Health Warning: Mercenaries at Work

Summary

• Lighthouse Reports releases an investigation claiming the food industry is clogging courts with lawsuits to interfere with food safety measures.

• 81% of the cases are in Mexico, but Lighthouse tries to portray it as a global industry strategy to protect ultra-processed foods.

• Most cases are against the imposition of indiscriminate Mexican sugar taxes on certain foods.

• There was no actual Lighthouse investigation, but a series of articles built around a database.

• The database was built by a group of NGOs and institutes all funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

• Michael Bloomberg’s main (only) health policy strategy, since his failed New York regulation, is to ban or raise taxes on lifestyle pleasures like sugary sodas and processed foods.

What happens when you want to run a campaign, but you have very limited data and evidence? One strategy more increasingly used is to hire an activist NGO like Lighthouse Reports to fabricate an investigation they can funnel through their tried and tested noise machine. What happens if the budget has been cleared but there is no story? No problem. Lighthouse Reports has experienced spinmeisters capable of communicating insignificant research like it was a groundbreaking exposé. Just pay the Dutch NGO enough and they’ll deliver?

Yesterday, Lighthouse Reports released its latest investigation entitled Big Food vs. The People. The subtitle claims to “expose Big Food’s 239 lawsuits against life-saving policies”. There was no actual “report” but a web-page with a collection of clever graphics and links to connected articles from their ten freelance partners (all “copublished” in a coordinated fashion yesterday). What they based this communication campaign on is a dataset they claim to have built that breaks down the industry lawsuits.

A simple visit to the dataset, something most readers, editors and food science activists don’t bother to do, would show some curious things. The 239 industry lawsuits were gathered over 15 years and 193 (81%) were from Mexico where the government had imposed an indiscriminate series of food and drink taxes and bans. If the lawsuits in Colombia and Brazil were removed, then only 11 lawsuits (6 in the US, 4 in India and 1 in the UK) would be able to be considered ... over 15 years. Lighthouse Reports was trying to sell an ultra-processed nothing burger.

Why wasn’t the Lighthouse Reports investigation then entitled Big Food vs. The People in Mexico? This would allow analysts to address the peculiar situation where the Mexican government’s food and drink regulations had become unreasonable and unfairly punished some companies and products with high taxes on obscure categories like “non-essential foods”.

The Lighthouse Reports NGO is not interested in an open discussion on food law or the rights of food producers and manufacturers to participate in the Mexican economy. They were interested in producing a report that would delegitimize the food industry, portray a local situation as a global phenomenon and then blast it across their global network of activist reporters and angry anti-capitalist academics.

Capitalist exploitation, health decline, poverty, big business profits… those are the stories they wanted to sell. The fact that there wasn’t enough legitimate news to create the intended outrage didn’t matter. Lighthouse would just feed it through their tried and tested noise machine.

The Lighthouse Campaign Noise Machine

Lighthouse Reports’ strategy is very simple.

• Get funding from a special interest group via a complex web of pass-throughs,

• assemble a group of hungry, freelance reporters with clear anti-capitalist political biases,

• produce a minimalist investigation,

• ensure a large budget to produce effective graphics,

• pay off your network of angry freelancers to coordinate a series of articles on the launch day,

• try to amplify the noise and let the special interest groups then take over the campaign.

The last article looked at how the Lighthouse Reports Poison PR investigation was a mercenary assault on behalf of the US litigation industry trying to create outrage to time with the bellwether cases against Syngenta on paraquat. The actual evidence they had was very thin, and only enough to bankrupt a small communications consultancy, but the Lighthouse Reports activists, along with their network of angry freelance journalists did what they were paid to do.

But if the Lighthouse network of activists, academics and reporters are merely a group of activist journalists for hire, shouldn’t the NGO be transparent on who was funding them, for how much, and what other levels of cooperation and coordination was shared?

