A Missouri jury is shortly to be asked to sit in judgment on the environmental standards that ought to apply to a smelter in the Peruvian Andes. The plaintiffs—more than 2,800 Peruvian citizens—are represented by American trial lawyers who recruited them in Peru. The defendant is not the Peruvian operating company that actually ran the facility, but its American parent, Doe Run Resources. Peru itself has twice protested to the United States that the proceedings infringe its sovereignty and breach the letter and spirit of the bilateral Trade Promotion Agreement.

The case is a textbook study in how well-intentioned environmental litigation can produce perverse outcomes. A clear-eyed risk-benefit analysis shows that Doe Run Peru’s stewardship of the La Oroya complex delivered measurable improvements in emissions, employment, and community conditions relative to the disastrous pre-1997 baseline—progress that the litigation now threatens to erase.

Critics contend the company’s record fell short in some areas, but the evidence indicates the story is more complicated: Doe Run Peru inherited a toxic legacy it did not create, invested far beyond its contractual obligations to clean it up, and kept the local economy alive while doing so. The litigation itself now does more harm than the emissions it seeks to punish.

Nationalized industry: “A vision from hell”

La Oroya sits at 12,300 feet in a narrow Andean valley. The metallurgical complex there began operations in 1922. For three-quarters of a century it was run first by a private American firm and then, after nationalization in 1974, by Centromin, a Peruvian state-owned enterprise. Emissions controls were minimal. Lead, arsenic, sulphur dioxide, and other metals poured into the air, water, and soil. By 1997, when the Peruvian government privatized the asset, the surrounding area was, in the words of one contemporary report, “a vision from hell.” The soil was contaminated; rivers ran with industrial waste; vegetation had largely disappeared.

Doe Run Peru, the new owner, inherited that legacy. Under the purchase agreement it accepted a detailed environmental remediation plan (known locally as a PAMA) that required roughly $110 million of spending over several years. The Peruvian government, for its part, retained responsibility for cleaning up historic soil contamination and agreed to indemnify the buyer against claims arising from pre-1997 operations. This division of labor was not generosity but commercial realism. No rational investor would have accepted open-ended liability for three generations of unregulated pollution by the state itself.

Private cleanup begins

What happened next is instructive. Doe Run Peru spent more than $300 million—nearly three times the original estimate. It built a new industrial wastewater-treatment plant, replaced antiquated slag-transport systems that had dumped waste directly into the Mantaro River, installed modern arsenic-handling facilities, upgraded air-pollution controls (including electrostatic precipitators and baghouses), and constructed sulphuric-acid plants to capture sulphur dioxide and metals from the lead, zinc and copper circuits. Fugitive emissions were tackled with enclosures and dedicated filtration. A closed-circuit television system allowed real-time monitoring and rapid response.

These were not cosmetic gestures. Lead emissions from the main stack fell substantially—by roughly 68-74% according to company and operational data—and overall air and effluent quality improved markedly in monitored parameters. Effluent discharges that had routinely violated Peruvian standards were brought substantially into compliance with the PAMA requirements Doe Run was obligated to meet.

Crucially, the company kept the complex running while it upgraded it. That mattered because La Oroya’s economy revolved around the smelter; closing it would have been an immediate social disaster. Instead, Doe Run Peru employed thousands, raised wages, built schools and clinics, ran hygiene programs for children, renovated homes to reduce lead-dust exposure, and funded nutrition and health initiatives.

Blood-lead levels among workers and residents, while still elevated by rich-country standards, fell markedly during its stewardship from the extreme pre- and early-privatization highs. The improvements were real, measurable, and achieved in one of the harshest industrial environments on earth.

Pragmatic investment vs punitive nostalgia

The risk-benefit ledger therefore favors Doe Run Peru’s approach. The pre-1997 baseline was decades of uncontrolled emissions under mixed private and state ownership. Doe Run Peru accepted a polluted asset, invested heavily in abatement technologies that its predecessors had never bothered with, and delivered measurable reductions in exposure while sustaining employment. The alternative—leaving the complex in state hands or selling it to an operator with lower environmental standards—would almost certainly have left the community worse off. That is the logic that has guided successful clean-ups of legacy industrial sites from the Ruhr to Pittsburgh: pragmatic investment beats punitive nostalgia.

Yet the Peruvian government did not honor its side of the bargain. It failed to remediate the historic soil contamination for which it had explicitly accepted responsibility. When the global financial crisis struck in 2008-09, it refused a modest extension to finish the final PAMA project. Doe Run Peru was forced into involuntary bankruptcy. The complex has been largely idle ever since. Thousands of direct and indirect jobs evaporated. No new operator has stepped in while the threat of American litigation hangs over the asset. The people now suffering most are the very residents the plaintiffs purport to represent.

Litigation compounds the injury

Two groups of American lawyers traveled to Peru to solicit clients. They enlisted a nun and a priest as “next friends” to lend moral authority in a devout community. The Peruvian entity that actually operated the smelter was not sued, only the Missouri parent and its executives. This is a deliberate attempt to keep the case in an American courtroom where damages can be larger and procedural hurdles lower.

Peru has objected formally, arguing that a Missouri jury has no business setting emissions standards for a Peruvian smelter or second-guessing the regulatory choices of a sovereign government. The US-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement expressly bars America from undertaking environmental law-enforcement activities in Peru. Allowing tort damages to function as de-facto fines for breaches of local standards comes uncomfortably close to doing exactly that.

Imagine the absurdity if the sovereign jurisdictions were reversed. Would the United States ever tolerate a foreign court ordering which regulations apply to a Missouri factory?

Evidence from whistleblower testimony and internal documents supplied by Doe Run describes forged official stamps, fabricated records, bribes to officials and coercive recruitment tactics—promises of dietary supplements withdrawn if families refused to sign. Critics of the company may downplay these issues, but the allegations cannot be waved away; they must be tested in court, and they raise serious questions about the integrity of the plaintiff recruitment process. Nor can the fact that the plaintiffs’ own experts have undermined the central jurisdictional theory: that St Louis executives “controlled” day-to-day operations at a complex 4,000 miles away. Real-time metallurgical decisions in the Andes are not made by video conference from Missouri.

The broader stakes are larger still. Foreign direct investment in extractive industries in developing countries is already politically fraught. Investors weigh political risk, commodity-price volatility and regulatory uncertainty. If American courts can retroactively impose their own environmental norms on projects that were openly negotiated with host governments, the calculus changes. Companies will either demand iron-clad indemnities (which Peru has shown it will not honor) or simply stay away.

The losers will be the very communities that need the capital, technology and managerial know-how to improve their environments. La Oroya’s experience is a cautionary tale: the only party that ever spent serious money cleaning up the site is now bankrupt; the complex it modernized is idle; the government that promised remediation has done nothing.

None of this is to deny that lead, arsenic and sulphur dioxide are serious hazards. Heavy-metal exposure carries well-documented health risks, particularly for children. Public policy must manage those risks. But risk management is not risk elimination at any cost. It requires weighing costs and benefits in context. In La Oroya the context was a legacy of 75 years of neglect by the state and prior owners, a high-altitude industrial valley with few other economic options, and a host government that both invited foreign capital and then failed to meet its own obligations. Against that backdrop, Doe Run Peru’s record—substantial emission cuts, sustained employment, community investment—represents genuine progress that no amount of litigation can replace.

Conclusion

A Missouri jury cannot usefully decide what the “correct” emissions standard for a Peruvian smelter should have been two decades ago. Nor can it fairly apportion blame when the host government has walked away from its contractual duties. The claims belong in Peru, where the facts can be examined by judges familiar with local conditions, the regulatory history, and the trade-offs inherent in any industrial operation.

For the last ten years, the Big Change activist movement has benefitted from unlimited dark funding coming from billionaire philanthropists, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into their networks of NGOs, law firms, large media groups, academics, scientists and influencers to control public policy. A large part of this money was undeclared, non-transparent and free from scrutiny as Big Change bought control of the public narrative, from climate hysteria to chemophobia, from fast food to pharma, from the microplastic mania to the arbitrary rejection of vaping and nicotine pouches as tobacco harm reduction tools…. Forcing their needless transitions on consumers, affecting western economies and prosperity, Big Change then moved to the task of dismantling capitalism and industrialization … that is … until somebody pulled the plug on the party.

Yesterday (April 23), the US Department of the Treasury announced that organizations claiming tax exempt status (NGOs, foundations, universities and some media groups) will have to be transparent about who is funding their projects and campaigns. The Firebreak has spent three years exposing a series of egregious violations where foundations were spending hundreds of millions of dollars creating NGO front groups, false research centers and media reporting organizations to advance their interests. Today we celebrate this announcement as the first step in a return to fairness in the policy arena.

This does not mean the misuse of foundation funding will end, but that it can no longer enjoy tax exempt status (ie, paid for by taxpayers). As billionaires hate to pay taxes, it will force most activist funding out into the light of day. The press release notes how fiscal sponsorship has been misused to hide abusive activist behavior.

“Fiscal sponsorship is an umbrella term for several longstanding and lawful structures through which a tax-exempt organization may support charitable projects and initiatives. Recent congressional oversight has raised concerns that some fiscal sponsorship arrangements may be used to obscure who is operating a project, who controls project funds, and how those funds are being used.”

The fact that fiscal sponsorship hides funding sources is one issue, but activist groups also pretend to be NGOs or legal entities when they don’t actually exist outside of the fiscal sponsoring organizations. As they are not legal entities, there is no accountability. In the Department of the Treasury’s press release, Scott Bessent states:

“When bad actors misuse charitable structures, directors and officers should understand that transparency can lead to scrutiny, accountability, and liability under the law.”

Big Change should be able to understand this given how NGOs like US Right to Know or Corporate Europe Observatory demand that industry be transparent. As these two NGOs are, themselves, funded by dark, donor-advised funds, the hypocrites actually thought the rules did not apply to them.

A good example of this was in the three-part Firebreak exposé on Beyond Plastics, a phantom NGO run out of a tiny academic institution in Vermont, Bennington College, acting as its fiscal sponsor. While there is no declaration of how much Beyond Plastics receives (as it only exists as a project sponsored from within Bennington College), it is known that Bloomberg Philanthropies has committed $85 million to the Beyond Plastics and Beyond Petrochemicals “projects” (and that the foundation is a donor to Bennington). But worse, how can a phantom NGO be held accountable if they don’t exist? When Beyond Plastics published false claims about the safety of plastic (PVC) water pipes, the industry body wanted to file a complaint, but to whom?

Bennington simply ignored the complaint and put Beyond Plastics’ false claims down to “academic freedom”.

Even more ridiculous is that the head of Beyond Plastics, Judith Enck, was allowed to testify in front of Congress representing this phantom NGO to advance her campaign. Judith must be exhausted after having to cover up so many years of deception.

A Call Finally Answered

The Firebreak has been regularly calling for the removal of the tax exempt status of any non-transparent donations, arguing it would reduce corrupt campaigns and the manipulation of policy debates. See below, for example, our recent recommendations to end conflicts of interest within the scientific community (where researchers are paid dark money to generate studies creating a baseless fear of microplastics).

Why is this Important?

Activist groups have been using this dark money loophole to hide funding, conflicts of interest and accountability for their claims. People can easily be bought (sorry) and some bad actors have destroyed the good will and public trust of NGOs. This is why The Firebreak proposes a distinction between humanitarian-based civil society NGOs and policy lobbying non-profits (that should be called: Alternative Policy Enterprises).

Take, for example, the smoke and mirrors show at Earthjustice. Registered as an NGO (tax exempt), this organization functions like a law office, filing lawsuits to support other activist campaigns. They have an annual budget of over $200 million although they only earn around $5 million in awards from successful lawsuits, which means not only that they must not be very good lawyers, but that the rest of their budget must come from donations or investments. But donations from whom?

The NGO is not at all transparent. A look at their 2023 IRS Form 990 shows that they received two donations from two “persons” totaling over $29 million. Earthjustice does not have to declare who paid this pseudo-law firm such large, kind grants. The only thing we are allowed to know is that this funding was tax-deductible (so a part of these millions was courtesy of the American taxpayer).

It is not correct for an organization that functions as a law firm, filing lawsuits against industries (and thus in favor of the interests of other industries), to take any anonymous donations … of any size. But this illustrates how corrupted the practice has become. Earthjustice no doubt believes that they are doing “God’s work” and can be trusted with such dark money, without having to reveal what earmarks or which interest groups were involved in $29 million worth of lawsuits. But in reality, whoever donates $15 million to a law firm has a clear interest in the outcome of the lawsuit (likely for some alternative product that will benefit if its competition is banned or bankrupted).

But don’t think for a moment these activists will just give up and come clean. They are not willing to go back to begging for funds or not controlling the narrative. They are not willing to give up the private jets and move back into the strip mall. Big Change organizations still have other tools at their disposal to hide donations from special interest groups, like dark donor-advised funds. The Firebreak will continue to expose these violations until a certain degree of fairness and transparency returns to the policy arena. But for now, let’s celebrate this win.

Scientists tend to get bogged down in the technical details when they try to explain something to a non-specialist. If I want to know if it is safe to eat an apple, I don’t want to know about maximum residue levels, LD50s or long-term, low-dose effects. I am searching for a simple message I can trust and relate to.

Where the scientists fail, the activist fear campaigners excel by simply saying: “There are chemicals on your apple that are banned in the EU. They will give you cancer and cause you to suffer a slow, painful death!!!” And if we try to explain the high levels of safety, their clear, simple message is: “Well, that is industry data. We just don’t know for sure what is an acceptable dose level so it is better to be safe than sorry!”

How do we deal with this message deficiency?

Too often the scientists get caught in the refutation trap: “No, this does not cause cancer!” or “There is no proof that this chemical causes autism.” These are not positive messages that the public is looking for. And the more you deny, the guiltier you look, falling into an unwinnable trap by merely associating the product with the risk. Trust is an emotional judgement and a positive message goes far in building confidence.

We tend to forget that the public does not want a comprehensive explanation or a science lesson. They are not looking for the facts. They are looking for a simple explanation, an image or story they can easily hold onto. Trust is built on information people can understand and relate to. They just want to know, with a reasonable confidence, that something will not harm them, so they can go on with their day (without fear and uncertainty). If that reassurance cannot be given to them in a way they can hold onto, then they are left with doubt, and are vulnerable to believe one of the many claims thrown at them by relentless fear-mongers.

The message game is played on uneven terms. The scientist has to be right, with certainty. The activist only has to get you to doubt something is certain. The science communicator has to respect the science and get the audience to reject the seeds of doubt.

I used to refer to activists as watchdogs. My dog could bark at the moon 99 times out of a hundred, but that one time it stops a threat, it justifies its worth. If a scientist or a company is wrong one time in a million, it is unacceptable. Trust is built on the intention of care and concern. My watchdog cares for me, that company researcher wants to profit from me.

I have been active in science and risk communications since the 1990s, well before the 2000 House of Lords Third Report on Science and Society. Back then, the number of experts in this field, across Europe, could be counted in single digits. While the fields of science and risk communications have changed over the last three decades, as well as the communications technologies, the messages and the framing remain largely the same.

Allow me to share the top twelve messages I have used to try to reassure the public on environmental health risks.

Child’s Play

All of the messages need to be simple, clear, relatable and immediately reassuring. They have to be easy enough for a child to understand yet complete enough to assure trust and confidence. Aim for common sense reasoning that can stick in people’s minds. Most importantly, the messages have to be short and direct – people lose interest after 15 words. They also need to get at the misconception leading to the fear and doubt.

To this day, my greatest achievement has to have been a children’s book for scientists on risk communication I had written in 2005. Truth be told, it took me 45 minutes to write the “Do’s and Don’ts” down in a scrap piece of paper in a bar in Thessaloniki. Perhaps that is why it remains so special to me.

Please feel free to use these twelve messages in conversations with your friends and family who might be trying to spread fear and uncertainty with you. Don’t get angry with them – your goal is not confrontation but reassurance.

Some of them have been borrowed from others far smarter than me.

Twelve Messages for Science Communicators

1. Chemicals are not man-made. In fact, man is made of chemicals.

2. Just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it is good. Ebola is natural.

3. There are more carcinogens in a single cup of coffee than in the pesticide residues of an entire year’s consumption of fruit and vegetables. (Bruce Ames)

4. There are over 1000 chemicals in a cup of coffee. We have only tested 28, and 19 of which are carcinogenic to rats. (Bruce Ames)

5. There are around 10,000 chemicals in a single meal, causing the body to deal with the cocktail effect on a daily basis. That’s what the body does.

6. Contextualize numbers: A part per billion is like a drop of water in an Olympic swimming pool. Or: A part per billion is like 1 second over 31 years. Or: This is equivalent to the size of Belgium.

7. The dose makes the poison. (Paracelsus). One aspirin can do a lot of good; 100 … not so good. Or: To reach a minimum level of daily risk exposure, you would need to eat 20 boxes of cereal per day.

8. Correlation is not causality. The presence of a chemical does not mean that it caused a disease any more than the rooster’s crowing caused the sun to rise.

9. Risk management is part of daily life. When we cross the road, we are managing a large number of risks. Why? Because we want the benefits. Risks have uncertainties but they are also tied to benefits and opportunities.

10. This chemical is produced naturally in the body. Or: This chemical also exists in nature. Or: This chemical has been synthetically produced to remove impurities.

11. Science doesn’t care about how you feel or what you believe. It seeks to discover the truth. Or: Science isn’t democratic. It respects the facts and evidence.

12. If the science is proved wrong, it will adapt and test the next best hypothesis. Does your dogma or belief system do that?

I could go on, but I like round, established numbers (not very scientific, I know).

When you communicate with non-scientists, be patient and empathetic. They may be misinformed or ignorant, but most of all they feel vulnerable. These issues concern them and they are afraid. Open up, share your own feelings and listen to them.

At the Forum for the Future of Agriculture, Kurt Vandenberghe, the European Commission European Commission Director General for DG CLIMA, presented the EU’s recent “Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming” regulation. From the perspective of climate change regulators, it seems that farmers exist to grow carbon stores, not food. After Kurt’s keynote, the bean counters all came out with their own agriculture carbon calculations. Afterall, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. But what exactly are they managing? The financialization of soil, carbon and nature are just further examples of how detached leaders are from what farmers actually do. Their metrics reminded me of the “Quick Fix Doctors” from the carbon emission trading scheme, building great solutions to answer the wrong questions.

My favorite quote of the conference came from Martin Stuchtey, the founder of the Landbanking Group, saying that “nature needs to be treated like an infrastructure project”. This reminded me of the optimism of the geo-engineers ready to take on the climate and “fix” Mother Nature. Once again, a great solution to answer the wrong question.

So what is the right question? Why didn’t anyone at this conference ask the farmers what they need? As in years past, a full day of speakers and panels at the Forum for the Future of Agriculture did not include a single farmer to voice their concerns. No, the experts and gurus thought they could speak on behalf of the agricultural sector and the food chain, shaping farmers’ needs to fit their own dogma while ignoring the interests of the most important link in the chain.

At times, some of the comments toward conventional agriculture at this Brussels event were downright offensive. Sandrine Dixson-Declève, the Global Ambassador for the Club of Rome and Executive Chair of Earth4All, did not earn any compliments from discussions during the coffee break when she crowed that organic produce is now cheaper than conventional (due to the high price of fertilizer following the US-Iran war). But what did we seriously expect? No one in the room was expecting a speaker from the Club of Rome to be sensitive to the plight of real people.

In the same way that Big Change failed to listen to the concerns of consumers and real people in crafting their solutions to the wrong questions on their climate campaign and energy transitions, the dreamers, idealists and activists plotting out their food system transition are working from their echo-chamber and not asking the farmers for their advice. Big Change’s cosmopolitan opinions of farmers are even more demeaning than the climate campaigners view of consumers: “Just pay them a short-term subsidy and that will be enough to make them go away and keep their tractors away from my office.”

To Big Change, farmers will just have to adapt to the new rules as we all set out on implementing our food system transition. Consumers will have to change their eating habits (maybe only meat on Mondays?) and the food industry will have to retool to adapt to the new reality. What could possibly go wrong?

It might not be a bad idea for Big Change activists to be asking the farmers what they need and want, and maybe these activists should also expand the sources of the advisers they are listening to. … And it would probably help if they were a little less arrogant in approaching the issue.

What do Farmers Want?

Farmers want to earn enough to make a living, protect their soil and land and safely bring the harvest in. They don’t wake up in the morning and think of how they can contribute to the great food system transition. They would love to save money using fewer inputs and less labor, but they also need solutions that will work. If they try something and it fails to perform, they will not use it again. They want better seeds, fewer weeds and a secure access to water and fertilizer. One thing most farmers absolutely hate is the amount of paperwork and delays they face with regulatory compliance, as they seem to spend more time at a desk than in the field.

So what is Big Change promising farmers? More paperwork, especially if their main job is now “carbon farming”. The Big Change campaigns to block GMOs and gene editing will restrict farmers from the best available seed technologies. Their strategy to ban herbicides like glyphosate not only restricts weed control, it also inhibits a farmer’s means to protect the soil with complex, multi-species cover crops and no-till farming (so they will release more carbon and moisture via tillage while requiring more fertilizer … unless, of course, if Big Change succeeds in restricting fertilizer use). As for access to water and irrigation, essential in a warmer climate, let’s not forget the almost annual attacks in France by militant peasant groups on farmers who try to build irrigation ponds to capture the winter rain. So the Big Change food system transition campaign will make it harder for farmers to make a living, to protect their soil and land and to bring in the harvest – the opposite of everything farmers need.

