing billions into fracking companies, questions are being asked as to why councils are investing in this industry when UK public support for fracking is consistently low.

Many councils have voted against fracking developments in their areas, but council-run funds remain invested in the industry.

In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland fracking has effectively halted, but Councils there still oversee pension funds investing heavily in fracking companies.

The companies that councils are investing in include BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and ConocoPhillips. These companies are fracking in places like Argentina, Canada and Australia. BP, one of the companies involved, does not frack in the UK to avoid ‘the wrong type of attention’ but has huge fracking operations abroad.

Fuelling climate change

Matthew Brown, leader of Preston Council. commented: “It’s disappointing to see local authority pension funds being invested in the fracking industry. Fracking destroys local landscapes, threatens communities and fuels climate change across the globe.

“Council pension funds should be going to support clean fossil-free energy which will secure a good return for members and help tackle climate change.”

Sakina Sheikh, divestment campaigner with Platform commented: “The devastating fires and record temperatures this summer have brought the impacts of climate change home. Neither local communities nor our climate can afford for the fracking industry to win.

“Our councils are providing everyday support to the frackers, it’s time to stop. It’s time to divest from fossil fuels.”

Pension funds

Deirdre Duff, divestment campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said: “UK councils should know better than to invest in fracking companies. These companies are inflicting their fracking operations on communities around the world, and this can have significant impacts.”

“Many UK councils have rightly opposed fracking in their own area – however it is shocking that they still support the global fracking industry. We should remember too that the climate change caused by fracking will affect us all, no matter where the fracking is conducted.”

The data is released by 350.org, Platform and Friends of the Earth. It ranks council-run pension funds by their investments in companies involved in fracking.

Full divestment commitments have so far been made by two UK council pension funds, with a further five making partial commitments. The campaign to divest local council pensions has received backing from Unison and the TUC.  

Across the world 905 institutions, with total investments valued at $6.24 trillion USD, have committed to divest from fossil fuels. 

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from Fossil Free UK.