Follow the Money

The Lighthouse Reports Poison PR investigation was motivated by the interests in the US litigation industry and (officially) funded with an $800,000 grant from the Oak Foundation to try to handicap conventional farming and the crop protection industry. Who funded this latest campaign and how much did the activists receive? In the interest of journalistic integrity and transparency, Lighthouse Reports has again chosen to not provide those details, requiring more Firebreak forensic foundation research.

This is important because the Lighthouse Reports NGO has identified itself as a collaborative investigation organization. In other words, they are mercenaries producing reports for the special interest groups operating from the shadows. Once we establish the groups behind this latest publication, we can better understand the objective of Big Food vs. The People.

The main work and resources went into the creation of the dataset of lawsuits in the six countries. There was actually no investigative report published, just a series of articles and postable graphics built around the dataset. Lighthouse reports attributes the work on the dataset to the following NGOs and institutions.

What do these organizations all have in common (or rather, with whom)?

El Poder del Consumidor, a Mexican consumer association, is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and is a partner group of Michael Bloomberg’s regranting body, Vital Strategies.

The Global Center for Legal Innovation on Food Environments acknowledges their interests very clearly:

It doesn’t go unnoticed that the three main countries in the Lighthouse Reports research, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, are also the key focus countries for the Global Center. The Global Center for Legal Innovation on Food Environments is situated in the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law which is situated in the Georgetown University Law Center where the Bloomberg funding is passed through. As a project under an academic fiscal sponsor, The Center does not have to declare their funding or be held accountable.

The Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI) is a Bloomberg Philanthropies regranting body, developed as an initiative of another well-known Bloomberg NGO, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. It is interesting to see how the Bloomberg flotilla of NGOs developed to fight tobacco and nicotine products are now exercising the same deceptive funding obfuscation on food policy campaigns.

ACT, the Brazilian health policy NGO based in São Paulo, is the last partner mentioned in the groups listed behind building the dataset. Once again, its main funders are Bloomberg Philanthropies, Vital Strategies and GHAI (the last two merely regranting the funds from the Bloomberg flagship).

This is a typical Bloomberg strategy of creating a large number of NGOs to pose as independent organizations while they are simply taking funds from Bloomberg Philanthropies and redistributing them among themselves. Outside of tobacco and nicotine control, Vital Strategies now has a food policy division that is working on implementing bans and higher food taxes. Is it just a coincidence that two of Vital Strategies’ main areas of operation on food policy are Colombia and Brazil? Their policy strategy is to increase taxes on “unhealthy” food and demand front of package labelling.

Michael Bloomberg’s Money, Michael Bloomberg’s Interests

Bloomberg Philanthropies has put aside $435 million to establish the Bloomberg Food Policy Program to wage war on ultra-processed, sugary food and drinks. Compared to Michael Bloomberg’s $2 billion for his war on nicotine, this may seem like small beer, but in any policy campaign arena, $435 million can buy a lot of influence. It can certainly buy a lot of journalists.

“Bloomberg Philanthropies is supporting the enactment and evaluation of policy that aim to move people toward healthier diets in cities and countries around the world. The program focuses its work in Brazil, the Caribbean (Jamaica & Barbados), Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, and the United States, all of which have high rates of obesity and are taking action.”

The key areas of initial operation for the Bloomberg Food Policy Program is, once again, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia and that should come as no surprise now that these areas were reflected in the Lighthouse Reports research. In essence, the various Bloomberg entities handed the research to the Dutch NGO as a finished product (along with the financial contribution … for the noise machine).

Like nicotine and tobacco control campaigns, Michael Bloomberg is stuck in a single-minded strategy on food policy: ban products and increase taxes. It doesn’t matter if it has never worked, creates dangerous black markets and leads to worse health consequences. His funding of this Lighthouse Reports investigation is meant to fight back against the mounting legal challenges from the food manufacturers and producers. A kind of “flanking” in lobbying terms. The poor man must still be struggling to accept one of his greatest failures as mayor of New York when he tried to tax and ban sugary drinks. Decades later, with billions wasted, Bloomberg is still unable to see the poverty of his policy strategy or what actual good his philanthropy could have done.