“It’s a sacrifice I am willing to make”

Farmers are not the only ones who will suffer from the Big Change food system transition.

• Consumers will have to pay more (just like the energy transitions consequence).

• People will eat fewer fruits and vegetables, not because of fear of Big Change’s contrived pesticide risk campaign, but because of high prices and lower food production supply.

• This will have a knock-on effect on public healthcare costs as diets deteriorate.

• As more farmers abandon their land or shift to agroforestry (exactly what Big Change wants in their campaign to re-wild farmland), rural communities will suffer as more economic activity leaves these agricultural regions.

• The food processing and manufacturing industries will struggle to maintain secure supplies, not just from fewer farmers but also from increased risks from crop failures. Costs will go up.

• This will affect retailers as they face longer supply chains, less price stability and access to quality produce.

All of this because a small group of well-funded activists just wanted to ban GMOs and pesticides. Big Change clearly does not realize how integrated the food system is.

What is infuriating is not only that Big Change is ignoring all of these issues, but that they will celebrate many of the negative consequences as they advance their transition strategy toward their real goal: a short-chain, local, organic food system without industry scale and involvement. Agroecology is essentially Marxism applied to the food chain. This transition is presented as inevitable and urgent, a foregone conclusion everyone has to accept, and Big Change, once again, does not care about the consequences, but only about winning this campaign.

Big Tech to the Rescue

Big Change is imposing their ideal-driven transition on the food system, without science-driven innovation. But given the dogmatic handcuffs these activists have placed on farmers (affecting the rest of the food chain), Big Tech is trying to find solutions and quick fixes.

Rather than fighting the finality logic of the food system transition, like the transition to renewable energy, researchers are trying to introduce new technologies to help adapt to the appropriated agricultural solutions (that are now deemed unacceptable by the self-appointed transition architects). Like the Smart Grid that was developed to deal with renewable power production inefficiencies (that benefit the affluent at a cost to the average consumer), farmers are now being offered high tech solutions to deal with what used to be minor problems.

A new era in agriculture is being rushed forward, including precision farming with AI decision-making tools and on-site sample analyses, drones to spray and measure yields, self-driving combines to better utilize land use … When a Big Change activist mentions vertical farming or digital labelling, everyone gets excited. These are all amazing emerging innovations to deal with problems that had never been serious or considered until Big Change started to obstruct how farmers farmed.

Like the expensive energy transition solutions, if you are wealthy ag-pioneer, own your land outright and like to play with new gadgets, these transition technologies will do the trick. But most farmers are struggling to make it to the next harvest. They cannot afford to invest in all of these Big Tech solutions for a low-tech operation. And by the way, how certain are we that Big Change peasant farmers, the ones who stormed French irrigation ponds as symbols of some undefined agro-industry, won’t start shooting drones out of the sky because of unfair competition with their tiny, permaculture or biodynamic plots?

Like the transition to electric vehicles, a great technology whose time has not yet come, Big Change will force the (too early) adaptation of these emerging agriculture technologies to speed up their transition timeline. As they develop and the food system adapts, then these technologies can be gradually implemented with continuous improvements and innovations (what industry production stewardship advocates consider as a “transition”). And they will develop according to what farmers need, and not to what some well-funded activists want.

Sure, Deere and Co, Microsoft and other major companies (all sponsoring the Forum for the Future of Agriculture events) will do well when these emerging technologies are widely adopted (when every farmer has a fleet of drones). But most farmers won’t or will suffer from the setbacks of developing emerging solutions that should have been given more time to evolve into an affordable, practical and successful solution to real problems. Once again, Big Change, with its “No Time to Lose” transition urgency, won’t let that happen.

So will the food system transition go the same way as the climate crisis energy transition? Surely some good things will come from it, but they would have in any case, just in their own time. But more farmers will go deeper in debt, abandon the fields or rotate to other, less consumer oriented crops. Markets will suffer supply shocks, affecting consumers and the rest of the food chain.

The campaign to impose a food system transition is just one further example of how the arrogance and hubris of Big Change puts humanity on another unnecessary collision course. Like the demise of their climate campaign, the public will react negatively to Big Change’s demands. It won’t just be tractors in front of government offices. Food and energy are seen in the West as basic rights. Nobody wants Big Change to go into their cupboards any more than they wanted them to turn down their thermostats.

While no one in the environmental movement wants to admit it, the rhetorical days of climate crises, net-zero and carbon-free solutions have become part of political history. This should not have happened given how hundreds of millions of dollars of dark foundation funding were poured into climate campaigning, paying off the media and driving ESG and corporate social responsibility goals. So what went wrong?

Neo-Marxists and environmentalists used the threat of climate change as the opportunity to refocus their campaign against industry and capitalism. They framed it as an existential crisis, centering on the urgent necessity for an energy transition away from fossil fuels toward renewables. There was “no time to lose” so targets were rushed forward to decarbonize western economies. Transition to renewables, transition to electric vehicles (EVs), transition to a net-zero industries – all of these massive green infrastructure transitions became imperative, with target deadlines set for 2030 (or 2035 at the latest).

It was a moral imperative. Millions of children were marching in the streets, there were theatrical street shows, closures of airports, movies on the climate movement and cultural events. If an academic wanted to publish a paper in a journal like Nature, it had to mention the climate crisis. Companies had to frame their press releases within the new theological dogma. And every news story was reported as a climate story. The narrative was so seamless that no one even asked who was funding this show. This is the perfect example of how Big Change was at work in the background, controlling the campaign, the narrative, the networks…

Fatal Assumptions

Since the impact of severely disrupting western economies would be inevitable, Big Change started to advance to concept of “degrowth” in a post-capitalist world. Rather than exhausting the word “transition”, Big Change referred to this period as “late-stage capitalism”, assuming that the fate of the economic/financial system had already been sealed.

There was one little problem. Nobody asked consumers if they were ready to give up social and economic goods, accept harder times and pay more for lower quality products.

• The transition to renewables meant higher energy costs, colder homes and risks to a secure energy supply.

• The transition to EVs meant more expensive cars with battery technologies that would be obsolete within a couple years.

• With wealth disparity near record levels, western consumers were then told that growth, jobs and progress were not longer part of the plan.

Should anyone have been surprised with the results of the elections of 2024-25 when consumers were asked what they actually thought of all of this?

People don’t want to give up social and economic goods for some idealistic transition. The climate campaigners had been drinking their own Kool-Aid and convinced themselves that saving the planet was a far greater calling than a warm home or affordable personal mobility. Change was inevitable, they argued, and the only question was how fast the transition could be imposed. These activists could afford the sacrifice and did not consider the effects such cutbacks would have on the less affluent. Worse, they believed the studies they had funded that reassured them that the transition would not lead to any short-term decline, and could even deliver benefits.

In the business community, there was a clear set of assumptions that no one could question: that the days of fossil fuels were over, that capitalism had entered its late, final stages, and that deindustrialization was a beneficial part of the degrowth strategy. Asset managers were rating companies according to their commitment to decarbonize, earning ESG points was a core corporate strategy and every event, every decision, had to be climate motivated.

Pure Madness

In hindsight, the demand from Big Change to rapidly decarbonize was pure madness. Government subsidies for offshore wind farms were driving the public purse deeper into debt, farmers converted valuable agricultural land to solar farms and targets for EVs were well ahead of production capacity or recharging infrastructure.

The financial community bought into the transition as a new business opportunity, new products and new investments. In their ESG world, old heavy industries were being challenged, threatened, blacklisted for not falling in line. Davos lost a decade of business leadership defining itself by climate interest groups and an angry Swedish teenager.

If the climate campaigners had just slowed their transition demands to incremental changes (which the industry concept of product stewardship called “continuous improvement”), they would still be leading the movement towards a greener, lower carbon economy over the coming decades. But Big Change is about creating opportunities to push a transition as fast and as binding as possible.

“Compromise” does not exist in the Big Change lexicon.

The Big Money Behind this Big Change Transition

Once climate change was declared a crisis, assumedly by the UN at first but repeated so often that no one (except Bjørn Lomborg) actually questioned the claim, Big Change was able to orchestrate large volumes of government and foundation funding channeled through their networks. With big money comes bigger networks of paid-off lawyers, scientists, journalists, lobbyists, consultants, celebrity influencers and slicker media campaigns. The Firebreak covered the party (even if we weren’t invited to the punchbowl).

• Florence Autret’s excellent investigation into the European Climate Foundation showed how foundations pumped hundreds of millions annually into a high-level fiscal sponsor to represent their interests at high levels in the European Union, UN and the World Economic Forum while paying off a network of NGOs. As part of the Big Change movement, they don’t feel they have to declare how much they receive from whom, and how much they regrant to whom (ECF’s 2023 income was €279 million).

• Perhaps the most egregious case of Big Change abuse was when a number of US-based foundations funded Canadian and international NGOs to run campaigns to try to “landlock” the Canadian province of Alberta to prevent them from being able to export their fossil fuels. The Firebreak reviewed the Albertan government’s official inquiry into the extent of the extremist campaigning, all orchestrated by foundation fund managers in the United States.

• The Agroecology Fund was a sleepy organization supporting peasant farmers on a budget of around $1 million a year until they changed their fiscal sponsor. Our Substack showed how the Global Greengrants Fund repackaged agroecology as a means to mitigate climate change (it doesn’t). They then tapped into their network of tech billionaires and within a couple years increased the funding to around $100 million for advocacy campaigns against conventional agriculture. Although they don’t disclose the amounts (because they only exist as a Global Greengrants Fund project and thus don’t have to), the Agroecology Fund seem to be running a lot of programs with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

• The Firebreak ran a series of investigations into the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), showing how support from the investment banking community allowed them to build a massive database of industry CO2 emissions (that the investment bankers then used as inside information to package into financial products). When the CDP started to diversify into other environmental disclosure products, the writing was on the wall.

• The UN nominally sponsored the Net-Zero Banking Alliance and the Net-Zero Asset Management Initiative to use the power of the financial industry to move the developed world toward a net-zero economy. The Firebreak showed how these bankers were the first to abandon the Big Change ship when they started to see how much they could earn selling AI Data Center investment funds (built on fossil fuels). By the 2025 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, the climate crisis was a distant memory.

• Big Change invested a lot into controlling the media and the climate narrative. The Firebreak exposed how foundations, via discreet fiscal sponsors, set up a project called Covering Climate Now, to regrant millions of dollars to “train” journalists to report every news story as a climate story. The money was flowing so freely among reporters, with foundations like Bloomberg Philanthropies creating their own investigative reporting arms, that the climate crisis narrative should have been cast in stone.

One of the tragedies from this manipulation of reality was the reappropriation of development aid. To meet UN imposed climate commitments, many government aid agencies simply refocused their funding and redirected their programs toward climate-related issues. There was no new money. If you are running a family planning charity or a community health service in a developing country, you had better shift to planting trees to be able to avail of aid funding. I, myself, was involved in a rural development project that had its German government funding yanked because it did not meet their new climate-driven parameters. Once again, Big Change does not care about the actual consequences of their campaigns so long as they are successful.

Unravelling Big Change

Project Climate failed, with their ambitious agenda rolled back, the net-zero strategy derailed and the return to a fossil-fuel based economy entrenched, likely well past 2035. The activists should have listened, engaged and compromised. But Big Change did not think like that, dismissed opposition and only listened to their own expert advice.

There is a thinly veiled arrogance from activists and academics who suffer from the patriarchal belief than anyone who does not think like them is stupid and that their concerns should simply be ignored. Since the ignorant public adds no value to the discussion, campaigns, cutbacks and hardships should just be imposed on them. If governments, knowing full well of a potential consumer backlash, do not comply with the activist demands, then Big Change pumps even more resources into attacking the regulators.

Giving these activists money and power just amplifies their arrogance (I call it the “Robert Malone Effect”). And if someone like me were to challenge their dogmatic activism with facts or a rational counter-arguments, I would just be ringfenced or branded an “industry shill”. In blissful ignorance, they can carry on with their campaign without the need for reflection or revision.

On the climate campaign, the idealists behind Big Change abruptly met hard reality during the elections of 2024-25. Will other Big Change campaigns suffer the same demise? In Part 3 of this series, Big Change’s food system transition will be evaluated.

With tens of millions in foundation funding and fiscal sponsor participation, with programs coordinated with the litigation industry and with a disproportionate influence on the media, academe and regulators, these change leaders could no longer be called NGOs. I coined the term: APEs (Alternative Policy Enterprises) to reflect how they have become a big business and could not be considered like other humanitarian NGOs and civil society groups committed to helping others. And to reflect their excessive size, like Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Tobacco … this movement should be called: Big Change.

Big Change

Big Change refers to an industrial-grade complex of activist forces and interest groups that implement continuous transition strategies to attain massive social, economic and political disruption. It has become a force seeking to dominate and control human behavior through their transformation of society. As a movement, Big Change does not seek consent, but rather, out of a sense of urgency, it imposes restrictions upon its publics.

They used to be a fringe movement of a handful of environmentalists climbing smokestacks and shouting outside of offices, but then, shifting to a foundation-funded model, their budgets increased exponentially, allowing them the cash to integrate media and academics into their campaigns. Activism is always about change and as the activist movement grew more powerful, more influential and more wealthy, it became Big Change. Now, standing beside their foundation billionaires, law firms and interest groups, they give speeches at UN conferences, Davos forums, US Congressional hearings and European Parliament meetings.

The narrative of Big Change is continuous transition away from the societal norms and laws, and it purveys most policy dialogues today. The world is changing at an incredible pace so we need to change or die. These campaigners are not looking at incremental change, but always revolutionary, systemic change.

“Transition” is the keyword used by Big Change campaigners.

• On energy, they have attempted to impose a transition away from fossil fuels.

• On chemicals, Big Change have used fear campaigns to transition toward “nature-based” alternatives.

• Conventional farming is coming under intense pressure from Big Change, working with Big Organic to restrict farmers’ ability to use synthetic pesticides, fertilizers and gene-edited seeds. A transition to agroecology is their only solution.

• Big Change wants to impose transitions away from livestock farming as well as putting arbitrary llimits on most food processing technologies.

• On economics, Big Change wants to see a transition from growth, global trade, capitalism and industry.

We need a “happiness index” instead of a GDP growth metric, they argue, and Big Change won’t be happy until capitalism is dead and their degrowth strategy is adopted. This is extreme-left socialism – Marxism without the proletariat. The wealth and technology that capitalism has produced will be redistributed: industry without factories, produce without production, work without labor… I once called this “Foundation Capitalism” but it is something far larger than just the inside influence the activists have on a handful of billionaires.

This is no longer a movement of tree-huggers with clipboards seeking donations from passersby on sidewalks or telemarketing for membership dues. That 1980s financing model is long gone. The Firebreak has been cataloguing some of the revenue streams Big Change has been non-transparently amassing.

• We translated an investigation by Florence Autret on the European Climate Foundation, an NGO that earns over €270 million per year they then quietly redistribute to almost every European NGO working on climate change campaigns.

• The Firebreak showed how the Agroecology Fund spends over $100 million a year advocating (ie, lobbying) against conventional farming practices. We had to go to the foundation pages to track the amounts as the Agroecology Fund a) does not exist as a legal entity, and b) does not, therefore, have to disclose its balance sheet.

• Bloomberg Philanthropies has created a flotilla of Big Change NGOs to fight, on behalf of the WHO, against tobacco harm reduction products like vaping and nicotine pouches. With $1.6 billion in funding (plus an extra $400 million committed) this is a classic textbook case study of how these Bloomberg NGOs are no longer merely stakeholders.

• Michael Bloomberg has also created operations like Beyond Plastics and Beyond Petroleum to lobby against plastics and fossil fuels. He has reportedly donated at least $85 million, with more from other foundations, but as he set them up via fiscal sponsors, where neither campaign operation is a legal entity, the actual income and campaign expenses remain in the dark.

Big Change prefers to operate with Big Secrets.

Idealists and Pragmatists

Idealists speak of values to guide their decisions. Pragmatists look for the best practical answers to solve the problems we face. Nature/natural is a strong value for the activist community, so these idealists will impose preconditions like:

• farmers only being allowed to use natural-based pesticides even if synthetic alternatives are more efficient and better for the environment.

• Natural products like steel and glass are favored over plastics even if plastic alternatives have been found to be more sustainable in almost all applications.

• Solar and wind are seen as nature-friendly forms of energy regardless of the horrible environmental impacts of their production and the limitations to their power generation.

The values guiding Big Change are held as immutable, regardless of the negative consequences of their implementation. In other words, Big Change is a movement run by zealots more concerned with winning (imposing their changes) than making progress or improving human well-being or the environment. Transparency and honesty are not important values for Big Change activists.

While it is clear that pragmatists should have long-term goals supported by a commitment to shared values, they serve as guidance more than diktats. Where situations change, as they often do, or alternatives prove to be less efficient or appropriate in certain conditions, then the values of flexibility and pragmatism should influence the decision-making process.

As discussed in an earlier article, there is a significant difference in how Big Change understands transition compared to industry.

• For the idealists and activists, transition is certain and urgent, with change to be implemented as soon as possible. It is not a process for improvement but a euphemism for revolution. And once Big Change launches a transition campaign, there is no going back, no room for discussion and no compromise.

• For industry, transition is a progressive evolution of change built on innovation, development and continuous improvement (product stewardship). Like activists, industry is very interested in reducing energy costs and pollution, but this does not mean they force an arbitrary transition to meet some ideological dogma. They are pragmatic and seek progress and evolution rather than disruption.

Change as progress is a force for good providing societal benefits. Change as a political strategy is a force for power demanding societal sacrifice. Big Change is about power and control.

Date: March 1, 2026, 10:00 am

Location: UCSF, San Francisco

Attendees: Don, Joanna, Robbie, Sam, Susan, John

Subject: Finding new targets for MDLs

Don: Thank you for joining us today. The purpose of this meeting is to find new chemicals and companies to focus our next wave of litigation efforts on. It has been an amazing time for our industry. We moved from being the joke of the legal profession, the greedy strip mall ambulance chasers, to becoming the wielders of social justice by: shaping societal narratives with our influence on regulators, the media and filmmakers; having the ability to fund studies to create courtroom-ready evidence; and being the true public defenders protecting humanity from the excesses of industry and capitalism. With billions in fees from recent headline lawsuits, we have built an empire of power and control.
… But we are also vulnerable, as the expenses and debt of our industry has grown faster than our opportunities. For some time now, we have needed much more revenue and, quite frankly, we are running out of credible cases on talc, glyphosate, fossil fuels and benzene. I think we have exploited these issues as far as we could but our budgets and debts keep multiplying. Bottom line: Given our cost structure, we urgently need big health issues to harvest new revenues from.

Robbie: I thought we were moving on paraquat? We invested a lot in that EWG journalist to promote the “Paraquat Papers”.

Susan: No, the science was really weak there and the bellwethers were an embarrassment. I thought we had bought that judge, but she really ripped into our strategy. And in any case, Syngenta, our primary target, announced they were going to stop producing the herbicide. That means the punitive damages part of the court decisions would be lower. That is always our best fee source.

Joanna: But herbicides are a real money spinner. We have built a strong network with the Moms, the NGOs and Big Organic behind us, most of the public will believe anything we say about the risks of herbicides and almost everyone except farmers think they’re unnecessary.

John: Didn’t we fund a group of scientists around that Benbrook fellow to test urine samples of pregnant women to track the correlation between herbicides and neonatal issues? That was sure to be a blockbuster, plus the researchers were eager to refer plaintiffs to us and act as litigation consultants. What did they call themselves?

Sam: They were called “Heartland Something Something”. I heard they folded operations after failing to get government recognition and funding. Then their new director had a rather public meltdown after he discovered the rules the scientists were breaking and what they were actually doing for us. He kept going on about them needing more integrity and some ethical procedures.

John: That’s too bad – Our law firm invested a lot of money into them via their donor-advised fund.

Don: Look, I am not going to have to remind you how urgent this is. Speaking for our firm, the litigation finance interest rates are really starting to bite. One more appeal on talc and we will have to ground one of our jets.

Robbie: Yeah, I hear ya. We’re selling off caseloads and had to cut our plaintiff settlement contributions to under 10% … some clients have even complained to the press … in breach of our NDAs. Thank goodness our media groups kept that off the news. … What are your loan rates, if I may ask?

Don: 25% annual interest and 25% of the payout or settlement. But they keep rolling the debts over, never question new loan applications or follow up on how we actually expense the cash.

Joanna: That’s pretty good. Can you give me their number? … What about climate change issues. Couldn’t we sue Big Oil for hiding the facts and causing climate change? Foundations will give us millions to file these climate nuisance cases so we don’t have to invest much into trying to win.

John: No, been there, done that. New Ventures Fund tried to group foundations together to support Sher Edling. They haven’t won a bloody thing and wasted too much cash on celebrities. The idiots were even plagiarizing their arguments.

Joanna: But Sher Edling were trying cases on behalf of State governments who were only interested in political posturing. What if we try to get plaintiffs who lost their homes to storms and wildfires to cry in front of juries?

Don: Those would give us peanuts. How much is a house worth? 10 mill, plus 100 more in punitives? That won’t even cover our ad spend and expert witness fees. The foundations were funding Sher Edling’s lawsuits just to harass the fossil fuel industry – they never planned to win.
No, we need something big, where we can file hundreds of thousands of cases to extort a large corporation to settle for tens of billions of dollars. It is the only way we can pay off of our debts and open up a new cash line with the finance firms.

