Johann Hari

Who would have thought that one day, a Tory leader would urge the British people to “get on yer bike” and the left would offer a cautious round of applause? No, this isn’t Norman Tebbit snarling at the swollen ranks of the unemployed. It’s David Cameron, whirring past on his BMX as he heads to the Soil Association today to deliver a speech in praise of organic farming. This is just the latest stage in a long, deliberate campaign to green-wash the blue benches of the House of Commons. The new leader has quizzed Blair across the despatch box about his chilling (or warming?) equivocations over a binding post-Kyoto Treaty. Then he warned in an advert this weekend, “Unless we reduce industry's carbon emissions, global temperatures could rise as much in the next hundred years as they have since the ice age.” He even brags about the solar panels on his new house. The message to Middle England is – don’t panic, I’m organic.

So how should those of us frantic and furious about global warming react? My initial feeling was that, in the middle of a global emergency, you take allies wherever you can find them. The environmentalist Mark Lynas recently explained the stakes we are all playing for: “251 million years ago, the world warmed by six degrees celcius in the space of less than a century. The result was that more than 95 percent of the species on the planet died. The International Panel on Climate Change [the UN body made up of the world’s leading climate scientists] predicts a rise hitting 5.6 degrees celcius during the twenty-first century.” This is a gamble with the very basis of human life. It shouldn’t be a left-right issue: the Tory shires won’t escape extreme weather events, and nor will the corporate CEOs. This is an existential issue for us all.

But then I began to look beyond Cameron’s rhetoric towards his actual policies. He militantly opposed one of the few measures the government has introduced to ensure we meet our Kyoto targets, the Climate Change Levy that places an extra tax on the greenhouse gas emissions of big business. He dismissed it as “red tape”, and has kept the policy in place. Then – in his first speech as party leader – he went even further, declaring, “I want to build more roads… we need a concerted programme of road building.” Nobody chuckled when, a minute later, he served up his boilerplate about climate change. How is this recipe for a hundred Newbury by-passes and vastly increased road traffic going to hold down greenhouse gas emissions?

It gets worse. The media fawned when Cameron appointed the aspiring Tory MP Zac Goldsmith to his policy review, taking it as a sign of real change – but this is because of a widespread misreading of Goldsmith. Just because you buy the Ecologist magazine and a toy farm with the £300m you inherited from your tycoon father doesn’t make you a serious environmentalist. Goldsmith is a sneering critic of the Green party, and a fierce opponent of both wind farms (“they’re ugly”) and nuclear power. His only proposal to meet our Kyoto targets – never mind the far more ambitious targets we need to achieve if we are going to avoid disaster – is to reduce energy waste. He believes that loft insulation, putting electrical appliances on standby and other small measures could cut Britain’s energy use by 60 percent. Yes, that’s 60 percent. I am all in favour of an urgent programme to cut waste, but this is simply an unserious, air-headed proposal. If he was not the pretty Old Etonian son of a fantastically rich man, Goldsmith would struggle to get a job as Number Two on the environment desk of a local paper. If he is going to shape the Tory policy on global warming, then we will be worse off even than under Tony “we-can’t-introduce-regulation” Blair.

Goldsmith’s reputation for environmentalism stems from his adoption of a trendy lifestyle greenry that is – at best – a distraction from the on-going global crisis. Cameron’s decision to address the Soil Association today in praise of organic farming is a perfect example of this fiddling while the world warms. The idea of organic farming was created in the 1920s by Rudolph Steiner, a mystic who said crops should be planted not with chemicals, but according to the signs of the Zodiac. He believed there was a mystical force emerging from the centre of the earth – and radiating down from the stars – that could make crops grow far better than “inhuman” mechanised agriculture.