Within this food and soda tax strategy lie the motives to hire the Lighthouse Reports activists. Why couldn’t the Lighthouse Reports NGO, and the lead author, Thin Wei Win, admit that their campaign was funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and that the objective was to feed into the Bloomberg strategy of increasing taxes on sugary food and drinks? Shouldn’t their network of journalists be transparent? Even the draft of the academic paper they hope to publish has no acknowledgement of Bloomberg funding or declaration of conflicts of interest. Without a proper academic structure, it is no wonder the draft remains unpublished.

This is paid-off activism, not journalism or research. Lighthouse Reports think the rules don’t apply to them so long as they win (and continue to gain further funding). There are also no demands for ethical conduct or transparency demanded on foundations like Bloomberg Philanthropies. They have created an excellent breeding ground for activist mercenaries like Lighthouse Reports to thrive. For the rest of us, yesterday was merely another day of well-amplified misinformation - more noise and nonsense.

An Afterthought

These mercenary activist media strategies are effective in spreading political campaigns but outside of their ethical repugnance, they are getting quite boring. One thing I did not understand with this latest special interest campaign is why Michael Bloomberg’s hired media gun, The Examination, didn’t pile onto the noise machine assault and amplify this investigation. Michael created and funded this “collaborative” news enterprise in part to attack the food industry. Perhaps there’s a turf war going on with the consultants running Bloomberg’s “in-house” media group, The Examination, having issues with the questionable techniques used by the Dutch activists. … Pass the popcorn.

• Strategic litigation is the latest evolution in the collusion between NGOs, journalists, foundations and the litigation industry.

• It allows special interest groups to fund and participate in anti-corporate campaigns without transparency or accountability.

• The Lighthouse Reports Poison PR investigative report is a case study of the vicious underhanded tactics used by these special interests to attack industry.

• An author of the Poison PR report will be presenting this case study next week at a public webinar on the benefits of strategic litigation.

Ten years ago, when I started writing SlimeGate, many in the activist NGO world felt uncomfortable about getting into bed with these slimeball tort lawyers. While the “enemy of my enemy may be my friend”, some activists were having misgivings about cooperating with a faction of the legal profession that would use NGOs to help them extort companies, not for justice for plaintiffs, but for massive wealth accumulation, private jets and personal excess. How far were these idealists willing to look the other way in order to score a victory against industry, raise funding and enforce positive change for the environment? In the last decade, the answer became clear: Very far!

I have watched the evolution in the activist-Predatort nexus, particularly during the glyphosate saga.

• Early on, groups like Corporate Europe Observatory were using activist scientists like Chris Portier to write reports for them on the risks of glyphosate, knowing full well his services were paid for by the law firms suing then Monsanto and later Bayer.

• Then NGOs like Friends of the Earth started coordinating their glyphosate lobbying efforts with key beneficiary law firms like Wisner Baum.

• It didn’t take too long after for the US litigation industry to start paying off NGOs, reporters and filmmakers to do their bidding, via non-transparent donor-advised funds, as in the funding behind the Into the Weeds campaign.

• Funding activist scientists like Philip Landrigan and Chuck Benbrook to produce court-ready evidence was seen in the financial malfeasance of the Heartland Health Research Alliance, a non-profit set up by the US litigation industry to channel millions into fabricating research to be used in NGO campaigns and further lawsuits.

At this point no one in the civil society movement had any qualms about receiving Predatort millions via foundations functioning as pass-throughs. The passion for the planet was taken over by the passion to win, and these modern-day Machiavellians were wickedly efficient. The money was too good for any ethical introspection and without transparency or public scrutiny, activists found they could say and do whatever they liked.

But if it had only stopped there…

Strategic Litigation

Two years ago, the deepest moral decline of the environmental activist profession was put in evidence, and next week we will be witnessing the instigators boasting about it. The Lighthouse Reports affair showed law firms working directly with journalists, NGOs and foundations to put one of their political adversaries out of business in the hopes of advancing a lawsuit on paraquat. This is an example of strategic litigation, and one of the perpetrators is presenting it as a case study at a webinar next week to train other activists.