Joanna: Whatever happened to those scientists and NGOs we had been funding to create doubt on artificial sweeteners? Didn’t we have Coke against the ropes to be the next Monsanto, with aspartame as the next glyphosate?

Susan: I thought so too but the industry groups finally got up and did something. They got the governments of Japan and the US to push IARC into a corner. We only got a “possibly carcinogenic” classification from their aspartame monograph, and that wasn’t enough to sway even the most outraged jury. I fear industry is finally catching on to our IARC playbook.

Don: That’s bad news. Can someone please tell me why we are paying those Collegium Ramazzini scientists so much if they can’t deliver a simple 2A classification? I mean, it’s only a hazard assessment for Christ’s sake.

John: Yeah, Fiorella doesn’t have the same influence as she used to. I blame the Russians.

Don: And Chris, Martyn, Philip and Bernard are getting on in age. We need some young blood to take over there. Daniele was good but he got himself into a little bit of a scandal and lost his job – does anyone know if we were found out in that scandal?

Joanna: I’ll check with Jennifer at Mercury Films. She’s always been very discreet. In any case, it wouldn’t help Ramazzini to expose us, so they are doing a good job keeping the media at bay.

Sam: I was reading somewhere that vaping might have health issues. Should we take another swing at Big Tobacco. Juries love to hate them.

Susan: Not gonna work. The science isn’t there, nicotine does not cause cancer and the harm reduction advocates have a compelling argument.

Sam: But we don’t need science, never did. Look at how Michael Bloomberg has made it rain. He is coming up to two billion in funding his campaign against tobacco harm reduction alternatives, has the WHO in his pocket and has an entire flotilla of highly-paid activist NGOs following his directions. Surely we can tap into some of that loose cash pile.

Don: At most we could only get a billion from them, nowhere near enough to move the needle. In any case, Big Tobacco is so last century. We need the next new Big Tobacco. Has anyone lunched with Naomi lately? I should give her a call.

Joanna: Well, didn’t we pay a group of researchers to make the case that the food industry is intentionally making people addicted to ultra-processed food? They even found some former tobacco scientists in their labs. That story writes itself – especially all of those big fast-food corporations who would settle out of court in a heartbeat. Ten billion is absolute peanuts for them.

Robbie: Two problems there. One, they print all of the food information on the back on the tray linings so the customers only have themselves to blame for their poor food choices. Two, we haven’t even got a definition of ultra-processed food and most research is based on really weak correlation studies. We’ll lose all cases in appeal when we aren’t able to choose the Judicial Hellhole jurisdictions and judges.

Don: What’s the point of paying campaign contributions to all of those judges and attorney generals if they can’t deliver anything for us?

John: I was thinking that the plastics industry is ripe for some settlement harvesting. There are a few cases in California against industry’s claims of being able to recycle plastics. These were funded by that Australian metals industry billionaire, so maybe we could amplify them with claims for environmental clean-up costs and force a settlement.

Susan: Sorry, but nobody in any courtroom cares about the environment. We need to march in the walking wounded, preferably hooked up to IVs, to show how plastics poisoned them and made them sick.

John: Our firm has been funding studies into microplastics causing all sorts of diseases and endocrine disruption. Can’t we start advertising for victims? I’m sure Andrew at Minderoo will underwrite our bellwether cases.

Robbie: Negative. The studies have all been making claims that are embarrassingly unsubstantiated … sorry. It doesn’t matter how many times our NGOs push that fear campaign, it is not sticking. PFAS??? Only regulators gave a damn and many are walking those decisions back. And besides, most of the companies processing the plastics that we are detecting in humans are small, downstream operators. They will just go bankrupt and that is a rabbit hole I am not going down again.

Susan: We can always hit Tylenol for autism. Bobby Jr practically handed that to us on a platter.

Don: Yeah, but Kenvue is on its knees already. Do you really want to spend the next decade in bankruptcy arbitration?
… Guys, this is going nowhere. We need new blood and we need it soon, otherwise it is back to the strip malls for a good number of us.

Joanna: You make us sound like vampires. (Heavy, nervous laughter from Don and Robbie)

Sam: We investigated the books of most Big Tech companies, and their cashflow will easily cover the billions to settle out of court. Given our financial distress, we need to go after the motherload.

Robbie: Yeah, but what cases can we use to extort them?

Sam: I’m sure we can find something. We might be able to go after Apple and Samsung on cell phone radiation. We can find some scientists to link 5G to cancers. Or maybe file more cases against social media companies for getting our kids addicted and depressed. The GenZs are ready and willing to take a microphone to claim their victimization. I mean, … they’re already doing it on TikTok. Then there is data protection, AI and misinformation. The public hates these tech billionaires so the juries are well-primed to deliver a few landmark decisions. We can easily pay some experts to come up with some evidence and publish some papers in the usual journals.

Joanna: But we are risking getting more and more exposed as the power controlling these issues from the shadows. Isn’t there a threat of reputational damage to our industry if a couple Elon posts stick to us?

John: No issue. Big Tech is falling more and more into the Evil Industry category. Did you see what the media did to that nice Sam Altman guy? Now the public are attacking his house. No, the public will be too outraged by industry malfeasance to notice the billions we are harvesting from them. They lie and we lie low. Our networks and industry groups will do all of the work for us. Those New York and DC-based NGOs we have been using work for peanuts.

Susan: It’s time to tobacconize them! Maybe our friends in IARC can do another monograph on cell phone radiation and cancers. I’ll reach out to Chris and Bernard to make some calls. Our journalists and foundations won’t need much convincing to use our reports to go after them.

Don: OK, it looks like a plan. Their pockets are deep and the billionaires don’t want to be vilified more than they already are. Let’s get a group together to see what Big Tech companies are doing that we can sue them for, then we can target one company and start planning our campaign. We’ll need to decide whose litigation finance company is going to underwrite and package this one.

Sam: We should set up a separate shell foundation to coordinate the attacks. Which NGOs and universities can we sign on? Let’s start with a short list of academics for our fiscal sponsor group.

John: And Davos has been picking up the AI and security points at the last two meetings. With all the scandals going on, I guess Larry is the one we should tap into at the World Economic Forum? I know Blackrock is rolling big time in data center investment funds, but this wouldn’t be the first time we got him to speak out of both sides of his mouth.

Don: Good points. But we’ll need to generate some credible-sounding evidence first. Remember the chemtrail fiasco? Shall we meet up at the Rockefeller Foundation’s New York offices in a month to start developing a strategy and dividing up who gets to sit on the Plaintiff’s Bar?

Meeting closed at 11:45, followed by a nice lunch.

These minutes are not 100% accurate. Given the nature of the business, it is likely the vocabulary and attitudes were less humane.

The main profits from any energy revolution are made by the first movers. With the present transition to green, renewable energy, the profits are obscene.

In 2017, I installed a number of solar panels on my roof. I wrote about how I realized what a hypocrite I was, erecting environmentally destructive green vanity symbols while financially impairing my neighbors. For the last decade, I enjoyed subsidies and free energy while they had to pay for them with higher electricity tariffs. To this day, solar panels are still playthings for the privileged, but it has gotten worse. As the green activists continue to push for a renewable-only grid, I am finding new ways to profit from my neighbors. As in 2017, I still hate myself … but I’m not an idiot. I’ll bank the profits and the government incentives.

Greens and socialists (more and more the same thing today – Marxists without the proletariat), have this anti-industry, post-capitalist agenda where they see renewables as the means to return energy to the people, the prosumers, flattening the inequities and social injustices of capitalist exploitation. These people are so cute, and while on paper, it might sound virtuous, in practice, the consequences, especially to their electorate, are devastating. How many apartment complexes or working class neighborhoods have solar panels or wind farms on their properties? Certainly not the apartment building across the street from me. The only thing they are getting is unaffordable energy bills, unstable electricity supply and a grim outlook as the energy mix continues to decarbonize.

Capitalism is merely entrepreneurial opportunism. It is not a disease that some self-appointed socialists need to eradicate; it is human nature. Even in the strictest peasant Communist state, people will still try to take advantage of an opportunity and do better for themselves and their families. Striving for success is normal behavior. The socialists find their progress or success offensive; the greens detest their increased consumption and wealth.

To them, the fossil fuel industry symbolizes this expansion of wealth, environmental harm and naked exploitation. So they have been running a campaign to transition from these capitalist weapons of mass destruction, and despite the temporary Trump bump, have been fairly successful in shifting from an efficient energy grid mix to a green grid. Meanwhile the dash for Middle East oil and the war economy market panic are masking the movement towards a renewables-based market trading environment. But behind to political gyrations, the transition continues unabated. If anything, their argument goes, the fossil fuel supply cuts have made a transition to renewables even more urgent. With that newfound urgency, we seem to be entering a new age of “green capitalism” on the renewables market.

What has changed in those nine years since I decided to put those horrible green goblins on my roof?

Grid Evolutions

People with means are able to capitalize on the opportunities in the energy sector. Wealthy neighborhoods have solar panels, EV chargers and well-insulated homes, all subsidized by the governments pretending they were meeting UN climate targets (by incentivizing the affluent). Farmers are now planting solar farms instead of food, leasing space for wind turbines and generating methane instead of fertilizer. I fear for the long-term effects of this incentivized stupidity, but at least these farmers are finally earning a decent income and having some time off in the summer.

In the decade since my solar panels have been paying me dividends, we have seen several energy shocks (from the post-COVID supply crisis to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the present tragedy in Iran). While my socialist-green neighbors have had to pay premiums to keep the lights on, I continued to enjoy free electricity and heating.

Faced with the climate-imposed demands for an energy transition, and the green NGO rejection of nuclear, cold fusion, hydroelectric and geothermal solutions, utilities have had to find means to control the unpredictability of renewable energy supply. To be more efficient, they are letting the market take over. The main threat is to have mass outages caused by renewable energy instability (remember the Spanish-Portuguese grid failure last year). Amid stupid, irrational preconditions, the grid had to get smart.

Most energy companies are demanding their customers install digital electricity meters so they can more easily inflict variable pricing to control and reduce energy consumption during peak periods. Seeing how this change would mean my old analog meter would no longer spin backwards to provide me with free energy and heating through the dark winters, I did what most other affluent Belgians did – I went out and bought a home battery so I could avoid having to pay for electricity at night. With government incentives, I didn’t even realize I was no longer going to be sharing my energy with my neighbors.

As I watched them install this non-recyclable, heavy-metaled monster in my garage, I tried not to think of all the children in the Congo that were being exploited for my privilege. And of course, all of my options are “Made in China”. There is no way this green solution of home batteries could ever be considered as ecologically friendly, let alone socially just. But the Green-Socialists have willed it so and the UN has sanctioned it as a necessary step for Net Zero. I made the investment.

Buy Low, Sell High

But I didn’t just buy a home battery. I bought a smart battery. As the salesman was trying to convince me of my advantages, even I was floored by the obscenity of this next level of green capitalist opportunism.

With my smart battery on a dynamic pricing electricity contract, I could turn my solar panels into a money spinner, and more. There are times when energy on the grid is at a surplus (ie, on very sunny or windy days) causing electricity to be negatively priced. At this time I could top up my smart battery and wait until the grid price is high to sell my power back at a profit. This is not energy I produced to share on the grid, this is pure, no-risk market manipulation automated to ensure maximum profit. My salesman was from a new energy provider that only serves such clients and then trades their surplus on the open market, furthering my opportunities.

Rather than being illegal, my robber baron capitalism is subsidized since I am helping stabilize the grid. The European Union even mandates that I have the right to exploit. My neighbors in the apartment complex, without solar panels or home batteries, had to pay the full price of their fixed tariff energy accounts. Meanwhile, I was not only getting free energy, I was able to profit from their misfortune by selling them those high-tariff kilowatts during peak hours that I was actually paid to load up.

While the salesman was appealing to my self-interest to be able to sell me a far larger battery than my wife and I would ever need, I kept looking out the window at my neighbors, the ones who voted for the Green and Socialist parties in the last election. As if I didn’t feel the obscenity of it all, I was then informed that if I had an electric car, I could store and trade even more energy through the car battery. So it is no longer a car. That was a feature too far – even I know that an EV is the most unsustainable thing I could possibly own. My neighbors can no longer afford cars because the government-demanded transition to EVs has pushed the price of mobility out of their reach.

I would tell them to take the bus but public transport support is being slashed as governments have to spend more to fund the energy transition subsidies. What a wonderful age for fat-cat capitalist exploitation!

Green Capitalism

The ideal world the Greens and Socialists have been dreaming of has led to a new generation of opportunists – green capitalists – who have spotted the gap in the market. My smart battery salesman has 40 solar panels in his garden (he realistically only needs seven or eight) and he proudly shared with me a spreadsheet with his return on investment and monthly income. Like any new form of capitalism, it will take a while for regulators to catch up and humanize the injustices. In the meantime, there will be even more winners as the green capitalists take advantage of the inequities and opportunities from the next wave of energy expansion required to meet the new data centers coming online.

I was told I could easily stack more batteries in my garage. The opportunities to profit here are endless.

My neighbors in the apartment complex, renters, don’t have the means to enter this lucrative energy market. They have candles. I try not to imagine how vulnerable they will become during this upcoming energy crises. What is even more obscene is that the Belgian government will likely, once again, give grants to all citizens (voters) to help ease the high energy costs from the US-Iran war. Once again, I will bank that money.

I am a robber baron of the new green capitalism and I should not be allowed to profit from the misfortune of others. But as my government has committed to meeting the UN climate goals, move to some mythical net-zero and complete the unnecessary transition to renewables, I am considered a hero of the green economy. I try not to think of what I am doing to the environment with my unsustainable solar panels and monster smart battery, or how I am profiting while my neighbors’ struggle.

I just consider myself a Ukrainian peasant at heart, with some good fortune, trying as always to save some money. It’s in my blood.

The rather tiresome Activist Playbook is being applied again, this time not to pesticides, plastics, fossil fuels or chemicals like PFAS, but now to so-called ultra-processed foods. A recent study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) by a group of French activist scientists and their doctoral students has been making headlines in the food-fear world. They are suggesting that exposure to chemicals used in six food additive preservatives (like vinegar) increases the risk of cancer. Which types of cancer? All of them, it seems.

The Activist Playbook is a well-oiled machine:

• Fund some scientists to produce a study suggesting a health risk or correlation to a cancer (in mice) from lab exposure to a chemical found in consumer products.

• Use a communications consultancy to create a significant amount of media coverage and public outrage.

• Use your network within the Ramazzini/IARC activist community to push forward a hazard-based monograph on these chemicals to further legitimize your alarmist claims.

• Get NGOs to use these fears to push the anti-industry, post-capitalist narrative.

• Once the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) pronounces their cancer classification, let the media and NGOs amplify the campaign as the US litigation industry begins to file lawsuits at a targeted company.

• Bring regulators into the game to invoke the precautionary principle, enhancing the perception of cancer causation to help influence the lawsuit outcomes.

• With hundreds of thousands of walking-wounded victims filing lawsuits and a select group of media-darling scientists force-feeding the public on a diet of fear and confusion, extort the targeted company into a multi-billion dollar settlement that hopefully bankrupts them.

• Take the cash and move onto the next chemical substance.

Ultra-processed foods are the next Holy Grail as the litigation industry’s climate lawfare and herbicide and talc honeypots run out of momentum. The first attempt, to identify the artificial sweetener, aspartame, as a carcinogen failed. But there are many chemicals used in the so-called ultra-processed food industry, so the activist scientists just moved on to a selection of preservatives used in food additives. Like aspartame though, the scientific community, fed up with the junk science designed for the media, is wasting no time to speak up and voice their criticisms.

The Relentless Madame UPF

The BMJ study was led by Mathilde Touvier, a French researcher and media darling who has always been ready for a microphone or a spot on a daytime talk show. I came to discover Madame Touvier’s tactics in the failed campaign to use the Activist Playbook to bring aspartame into the litigation industry’s arsenal of extortion. Then she was using any tactic she could to get the public outraged by the artificial sweetener, breaking rules of scientific integrity (like releasing possible findings of her study to the media prior to peer review). Her most recent attack on the chemicals in food preservatives reflected similar tactics and ethical issues.

In the BMJ paper, Touvier threw shade on the source of the study’s funding (perhaps trying to hide how much of it was a one-woman-show). She was a European Research Council (ERC) grantee (receiving €2 million in funding for this project) and she was awarded a funding prize from the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller. But rather than simply acknowledging that she had personally received direct EU and foundation funding, Touvier opted for the more deceptive line of saying: “This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) ... and a Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation research prize 2021”. This is typical of Touvier’s tactics, consciously trying to hide the fact that she received direct funding. Why didn’t she just acknowledge that she herself received the funding?

There was some interesting wording in the Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation funding award (“to identify correlations between ultra-processed foods and health”). The funding was not for a researcher to study a causal link between food and health issues, but rather was specified to identify correlations between certain foods and diseases. It is widely accepted in the scientific world that correlation does not imply causation. Touvier’s study seems to be another case of an activist foundation funding an activist scientist to develop activist-modeled assumptions for an activist fear campaign.

The Relentless Communicator

Once the study was published, the ultra-processed food campaigners took over amplifying the news in the mainstream media, including getting Touvier’s name all over articles in CNN, the Guardian and LeMonde. None of these articles covered dissenting views or discussed weaknesses and issues with the research. The BfR was motivated to issue the statement on this study (see below) because it had “garnered significant media attention”.

Getting the mainstream media to pick up an scientific journal article within 24 hours, and parrot the press release, does not happen normally with scientific publications unless a communications consultancy is employed to amplify the impact.

It should be noted that the same group of authors published a second article from the same research (on the very same day as the BMJ cancer correlation article) in Nature Communications claiming a link between these chemical preservatives in food additives with an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes. Given that the articles were submitted for peer review in popular journals four to five months in advance, it is extraordinary that the authors would demand to coordinate publication on the very same day, January 7. The purpose, of course, was to make a bigger impact in the mainstream media on January 8, 2026 so I suppose everyone wins (except the truth).

The two journals, BMJ and Nature, also behaved shabbily here in agreeing to Touvier’s media stunt, opting to publish activism to garner clicks rather than advance serious scientific research.

Next Step: Get an IARC Monograph Cancer Classification for the US Litigation Industry

Touvier has recently been elected to represent France on IARC’s Scientific Council. The study also includes another IARC author, Inge Huybrechts, so we can expect an IARC monograph on ultra-processed foods in the coming years based on the correlation findings of this study. Like the late addition of glyphosate to an IARC monograph on insecticides, the US litigation industry will do what it can to accelerate this process in order to then start amassing plaintiffs to sue a targeted food corporation.

Some would argue that this is a very cynical criticism. Not every scientist accepts and compulsively uses adversarial regulation tactics to attack industry. Some do this research because they believe they are advancing scientific discovery and keeping people safe. If Mathilde Touvier were to fit this mold, then she would have used a proper methodology rather than relying on correlations, she would have adjusted findings to consider confounding factors and false positives and she would have done deeper research into the level of exposures that could create a causal relationship between a chemical and a cancer (see BfR critique below). But as she did not, we can only assume that Touvier’s motives for producing this study were to create a strong media reaction and public outrage, advance her personal campaign against ultra-processed foods and create a benchmark for (regulatory, activist and litigious) pressure against the food industry.

• The litigation industry does not need quality evidence to create a case to persuade a jury.

• The activist NGOs do not need quality evidence to run a campaign and create public fear.

• The foundations do not need quality evidence to set up a funding program.

The Activist Playbook is built to thrive even if the scientific evidence falls flat. But in any case, we still need to ask: What did the scientific community think about the quality of Touvier’s research, her methodology and her conclusions?

The Scientific Community Reacts

After the last decade of campaigns built on junk science, the scientific community is no longer as patient with the tactics of these fear-mongering activist scientists. Last month, the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) examined the Touvier cancer correlation paper and concluded that the publication did not provide any data that would make the agency consider reevaluating its position on the safety of the six preservatives used in food additives (ie, that Touvier failed to provide sufficient data or information to suggest these preservatives were carcinogenic).

As the BfR published their critique in German, the Firebreak provided an English translation below. The German risk assessment agency summed up the quality of the study as follows:

From the perspective of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), the study is subject to a number of significant limitations and uncertainties. Therefore, the BfR currently sees no reason to reassess the health risks of the preservatives in question based on this study.

In other words, while it may not affect the Activist Playbook and the intentions of the tort lawyers, NGO activists, foundation funders and media scaremongers, from the scientific position, Mathilde Touvier’s latest anti-UPF campaign stunt can be summed up in two words: “Junk science”.

Study on preservatives and cancer has weaknesses

The Federal Institute for Risk Assessment arrives at a critical assessment.

This is what it’s about:

A study conducted in France has identified six preservatives as being linked to an increased risk of cancer. The recently published research has garnered significant media attention. It is based on an analysis of questionnaires completed online by more than 100,000 participants in the NutriNet-Santé cohort study over an average period of 7.6 years.

From the perspective of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), the study is subject to a number of significant limitations and uncertainties. Therefore, the BfR currently sees no reason to reassess the health risks of the preservatives in question based on this study.

Link to the study: https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj-2025-084917

The study used participants’ dietary information to infer the preservatives contained in their food. At the start of the study, the 105,260 participants were free of malignant tumors. During the study period, 4,226 of them developed cancer.

Eleven of the 17 preservatives examined were not associated with the occurrence of cancer. For the remaining six substances, a statistically significant association with an increased incidence of tumors was found. If the results for these preservatives are confirmed, the study authors believe it would be a reason to reconsider their current regulation.

