The decision to publish news concerning World Bank “secret study”
There has been some understandable grumbling about the decision to publish a story about a World Bank “secret study,” obtained by the Guardian in the UK, and according to the Guardian story killed by senior management at the Bank to avoid embarrassing US President George W. Bush. The story had a bullet: a finding by a respected economist that biofuels had been responsible for a 75 percent increase in global food prices.
Because the story was based on unreleased documents and quoted unnamed sources on the provenance of what the Guardian received, the story was originally included in the Opinion section of Friday’s Daily Biofuels News Digest. The standard of proof is much lower on an opinion piece, and even if flat out wrong the piece could stand as a viable opinion.
By Monday, a global media firestorm had erupted, with publication in more than 100 papers, online sites and blogs. Already the number, which was quoted without much context in the Guardian to begin with, was being quoted without context. The publishing frenzy had not been seen since the appearance of two articles in Science magazine on emissions and land-use in January, and an anti-biofuels hatchet job in Time Magazine in April.
Accordingly, the decision was taken to publish a piece as Top Story for Monday, intended to bring awareness of readers not only to the story, but to the frenzy surrounding it. By the end of its first day online, it had become the ___th most widely read story in the Digest’s history, with more than 7,000 readers looking at it on day one via email, RSS or the web. Although the Digest receives more than 350,000 page views per month across all media, there are more than 3,000 posted stories and readership of individual stories often numbers in the dozens or hundreds. The Digest’s background report on the controversy was also picked up on Reuters, CNET and other media, where it was even more widely read.
The story itself is hardly yet worth all the fuss. Until someone makes it public so its claims can be measured, the story is pure sensationalism. However, its popularity continues to point to an insatiable appetite for anti-biofuels stories.
“We fully acknowledge many inherent uncertainties in this kind of study,” wrote Timothy Searchinger in a response to criticism of his study within the academic community. Yet the Searchinger article in Science magazine has 17,000 links or references in Google, and many of the conclusions are accepted without qualification by those citing the work.
The Grocery Manufacturers Association, in a document outlining strategy for their anti-biofuels campaign, said that they aimed to engage with a global, “center-left” coalition of anti-biofuels activists. It appears that there is a nexus between global poverty advocates and a group of anti-development, or rather anti-consumption, organizations that view biofuels as a threat. What is the biofuels threat? That it perpetuates what is felt to be an unsustainable, Western emphasis on rising consumption. This group tends to subscribe to the Malthusian premise that conservation of consumption, or of population, is the sustainable path. A competing group believes that scientific breakthroughs can raise the world’s people to a far higher living standard while reducing per capita consumption.
Monoculture agriculture, genetic modification, hybrid automobiles, and biofuels all appear to be under the microscope of criticism from this wing, because they do not solve the lifestyle problem seen by these critics, but rather enable the perpetuation of an unsustainable lifestyle.
In short, it appears to be the debate between those who believe that we need less progress, and those who say we need more. Both cite the Law of Unintended Consequences, for it applies both to action and inaction. Both claim to have science on their side. Both claim to have economists on their side. They are currently competing for the support of political leaders.
The Guardian piece is a single bullet in a long war, but it is a shot heard round the world, and was published as such. Readers need to know not only what is going on, but what is “hot news”, and knowledge of the source of its heat. A real “war of ideas” is gathering steam, one in which biofuels are no more than some collateral damage.