Strategic litigation (also called “impact litigation”) is the weaponization of the litigation industry to effect change on industries, governments and public perceptions. Born from a La Jolla conference in 2012, the brainchild of Naomi Oreskes’ tormented mind, the strategy was to circumvent the regulatory process (seen as poisoned by lobbyists) with their alternative, later referred to as adversarial regulation. This approach was built around a litigation-led campaign attacking a targeted industry or product. The goal is to use relentless lawfare assaults to effectively tobacconize other industries, destroying their reputation, market and business model (suing them out of business or into submission). There was no need to engage in the messy (albeit democratic) business of regulatory change. Some people call this extortion; Naomi referred to it as “progress” (and personally lucrative).

Fourteen years after La Jolla, it is no longer a convenient coincidence when activists, foundations and law firms have the same goals. Now these campaigns are coordinated with clear strategies and gameplans from the outset. Imagine an activist consultant working for a foundation (or developing a dark fiscal sponsorship organization from a group of foundations), coordinating a multi-pronged attack on a company or regulatory body via a group of NGOs and law firms.

The collusion can take many forms.

Dark subterfuge

These campaigns would usually go under the radar as none of these groups feel the need to be transparent or accountable. Consultants who have worked their way onto foundation boards can act like generals stealthly commanding a flotilla of NGOs. A good example was when the provincial government in Alberta, Canada had to conduct an inquiry with a forensic accounting expert to learn how far these dark forces had gone to obstruct economic affairs in the province (NGOs spent at least 1.28 billion CAD in foundation funding that had “lost its character”). The media, mostly funded by these same foundations, ignored the government’s findings.

Fiscal sponsors

The fiscal sponsor may create its own NGO-like organization to spearhead the campaign (ensuring that the campaign group is not filed as a legal entity to avoid transparency and accountability requirements). The law firms will share their network of scientists, serving as highly-paid litigation consultants, to publish papers to raise doubt about the issue at hand. This was Glyphosate 101. These papers as well as the overall campaign are then amplified by foundation-funded media groups and investigative reporters.

Dark, donor-advised funds

Depending on the potential for payouts, law firms may fund the campaign via dark donor-advised foundation funds (as in the Heartland Health Research Alliance) or the foundations may fund multiple dead-end lawfare assaults on targeted industries, not to win but to merely extract reputational damage to feed into a larger campaign (as seen with Sher Edling or Earthjustice).

Global, transnational reach

As an added touch, this unholy alliance can foster its influence (scientists or foundation funding) into UN bodies to drive another regulatory angle (seen with IARC, the FAO, UNEP and the WHO). The UN conference mill is now captured by the foundations, activist scientists, NGOs and specialty media groups.

Strategic litigation has delivered dividends for a wide range of activist campaigns like those against glyphosate, plastics and microplastics, fossil fuels, salmon farming but the playbook is rarely openly discussed by its perpetrators. That is why next week’s webinar on Strategic Litigation will be interesting.

The Lighthouse Laser Beam

The Lighthouse Reports’ Poison PR investigation is a case study of the backhanded dealings of the NGO, media and foundation special interests covertly working with the US litigation industry in a coordinated assault on a small communications firm. It was driven by law firms attempting to create public outrage of corporate malfeasance as they launched a large number of paraquat lawsuits.

This jury priming tactic (creating anti-industry outrage) was used successfully with the release and promotion of the Monsanto Papers during the glyphosate lawsuits and attempted with Oreskes’ Exxon Knew campaign to link the fossil fuel industry with the consequences of climate change. But this story has an ethical taint that makes the perpetration of the Poison PR campaign even more repugnant.

The Lighthouse-Predatort alliance started when a group of US tort law firms, including the Miller Firm, obtained a series of documents in discovery from Syngenta related to their paraquat activities. They leaked the confidential documents to the Environmental Working Group activist and self-proclaimed “journalist”, Carey Gillam, who claimed she woke up one morning and discovered 10,000 files in boxes outside of her front door.