The BfR has assessed the publication and points out a number of weaknesses in the study:

• Questionable causality: The NutriNet-Santé study is an observational study that investigated statistical associations (correlations) between preservatives and the occurrence of cancer. However, statistically significant associations cannot automatically be interpreted as causal relationships.

• Multiple testing: This study examines associations between a variety of preservatives and the occurrence of cancer. Therefore, it is susceptible to the phenomenon of multiple testing: When several statistical tests are performed, it is to be expected that some will randomly produce a false positive result. Since many preservatives were investigated in this publication, positive associations could be due to chance.

• Confounding factors: A significant problem in observational studies is the occurrence of confounding factors. These must be taken into account during data analysis. This is done, among other things, using statistical methods (adjustment). Despite extensive adjustment, residual confounding may remain. For example, it is difficult to separate the effect of certain preservatives from that of the foods in which they occur. Thus, the intake of sulfites (a preservative in wine) is associated with wine consumption. The observed cancer risk associated with sulfites may therefore be more likely attributable to alcohol consumption than to the preservative itself. Regular alcohol consumption is an established risk factor for certain cancers.

• Unclear recording: The data basis for the estimate of the intake of preservatives (exposure) in this study was based on the self-reported data of the participants. Inaccurate or incorrect answers lead to uncertain estimates of the preservatives ingested with the food.

• Questionable plausibility: The study reports an increased cancer risk of 12 percent (acetic acid) and 15 percent (acetates) for acetic acid and acetates, respectively (hazard ratio of 1.12 and 1.15, respectively). This is of the same order of magnitude as the increased cancer risk identified in the study for sorbates (14 percent), sulfites (12 percent), sodium erythorbate (12 percent), and potassium nitrate (13 percent). Acetic acid and acetates are natural components of many foods and are also produced in significant quantities during human metabolism. This calls into question the plausibility of the associations found for these preservatives and suggests that they should be considered of limited relevance.

• Reassessed: The preservatives discussed in the study were reassessed by the European Food Safety Authority ( EFSA ) as part of its program for the reassessment of approved food additives. With regard to potentially genotoxic and carcinogenic properties, EFSA had no health concerns for the additives in question.

Conclusion: For the majority of the preservatives considered in the study, no association with the occurrence of cancer was found. The observed associations are subject to uncertainties and should be interpreted with caution. It is unclear whether the observed associations are the result of multiple testing. If the observed associations do indeed describe existing effects, it remains unclear whether these are truly attributable to the additives. As the authors of the publication also emphasize, the results would need to be confirmed by an independent body. From the BfR ‘s perspective, this publication does not justify changing the risk assessments of the preservatives in question carried out by the EFSA .

End of translation

In Part 1, we looked at how the European Commission tender for a Single Framework Contract for Support Actions in the Field of Tobacco Control, the main source of policy guidance for the upcoming revision of the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive, was badly managed and should have been rerun. We looked at and how the consortium partners, who were essentially representing the views of an American billionaire, should have been excluded. The second part will examine the conflicts of interest of the consortium members and how this issue was dealt with.

The official report (produced by the anti-nicotine NGOs), based on its recommendations, points clearly to a ban of all flavours in vapes, a complete ban of nicotine pouches, and plain packaging for any other safer nicotine product currently on the market. Was this the view of a public consultation or the view of a few campaign-driven NGOs within the EU-funded consortium?

A clear conflict of interest

Members of the consortium which produced what we’re calling the Bloomberg Report - which charts how the EU Commission will try to steer nicotine policy - have strong views against the use of nicotine products like vapes and pouches as smoking cessation strategies.

The European Network for Smoking Prevention (ENSP) is an activist NGO running a campaign against alternative nicotine products. Vital Strategies, is an openly declared anti-vaping advocacy group. They exist to implement Michael Bloomberg’s global strategy against safer nicotine products.

In other words, members of the consortium that received €3,000,000 to advise European officials on their nicotine products policy had glaring conflicts of interest. When confronted by this in a question in the European Parliament, the Commission replied that the members all signed documents (declaration on honour) declaring they would remain impartial and objective in their advice.

The Ombudsman investigates

The tobacco industry flagged this to the European Ombudsman which opened an investigation: a serious step in and of itself, given the political pressure it was likely under to ignore the whole issue.

And indeed, members of the consortium had signed a declaration about conflicts of interest, where they declared that its staff members “have not…had any professional involvement in any project related to tobacco in the last four years”. It seems unlikely that staff members at an organisation called the European Network on Smoking Prevention, for example, had no professional involvement in tobacco in the four years prior to the signing of the contract.

Indeed, Clearing the Air found evidence that ENSP was actively lobbying DG Sante on tobacco and nicotine issues while it was under contract to produce the report on revising the EU’s tobacco control laws; a clear and flagrant breach of the rules on conflicts of interest.

So why lie about it?

The Commission’s guidance states that a conflict of interest exists where the ‘impartial and objective exercise of the functions of a financial actor or other person…is compromised for reasons involving family, emotional life, political or national affinity, economic interest or any other direct or indirect personal interest.’ Conflicts of interest can also result from “involvement with non-governmental…organisations”.

Someone should probably have mentioned that to Cornel Radu-Loghin, the head of ENSP who told Euractiv that, as an NGO, the very concept of a conflict of interest is not applicable.

“Not very satisfactory”

“Not very satisfactory” was how the European Ombudsman’s team described how DG Santé responded to allegations of a conflict of interest in opening their investigation, noting that there were “legitimate concerns as to the partiality and capacity of the NGO to deliver a fair and unbiased assessment”. The clue is in the name, really. An NGO called “The European Network on Smoking Prevention” is unlikely to be any more “impartial and objective” when looking at future policy on smoking than big tobacco.

“We should be mindful of the reputational risk in this case”, the Ombudsman noted, “[w]hile the complaint is brought by a tobacco lobby…NGOs are still subject to COI [conflict of interest] rules and the Commission needs to ensure that its work on such topics is not biased and that the rules have been applied…This is particularly true with alternative tobacco products such as e-cigarettes”.

ENSP has strong views on “alternative tobacco products”. It has adopted a “clear position against all nicotine and tobacco products…and publicly lobbied to restrict these products”, according to the Ombudsman.

And that is where the problem lies.

The science on cigarettes is settled: smoking kills you and you should stop doing it. Even big tobacco – after much soul searching – finally decided to concede that point.

But the science on “alternative” products – vapes, nicotine pouches and so on – is hotly contested. Tobacco control allies of yesteryear now fight tooth and nail over whether safer nicotine products are the solution to the smoking epidemic or a menace to be stamped out.

It shouldn’t be. We know beyond any doubt that safer nicotine products are indeed a lot safer. Any impartial examination of the topic would have come to the same conclusions as the British, French and German governments have: smoking kills you, safer nicotine products don’t, and it makes sense for people to move from one to the other.

Consulting “far and wide”

In its proposal, the consortium claimed their data collection tools would be “surveys and interviews, literature review, public consultation, automated language processing, econometric models, workshops.”

For the authors of the European Commission’s main tobacco and nicotine products guidance document to be objective in their data collection, this would imply that they would consult a wide range of stakeholders, including those active in promoting tobacco harm reduction via safer nicotine products, or those campaigning to use these products to promote smoking cessation.

There are plenty of them around, and the Commission paid three million euros for this consortium to prepare the most comprehensive report on the widest range of stakeholders. So who did they ask?

An online group with 39 of the leading European pro-tobacco harm reduction consultants and academics was asked if any of them were indeed consulted by the consortium running the European Commission’s €3 million project. These experts are easy to find: most of them speak frequently at conferences, presenting and publishing their research on the effectiveness of vaping and nicotine pouches in reducing the harmful effects of smoking.

It seems, though, that not a single one of the 39 experts were consulted by any of the activist groups charged with providing the European Commission with a wide range of expert advice.

We asked the 39 experts if they knew anyone in their networks who was approached to give evidence to the European Commission policy consultation group. We could only find a few consumer organisations. And here, it gets curious.

Pro THR participants we spoke to say they were made to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) before being consulted. Consumer associations make their positions public, so there was no reason for an NDA to protect this stakeholder group.

Rather, the NDA seems to have been meant to protect the EU taxpayer funded consortium. If the association presented the EU policy advisers with important information and data on how tobacco harm reduction strategies have been effective in reducing tobacco-related deaths, and the consortium chose to ignore this information in their report to the European Commission, the NDA would protect the policy consultants and NGOs from any charges of a dereliction of duty given their declaration on honour.

At the final stakeholder meeting - called a “validation workshop” held by Open Evidence, the antis and the pros were separated in zoom breakout rooms and were not given the opportunity to discuss the findings with each other. “It was essentially two echo chambers”, one person present told us.

Although the €3 million taxpayer funded consortium signed a declaration on honour to not allow the evident bias of their years of activist campaigning to pollute the openness of their policy advice, it seems that they only consulted a handful of stakeholder groups - and seemingly none of the academics - they disagreed with. And only then on the condition that consumers were muffled and could not make public the information they gave the researchers.

A Biased and Corrupt Report

The report upon which the European Commission will base its regulatory decisions on whether to promote or restrict safer nicotine products like e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches is biased and corrupted.

It is clear, from the cavalier attitude of the Commission, that the evidence pointing to mismanagement and corner-cutting don’t matter. When the aggrieved party is industry - even worse, Big Tobacco - they do what they want and ignore any criticism or evidence. Anyone who would speak up would be an obvious shill.

Would the European Ombudsman or the European Commission Secretariat General so easily look away at such transgressions if it pertained to policy guidance on workers’ rights or environmental protection? Where’s the outrage from anti-business NGOs like Corporate Europe Observatory, always quick to call out organisations they don’t like, but silent when it comes to the transgressions of others in their close-knit circle of publicly financed NGOs?.

Hypocrisy 101: Rules and processes only matter if we get the outcome we want. Policy-based evidence, not evidence-based policy. And now the EU Commissioner in charge of tobacco and nicotine reforms is busy lying about safer nicotine products, telling anyone who listens that he thinks they are just as dangerous as cigarettes.

Everything this report says lacks credibility, coming from a biased process, written by a biased team with clear conflicts of interest, backed by the narrow interests of a single American billionaire and spearheaded by a Commissioner who is brazenly lying to our faces about relative risk. The only sensible thing for policymakers to do with it involves a shredder and a waste paper basket.

Peter Beckett is the editor of Clearing the Air. This article was published in coordination with Clearing the Air.

Brussels has today received a report evaluating whether the EU needs to update its rules on tobacco and nicotine. Far from a dispassionate review of the evidence, what we have is a document essentially written by anti-harm reduction activists that will be used as a permission structure by the European Commission to do what it wants to do anyway: ban as many safer nicotine products as it can get away with. The Health Commissioner himself is already gaslighting stakeholders. He must know that when he says that new nicotine products are just as bad as smoking, he is lying.

The European Commission often outsources the policy research process to third parties, as it has done here. Since the days of former Commissioner Edith Cresson paying her dentist hundreds of thousands of euros to do not very much - a scandal that led to the resignation of the Santer Commission in 1999 - the guidance defining the process for awarding EU research contracts have become far more rigorous. Some funding programmes have been criticised by scientists as being too cumbersome.

So it’s worth revisiting how this report came to be, and who’s behind it.

The EU Tender Process

Corruption and bias have been built into the process from the start. In August 2022, the European Commission’s DG Santé (the equivalent of the EU’s Health Ministry) launched a tender process for an external consultant to support the implementation and development of policy and legislation, review the existing tobacco control laws and lay the groundwork for new laws.

The tender was for three million euros, so there should have been widespread interest in the opportunity to advise on the development of tobacco and nicotine policy - to actually create the playbook from which the revision of the 2014 EU Tobacco Products Directive will start. It should have had an army of health and consumer organisations lining up for the opportunity to lobby the European Commission from within.

But oddly, there was only one proposal, via a consortium organised by Open Evidence, and rather than reopening the process to ensure competition and a fair decision process, as is the standard procedure in the EU, the Commission chose to award the funds to this consortium.

Open Evidence is a small Spanish consulting firm without much experience in the field of nicotine products and tobacco harm reduction. Like many organizations in the Brussels Bubble consulting ecosystem, it’s staffed mainly by young graduates after their EU internship experience, waiting for their shot at joining the Commission proper. They survive from one EU funded project to the next.

Not surprisingly, this small and badly equipped company was likely to have to subcontract large chunks of this work. So the membership of their consortium matters.

The Bloomberg Report takes shape

Enter Michael Bloomberg. His foundations have spent $1.6 billion creating a complex web of NGOs, academics and policy groups to promote his misguided campaign against tobacco harm reduction. So when the Commission tender popped up, it was no surprise that anti-nicotine NGOs and researchers funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies would have their hands in this particular cookie jar.

One of the main partners in the consortium is an umbrella group, the European Network for Smoking Prevention (ENSP): an activist NGO running a campaign to make Europe not just tobacco-free, but also nicotine-free by 2030. So what sort of advice would this anti-vaping group offer when consulted on the European Commission’s programme for a smoke-free Europe by 2040?

ENSP received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies via their interconnection with the Smoke Free Partnership (SFP). Bloomberg Philanthropies provided SFP with a grant to build capacity in tobacco taxation in Europe.

ENSP also cooperates with Duncan Thomas from the University of Bath and lead of the Tobacco Control Research Group, a research unit and anti-tobacco/nicotine industry communications campaign nerve centre funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Another group in the EU consortium to provide guidance for European nicotine product policies is Vital Strategies. This is an anti-vaping advocacy group funded almost entirely by Michael Bloomberg. This US-based NGO cannot accept a world where vaping continues to be permitted, so it is hard to comprehend how three million euros of EU taxpayer money has been spent funding this group to advise the European Commission on its nicotine product policies.

The Best Policy Guidance a Billionaire Philanthropist Can Buy

The rabbit hole runs even deeper. Aside from selecting - unopposed - a consortium essentially underpinned by Bloomberg’s support, the very architecture of DG Santé’s policy owes its existence to money from the very same trough.

DG Santé prides itself on its close cooperation with the WHO’s tobacco control arm, the Secretariat of the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control. And here it gets complicated. With $1.6 billion in financing, Bloomberg has basically funded the entire WHO strategy against tobacco and nicotine products via his MPOWER programme. This one billionaire philanthropist has a global influence on public health decisions which, in turn, exerts further pressure on the European Commission to fall in line.

Bloomberg has become notorious for his pig-headed rejection of safer nicotine products to help consumers quit smoking harmful tobacco products. He has used his deep pockets to impose his dogma on the global campaigns against smoking. We have no idea what his motivation is. All we do know is that his conclusions contradict the established science.

Should the Commission allow itself to be beholden to the interests of this American activist philanthropist? Would they let Elon Musk control a review of the EU Digital Services Act if he bought off every NGO involved in the process?

There is a good reason why the EU is considering laws against foreign interest groups or individuals exerting an undue influence on the European policy process. Why should Bloomberg’s anti-nicotine representatives be allowed to influence the European Commission’s guidance for their tobacco and nicotine control policies?

So What?

Did the Commission ignore the proper tender procedure and proposed rules against foreign interests influencing EU policy because of external pressures? Or did the European Commission health directorate just not care?

They clearly feel enabled to set aside proper tender procedures and award a large contract to organisations they like, ignoring their conflicts of interest, because any action they would take would be against Big Tobacco. Who would possibly care, speak out or stand up and defend the tobacco industry?

The media, terrified of being accused of supporting tobacco companies, has largely chosen to not do their job. Politico - the most popular specialist media outlet covering the EU’s political bubble - is working hand in glove with a Bloomberg funded “investigative” media outlet, the Examination, to produce what is essentially anti-nicotine propaganda. And the NGO activists don’t even have to do their job, but just dust off their old anti-smoking campaigns and change the word to “nicotine”.

The tobacco industry broke rules, lied about risk and went around the system 40 years ago. The European Commission is now doing exactly the same. They may feel they are doing it out of some sense of moral righteousness, but that does not hide the stench of their corruption. They will receive the Bloomberg Report against tobacco harm reduction products, ignore the conflicts of interest, and translate the recommendations into regulations. Who would possibly object?

Peter Beckett is the editor of Clearing the Air. This article was published in coordination with Clearing the Air.

Part 2 of this assessment will look at the conflicts of interest and how the consortium and the European Commission chose to deal with them.

Several readers contacted me saying Landrigan’s deceptive practices needed more attention than just a mere addendum to an article. What follows is an expanded timeline of the subterfuge and deception behind Landrigan’s use of special interest groups to promote his activist science since 2018. A further analysis has been added at the end.

It should be noted that Landrigan is not transparent (nor is Boston College) about the amounts of special interest funding behind his research activities and how it is used by the front groups he created within Boston College. Given the amounts most impact research projects attract, we have to assume that Landrigan’s campaigns are funded in the range of millions of dollars. The details have been gathered by Copilot (directed, structured and checked by the author).

Seven Years of Unspoken Wealth

• Landrigan retired from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2015 although he remained a full professor and Dean for Global Health at Mount Sinai until 2018.

• Landrigan set up the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good in 2018 at Boston College. Their website offers programs with courses offered by different faculties but only lists two academics within this program, Landrigan and Summer Sherburne Hawkins.

• Landrigan set up the Global Observatory on Planetary Health in 2018 at Boston College. It presently employs one other scientist, Ramazzini confrere, Kurt Straif.

• While Boston College states that The Observatory is the “research arm” of the Global Public Health Program, there are no cases of joint projects outside of the two organizations sharing the same founder and director (ie, Landrigan).

• Landrigan joined the Centre Scientifique de Monaco in 2019 to co‑chair the Monaco Commission on Human Health and Ocean Pollution.

• Officially, Landrigan’s Global Observatory on Planetary Health partnered directly with the Centre Scientifique de Monaco and the Prince Albert II Foundation rather than via Landrigan himself.

• The Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation has funded the Centre Scientifique de Monaco since 2018 for ocean research, including plastics.

• Landrigan was advising the Heartland Study start-up team in 2018 while serving as chair of the Ramazzini Institute Science Advisory Committee. The Heartland Health Research Alliance was officially formed in 2020.

• In 2018, Landrigan transferred $950,000 from the Heartland Study accounts to the Ramazzini Institute for their glyphosate research. On the Heartland IRS 990 form, the transfer was made to Boston College. There was no declaration or records whether this money was channeled through his newly formed Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good, his newly formed Global Observatory on Planetary Health or via Boston College.

• Landrigan only acknowledged this 2018 transfer to the Ramazzini Institute in 2023, and this was only due to a change in management at the Heartland Health Research Alliance (that took compliance and integrity more seriously than the previous management).

• Heartland Health Research Alliance, created as a fiscal sponsor to fund the Heartland Health Study, gets its funding from the litigation industry and the organic food industry lobby via foundations using anonymous, donor-advised funds with foundations. There is very limited transparency. Philip Landrigan chairs Heartland’s Science Advisory Board and Boston College (assumedly via one of Landrigan’s front groups) is a Heartland partner.

  

• Kurt Straif leaves IARC and begins working for Boston College with his Ramazzini confrere at the Global Observatory on Planetary Health as a Visiting Professor in 2019, formally becoming a Research Professor and Co‑Director at the Observatory in 2022. Straif and Landrigan are the only staff listed on the website.

• Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation has funded the Global Observatory and is also one of its formal partners.

• The Minderoo–Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health was created in 2022 with an undisclosed amount of funding from the Minderoo Foundation, the Centre Scientifique de Monaco (CSM) and the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation.

• The Minderoo–Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health is coordinated by the Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College, namely Philippe Landrigan, who has served as the lead scientist in their report.

• In the 2023 journal report announcing the Commission on Plastics and Human Health, 19 of the authors declared to either be employed or funded by the Minderoo Foundation. Philip Landrigan did not declare any funding (assumedly because Minderoo pays Boston College which pays the Observatory which pays Landrigan). This is the same subterfuge Landrigan pulled off to hide tort law firm and organic food industry funding from his involvement in the Heartland Study and the Ramazzini Institute. Likewise, another author of the 2023 Minderoo report, Judith Enck, did not declare any interests even though her NGO, Beyond Plastics a) does not exist as an entity and b) is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Rockefeller Foundation via another dark university fiscal sponsor, Bennington College.

• The Lancet Countdown on Health and Plastics was designed to provide global monitoring of the impact of plastics on human health and the environment. It was launched in 2025 with principal funding from the Minderoo Foundation, in collaboration with Boston College, Heidelberg University, and the Centre Scientifique de Monaco (CSM). It was coordinated by Landrigan’s Global Observatory on Planetary Health.

• The Lancet Countdown Report, with Landrigan again as the lead author, contained a 95-line declaration of interests for the authors (with most funding for the plastics researchers coming from foundations including a good number acknowledging funding from the Minderoo Foundation).

• The Minderoo Foundation was created by the Australian billionaire, Andrew Forrest, executive chairman of the Fortescue Metals Group. As a main supplier of iron ore that goes into iron and steel, Fortescue will expand its markets considerably should plastics be banned or severely restricted.

• The main journal articles related to these activities, with Landrigan as the lead author, have mostly been published in the Annals of Global Health journal. While the journal claims to be founded in 1934 by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (as the Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine), it is supported operationally by Boston College’s Program for Global Public Health (ie, Philip Landrigan). The journal was dormant after 2014 and it transitioned from a general medical journal to a global health journal focusing on “planetary‑health and prevention science” with the new publishing process finalized in 2019.

• Since the reorganization in 2018-2019, Philip Landrigan has been the Editor‑in‑Chief of the Annals of Global Health journal.