Ah, but surely the organic movement has moved far beyond these unscientific, deranged roots? Surely today it is based on piles of peer-reviewed studies and proper investigations? The man David Cameron will stand next to today and hold up as a model for Britain, the Soil Association director Patrick Holden, uses Steiner’s techniques on his own farm in Wales today, planting apples according to the movements of the moon and astrological signs. (Apparently, apples belong to the Leo star sign, presumably because of their fiery temperament and ruthless ambition). The hero and icon of the organic movement – Charles Windsor – champions this Mystic Meg approach to farming too, using your tax money and mine.

Organic farming started as a faith-based position, and ever since, it has scrambled – without success – to find scientific backing for its claims. At first, the argument for organic food sounds persuasive though: isn’t it better to use the things we can find in nature, rather than synthetic chemicals? But it doesn’t take much analysis to see why this is flawed: after all, toxins and poisons occur naturally too. This becomes clear if you compare the way organic farmers deal with potato blight to the way science-based farmers treat it. Organic farmers use something called copper sulphate, because it occurs under nature. Ah, natural – and safe, right? Well, copper sulphate has caused liver disease in vineyard workers, and it is so toxic that the EU theoretically banned it in 2002, but since organic farmers don’t have any alternative, it is still being used. In exactly the same situation, scientific farmers use synthetic copper. Boo! Hiss! Unnatural! But every single scientific study has found to be safer and more effective than its organic twin. Think about it: SARS and AIDS are ‘natural’ phenomena; penicillin and vaccinations are ‘synthetic’.

The Soil Association has had to backtrack from every scientific claim they have made. When they issued a pamphlet claiming that organic food is healthier, tastier and so on – the claims Cameron is expected to echo today – they were reported to the Advertising Standards Authority. The ‘evidence’ produced by the Soil Association to back up its claims was so feeble that the pamphlet had to be withdrawn. Even the scientists cited by the Association distance themselves from its absurd claims. For example, they recently vaunted a 1980 study by Dr William Lockeretz as evidence conclusively showing organic food is better for you. But Dr Lockeretz actually says, “I wish I could tell you there is a clear, consistent nutritional difference… Unfortunately, on the basis of my reading of the scientific literature, I don’t think such a claim can be responsibly made.” Even the proprietors of Lucies Organic Store, a leading British organic outlet, admit on their website that “because organic methods use manures, this can lead to bacterial contemination of produce,” and that “organic and old-fashioned pesticides may also be harmful to the environment,” simple facts that the Soil Association refuses to accept.

Worse, the Soil Association rhapsodises about a mythical Arcadian past before chemicals and modernity contaminated agriculture. Well, only a few generations back, my family were ‘organic farmers’ in rural Switzerland: pesticides didn’t exist. Far from being an idyllic life, it was a miserable, back-breaking grind, where supplies were constantly vulnerable to climactic variations and crops were perpetually lost to pests and diseases. To pine for this world – when crop yields were 20-50 percent lower, and far more people went hungry – is not only delusional; it is reactionary.

Of course we need tougher regulation of pesticides and chemicals, to ensure dangerous ones don’t slip through. But there was an EU proposal to do just that last month – the REACH agreement – and Cameron’s Tories opposed it as (you guessed it) “red tape”. To now go to the other extreme and promote farmers who are against using all synthetic chemicals is a bizarre and hypocritical over-reaction – like responding to the thalidomide scandal by stopping all pregnant women from taking medicine at all. Environmentalists have science on our side when it comes to the biggest issue in the world, global warming. Why allow that fact to be compromised by advocating this hocus pocus? The world’s leading environmental science journal, Nature, made this warning recently, when it published a study of organic food that found it contains “very little science”, is not any better for consumers, and causes environmental damage of its own through unusually high use of fossil fuels. It concluded: “Organic agriculture was originally formulated as an ideology, but today’s global problems – such an climate change and population growth – need agricultural pragmatism and flexibility, not ideology.”

So far, David Cameron has offered environmentalists a playboy airhead, some worthless New Age farming, and a road-building programme. Now remind me again why we were applauding his greenry?