The Miller Firm has had a longstanding relationship with Gillam, using her to amplify the release of the Monsanto Papers during the bellwether glyphosate case, to which both parties profited handsomely. She also orchestrated a character assassination of Tim Litzenburg when he was challenging their glyphosate evidence (as not actually the main cause of the plaintiff’s cancers) so she has proven to be very efficient at hiding the knives. Gillam promptly published the leaked documents on the EWG website, calling them the “Paraquat Papers” (evidence enough that Carey had exhausted any remaining creative inspiration).

The documents themselves had limited value for the class action suits being gathered against Syngenta, but they revealed a relationship between the company and a small communications firm, v-Fluence. The firm, with 28 employees, was known for its daily Bonus Eventus newsletters that documented activist strategies and campaign events, offering ag-tech and food industry actors a window on their tactics and advice on how to manage the issues.

The story from the leaked documents was not about paraquat (the evidence of a link to Parkinson’s was very weak) nor about Syngenta (who had followed their ethical codes of conduct), but instead focused on how v-Fluence had been internally sharing some of the negative published media about activists, including Ms Gillam.

Gillam took the confidential discovery documents to Lighthouse Reports, a Dutch non-profit mercenary group producing investigative reports at the behest of any special interests that would fund the NGO’s publications. (They call it “collaborative journalism”.) In other words, Lighthouse Reports is another one of those “Reporters for Hire” groups feeding off of foundation funding to publish bespoke investigative journalism attack pieces. For their Poison PR investigation, they assembled a group of reporters from across the globe (essentially eight freelance journalists who had been sharing each others’ anti-industry hit-pieces).

Lighthouse secured funding from the Oak Foundation for this campaign, totalling at least €800,000. Oak has a clear strategy of funding campaigns against industry, promoting agroecology and attacking conventional agricultural practices. The foundation also provides a dark donor-advised funding mechanism (a funding pass-through) so we really cannot say which special interests were behind this report. Needless to say, Lighthouse Reports activists were drunk with cash as both Carey Gillam and Margo Gibbs (based in Amsterdam) had offered to fly to St Louis to personally interview the v-Fluence managing director (see mail below). They even hacked into the closed Bonus Eventus website.

The Lighthouse Reports investigation into this small communications firm was merely the first step in this strategic litigation exercise. Law firms from the US and Europe then started to file lawsuits against v-Fluence, demanding disclosure of all correspondence and documents. Cases were then filed against their clients, ensuring an exodus that would bankrupt the firm. The efficiency of these relentless attacks on a small firm like v-Fluence was brutal, vicious and vindictive.

Meanwhile, the network of journalists amplified the investigation for several months, hoping to snowball the claims against this small organization into a mass global outrage event as the paraquat bellwether lawsuits were being heard in the US. Domiciled in Brussels, I was on Le Monde activist, Stéphane Content’s dance card (but I ignored his correspondence as he had broken at least eight of Le Monde’s ten ethical codes of conduct).

Celebrating Failure

This was definitely not a Monsanto Papers success story. The Lighthouse Report investigation did not reveal any large exposé of corporate corruption. They spent a lot of money and made a lot of noise, but the then ongoing paraquat bellwether cases were thrown out on the basis of bad science. The judge not only dismissed the poor research, she referred to how the litigation consultant “required several methodological contortions and outright violations of the scientific standards he professed to apply”.

Unlike glyphosate, the law firms could not use outrage as a substitute for scientific evidence. The only thing the law firms, working in tandem with the reporters, activists and foundations, had achieved was bankrupting a small communications company (and a reminder, if we needed one, of how weak and cowardly industry trade associations like CropLife America have become).

Despite its failure and evidence of a tired gameplan, the Lighthouse Reports’ tactics show the dark underbelly of activist collusion with the litigation industry. See my critical analysis of the Lighthouse Reports investigation here. There was no transparency (essential for reporters) but rather a concerted effort by law firms, foundations and the journalists to hide their sources, funding and evidence. They hacked, lied and cheated to get their story out.