• In 2025, the Minderoo Foundation made a five million dollar donation to the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation for their ReOcean pollution campaign. It had previously funded the Monaco Commission on Human Health and Ocean Pollution (co‑chaired by Landrigan). As nothing is declared, it is unclear how much of the previous donations to anti-plastics campaigns came from the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation and how much was merely pass-throughs from other foundations (like the Minderoo Foundation).

• In 2026, Philip Landrigan appears multiple times in the Minderoo Foundation funded film, The Plastic Detox.

• Prior to 2018, Landrigan had not done any research or published any articles on plastics.

• There are no public records or declarations of funding or budgets for the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good or the Global Observatory on Planetary Health. Boston College, as fiscal sponsor, does not declare the source and use of funding for these two Landrigan institutional front groups (which do not exist as standalone entities).

While Landrigan is core to all of these activities, most of his work is done via other organizations, several of which are shell organizations created by him at the same time as foundation funding was made available and moved around. Philip Landrigan is leaving us in the dark about his funding while promoting groups like the Ramazzini Institute for their “independent” funding.

Whenever you hear activist groups and academics talk about the need for “independent science”, remember how leaders like Philip Landrigan are managing millions from special interest groups trying to profit from a ban on plastics, pesticides and GMOs. The only thing independent about this funding is the independence from any transparent declarations.

The University Black Hole

Like Bennington College, that sponsored the Beyond Plastics activist front group via large foundation “donations”, Boston College is facing some serious research integrity issues. The administrators of this university know full-well that they are acting merely as pass-throughs for millions of dollars of undeclared foundation funding (originating from other interest groups) going to non-existent front groups for activist scientists. They do not declare the funding to these groups, but rather take a commission off of the top (usually at least 10%). The universities allow academic entrepreneurs like Philip Landrigan to use their school’s name and reputation to run campaigns and organize commissions or research alliances of activist scientists to fulfil the objectives of the special interest groups funding them.

Landrigan knows how to cleanse the cash. The Firebreak’s exposé into the Heartland Health Research Alliance showed how the organization was created to disperse special interest funding from the US litigation industry and the organic food industry lobby to the universities of a group of academics. These academics (many Ramazzini fellows) had created research “labs” within their institutions to rinse the funding of any tainted sources. And just to be safe, the Heartland group worked with foundations via dark donor-advised funds so that the special interest sources are thrice anonymized, allowing the academics to publish papers casting doubt on the safety of herbicides while remaining free from any need to declare these interests.

Landrigan advised Charles Benbrook how to set up the Heartland Health Research Alliance in 2018 and that same year took almost a million dollars of the Heartland’s litigation/organic industry seed capital to fund the Ramazzini Institute’s glyphosate study (undeclared until 2023) via his Boston College front group. Each laundering phase (from donor-advised funding to Heartland admin to University fiscal sponsors to the academic front groups) takes at least 10% off the top in pass-through fees, meaning that almost half of the money is lost in the numerous cleansings. That is the price activist scientists are willing to pay to hide their special interest funding and claim their “independent research”.

Philip Landrigan was the chair of the Heartland Health Research Alliance’s scientific board, as well as the Ramazzini Institute’s Science Advisory Board, so he knew how to dance the transparency two-step when the Minderoo Foundation came calling seeking a well-connected, bent activist scientist to manage their the metals industry’s anti-plastic campaigns. But just because he can get away with moving millions of dollars around without declaring any of it, doesn’t make such actions ethical or acceptable.

Welcome to the world of independent science.

The Hypocrisy Hypothesis

When the Ramazzini Institute fired its director, Daniele Mandrioli, Philip Landrigan posted a scathing letter attacking the board, implausibly claiming they were being influenced by industry actors (ie, Monsanto). This is a rich allegation from a man whose rent is being paid for by interest groups from the metals industry, the organic food industry and the litigation industry, all profiting nicely from Landrigan’s campaigns against pesticides, GMOs and plastics.

If Philip Landrigan claimed he did not know where the funding was coming from, he would be lying. Instead, he just remains quiet assuming that nobody cares if he is transparent or not, or if he is serving as a mouthpiece for a wide range of special interest groups. He and his ilk have created an environment where the chemical industry is perceived as pure evil, so any action taken by zealots to hurt these opponents is morally tolerable. I, for one, find his double standards, dallies with special interest groups and total disregard of transparent funding rules disgraceful and an affront to the reputation of science.

What is even less morally tolerable is that American universities like Boston College have pretended not to notice all of the dark money passing through their accounts. They may preach transparency in their academic codes of conduct, but these university administrators seem to be able to look the other way as the tolls received from their fiscal sponsor black holes accumulate. As long as they allow such corruption to continue, activist academics will thrive and use their academic front groups to advance their campaigns.

Universities also need to accept that foundation funding has an equal if not larger stench than industry funding. The main issue here is not that both are driven by special interests but that industry needs to be transparent while foundations move funds in total darkness. When a university then adds a further layer of shade on this darkness, while pretending to give such activism an academic seal of approval, academic integrity falls off a cliff.

Perhaps Boston College, and most other American universities that have discovered the easy money of fiscal sponsorship of activist front groups, should put a banner in their college prospectus saying: “We can be bought.”

In the mid-2010s, I was having a conversation with several directors from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) about joining their external Risk Communication Advisory Board. As one of the early science and risk communicators in the 1990s, and as a full-time academic, I had thought I ticked all of the boxes. But the EFSA directors informed me that, as much as they personally liked my work, I could not participate on this advisory board as I had worked for industry (over ten years before) and EFSA would have to consider that a “conflict of interest”. I was confused by their logic as I knew quite well that at least three of the members on that EFSA Advisory Board were academics running programs and projects directly funded by industry.

The term “conflict of interest” seems to only apply to people who have worked directly for industry. Even ten years after leaving industry, I somehow was too “tainted” to touch. Activists working for an NGO paid by a foundation or, worse, paid by an industry that supports their transition strategy (like organic food or renewables industries) do not feel their “bought and paid for” interventions should be considered a conflict of interest. They don’t need to defend themselves so long as NGOs constantly attack corporate funding to deflect their own stink. This prejudice, constantly amplified, has infected public perception leading to a tolerance towards a large number of unacceptable foundation funding practices of media groups, scientific researchers, NGOs, academics and political actors.

So long as the public feels that the billions spent every day by foundations, non-transparently funding media reporting on their activist campaigns, anti-capitalist dogma, political interference and legal interventions stink far less than the few industry millions trying to defend jobs and innovations, they can go on ignoring the glaring hypocrisy. Worse, foundation funding is tax deductible, so their lobbying and financial gaming is paid for by everyone.

But it still stinks to high heaven.

The best example of their twisted perspective was when the European Commission awarded a €3 million tender (uncontested and thus illegitimate) to a consortium of anti-tobacco NGOs to prepare advice for the upcoming revision of the Tobacco Products Directive. Tobacco harm reduction advocates complained that the lead NGO, the European Network for Smoking Prevention (ENSP), was paid and committed to stopping alternative nicotine products like e-cigarettes or nicotine pouches, and this constituted a conflict of interest. The head of the ENSP told Euractiv that, as an NGO, the very concept of a conflict of interest is not applicable. Awkwardly, the European Commission made the consortium members promise (ie, sign a declaration of honor) to be objective so they could continue to work on their soon-to-be published report that will guide European Commission policy toward a nicotine-free Europe (known commonly as the EU Bloomberg Report).

NGO activists have continued to propagate this double-standard, demanding transparency only from industry. If you claim you don’t have conflicts of interest, then you don’t need to publish your accounts, acknowledge your funding or special interests. Eko (formerly SumOfUs) has campaigned against industries they deem non-transparent. But while they operated in the European Union, they refused to file a European Transparency Initiative report until 2019 (after a loud campaign by some blogger in Brussels) but if you read the transparency report they file, they declare no lobbying costs and almost all of the lines are left blank. Transparency is for the stupid.

The Firebreak has repeatedly called for foundations to be held to the same standards of transparency, not only declaring how much they give to which campaigns, research or lobbying work, but also to abandon the completely dark practice of donor-advised funds (where interest groups can donate to a foundation anonymously on the understanding that the funds are earmarked for their designated recipient). Fiscal sponsors are even worse as the foundations operate NGO-like campaigns from entities that technically don’t exist – no tax declarations, no accountability. Some of these activist front groups (like Beyond Plastics or the Agroecology Fund) spend or regrant hundreds of millions of dollars per year and pretend to be legitimate organizations, lobbying regulators, testifying in front of Congress and organizing public campaigns. But through tricks of smoke and mirrors, these “NGOs” don’t exist.

Their “If a tree falls in a forest” logic is sound (albeit unethical). If they work for an organization that does not exist and does not declare its funding, it is impossible to have a conflict of interest. They believe you can only have a conflict if you make a profit, and these NGOs spend their resources as fast as they can.

The hypocrisy is rich here. Take for example the European NGO, Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). Before becoming the leading group in pushing the post-capitalist narrative, this group was founded to demand industry transparency, but those rules do not apply at all to them. Firebreak research showed how around half of their funding not only comes from dark, donor-advised funds, but these groups are based in the United States. Should Europe allow an interest group (claiming to be European) to influence the EU decision process on issues like trade and innovation while acting on behalf of undeclared American special interests? Given that they are representing non-transparent, foreign agents and interest groups, activists belonging to Corporate Europe Observatory should be stripped of access to the European Parliament, Commission and other institutions that demand a certain modicum of ethics, integrity and transparency. But they are an NGO … so nobody cares.

So long as industry is battling a public trust deficit and NGOs and foundations keep exploiting their trust surplus, activists can get away with anything. Trust is more important than truth.

The Science of Interest

Industry funds research. Innovation is key to developing new products and markets, continuous improvement of existing products (product stewardship) and to meet regulatory demands for product safety and sustainability. But is industry-funded research inherently biased and corrupted. If the science is improperly conducted, a company risks failed market share, years of litigation or clean-up costs. In other words, it is in a company’s interest to get the science right.

Industry is constantly under the microscope so any ethical or methodological transgressions by their researchers would quickly be exposed. There have been a few cases of well-publicized malfeasance but, by and large, industry research and innovation has been properly conducted, bringing an incredible number of new products and services to consumers, improving lives and well-being. Governments need data to regulate products that only industries are capable of providing, using the agreed upon Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) techniques.

Foundations are starting to fund counter-research, but no one here is talking about GLP. Rather, the activist science is designed to produce data to contradict existing data and raise public fear and outrage. The recent plethora of studies published claiming that our bodies are battling an onslaught of microplastics and nanoplastics have all been rejected by scientific agencies and the larger research community. But that does not stop the same foundation-funded media, universities and NGOs to amplify the findings and perpetuate the myths.

Technologies have not only accelerated new discoveries in industry research, but also advanced what we know today compared to what researchers in the 1950s knew. Activists though are judging research practices from 75 years ago with today’s technologies in their post-capitalist Marxist campaign to throw all industry research out. These anti-industry campaigners are demanding “independent” research which they assume is free from special interests and bias.

The assumption here is that independent research is free from conflicts of interest because, well, it’s independent. Given the costs of research technologies today, and government funding cutbacks, it is hard to imagine how funding could truly be free from special interests. It is not like in Albert Einstein’s time where he could develop his theories funded by his own third grade patent officer salary.

Foundations are providing a large amount of the “independent research” funding. But these are, at best, politically-motivated groups led by dogmatic philanthropists and, at worst, intermediaries channeling dark donor-advised funds from special interest groups. Michael Bloomberg’s latest $420 million commitment to tobacco control campaigns pushes him over the $2 billion funding mark for this single issue. He is staunchly against tobacco harm reduction alternatives like vaping or nicotine pouches and he is forcing the World Health Organization to follow his lead. It is unlikely that anyone within Bloomberg’s flotilla of well-funded NGO echochambers would do anything other than confirm his anti-nicotine bias (no matter how clear the science and data is).

• Industry funds research to advance profitability and competitiveness. If the research is inadequate or corrupted, the products will not succeed and the company will lose market share, suffer litigation or have to pay clean-up costs. Poor methodology or integrity issues are not sustainable.

• Foundation-funded research is campaign-directed (to show a substance is a health or environmental hazard). Its success is measured by how well it confirms some billionaire’s dogma or ideology. The methodology is defined by the desired conclusion and there is no real consequence for irresponsible research.

The Activist Endgame

Conclusions from “independent science” are fed into the activist campaigns, amplified and valued far more than industry research could ever be. So long as the well-funded NGO communicators keep pumping their dogma:

• nobody will care about how many people return to smoking and face far worse health consequences thanks to Michael Bloomberg’s irrational bias.

• Nobody will care how many more unsustainable, less innovative alternatives are used as the war on plastics leads to senseless policy decisions.

• Nobody will care about the future of agriculture, soil health and food security should the activists succeed in banning important pesticides.

As these philanthropists are growing in power, funding the media, buying researchers, controlling the courts, producing films and defining the public narrative, we are being conditioned on what to think about the public goods and well-being we are rapidly losing. Nobody will likely care until the economy collapses, people go hungry or the bodies start piling up.

There’s a new sheriff in town, with deep pockets, so if you want to get anything done, you had better fall in line with the foundations’ rhetoric and fundamentalism. And don’t you dare question the legitimacy of the non-transparent, non-registered organizations, fiscal sponsors or dark donor-advised funds or you’ll be labeled an industry shill. The media, the regulators, the research community and the courts have been sucked into a prejudicial purgatory defined and amplified by the dogma of philanthropic billions rather than by rationality, productivity, innovation and sustainability.

Money is oxygen for communication campaigns and the arrival of professionalized foundations into the environmental health issue sphere has sucked all of the air out of the room. With their well-organized messaging, the public perceives foundation funding as benign – that philanthropists are forces for good – while industry funding is corrupt and designed to harm people for profit.

• A scientist or activist can take millions from a foundation and still be welcome in their community while if they were to be even remotely associated with industry, they are excommunicated.

• An investigative journalist paid by a foundation grant to cover a story of a campaign funded by that same foundation, publishing it in a mainstream media group receiving hundreds of millions from foundations, will have the article celebrated as great independent journalism.

• The WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (largely funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies) prohibits participation from anyone who is related (within four degrees) to someone with any type of tobacco interest. If your second cousin runs a vape shop, you are tainted. But if Michael Bloomberg says you are a legitimate organization, even if you don’t exist as an entity, you get a front-row seat at a WHO global conference.

The Firebreak has attempted, in a rather lonely manner, to provide solutions to stop the activist endgame. As a reminder, here are some recommendations.

1. There needs to be a distinction between humanitarian NGOs and activist lobby groups (Alternative Policy Enterprises or APEs). Funding of these APEs should not be tax deductible.

2. There needs to be transparency on the use of donor-advised funds. Special interest groups like tort law firms should not be allowed to secretly channel funding into research or media groups.

3. Billionaires creating or funding news organizations need to commit to the same objectivity and news balance requirements as public media groups … or they should be branded as propaganda outlets.

4. The fiscal sponsor loophole needs to be tightened up. We cannot continue to have faux-NGOs like Beyond Plastics or the Agroecology Fund running campaigns with hundreds of millions in foundation funding with no transparency, no disclosures and no accountability.

5. Universities need to disclose what funding they receive from which foundations and detail, transparently how and to whom the funds have been distributed (see Postscript).

6. Foundation-funded research, even if it were ever to be transparent and open, should be considered as having conflicts of interest in the same way industry-funded research is, and be treated likewise.

7. Courts and juries must be informed when cases are being brought on behalf of governments but fully funded by interest groups hiding behind foundation fiscal sponsors. See the Firebreak case studies on Sher Edling’s series of climate nuisance lawfare suits.

There are always interests. Special interests always have a smell. Industry interests are certainly not the worst smelling (even though other interest groups have tried to paint them as such).

Postscript: A Serial Scientific Sales Rep

Philip Landrigan’s mischievous activism keeps turning up in Firebreak reports. His recent work promoting the anti-plastics campaign highlighted how deep the conflict of interest issue is within the so-called independent science community. Landrigan’s work over the last decade is a good illustration of how an individual has done very well providing scientific-like answers that the foundations and other special interest groups have paid him for. What is less evident is the game of smoke and mirrors that Landrigan uses to hide these interests.

Here are a list of organizations that Landrigan is using to channel funds for different projects (and himself). It is very difficult to access the amounts that have been funded since foundations are generally not transparent (nor is Boston College), but today most impact funding projects like those mentioned below are funded in the range of millions of dollars. The details have been gathered by Copilot (directed, structured and checked by the author).

• Landrigan retired from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2015 although he remained a full professor and Dean for Global Health at Mount Sinai until 2018.

• Landrigan set up the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good in 2018 at Boston College.

• Landrigan set up the Global Observatory on Planetary Health in 2018 at Boston College. It presently employs one other scientist, Ramazzini confrere, Kurt Straif.

• While Boston College states that “The Observatory is the research arm of the Global Public Health Program”, there are no cases of joint projects outside of the two organizations sharing the same founder and director (ie, Landrigan).

• Landrigan joined the Centre Scientifique de Monaco in 2019 to co‑chair the Monaco Commission on Human Health and Ocean Pollution.

• Officially, the Global Observatory on Planetary Health partnered directly with the Centre Scientifique de Monaco and the Prince Albert II Foundation rather than via Landrigan himself.

• The Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation has funded the Centre Scientifique de Monaco since 2018 for ocean research, including plastics.

• Landrigan was advising the Heartland Study team in 2018 while serving as chair of the Ramazzini Institute Science Advisory Committee. The Heartland Health Research Alliance was officially formed in 2020.

• In 2018, Landrigan transferred $950,000 from the Heartland Study accounts to the Ramazzini Institute for their glyphosate research. On the Heartland IRS 990 form, the transfer was made to Boston College. There was no declaration or records whether this money was channeled through his newly formed Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good, his newly formed Global Observatory on Planetary Health or via Boston College.

• Landrigan only acknowledged this 2018 transfer to the Ramazzini Institute where he headed the Science Advisory Board, in 2023 and this was only due to a change in management at the Heartland Health Research Alliance (that took compliance and integrity more seriously than the previous management).

• Heartland Health Research Alliance, created as a fiscal sponsor to fund the Heartland Health Study, gets its funding from the litigation industry and the organic food industry lobby via foundations using anonymous, donor-advised funds. There is very limited transparency. Philip Landrigan chairs Heartland’s Science Advisory Board and Boston College (assumedly via one of Landrigan’s operations) is a Heartland partner.

• Kurt Straif leaves IARC and begins working for Boston College with his Ramazzini confrere at the Global Observatory on Planetary Health as a Visiting Professor in 2019, formally becoming a Research Professor and Co‑Director at the Observatory in 2022. Straif and Landrigan are the only staff listed on the website.

• Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation has funded the Global Observatory and is also one of its formal partners.

• The Minderoo–Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health was created in 2022 with an undisclosed amount of funding from the Minderoo Foundation, the Centre Scientifique de Monaco (CSM) and the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation.

• The Minderoo–Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health is coordinated by the Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College, namely Philippe Landrigan, who has served as the lead scientist.

• The The Lancet Countdown on Health and Plastics was designed to provide global monitoring of the impact of plastics on human health and the environment. It was launched in 2025 with principal funding from Minderoo, in collaboration with Boston College, Heidelberg University, and the Centre Scientifique de Monaco (CSM). It was coordinated by Landrigan’s Global Observatory on Planetary Health.

• The Lancet Countdown Report, with Landrigan as the lead author, contained a 95-line declaration of interests for the authors (with most funding for the plastics researchers coming from foundations including a good number acknowledging funding from the Minderoo Foundation).

• The Minderoo Foundation was created by the Australian billionaire, Andrew Forrest, executive chairman of the Fortescue Metals Group. As a main supplier of iron ore that goes into iron and steel, Fortescue will expand its markets considerably should plastics be banned or severely restricted.

• The main journal articles related to these activities, with Landrigan as the lead author, have mostly been published in the Annals of Global Health journal. While the journal claims to be founded in 1934 by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (as the Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine), it is supported operationally by Boston College’s Program for Global Public Health (ie, Philip Landrigan). The journal was dormant after 2014 and it transitioned from a general medical journal to a global health journal focusing on “planetary‑health and prevention science” with the new publishing process finalized in 2019.

• Since the reorganization in 2018-2019, Philip Landrigan has been the Editor‑in‑Chief of the Annals of Global Health journal.

• In 2025, the Minderoo Foundation made a five million dollar donation to the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation for their ReOcean pollution campaign. It had previously funded the Monaco Commission on Human Health and Ocean Pollution (co‑chaired by Landrigan)

• In 2026, Philip Landrigan appears multiple times in the Minderoo Foundation funded film, The Plastic Detox.

• Prior to 2018, Landrigan had not done any research or published any articles on plastics.

• There are no public records or declarations of funding or budgets for the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good or the Global Observatory on Planetary Health. Boston College, as fiscal sponsor, does not declare the source and use of funding for these two Landrigan operations (which do not exist as standalone entities).

While Landrigan is core to all of these activities, most of his work is done via other organizations, several of which are shell organizations created by him at the same time as foundation funding was made available and moved around. Philip Landrigan is leaving us in the dark about his funding while promoting groups like the Ramazzini Institute for their “independent” funding.

How can Landrigan’s research activities be considered independent science free from conflicts of interest? How are these conflicts of interest not worse than industry-funded research?

