During the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, as lockdowns were put in place by government, there was concern about the experts demanding the decisions. They were overwhelmingly not biologists and immunologists and doctors but were instead epidemiologists using numerical models and making projections with data in rapid flux.
And, claims former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, dissent was banned. Few wanted to hear discussion about the mental health aspects of extended isolation on children, or missed doctor’s appointments and NHS waiting list backlogs so extensive that now patients take…
In the United Kingdom, they were earlier to embrace offshore wind turbines. Now they face a critical environmental, economic, and energy challenge; how to get rid of them.
And that is a problem about to hit all of Europe.
In the early 2000s, the UK embraced offshore wind turbines as a way to offset their CO2 emissions and, like most confirmation bias events, refused to see the data right in front of their eyes. Wind power deserves basic research, but not government subsidies and mandates. It didn't work 200 years ago any more than having a garden meant you could feed a city and very little…
In modern politics, populism has become a bad word but democracy itself is populist, and in recent decades populism has become a battle cry for alternative food supply movements.
There are some who contend that representative agriculture by a tiny percentage of the population - a republic of food - needs to be supplanted by short food supply chains which deal directly with consumers - populism. The term they use is not populism, of course, they re-branded it as "food sovereignty" and "local determination of good agricultural practices" and a desire to remove "industrial" agriculture, but such…