But their story was a nothing burger.

The intention of creating another ExxonKnew or Monsanto Papers campaign to cultivate jury outrage to augment court payouts and increase the chance of settlements (extortion) in tens of thousands of paraquat lawsuits were weak when the only case they had was a communications firm that was sharing published documents of activist tactics. If vengeance is a measure for success, then Carey should be proud.

Strategic litigation is one more weapon in the activist arsenal to spread distrust, outrage and disinformation against industry. When law firms hire activist zealots to do their dirty work, they are getting value for money. When NGOs get in bed with these slimeball Predatorts, they surrender all integrity and self-respect. It is a toxic activist tool that should only be exercised out of desperation. But now NGOs and foundations seem to use it as their main campaign strategy.

Next week, one of the authors of the Lighthouse Reports Poison PR publication, Thin Lei Win, will proudly present this case study at a webinar on strategic litigation. I’m looking forward to learning how she sleeps at night.

In a recent article, I wondered where all of the activists have gone. Have we stopped caring for the environment? Then again, we rarely hear the term “environmentalist” used today. Is this eco-religion no longer serving as the opium of the masses? Does this cult that once gave meaning to post-religious sophisticates somehow feel awkward now?

When was the last time you heard someone call themselves an “environmentalist”?

A decade ago, self-professed environmentalists would proudly claim to all in earshot that they cared for the environment, that they lived sustainably and answered to a higher calling as agents of change to make Mother Earth whole again. These martyrs for the cause identified themselves by their green choices and eagerly displayed their badges and totems. The implication, a decade ago, was that the rest of us were heathens, polluters and peasants.

But does such eco-prescription resonate today? Do green policies garner as many votes today as a decade ago? Are people willing to pay more for a product based on its ecological claims? The eco-class no longer seems to be held in high esteem or valued on a higher plane.

When did the term “environmentalist” fall out of fashion?

• Was it when the Extinction Rebellion protestors glued themselves to buses and trains, making Londoners late for work?

• Was it after the energy, food and transportation inflation caused by green regulations?

• Did other issues, like wars and pandemics, take over and put the elitist green agenda into perspective?

• Or perhaps the environmentalists have become victims of their own success. We have all become greener and no longer feel vulnerable to stricter ecological prescriptions.

I’d like to think of myself as caring for the planet. I don’t litter, use more energy than I should or consume things I don’t need. I would like to think that I understand enough on how to live sustainably and make responsible choices. I am not shamed by the ever-increasingly stringent standards imposed by the eco-elite (to go organic, drive an electric car or install a heat pump).

This is where environmentalism as a cult religion has reached its limit. If I turn the lights off, take the bus, recycle or save water, my choices are not green, they are rational. When I invested in solar panels on my roof, it was not to seek approval from my neighbors but to save money. When I added a home battery, I felt that I was wasteful, but I no longer trusted my utility and needed to secure my energy supply. These are practical decisions. I don’t think of myself as an environmentalist, but a decade ago, I would have been.

An added problem is in the baggage carried by the word “environmentalist”. It carries a connotation of smug elitism. It suggests a state of being (a purity) rather than a progression toward making the world more sustainable. I know I will always pollute, so I strive to pollute less.

I pollute … and so do you!

In reality, we all pollute from the moment we are born and start having an impact on the planet until the time our ashes are spread across a field as fertilizer (that’s a thing now). Breathing, eating, consuming... all leave a footprint. I wrote an article on this twelve years ago called “I Pollute!” where I set the goal of my ecological decisions to pollute less. Environmentalists believe they don’t pollute, and that others do. On climate change, plastic pollution, wastewater emissions, soil degradation ... they appropriate blame on others and not themselves. And they won’t stop until they fix others, change regulations, ban industries and products in order to transition to their perfect world of zero waste, net zero CO2 emissions, zero plastics ... until we reach some mythical world with zero risks.