This is the conclusion of a three-part series on the Plastic Fear Complex presenting plastics as the next global environmental health crisis, following the climate change playbook of controlling the narrative and fabricating fear. Part One looked at how media groups are starting to finally wake up to the nonsense published by activist scientists about the faux risks of microplastics. Part Two examined how the Minderoo Foundation has been pumping millions of dollars into funding activist science publications, NGO campaigns, lawsuits and media reporting against plastics. This third part is a film review of The Plastic Detox - the Minderoo Foundation-funded anti-plastics lobbumentary just released on Netflix. It serves as a case in point of how facts don’t matter when emotional, anti-industry campaigns have unlimited funding to control what the public perceives.

Writing a review of the Minderoo Pictures film, The Plastic Detox, was a challenge. Do I assess it on its production and cinematography value? Do I evaluate the 90-minute film on how it treated basic facts and evidence on plastics? Should the motivations, politics and campaigns of the parties involved enter into the review? Should it be evaluated as an example of how millions of dollars in foundation funding is liberally splashed out to support a series of Minderoo-backed political campaigns against plastics? Perhaps it is best to start with the quality of the film, rushed through with less than a month of post-production to meet the Netflix release window.

Poor Quality

Something was off from the very start of this “philanthropic film initiative” when I noticed the names of 23 executive producers in the opening credits interlacing a series of influencers making knowledgeable, panicked claims to intense music about microplastics found in their balls. Maybe their screams of how plastics are causing their penises to shrink, lower their sperm counts and cause an increase in miscarriages was meant to distract me from the listing of the 23 cooks in the kitchen.

But these 23 executive producers each wanted to partake in the Minderoo Foundation’s honeypot and concentrate on their own pet campaigns against plastics, so instead of a clear story, the viewer is forced to try to piece together a mosaic of vignettes of anti-plastic crusaders from high fashion to plastic-free cosmetics and hair gurus to Louisiana factory fighters to California attorney generals - all mixed together (and often returned to) without any coherence. And then there were the nine scientists they had lined up to add a variety of spices to the soup. The director no doubt tried to shove these pre-filmed reels into breaks within his main storyline but the transitions were often too forced and painful for the audience.

This is always the problem with activist campaigners who try to flood an issue with so many special interests and then struggle to keep everyone on the same page (like forcing the No-Nukes and anti-hydroelectric protestors into the climate/renewables campaign). Was this a film about plastics causing infertility, or social justice violations in Cancer Alley or industry lies about recycling capacity? This was a major flaw in the film’s script that only 23 executive producers can claim credit for.

There was only one common thread that this executive production cabal could agree upon: that not a single good thing could be said about the benefits coming from plastics. The bias was breathtaking. Not a word of how plastics prevent food from spoiling or cross contaminating, or how it allows for a reduction in CO2 emissions (compared to steel, glass and wood), or even how plastic devices and PPE keep people safe. If your ambition is to ban plastics, you have to be prepared to lie and look stupid.

The Main Story

The main storyline was how six couples, all trying to have children without success for between two and ten years, could conceive if they just removed most plastics from their homes. The plot was simple: “If we lower their exposure to the chemicals in plastics, can we change their fertility?” This tactic is similar to the story about a decade ago of the cute Swedish family that went organic for two weeks and suddenly became “healthy” (until we found out the Coop supermarket chain was sanctioned and the campaign was banned as a misleading advertisement).

Any couple having tried to have a child without success can understand the emotional strain such a situation can put on a person, a relationship and a community. Personally, my wife and I tried for four years to have a child, without success, so I understand the power of such a storytelling technique. As the couples cried onscreen to somber music, who would not be rooting for them to finally receive the good news of a long-anticipated little one? But is it ethical for such personal tragedies to be mixed with political agenda and activist campaigns?

Minderoo Pictures aims to be the impact storytelling arm of the Minderoo Foundation and with a significant investment in campaigns to ban plastics, their objective was to produce a frightening, upsetting and provocative film about the assault of plastics on humanity. Haunting music provided a loud overlay on the images as the camera scanned an average house, showing chemicals suddenly coming to life and off-gassing from our everyday products, emitting fake fumes (microplastics no doubt) into the air while a voiceover was telling you:

“They are often in places you can’t see! … But that’s just the tip of the iceberg” … “and our children are absolutely inundated with the plastics in their toys” …“We ingest them, we absorb them through our skin, we inhale them – every which way that they can get into our bodies, they do. And as they pass through our bodies, they wreak all sorts of havoc.”

With scary animation and haunting music, the theme of the film was clear: Plastic is the enemy of humanity.

The Star Scientist

The main part of the film starts with a scientist – Shanna Swan – being called to the stage and speaking to an adoring audience on the infertility crisis. The storyline then transitions to Shanna, this kindly 90-year-old grandmotherly figure, appearing on Joe Rogan. This is, of course, credibility sculpting. Shanna starts her speech with the claim that our increase in infertility is closely linked to our exposures to plastics.

The film then moved back to reactions of people when being told men’s penises are getting smaller. If the goal was to lock a message in the heads of the viewers that plastics are linked to smaller kits, then it succeeded within the first five minutes.

Once film viewers were made comfortable with Swan’s authority, with flashbacks to academic papers and TV interviews in the 80s and 90s, she presented her thesis:

“There are a lot of crises in the world right now. I don’t want to scare people, but I want to tell them that this is also an important crisis. This is also something we have to pay attention to, and actually in terms of our survival as a species, it may be (… pause for effect) one of the most important.”

So the plot for the film is: “What do we do to keep the human race alive?”. And the conclusion is simple: Ban plastics.

The Science

Swan admitted that the film’s plastic detox experiment was not “quote-unquote a scientific study”. There was no control group. It involved a very small group from different parts of the US and all of the couples who were infertile had unexplained infertility. The idea is that we should not challenge this famous scientist’s claims or methodology and just let the story unfold with literary license.

Swan’s argument was simple and simplistic: “There was nothing in their lifestyle that was causing the infertility with the exception of chemicals in their environment.” This was a disturbingly unscientific conclusion coming from someone with Swan’s evident credentials. But it is the idea dominating the emerging exposomist movement (replacing three decades of failed endocrine disruption research claims) that every disease that is not genetic or communicable comes from chemical exposures.

There was no reflection on the lifestyle influences affecting infertility. Most of the women trying to conceive were in their mid to late 30s (a time when fertility is naturally declining). Swan admitted she herself had two children in her twenties and then tried for a third before finally succeeding at the age of 42 so this fact must have been on her mind even if she did not share it. Any increase in infertility can also be attributed to the stress of modern life, more sedentary and dominated by screens, with increased anxiety from social media manipulation, shifts in diet and exercise patterns. You would likely get better conception results if you conducted a social media detox.

Three decades of failed hypotheses

But those are factors the endocrine disruption scientific community overlooks when they make claims like: “There was nothing in their lifestyle that was causing the infertility with the exception of chemicals in their environment.” For more then three decades, endocrine disruption activists have rejected other theories to complex issues, criticized scientists who did not follow their paradigm while failing to prove their claims, hiding contradicting evidence and continuing to scare the public with their theories.

After three decades, the endocrine disruption fear campaign became “banalized” (like dioxins and ozone depletion), funding dried up and the scientific world moved on, with these activist scientists turning to concentrate on bigger theories like defining the exposome. The Plastics Fear Complex resurrected these die-hard endocrine disruption activist scientists with funding, microphones and credibility. But the dogmatic intransigence of the scientists speaking in this film are a reminder of why they had been ostracized by the scientific community.

Leonardo Trasande rounded off the following diseases that came from endocrine disrupting chemicals: heart attacks, stroke, autism, ADD, Parkinson’s, dementia, obesity and boldly claimed that these diseases can be passed down five generations. He surprisingly forgot to mention cancer. I was curious about the certainty of his claims. One generation ago, my mother smoked while she was pregnant with me. And Leo now wants me to panic about touching a plastic bag???

Landrigan Again

Part Two of this series showed how Philip Landrigan is bought and paid for by Andrew Forrest and his Minderoo Foundation. Punching his timesheet for this film, Philip tried to explain how a toxic chemical, when it enters a woman’s body, contaminates three generations. He called it “toxic trespass” without any attempt to explain to the audience that all things are made of chemicals and that all chemical substances, even water, at some level, is toxic. When John C Warner, the father of green chemistry said: “Things don’t have to be toxic!”, I was tempted to switch over to stream something on Disney+.

I understand that when Philip Landrigan growls about toxic chemicals, he only means synthetic chemicals … even though natural substances in foods like coffee, humus or soybeans expose us to far greater levels of endocrine disrupting chemicals. Fortunately very few people drink coffee today and vegan mothers don’t feed their babies soy milk.

The Minderoo Foundation’s prized Golden Boy, Philip Landrigan, must have just been itching to go off-script and add that infertility is also caused by pesticides, but he was forced to pass over that in silence. Philip is working for a new paymaster now.

I would need two more articles to go through the ridiculous emotional claims made during the film’s scientist cameos. Without blinking an eye, they continued to advance the now well-debunked myths about microplastic exposures. The point is that the film, Plastic Detox, was not meant to be scientifically correct – it was meant to frighten people.

The Plastic Detox

Between the unrelated anti-industry side-stories and scientists sharing their theories, Shanna Swan takes the six couples through a plastic detox, throwing out most of their household products on Day 1 and replacing the plastics in their homes with “safe” products. Supermarkets were portrayed as a toxic war-zone. After an hour with Shanna in the shop, one of the detox participants looked in horror as a cashier was trying to pass them a receipt, shouting at her as if the BPA-laced paper were the bubonic plague. It was hard not to notice how this participant touted massive body tattoos (but the ink must have been “chemical-free”).

The plastic detox would last for seven weeks with regular measurements of the participants’ BMI, urine and sperm samples to track the success of their detox. After the first tests, the kindly Shanna Swan gave the bad news to each couple of their deathly exposures to dangerous chemicals added to plastics. As the body burden of toxic chemicals with scary names was read out, the reactions were dramatic. When Shanna exclaimed: “Jesse, you have high phthalates!”, the poor man wilted in shame and absolute horror. It must have meant something bad.

After six weeks, when sperm counts were still declining, Shanna reassured them it was not their fault. “Endocrine disruptors are so pervasive, you are being exposed even when you least expect it.” The audience was made to understand how difficult it is to remove all of the contaminants in their lives (especially as evil industry keeps on polluting their environment with the support of a corrupt government). These setbacks so near to the end of the seven week detox had a dramatic cinematographic effect as hopelessness and despair were captured through the lens. Our rooting for these infertile couples was being put to the test.

These declines though were quickly forgotten at the end when Swan triumphantly celebrated week seven’s results, presenting graphs for the entire period, all showing continuous increases in sperm counts for all of the men in the test group as their exposures to plastics were reduced. It was a remarkable success, vindicating thirty years of Shanna’s research. But, but … Week 6 sperm declines? Despair? … OK, never mind, it is just a film…

And the audience, after investing 90 minutes into the preset storyline, wanted to believe that the plastic detox worked. The film ended with three couples celebrating the birth of their children. A happy ending.

This is quite a remarkable jump to assume that brushing your teeth with a bamboo brush and baking soda would make you fertile again, but today’s non-critical society will likely accept this conclusion without question or hesitation and blame plastics and industry for this painful misfortune of infertility.

Most of the couples with non-explained infertility were only trying for two years. That is not a long time for people in their 30s. When my wife and I were trying for four years, we were told by a specialist to be patient (couples waiting to have children until their 30s were less than half as fertile as teenagers). After four years of trying, we had three children naturally in the next three years. This happy ending came with no plastic detox and, like most people, no foundation-funded film crews trying to force a politicized story.

The Politics

Minderoo Pictures was created in 2021 via Australian billionaire and executive chairman of Fortescue Metals Group, Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation. Referred to as a “philanthropic film initiative” focused on producing high-impact documentaries addressing urgent global environmental and social issues, one of its first projects was to produce this film about plastics. Forrest’s aggressive ambition is clear:

“To have real impact we must motivate people, companies, and governments to act, to reassess their behaviors or start a movement. This is what we hope to achieve through Minderoo Pictures.”

And if this movement bans plastics and helps the metals industries, so be it.

But Forrest’s ethics (or lack thereof) is disturbing. The $7.7 million (A$10 million) Forrest gave to set up Minderoo Pictures was not a philanthropic gift. It was a campaign tool – a weapon – to fulfil the billionaire’s ambition in a battle against the plastics industry. Andrew Forrest makes no secret that he wants to ban plastics to hurt his adversaries so he created the film to advance this.

In the last section of the Plastic Fear Complex series, we saw how Andrew Forrest used his Australian Minderoo Foundation to fund an NGO front group, the Intergenerational Environment Justice Fund, to secretly pay $500,000 to a US law firm to file a lawsuit against Andrew’s arch-enemy, ExxonMobil, for making false claims about their plastics recycling capacity. This law firm then made a series of donations (amounting to $39,000) to the California Attorney General, Rob Bonta. Bonta then simultaneously filed a similar lawsuit, on behalf of the state of California, against Exxon.

Ten minutes of screentime in Andrew Forrest’s Plastic Detox film was dedicated to Rob Bonta and it is clear that this interruption in the natural flow of the film was at Forrest’s behest. It did not fit the main theme about plastics and fertility so we can only assume that this insertion was intended to advance the ongoing lawsuits, prime the juries and advance the California AG’s stature (and his own case against Exxon as well). Most film viewers will not have noticed this Sugar Daddy manipulation.

Bonta’s forlorn voiceover about his daughter not wanting children while the screen captures images of a developing country with piles of plastic trash and burning garbage fires was sickening if you realize that he was only doing this bit as a $39,000 donation payback. The California Attorney General’s claims that big corporations are lying to the public for money, likening the plastic industry to Big Tobacco, rings hollow amidst the stench of Bonta’s own hypocrisy.

The Plastics Detox was not a credible film about the risks people are facing living in the modern world. It was a campaign weapon used by a petty billionaire from the metals industry to fight against the more sustainable use of plastics. We have to understand how big foundations are funding the Plastic Fear Complex and how they can control the narrative by buying off scientists, NGOs, the media and the streaming companies. When billionaires can produce films that advance their interests, pay off Netflix to pretend the product is genuine, and millions of viewers consume the propaganda, then a little bit more of democracy and free thinking dies.

This is Part Two of a three-part series on the Plastic Fear Complex looking at how plastics are being positioned to be the next global crisis, following the climate change playbook of controlling the narrative and fabricating fear. Part One looked at how media groups are starting to finally wake up to the nonsense published by activist scientists about the faux risks of microplastics. This section will look at one case of a large foundation pumping millions of dollars to fund activist science publications, NGO campaigns and media reporting against plastics. Part 3 will be a review of a foundation-funded anti-plastics lobbumentary just released on Netflix as a case in point of how facts don’t matter when emotional, anti-industry campaigns have unlimited funding to control what the public perceives.

To lead an environmental health crisis campaign today, you need to create an academic body or group of scientists, gather them together to declare a consensus and actively demand a list of solutions. This is the basis from which media, NGOs and ad hoc international committees in the UN can be formed to demand this change. As scientists don’t come cheap, this costs money and relies today on foundations willing to commit long-term funding and engagement in pursuit of change and some idealized transition. The Plastic Fear Complex has all of these elements.

Many large US foundations have been bankrolling the activist scientists publishing poor research questioning the safety of plastics, connected media reports, NGO campaigns and international organizations like UNEP’s Ban Plastics conferences. These NGOs include the Rockefeller Foundation, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Oak Foundation … But there is a new, scrappier Australian foundation now financing the Plastic Fear Complex and this article will focus on the quality of their activism.

Whenever there is a large academic commission or conference on an upcoming environmental health “crisis” (often promoted by predatory opportunistic journal editors like Richard Horton at the Lancet), it doesn’t take much searching to find a trail of C-notes from some foundation or specially designated fiscal sponsor to these activist campaigners. The Firebreak did an exposé showing how Bloomberg Philanthropies has been pumping millions into Beyond Plastics, a project managed through a tiny Vermont liberal arts college acting as a non-transparent fiscal sponsor. The Plastic Fear Complex campaigners are celebrating the recent arrival of unlimited special interest funding from Australia’s Minderoo Foundation, the political plaything of Fortescue Metals Group’s outspoken executive chairman, Andrew Forrest.

From Minderoo to Monaco to The Lancet

The first part of this series showed how Philip Landrigan cited the Lancet Countdown on Health and Plastics as a source to refute the futility of the microplastic fear publications. But the Countdown is not actually a research work. There isn’t any new “science” on plastics in the “Countdown” (which is probably why the Lancet didn’t honor it with the title of a “Commission”). Rather it is a source for campaign literature from a pool of activist scientists using their network to increase their publication base, peer review and cite each other, and attend conferences and symposiums funded by a number of foundations seeking to be identified with the greatest environmental campaign since the glory days of catastrophic climate change fears.

The Lancet “Countdown” article used text and strategy that was disturbingly similar to another article published by Landrigan and a large number of anti-plastic activists entitled the Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health which used much of the same text as Landrigan’s 2022 announcement of the Minderoo-funded project. I suspect those interns and post-grad ghostwriters need a course on research integrity.

The Declaration of Interests section for the Lancet Countdown anti-plastics report amounted to 95 lines of interest groups supporting and funding the academics and researchers involved. This section of funding declarations is the longest part of the article and is a clear demonstration of the forces behind the Plastic Fear Complex. See image below. Take a moment to take this in: 95 lines of “declared” special interest funding behind the scientists and academics involved in this Lancet campaign against plastics.

The main funding for the Lancet Countdown research came from the Minderoo Foundation. The Lancet project developed from the Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health. Not only did a large number of scientists involved declare funding from the Minderoo Foundation, but the project had a direct involvement of many Minderoo Foundation staff. As Minderoo was not very active in plastics issues prior to this, the question remains: Who brought them together for this campaign?

All roads seem to go back to the Lancet Countdown’s coordinator and report lead author, Philip J Landrigan.

A Jack of All Trades

Philip Landrigan is best known for his campaigns against GMOs and herbicides like glyphosate. He was head of the Scientific Advisory Committee at the Ramazzini Institute, active in their Global Glyphosate Study, and the chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Heartland Health Research Alliance, an organization designed to funnel dark funding from the US litigation industry to researchers publishing papers against herbicides like glyphosate.

Landrigan is also, strangely, the health advisor to the Evangelical Environmental Network. Paying the rent or are there health issues with the Rapture?

The Firebreak has published articles on Landrigan, including his secret, unethical and legally suspect transfer of one million dollars from the Heartland Health Study budget to the cash-strapped Ramazzini Institute via his school, Boston College, so the Italian research institute could continue its glyphosate study. There were also articles (here, here and here) on the abuse of Landrigan’s board position to have forced the American Academy of Pediatrics to give its members unscientific guidance to advise parents to feed their children organic food.

Landrigan had a long career going back to the 1970s, but he had not been involved in any research on plastics or had his name on any significant plastics publications until 2022 when he was recruited to lead the Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health.

Given how lucrative the Heartland Health Study payola was, there must have been some serious money involved to get the long retired Landrigan to switch horses and, so late in his career, suddenly become an “expert” in plastics. As expected, the Minderoo Foundation does not reveal the level of their funding to this anti-plastics campaign (foundations don’t need to be transparent), but it seems to be making up a considerable part of the $300 million commitment made in 2019 to a new plastic waste initiative (Sea the Future).

Minderoo also gave €5 million to the ReOcean Fund in 2019, run by the Fondation Prince Albert II de Monaco to focus on ocean health and plastic pollution. Landrigan has been involved with ReOcean since 2019 (although it seems COVID interrupted this cooperation as nothing developed from this project until the Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health was launched in 2022).

This Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health is coordinated by the Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College whose Program Director is none other than Philip J Landrigan. As well, Boston College’s Global Observatory has a program called Plastics Health Aware that provides a basic checklist of all of the diseases caused by plastics and their chemical additives. You did not have to look too far to see that this project is managed by Philip J Landrigan and funded by … the Minderoo Foundation. There are only two scientists working at the Global Observatory on Planetary Health, Landrigan and his Ramazzini confrere, Kurt Straif, whom Landrigan employed when he suddenly had to leave his post as head of the IARC monograph program.

Interestingly, the Global Observatory on Planetary Health website does not acknowledge any funding from the Minderoo Foundation. Was it all funneled through Monaco?

No wonder the Heartland Health Study was archived around this same time. Philip found another Sugar Daddy with deeper pockets and less taint than the US litigation industry.

Pot, Kettle, Plastic Alternative to Steel

The Minderoo Foundation is founded and funded by the outspoken Andrew Forrest, an excessively loud-mouthed Australian billionaire who has taken his definition of saving the planet as his calling and personal salvation. Someone should remind this Davos Darling that he is the executive chairman of Fortescue Metals Group, a mining company extracting iron ore from that planet he loves in order to produce energy-intensive iron and steel. The fact that the metals industry stands to gain massively from any success from Forrest’s Ban Plastics campaigns and his mudslinging orations seems to be considered even less important than the scientific facts working against his activism.

Forrest’s tactics are as dirty as his money. Battling ExxonMobil on the green energy front, he has secretly financed an NGO to fund lawsuits claiming Exxon lied about their plastics recycling program. He channeled $500,000 via his Minderoo Foundation through a front group NGO called the Intergenerational Environment Justice Fund. While the NGO claims no affiliation with the Minderoo Foundation, that is not what the law firm’s FARA declaration said. The Minderoo front group worked with US NGO proxies to fund a law firm suing Exxon who in turn donated $39,000 to the California District Attorney, Rob Bonta, who also simultaneously filed a lawsuit against Exxon’s plastics recycling.

Who needs ethics or integrity when you are on a mission to ban plastics?

The plastics industry has a choice. Either start to play as dirty as their self-interested adversaries who are willing to lie, cheat and delegitimize a competing industry, or just stop producing plastics. The Plastic Fear Complex is well funded and will stop at nothing to eliminate their industry.

It is a pity this unethical activity was yet again done in the name of professionalized philanthropy. That $500,000 could have done so much to further rural development in Western Australia if Andrew had just shut up and stayed in his lane.

As long as Andrew Forrest keeps pumping his Minderoo millions into his pointless anti-plastic campaigns, there will be those signing up to amplify his nonsense. Maybe his Minderoo Foundation should start funding journalists because, as Part 1 demonstrated, many of them are waking up to the hypocrisy of his activism. Or even better, maybe Andrew can go to Hollywood and create an organization called Minderoo Films to produce an anti-plastics lobbumentary that they can then use to buy their way onto the Netflix platform.

A review of Minderoo Films release: “The Plastic Detox” is the third part of this Plastic Fear Complex series.

This is the first of a three-part series on the Plastic Fear Complex. It will look at how plastics are being positioned to be the next global crisis, following the climate change playbook of controlling the narrative and fabricating fear. Part One looks at how media groups are starting to finally wake up to the nonsense published by activist scientists about the faux risks of microplastics. This though does not matter so long as large foundations continue to pump funds into activist science research, NGO campaigns and media reporting against plastics (Part 2). Part 3 will be a review of a foundation-funded anti-plastics lobbumentary just released on Netflix as a case in point of how facts don’t matter when emotional, anti-industry campaigns have unlimited funding to control what the public perceives.

Since the rise of MAHA in US policy, journalists have been starting to question the findings of activist scientists, and instead of amplifying their campaigns and scary conclusions (as scandals and crises make better headlines), they are shining a spotlight on the nonsense being published, propagated and promoted on behalf of some undisclosed funders and special interests. In particular, in 2026, journalists are starting to wake up to the poor research, bad methodology and lack of integrity of scientists publishing their insignificant findings and questionable conclusions from “research” on microplastics and nanoplastics claimed to be present in humans and the environment.

The realization of bad science was slow to arrive. The Firebreak was one of the few sources to report last October about the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) literature review that concluded that almost all published microplastic and nanoplastic studies were littered with mistakes, poor methodologies and unjustifiable conclusions.

The Firebreak analysis of the EFSA report rejecting the validity of most micro/nanoplastic studies concluded with advice on what journalists should be covering each time (each week) another publication comes out making some ridiculous claim about the risks of our exposure to plastics.

I have been playing this game for far too long to imagine any mainstream media groups would forego the instant attraction of catastrophic/crisis reporting in favor of hard truths and scientific facts. Imagine my surprise when the first media group to find reporting integrity and report the reality of the anti-plastics tactics was The Guardian.

The Guardian Bombshell

In January, the Guardian published a scathing article by their environment editor, Damian Carrington, calling most microplastic studies meaningless, scaremongering, a joke or biologically implausible. The article, entitled “‘A bombshell’: doubt cast on discovery of microplastics throughout human body” starts off with a reality check:

Carrington’s Guardian article looked at seven particular microplastic studies, measuring the reactions within the wider scientific community and found cases of poor methodology, bad lab practices, false positives and claims not supported by evidence from researchers lacking any analytical chemistry knowledge. The level of doubts being voiced in the scientific community at the number of studies and their unjustifiable claims was termed “a bombshell”. Until this article though, the mainstream media has not been honestly reporting on the dissent from credible scientists on the ridiculous claims about the microplastic invasion.

The next question for the media to start considering is why there are so many (expensive) studies on microplastics and nanoplastics conducted, published and widely amplified. Who is funding them and what are their interests? If David Carrington actually does read The Firebreak, he might have another media scoop.

What was interesting from a mainstream media group that habitually promotes scaremongering campaigns (touted by reporters like George Monbiot and Carey Gillam) is the Guardian’s appeal now to reduce scaremongering and to tone down the level of public internecine sniping between scientists. The main conclusion of this article is not to panic when alarmist claims are made and trust that the analytical technology is improving as the science evolves.

The Empire Strikes Back

Eight days after the “bombshell” Guardian article, a group of activist scientists struck back with a rebuttal stressing the dangers of microplastics. The authors, Joe Yates, Philip J Landrigan, Jennifer Kirwan and Jamie Davies, were coordinated (by some unmentioned organization) to write separate letters bundled into a response article to try to diffuse the Guardian’s unexpected criticism of the anti-plastics campaign.

Their main point, outside of the usual “industry collusion” trope, is that disagreement is an important part of the scientific process but the media should not use it for political purposes. I wonder why these “independent scientists” did not publish the same responses when their papers arguing that microplastics are causing serious health issues were amplified by the same media groups.

Most well-known in this group was Philip Landrigan who didn’t really address the arguments in the Guardian bombshell article, but just repeated the activist talking points on how bad plastics are. He also used the opportunity of his short letter to plug his Lancet Countdown on Health and Plastics, an assembly of activist scientists he is leading that is starting yet another exclusive academic platform for publishing their research agenda. This academic sideshow is funded by the Minderoo Foundation (see Part 2 of this series).

A Credit Card of Microplastic Scaremongering

This month, New Scientist came out with an even more critical assessment of the poor methodology and ridiculous conclusions from the recent slew of studies on micro/nanoplastics. The article, written by Chelsea Whyte, entitled: “How worried should you be about microplastics?”, concluded that you should not be worried at all, but rather, mildly bemused.

The article started with an assessment of the exposomist claim that we ingest 5 grams, or the equivalent of one credit card, of microplastics per week. Whyte claims the study used some very shoddy math and in reality, we more likely ingest only “0.0041 milligrams per week, which is less than a grain of salt)”. Like the Guardian “Bombshell” article, she examined the flawed methodology of vaporizing tissue samples, a practice that would convert human fat into microplastic false positives.

The article then asked the more important but rarely considered question. If there are microplastics in our bodies, no matter how little, what is the risk? Whyte looked at the possibility of other harmful chemical additives leaching out of the microplastics into human bodies and concluded that the amount and risk were negligible. Many animal studies providing massive microplastic doses to mice and pigs proved to be unrealistic.

The New Scientist article concludes that these claims feed “into our doomerism feelings about the pollution happening all around us” but there are many more pressing issues we should be worried about than microplastics in our bodies.

How is Such Misrepresentation Possible?

Whether the studies are raising fears about microplastics, ultra-processed foods, PFAS or glyphosate, the reality is that these nonsense studies are making their way into journals because of the broken peer review process, a myriad of funding interests and the rise of a post-capitalist activist ideology ripping through the academe. And news organizations love their cataclysmic claims.

In some cases, articles with alarmist findings on microplastics were published by lab technicians. Universities spending large budgets on high-precision laboratory analytical equipment need to promote their facilities to gain stature and market opportunities. Publishing detection findings of nanoplastics crossing the brain-blood barrier will certainly get attention in the research community.

But shouldn’t the peer review process filter out the bad research methodologies and unjustifiable conclusions?

Today most journals are no longer respecting a credible peer review process. I have written in the past how the system is broken, how many predatory journals funnel papers through via a pay-to-play process and how even credible journals favor the shock headline articles over good methodology.

Then there are the outside interests who will benefit from the public fear and reaction against plastics. Many of the studies are funded by NGOs, activist foundations and competing industries with alternatives to plastics. Part 2 of this series will examine such cases.

But surely we can now assume, given the mainstream media reaction against the Plastic Fear Complex, these studies, the funding and the campaigning will now have to stop.

Is the Microplastic Myth Now Dead?

Where do activist campaigns go when they have been thoroughly discredited?

• Chemtrail conspiracies have been refuted.

• The MMR vaccine – autism link categorically rejected.

• 4G fears became 5G campaigns that will soon look in horror at 6G.

• The endocrine disruption doomsday scenarios fell flat as the decades passed.

But still these myths are propagated every day, they find activists willing to put old fears in new bottles and keep a residue of uncertainty in the back of the forever frightened public’s minds. Too much has been invested in the Ban Plastics movement to let a little reality and a few bad articles interrupt a multi-pronged activist campaign.

The Plastic Fear Complex has become too large to simply be unwoven.

• There are too many anti-plastic NGO campaigns depending on continued public fear and outrage.

• There are too many activist scientists midway through a research study that relies on the publication of a paper with preset conclusions to justify the funding.

• There are too many foundations that have moved a certain number of fund managers and five year budgets from climate campaigns to their ban plastics division (as an extension of their anti-fossil fuel strategy).

• There are too many industries with alternatives to plastics that have invested in communications and lobbying campaign groups.

Even without facts, reliable studies or mainstream media support, there is still ample foundation funding, public fear and an army of interest groups that will push the well-oiled Plastic Fear Complex forward (dreaming of the next plastic straw opportunity). Too many upcoming studies and investigative journalists are in the pipeline to let the facts get in the way. They’ll just move the goalposts, wordsmith their slogans and carry on as if nothing has changed.

But will the rest of us continue to allow ourselves to be fooled? That is the question of this Plastic Fear Complex series. Part 2 will look at how the activists, with unlimited funding, will be able to manufacture a flood of anti-plastic campaign materials.

I attended a MAHA Action Media Hub event several weeks ago. These closed events are meant to rally the faithful and allow the MAHA leaders and influencers to put their spin on the issues. The MAHA online event on February 25, 2026 followed the Trump Executive Order declaring that glyphosate was essential. It was meant to diffuse the outrage and talk of rebellion. It seemed the followers and the faithful attending the Zoom call were ready to toe the line and move on. They preferred to fill up the comments bar with promotions of many of their wellness products or to share their curious ideas on health and well-being.

It was very much an evening to where grifters were raising fears to sell their wares to the terrified. Conspiracy was the MAHA commodity in ample supply.

MAHA Action is a curious group. It only has two people on its board, Tony Lyons as “co-founder” (the website does not say who the other founder was) and a bee farmer, Leigh Merinoff – a raw milk advocate who also has a position on RFK Jr’s PACs and his Children’s Health Defense. Del Bigtree, as one-time CEO of MAHA Action, seems to have been erased from all records. Nothing official, I’m sure, but there seems to be some trouble in paradise.

The media hub seems to be the main MAHA Action product, providing a platform for MAHA leaders to present short, weekly statements in an attempt to control the MAHA message and keep the movement’s faithful excited.

The February 25th event was chaired by Tony Lyons, the founder and president of Skyhorse Publishing, the organization that publishes RFK Jr’s books and, according to RFK Jr’s declaration of interests, a major source of his income. Lyons managed RFK’s original Democratic primary campaign, his American Values 2024 PAC and is now running the present MAHA PAC looking at options for RFK Jr to run in the 2028 presidential election. While Lyons also runs the MAHA Institute think tank (another Bigtree product), his title for the MAHA Media Hub event was as President of MAHA Action.

It seems safe to assume that Tony has taken over from Del as the face of MAHA under Bobby Jr (suggesting a shift away from the rabid anti-vaxxer faction).

The MAHA leaders were using their five minutes allotted to them to control the MAHA message. They called it a live event, and while some of the speakers had not mastered the unmute button, the distance between the speaker and the audience was so broad as to suggest it was all pre-recorded and tightly controlled. They did not allow for engagement or participation, followers could not ask questions and there was no attention paid to their concerns. MAHA is about control and propagation.

Lyons started the event with the elephant in the room: Trump’s Executive Order the week before making glyphosate an essential product. Most speakers addressed this point, trying to keep the troops loyal while assuring them that this was a temporary compromise. Lyons argued that if glyphosate were banned today, food prices would skyrocket. He threw the crowd some red meat, noting that RFK Jr talked about a new, laser-based means to kill weeds, but that this technology was not yet ready.

Yes, all farmers need to learn to work with laser beams because, well, … glyphosate.

Lyons was angry that people were trying to divide MAHA after Trump’s Executive Order on glyphosate. He seemed to suggest that the attacks were coming from industry lobbyists (like this obvious one). The reality is that Trump divided MAHA with his Executive Order and the angry MAHA Moms were finishing the job.

This was a damage control media event so it comes as no surprise that there were no significant MAHA Moms allowed to speak. The prime speaking slot was reserved for MAHA’s latest rising star, Florida Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo.

Ladapo was very proud that Florida has been testing everything, basking in the glory of the outrage created by his tests of glyphosate in bread. This state surgeon general claims there is good data that shows how glyphosate causes fatty liver disease, destroys the gut biome, crosses the brain-blood barrier ... but outside of repeating these activist campaign talking points, no scientific support was provided. I suppose respecting science is just a “nice-to-have” for surgeon generals.

Ladapo then went off on a tangent about finding arsenic in candy. He claimed he doesn’t know where it was coming from, and did not get into how small the detection levels were. He missed a pure MAHA moment by failing to mention other health problems in candy, but that would have confused the good doctor’s chemophobia message.

To his credit, Dr Ladapo was one of the few MAHA speakers that evening who was not trying to sell a book or product to the faithful and fearful in attendance. He is selling himself and we should not be surprised to see a Representative Ladapo in the coming Congress.

It was time for the MAHA insider to come and report to the movement about how hard the administration is working to secure their health. No, not Casey Means, the other one.

Calley Means started his speech getting right into the glyphosate issue. It is not just a herbicide and banning glyphosate is more than just a regulatory challenge. Calley Means boldly claimed “We are fighting for civilization and this is existential!”

He admitted that glyphosate has been the most vexing issue he has come across and it is presently a very “sub-optimal” situation. He tried to get the MAHA mob to be reasonable and ready to compromise (in a conspiracy marketer’s manipulative manner). “Farmers” Means said, “are really suffering and there is a perception these chemicals are needed for food production”. He admitted it was a very tough situation: “We are grappling with these very complex issues.”

Means vowed to continue to work with the administration and ensure that MAHA stays part of it. This is a sign that all is not well in Washington but he plans to be seen going down as a fighter. Calley Means’ arrogance and capacity to embellish himself is legendary. I kept noticing how he seemed to think of himself at the same level as RFK Jr in this debate, continually using the term “we” in reference to HHS activities. He claimed, for example, that “MAHA has a big seat at the table and we will continue to push this.”

The MAHA Action Media Hub then took a turn to the Pentecostal when Daniel Pompa filed his five minute video intervention. A recent Firebreak article showed how the Pentecostals were the real backbone of the MAHA movement.

Pompa shared how discouraged people are about Trump’s glyphosate executive order. He assured the MAHA faithful in attendance that there was no gaslighting going on. In what could only be described as the best spin ever, he justified why MAHA could not pull glyphosate out of food system right away. “Getting farmers to stop using glyphosate would like taking a drug addict off drugs cold turkey.” It would be too much. Pompa feels farmers are addicted to the stuff.

Pompa then took an interesting turn to the spiritual, asking the MAHA soldiers a rhetorical question:

“Did we think for one minute that there wouldn’t be a battle. But the battle is always spiritual. Like with pharmaceuticals and vaccines, there was a battle, as now with chemical companies and pesticides, and they are trying to turn us on ourselves.”

He implored that the faithful must trust the MAHA board stating “It is not as simple as just taking a chemical away. The battle is spiritual, but we need a war cry – be strong and courageous. We are stepping into a promise that God has for us … and not let them divide us. Trust the message from the top.”

In repeating the Biblical calling: “Be strong and courageous”, I kept waiting for Pompa to exclaim “Brother Bobby knows the way to the Promised Land!”. Is it too soon?

Most of the speakers fit the MAHA mold, except perhaps Shira Boehler. She is an articulate lung cancer survivor who fought to change the guidelines so that lung scans are more commonly done. Her argument is sound - that lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer death for woman … even more than breast cancer. But I wondered why she was using this medium to tell her story, except perhaps to sell her book, but that seemed secondary for her. Maybe not for the ever opportunistic Tony Lyons, whose Skyhorse Publishing is her book’s publisher.

While Boehler was sharing heartfelt moments of her ordeal, the MAHA Action Media Hub comment section lit up. MAHAvians were claiming lung cancer was caused by wearing masks. Others said, knowingly, that scans or mammograms caused cancer. These dear angels never fail to come through.

The grift though was gaining momentum as the evening event approached its zenith, with two heavyweights in the MAHA world still to speak.

Jeff Hays was there to promote his film, the MAHA Movie. Hays used most of his allotted time to play a three-minute trailer of his new film. While he announced that it was going live that night, the scenes in the trailer were identical to a film Hays had released in 2025 under the title “Toxic Nation”. I should know as I suffered through it when I wrote an article last year. Rehashing new wine in old bottles is not an issue in a MAHA world where messages are short, emotional and simple.

The evening ended with Robert Malone telling the MAHA movement their time is now (and please buy my book … available at Tony Lyons‘ Skyhorse Publishing). Malone cited a political survey that the American people are far less divided … and 59% support MAHA. As over half of those surveyed supported reducing vaccine load, Malone reminded the faithful that these are not fringe ideas. He piled the praise on even more, saying MAHA is polling higher than support for politicians like Trump and RFK Jr (who only poll support in the low 40s). “MAHA is the majority,” Malone crowed, “and holds the power.”

Bob will do well in the coming RFK Jr administration.

From Deplatform to De Platform

What emerged from this evening of speeches from MAHA leaders is their attempt to mainstream the movement, present themselves not as a lunatic fringe but as a force that will influence the coming elections. But you don’t have to look far to find the old ways, conspiracy mongers and batshit crazy grifters at work at the heart of MAHA. As much as people in the “MAHA leadership” try to paper over the stains, the taint remains.

Russell Brand spoke at the MAHA Action Media Hub the week before. Maybe Alex Jones is free in April. The MAHA Action Media Hub is the new leadership grooming ground.

Tony Lyons perhaps said it best. “Before RFK Jr came to power, people like himself were being deplatformed. Now they are running the platform.”

The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Reasons for Regulating

What is a regulation for? Why do governments regulate? When a regulation is good, it often goes unnoticed (cleaner environment, economic expansion, better quality of life…). When it is a bad regulation, the consequences could be catastrophic (rise in organized crime, loss of respect in regulatory authorities, economic decline…). While the European Union embarks on a series of regulatory simplifications (deregulation), the important metric for each case is to ask what the regulation is for.

Some would argue that regulations should be introduced to change people’s behavior – to nudge them to more sustainable practices with carrots and sticks. If you want a healthier population, you need to encourage fitness and that includes investing in sports centers, parks, infrastructure, subsidizing healthier foods… Others would say we regulate to stop bad behavior, protect populations and discourage certain lifestyle activities. Ban a substance, prevent access or tax it out of a market.

As it is often easier to control people from doing something rather than encouraging better behavior, regulators tend to fall into the latter camp. Taxes are the regulatory weapon of choice as it supports a side-occupation – to raise revenue (where more revenue is measured as better). With this one-weapon arsenal, regulatory failure is measured by how consumers respond to ever-increasing tax measures (by adopting more harmful alternatives, adopting illegal practices or moving to lower quality products).

Taxing Harm Reduction

Last year the European Commission proposed significant increases to excise duties on vaping products and nicotine pouches, with new minimum taxes to be implemented to harmonize rates across the EU by 2026-2027. Their proposed rates include up to 40% tax for higher nicotine e-liquids (at €0.36 per ml) and a 50% tax on nicotine pouches. Last January the European Council proposed to lower the tax rate on higher nicotine e-liquids (at 0.20 per ml), extending the implementation phase-in, while leaving the tax on nicotine pouches unchanged at 50%. This means a €5 pack of nicotine pouches could cost €7.50. The European Economic and Social Committee warned about the risk of black markets coming from such restrictive taxes. The European Parliament is now considering this legislation.

The European Union is imposing these tax increases via the tax harmonization mechanism (is that even legal?) to comply with the wishes of the World Health Organization, which is pushing for higher taxes on tobacco harm reduction alternatives like vaping and nicotine pouches (… to comply with the wishes of Michael Bloomberg whose $1.6 billion in donations is essentially running the WHO’s MPOWER strategy).

But are any of these overpaid officials actually thinking of the damage their bad regulations will cause? These health advocate zealots are nudging consumers off of a cliff, pushing them toward unhealthy decisions that will lead to more cancer and more death.

There are many reasons why taxing tobacco harm reduction products is the wrong approach for public health, the economy, public safety and tobacco control strategies.

Gateway Back to Hell

People using tobacco harm reduction products like e-cigarettes or nicotine pouches often were only able to quit smoking with these products. If you tax these low-harm alternatives beyond people’s financial capacity, sadly, many will go back to smoking. Ideally, tobacco harm reduction products should be tax-free or subsidized to prevent consumers from taking the much higher risks with tobacco. It would be a major public health disaster if vapers go back to smoking, but that is what this EU regulation is encouraging.

While there may be short-term fiscal opportunities in implementing higher taxes on tobacco harm reduction products, over the long term, the added healthcare costs in treating patients for the consequences of continued smoking far outweigh the fiscal benefits.

Homebrew Juicers

Moonshiners in the 1920s needed a significant investment, feedstock and skillset to run basement distilleries during the US Prohibition on alcohol and still the businesses (and organized crime) proliferated. I have argued before that Al Capone was the product of bad regulations pushed by the prohibitionist zealots. Who will be Michael Bloomberg’s Al Capone?

To mix e-liquid for vapers, you essentially need a Grade 10 science education and a few bottles and syringes to mix the nicotine with propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin … and any flavors you might fancy. Just Google “How to make your own vape juice” for some frighteningly simple videos.