Twelve years ago, before it was articulated as “degrowth”, I presented the environmentalist ideology:

Part of the idealists’ dream is a world of micro-economies, locally growing their own produce, goods and services while consuming much less, free from plastics and chemicals (sic) and free from the powers of multinationals and world powers. They have rejected the dream of modernism (that science and technology will continue to solve the problems we face), demanding that the world transform itself with locally generated, green smart grids and small agricultural communes (entailing a Neo-Malthusian drive to depopulate and reverse the present path of development). (I Pollute)

Nobody seems to still be talking openly about this environmentalist utopia today. The climate campaigns eventually drowned in the activists’ own hypocrisy of Davos Man’s private jets, gated mansions and over-consumption. Even Greta’s two large dogs raised some undiscussed ecological challenges.

In any church, the zealots occupying the front pews will claim to be the true believers, loudly judging those at the back who may not be practicing according to their strict interpretation of the scriptures. But zealots often push a religion to its limit, relying on fire, brimstone and the fear of their god. Faith should be humble (as we bow to something greater than us).

In the church of environmentalism, should the activists (the zealots) be given the torch to lead the movement, turning sustainable decisions into a condemnation of the heathens while scaring those who don’t meet their transcending green standards? The humble who recognize that they pollute and strive to pollute less will just find another church (and they have).

Rather than scaring or shaming, perhaps another approach should be taken.

Progression and Pragmatism

It would be best to ignore the zealots, their condemnations and fearmongering and focus development on a continuous improvement within the scope of the best available alternatives. This progressive pragmatism seems to be where environmental policy is today as Green Deal regulations in Brussels are being scaled back and the US deregulation strategy is confronting excessive green restrictions.

Some examples of progressive pragmatism replacing environmentalist ideology:

• We are not scrapping all fossil fuels because of some diktat imposing renewables, especially if that means interruptions in power supply or more expensive utility bills. If there is to be a transition to renewables (not a foregone conclusion), it would need to be gradual (to minimize impact on the poor populations) and only when the technology has matured.

• As populations grow and put greater pressure on food production, we don’t impose low-yield organic farming (especially in developing countries) but rather look at how to improve food production while lowering the impact on soil, water and air.

• If plastics are finding their way into the environment, we don’t ban these products (that are more sustainable than glass, steel, paper and copper) but rather develop means to reduce emissions, manage waste and inform populations.

A progressive pragmatism is about developing solutions and improvements. While it may not reflect the ambitions of the zealot activist elite, the evolutionary development will do more to advance the environment while keeping humans engaged in the process. An environmentalism that only rewards those committed to some static green dogma will not achieve a better environment. Sustainability is a process, a continuous improvement, a development - it should not be considered as a virtue.

Nature First or Human First?

The word “environmentalist” is tainted in its misanthropic superiority, laden with judgement, hypocrisy and rhetoric. Sustainability has become rather hollow as a reference to reduced impact when the term could mean almost anything. Environmentalism has become “anti-human”, campaigning against technology, capitalism and consumerism. The planet would be just fine, they argue, if there were no humans. Human intervention invariably damages nature and the best we can do is stand back and let nature heal itself. This was the environmentalist paradigm of William Vogt presented by Charles Mann in his seminal book, The Wizard and the Prophet.

There are other elements at play than merely bowing unquestionably to the primacy of Mother Nature. One of the issues that had harmed the environmental movement was the drive to put planet first, regardless of the consequences. There was an uncomfortable reaction to a eco-theology that would look the other way when poor economies suffered under our demands for lower carbon emissions; when children died or went blind from of vitamin A deficiency even though Golden Rice could be cultivated; or when food production is lost because Western elites want to impose a Marxist agroecology ideology on subsistence farmers.

The precautionary principle became the most wicked tool of these misanthropic environmentalists. Under the pretence of risk management, they endeavored to delay or reject any innovation or technology that would go up against Mother Nature, regardless of the negative consequences to mankind.