The reality is that if governments impose a regressive excise tax on e-liquids, people will just make their own or find someone in their neighborhood who can supply them a favorite nicotine juice at a reasonable price. So rather than a small tax the authorities would be able to receive, enabling them to monitor consumption and apply their safety and quality standards (what regulators are supposed to do), there will be no tax revenues and no understanding of how consumers are using the vaping products.

Gangland Violence

The disaster following from the misguided Australian nicotine regulations is worthy of some mention. The authorities have willfully imposed restrictive tobacco and e-cigarette tax and distribution policies and within a short period of time, this policy led to black markets and organized crime with gangs fighting for turf and bombing distribution shops. With a five billion Australian dollar illicit trade market following from the prohibitionist tax policies, there have been over 200 tobacconists that have seen their shops firebombed. Different Australian states have lost control as the gangs have become heavily armed.

Is the Antwerp-Brussels cocaine corridor next for a new European black market?

Dangerous Unregulated Substances

Your neighborhood homebrew juicer, operating out of a back patio or online account, may start to get creative adding more flavors or additives, branching into stimulants or narcotics and increasing production. As a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, this Grade 10 science graduate is not qualified (or concerned) on product safety or quality. Products approved for sale by regulators comply with production standards, packaging and storage requirements, assuring the consumer a high level of quality and safety. Black market bootleg e-juice does not.

The Bloomberg-funded NGOs campaigning for higher taxes on nicotine products, I suspect, are not worried about the increased risk of people dying or getting sick from illicit nicotine contraband. It will allow them to then demand a total ban on all tobacco harm reduction products because of these elevated risks. They will come up with new names to scare people. They will not accept responsibility for the carnage their myopic dogma is causing but rather use it to further their prejudice against harm reduction advocates. Something must be done about these horrible little zealots.

Economic Decline

The growth of vape shops in many European countries has been impressive, offering a wide variety of new products from small and large companies. Raising taxes by 40 to 50% will wipe out this emerging market of tobacco harm reduction products literally overnight, putting the vape shops out of business and removing the ability to control and monitor the consumers (age and product choice). E-cigarette and nicotine pouch producers were already struggling with lost market share due to counterfeits and homebrew juicers, but this increase in taxation will erase any remaining trust in the authorities and open the floodgates toward the black market.

Only the tobacco companies in this product space will survive as some vapers will return to smoking (fulfilling the false, Bloomberg-led prophecy that Big Tobacco is controlling this market). How do you spell ‘stupid’?

Poor Consultation Process

For regulations to be comprehensive, they should involve inclusive public consultations. Even though the European Commission conducts such open surveys every day, the inquiry on the proposed tobacco and nicotine taxation strategy was so badly managed as to be an embarrassment. See the Clearing the Air analysis. First the questionnaire was written in a way to discourage people from expressing their concerns. The process to register to participate in the consultation is so cumbersome as to prevent members of the public from taking to time to enter the process.

Even then, an overwhelming number of EU citizens and consumers participated in the consultation on the tax harmonization proposals, with 89% disagreeing with the European Commission’s strategy. EU citizens made up 93% of the consultation’s participants. These consumers did not want to be forced to go back to smoking.

The consultation results should have been a clear indication for the European officials to go back and revise their proposed regulation. But instead they doubled-down, agreeing with the Bloomberg-funded NGOs that the consultation may have been skewed by an organized “industry” action against the European Commission’s taxation plans.

No doubt the vape shops mobilized their customers to stand up and defend their right to reduced harm alternatives to tobacco. That is their right and many vapers are very passionate about how they were able to beat smoking. But the clear voices of thousands of consumers should carry more weight than a foundation-funded non-profit that is essentially three people in a room with a laptop.

Instead the European Commission is committed to following the WHO’s MPOWER dictates of increasing taxes on tobacco harm reduction tools (even though this WHO strategy is funded and managed by the US billionaire, Michael Bloomberg). To the zealots, imposing severe taxes is more important than any democratic process or rational regulation.

When do you know a regulation will be bad?

• When consumers will be forced to go back to more harmful alternatives.

• When black markets and organized crime will fill the void left by the bad regulation.

• When consumers will make or buy homemade alternatives that have lower safety and quality levels.

• When regulators are not listening to the interests of consumers.

If you want to know what a bad European regulation is, watch this space.

The MAHA outrage was immediate. This was treacherous, a middle finger flipped upon all of the hard-working MAHA Moms, a declaration of chemical warfare on the American public and a bow toward the interests of the chemical lobby (read Monsanto) and their “systematic poisoning” of children.

Even more infuriating, the MAHA leader, RFK Jr, issued a statement shortly after (obviously not written by him) supporting the decision and ensuring security for Americans.

Donald Trump’s Executive Order puts America first where it matters most — our defense readiness and our food supply. We must safeguard America’s national security first, because all of our priorities depend on it.

This is a far cry from MAHA orthodoxy.

As America shifts into the next presidential election cycle, this executive order will be a rallying cry for the Democrats. Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, no longer hiding her presidential ambitions, shared a post by the conspiracy lunatic, Mike Adams, the Health Ranger (remember chemtrails?). Was she ill-informed or was this a cynical ploy to tap into the outraged MAHA Mom movement? As much as RFK Jr tries to play the anti-industry card, the post-capitalist home is firmly rooted in the democratic socialist wing of the Democratic Party. Even Cory Booker is trying to bring the MAHA Moms home.

While the New York Times reported that the “MAHA Moms have turned on President Trump”, there will be a lot of storms in some very chipped tea cups. As discussed in a recent article, the MAHA Moms can’t leave the movement so they will eventually suck it up and plod forward.

What did the Executive Order Actually Say?

The order will protect both elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides (and not other herbicides under relentless attack). Elemental phosphorus is used in the production of glyphosate as well as military applications, solar cells and lithium-ion battery chemistries. US production does not meet domestic demand, leaving American industries vulnerable.

On glyphosate, the executive order states:

As the most widely used crop protection tools in United States agriculture, glyphosate-based herbicides are a cornerstone of this Nation’s agricultural productivity and rural economy, allowing United States farmers and ranchers to maintain high yields and low production costs while ensuring that healthy, affordable food options remain within reach for all American families.

While MAHA lobbyists like Vani Hari claim the pesticide industry wrote this document, it is clear the farmers were the sole interest group pushing for this. A large number of farmers would go out of business without access to herbicides like glyphosate. This would have a profound effect on US food security. This is basic common sense.

There is a curious point in the executive order about immunity for producers (what put a bee in the MAHA bonnet). It claims to confer “all immunity provided for in section 707 of the Act (50 U.S.C. 4557)” which states that “no person shall be held liable for damages or penalties for any act or failure to act resulting directly or indirectly from compliance with a rule, regulation, or orders, even if those rules are later deemed invalid by a court.” I am trying to understand why Bayer, last week, filed a second settlement offer against the existing glyphosate lawsuits if this order grants the company immunity.

Why is Glyphosate Essential?

I got into the glyphosate debate early on as I knew what the introduction of herbicides had done for modern agriculture (and by extension, the economic boom in the 1960s).

Here are some reasons why there could not be sustainable agriculture without herbicides like those containing glyphosate.

Sustainable Farming: The most important thing a farmer has is the soil. Lose the soil and you lose the farm. In the last 30 years, no-till or low-till farming has proven to be more sustainable as farmers don’t disturb the soil biota, release carbon or lose moisture, while allowing roots to aerate the soil. Tillage is done, particularly by organic farmers, to control weeds, leaving the valuable topsoil exposed to wind and water erosion. Herbicides, like those with glyphosate, have allowed farmers to control weeds without the unsustainable tillage (including lower CO2 emissions from fewer tractor runs). More advantageous for farmers, herbicide-resistant bred seeds like soy and maize let them delay killing the weeds until they start competing with the crops, reducing the need for multiple spraying (to even just once during the harvest cycle).

Feeding the Soil: Along with no-till farming, cover crops have become a valuable means to protect and nourish the soil during the off-season. Cover crops protect the soil from erosion, keep moisture in the ground, aerate the soil and add valuable nutrients reducing the need for fertilizers. In the last two decades, cover crop pioneers have been mixing different species to prepare the soil for the incoming cash crop, while reducing the prevalence of certain pests. The benefits from such sustainable innovations will be lost if farmers could not terminate their cover crops with herbicides like those containing glyphosate at the time of drilling their cash crops. Organic farmers cannot enjoy the benefits of multi-species cover cropping and need to repetitively plow their fields (losing much of the sustainable soil advantages from cover cropping).

Child Labor: As a child in the 1960s I was tasked with pulling weeds – an endless, thankless job battling to save the soil from the saturating strength of weeds. School had breaks in the summer months not so kids could go to camp or the beach, but because farmers needed them in the fields when weed infestation was at its highest. Farmers had to have big families because of the labor demand and weeding in an open, hot field was not considered exploitation then. When herbicides like those containing glyphosate were introduced, children were allowed to develop other skills far more valuable to society. Only then could regulators like the State of California pass a law banning hand-weeding as cruelty to farm laborers. Interestingly, the organic farming lobby got an exemption from this humanitarian law on the grounds that they don’t use herbicides.

Low Impact: Glyphosate has a very low toxicity level for humans with a LD50 level below that of salt, chocolate and baking soda. It breaks down quickly in the environment without damaging the soil or water tables. And while the anti-glyphosate interest groups have spent unimaginable sums funding studies by opportunistic activist scientists to try to prove health or environmental risks from the herbicide (if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything), no government regulatory risk body has concurred with the claims made in the activist scientists’ relentless stream of studies, resisting over a decade of nonsensical, politicized assault. No matter how many times MAHA Moms scream out their well-repeated slogans, glyphosate has an extremely low impact. The herbicide has also been off patent since 2001, with a multitude of producers, making glyphosate inexpensive and surprisingly still effective. Whereas industry could make more money selling patent-protected herbicides, farmers have been the key group demanding that President Trump give glyphosate the federally protected critical resource status.

Glyphosate works, it’s safe, it’s cheap and for that, it’s Public Enemy #1.

Who is Behind the Anti-Glyphosate Movement?

Glyphosate is the poster-boy of hate in the front line in the war against chemicals, conventional farming and capitalism. Never has such a benign product that has done so much good for the environment, society and economic prosperity been so vilified by such an ignorant population of activists. But this army of MAHA Moms, NGOs and 280-character influencers could not successfully sustain a campaign of intense popular outrage against the herbicide of the century, without any government regulatory support, evidence or alternatives, unless they had massive funding and coordination from special interest groups. Follow the money. Who were the groups behind these useful idiots, benefitting so greatly from their well-executed, but uneducated chemophobia?

The Organic Food Industry Lobby

Organic farmers don’t benefit from herbicides like glyphosate. This is an important factor in the yield gap between organic and conventional farming and as regenerative practices like no-till and cover cropping with herbicides begin to raise the sustainability gap, the “organic is better” argument is starting to ring hollow. The organic food industry lobby has funded many campaigns, activist scientists and NGOs (from US Right to Know to EWG to the Heartland Health Research Alliance) to try to ban glyphosate.

More challenging for the organic food industry is their rejection of the use of genetically modified or edited seed technologies. Given that GMOs have consistently been proven to be safe, the only way the organic food lobby could block these innovations is to make herbicide-resistant seeds unprofitable by banning the herbicides used to protect the crops. It should come as no surprise that the campaign to ban glyphosate was a last minute addition in 2014 to an IARC monograph on insecticides the year after the US organic food lobby campaign to label GMOs failed and the Seralini rat study was retracted.

The US Litigation Industry

When Christopher Portier was forced to reveal, under oath, that he was secretly being paid by the litigation industry to deliver the evidence several law firms could then use in courts to justify their claim that glyphosate is carcinogenic, I started to dig deeper into how this non-transparent, often ethically compromised tort law industry was financing activist scientists, NGOs, filmmakers and investigative reporters to produce evidence and public outrage they could convert into wealth, not for the plaintiffs but themselves. This research became SlimeGate, as I revealed an ecosystem of bottom-feeders, litigation finance loan sharks and extortionists trading plaintiffs in a victim misery exchange.

The litigation industry’s relentless onslaught on Monsanto and then Bayer, filing hundreds of thousands of lawsuits, mostly bogus cases, with the intent of extorting a settlement for the law firms (and not about justice for the plaintiffs) was too much for the company to withstand. With a first settlement of $11 billion and a second ongoing for $7.25 billion, there is no publication of how much actually went to the plaintiffs, but if past cases provide any measure, it will be minuscule. Most of the blood money goes to paying off the litigation finance lenders, the networks of advertisers and plaintiff processors, the lawyers and their private jets, with a few hundred million dollars put aside to buy scientists and activist campaigners. Money well-spent for future litigation harvests.

It is not about justice for the victims. It is not about ideology or changing the laws. It is about pure Predatort enrichment and doing whatever it takes to win. RFK Jr comes from this ilk and is continuing to play that game.

The Anti-Industry Post-Capitalist Movement

Green Marxism has become a thing (a sort of socialist paradise without the proletariat). Climate change framed the rebranding of Marxism with claims like “You can’t have capitalism and fight climate change at the same time”. The time was urgent to deindustrialize and transition (there is that word again) to a post-capitalist world order. Agriculture would have to abandon the conventional, industrial-based practices and return to traditional, peasant-farming techniques. For agroecologists and permaculturists, even organic farming was seen as too profit-oriented. Large cash crop farms would have to stop operations, livestock farming largely cut back with radical changes implemented down the food chain. Journalists like George Monbiot argue that the only way to save the world is to rewild a large part of our agricultural land.

As activists and Moms groups were convinced to campaign to ban essential agricultural tools like glyphosate, farmers will lose tools to make their operations profitable and environmentally sustainable. Fewer farms, more rewilding – mission accomplished. And more expensive food, but that never bothered these “champagne socialists”.

We are in the age of Foundation Capitalism, where billionaires use their philanthropy to advance their interests and vanity projects. In the last three decades, their foundations have changed the policy landscape, funding NGOs, media groups, researchers, activists and lawyers to control the narrative on issues from climate change to agricultural practices, from chemicals to vaping. But with billions pouring into these lobbying campaigns rather than going to humanitarian aid projects, what is the “true cost” of foundation funding?

Activist campaigns have tried to reassess the true cost of conventional agriculture by bringing in other externalized costs not accounted for in the price of products reaching the market. These clever accounting tricks attempted to show that the higher organic food prices actually have a closer true value when compared to the externalized environmental health impacts of conventional agriculture. The same true cost tactics have been applied to try to dismiss the lower prices for plastics and chemicals.

What if we took the same approach and took the billions of dollars that foundations have given to activists for their environmental lobbying campaigns and consider the true cost of such wastage compared to if they had donated those amounts to legitimate humanitarian causes? The true cost of this waste of philanthropy needs to be considered in the assessment of the necessity for foundation reform.

Philanthropic foundations have started to have a significant effect on environmental health debates with their support for activist groups, law firms, agencies within the UN, the media and fabricated phantom NGOs via fiscal sponsorships. When special interest groups led by billionaires can fund all that is needed for a campaign to win, the threat to the democratic process has become significant.

Keep in mind that there should be a distinction within the non-profit world between groups doing humanitarian work (legitimate NGOs) and activist lobby groups that try to effect policy change via fear campaigns. The latter cannot be considered NGOs, but rather, what I have termed: APEs (Alternative Policy Enterprises). See a Firebreak series on this. APEs are lobbying campaign groups, political activists trying to change public policy, and should not be considered under the same conditions as humanitarian NGOs working in the field (medical services, food banks, poverty alleviation, education support…).

What follows will assess the wasted philanthropist funding of APEs and consider the true cost of such donations (and what the funding could have achieved if the foundations had donated to legitimate humanitarian NGOs). The goal here is to start a debate on whether such donations to activist lobbying campaign groups should be considered in the same way as humanitarian aid. If, as any reasonable person would agree, APEs are quite different from NGOs, then certain regulatory measures should be taken to prevent widespread financial promotion of these lobbying groups.

European Climate Foundation

The European Climate Foundation is not actually a foundation but a fiscal sponsor working on behalf of many large foundations including Bloomberg Philanthropies, ClimateWorks Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Oak Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This group is non-transparent in its regranting actions although the Firebreak translated and published an exposé that pieced together its donations to a wide range of climate NGOs, media groups, the World Economic Forum and UN-based associations to direct its (now faltering) net-zero campaign. Its most recent two-page financial declaration (2024) reveals an annual income of €252 million.

Instead of political lobbying, media manipulation and running the Davos show from behind a curtain, what could a real NGO have done with €252 million a year to make a difference in the world? If that funding, which only went to creating fear and disinformation, were spent on improving water and sanitation conditions in rural Sub‑Saharan Africa, it could have saved from 5,000 to 15,000 lives annually (following the Unicef/WHO WASH metric). The variance is due to countries, ages and types of intervention, but it is clear the true cost of philanthropist funding of the futile European Climate Foundation’s lobbying campaigns could have done so much more.

Michael Bloomberg’s $1.6 Billion Tobacco Control Campaign

One of the most remarkable exposés of a billionaire’s ability to control a global policy debate is how Michael Bloomberg created and funded more than a dozen NGOs (and a good part of the World Health Organization) to implement his strategy against tobacco harm reduction techniques. Focusing his flotilla of well-paid NGOs and researchers, Bloomberg has created a series of disinformation campaigns against vaping as a viable smoking cessation strategy, manipulating governments from mostly developing countries while controlling the agenda in one of the main WHO strategy initiatives. Because of confusion spread from his $1.6 billion lobbying campaigns, millions of people continue to smoke and suffer the health consequences of tobacco harm.

Outside of the number of lives put at risk by this billionaire’s smarmy self-promotion of moral sanctity, what could $1.6 billion have achieved if it had been directed toward real health issues? Since Bloomberg covets his title of WHO NCD ambassador, the amount he has squandered on spreading fear and lies about tobacco harm reduction strategies could have built between 4,000 to 8,000 primary health clinics in the world’s ten poorest countries. The variance depends on available infrastructure, construction costs and existing healthcare supply chains. These clinics Bloomberg never bothered to build could have saved 300,000 to 500,000 lives per year (more if the clinics are well-staffed). Instead, he is just killing more people who continue to smoke because of disinformation coming from his incapacity to understand basic health risk management.

Funding Agroecology or Fighting Child Malnutrition?

The Agroecology Fund, according to a Firebreak exposé, received over $100 million in 2023-24 from foundations like Waverley Street Foundation, the Ballmer Group, the Walton Family Foundation, 11th Hour Project, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Thousand Currents, David Rockefeller Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, Ikea Foundation, Oak Foundation... The funds were not earmarked to aiding subsistence farmers in the poorest countries or securing food supplies in vulnerable agrarian regions, but rather to funding lobbying campaigns to promote agroecology as an alternative to conventional agriculture technologies. In other words, the Agroecology Fund’s objective is to spread fear and misinformation about farming practices that do not meet their Marxist ideology.

It is difficult to get accurate figures on how much the Fund receives and regrants given that the Agroecology Fund does not exist, does not publish financial accounts and is not accountable for the consequences of its actions. It is a phantom NGO managed out of the Global Greengrants Fund, a fiscal sponsor that takes a percentage of every foundation donation. Based on the amounts the foundations declared to have donated, the Firebreak can safely conclude they receive more than $100 million a year.

But rather than funding lobbying campaign APEs to promote a failed, politically driven agricultural practice, how much malnutrition could have been prevented if this $100 million had gone toward micronutrient fortification strategies in the world’s ten poorest countries? These mal-funded donations could have corrected or prevented 20–60 million cases of micronutrient deficiency and averted one to three million DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Years) or roughly 30,000–100,000 deaths. Instead, the well-funded agroecology activist movement promises more malnutrition, child labor and economic impoverishment.

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

The true cost of wasted philanthropic funding opportunities is costing humanity hundreds of millions of lives per year. While statisticians like Bjørn Lomborg have heroically tried to wake people up, most leaders continue to enjoy their dogmatic slumber and feel, in any case, that there is nothing that can be done.

People are free to decide what to do with their money and donate to organizations that have done the best job marketing themselves as some sort of solution to some sort of problem. If Michael Bloomberg chooses to be stupid with his billions, and his family continues to allow him to pursue these vanity follies, it is not for some researcher in the Philippines to prevent him. But given the amount of money being wasted on misguided lobbying campaigns that deliver no social goods, we can no longer refer to these special interests as charities or civil society non-profits. APEs are not NGOs and they do not provide any service to society.

Governments cannot encourage any philanthropic APEs funding that acts against the interests of society and at a cost to legitimate NGOs struggling in the field while facing serious financial challenges. While the billionaires have allowed activists to infiltrate their foundations and spend their funds stupidly, these “donations” need to be reconsidered not as charitable funding but as special interest investments. This implies that:

• Funding APEs cannot be tax deductible;

• strict transparency and fiscal declaration measures need to be applied to APEs in the same way as any other corporations;

• APEs have to be registered and publish their accounts.

Finally, a popular bias has to be removed - that foundations serve as forces for good and that their donations don’t have any strings attached. Given the amount of wealth created since the Internet revolution just one generation ago, billionaire interest groups have become an influential force that needs to be reckoned with. The number of foundations banding together behind dark fiscal sponsors amassing hundreds of millions of dollars for political activism is the most astonishing political shift in the last two decades. These groups are as likely to control the media, create a swarm of activist NGOs and buy-off politicians as any other interest group, just with exponentially more money.

The true cost calculations in this article, as well as the cover image, were made with the support of Copilot.