Three decades of precautionary campaigns against GMOs, five decades against chemical disinfectants and six decades against nuclear energy were enough to conclude the game is up. We are no longer willing to tolerate the loss of beneficial technologies because some small group of activists are seeking to impose their political dogma via fear and outrage. This “only if I can be certain it’s safe” precautionaria is a relic of the lost environmentalist perfect-world ideology.

Today the word “precaution” readily draws scowls. If there is an emerging ecological problem, like increasing power demands from AI data centers, we are looking for the best solutions, not running to door and imposing precautionary bans or restrictions. Leaders are learning that they have to make hard decisions rather than sweeping emerging innovations under the rug of some contrived regulatory principle.

A Return to Realpolitik

As we tend to lock ourselves into a binary logic, and if we no longer use the terms “environmentalist”, “activist” or “precautionista” in our lexicon, what alternatives are there?

• The term “ecomodernist” was introduced to refer to a pro-science approach to solving ecological problems. But this has served more as a foil to the emotional environmentalist campaigns. Today, most green activists call themselves ecomodernists, but, like agroecologists, their scientific method is so weighed down by ideological restrictions and caveats that they would cause Francis Bacon and Karl Popper to roll in their graves.

• Recently the term “eco-humanist” has been discussed to guide a more human-centered green narrative. But the prefix is merely an add-on to more deeply integrate humanism. Humanism with a concern for the environment is simply … humanism.

At the end of the day, caring for the environment, using the best available science and technologies to solve problems, and promoting human well-being are all common sense decisions. There is no need to label it to justify some eco-prescriptive policy or virtuous elitism. The environment (however defined as a nexus with humans) should be managed from a pragmatic ideology: a progressive approach along a path of continuous improvement of the environment while protecting humanity, societal goods and well-being.

Several years ago, I argued for a return to the practice of Realpolitik in environmental policies. I defined it more by what it is not:

Realpolitik “refers to decisions not made solely on issues of ideology and morality. In other words, Realpolitik refers to pragmatic decisions based on best possible outcomes and compromises (something done when leaders have to face unpleasant realities). Ideologues can easily ignore scientific facts when imposing their power but Realpolitikers will follow the best available science while appealing to reason.”

This pragmatic approach, going back to the 1850s, rejected ideology, religious dogma and some vision of a perfect world, and realistically sought better solutions. We accept that we pollute, but the goal is to pollute less, either by lowering consumption or adopting better technologies.

Environmentalism and the campaign to put the planet first, over and beyond human aspiration, is dead. Long live pragmatic, progressive environmental solutions. Welcome back to a policy world driven by Realpolitik.

French translation

Here’s a fun question in the spirit of the season: in what world can a government fund an NGO, instruct that NGO to lobby the government’s own legislature, count the resulting pressure campaign as “the voice of civil society,” and then cite that voice as the democratic mandate for its policies?

Only in Brussels. And they got caught.

Rewind to January 2025. EU Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin stood before the European Parliament and admitted — in the carefully sanded language of a man reading from legal review — that it was “inappropriate” for Commission services to sign agreements obliging NGOs to lobby MEPs specifically. The money flowed through LIFE, the EU’s €5.4 billion environmental slush fund. German MEP Monika Hohlmeier had pulled roughly 30 funding contracts from 2022–23 and found that grantees were expected to organize mass protests, run mass mailings, and squeeze lawmakers on the eve of key votes. Some were deployed to lobby against the Commission’s own trade agenda — DG ENVI using taxpayer-funded greens as a proxy army against Mercosur while President von der Leyen championed the deal down the hall.

Call it what it is: ventriloquism. The Commission threw its voice through a felt puppet labeled “independent civil society” and then applauded the puppet’s testimony.

The cleanup was a masterclass in Brussels damage control. The European Court of Auditors probed and found EU funding of NGOs “too opaque” — €7.4 billion sloshed to NGOs from 2021–23 with no reliable central tracking, 30 organizations hoovering up 40 percent of a decade’s funds, a state-controlled institute misclassified as an “NGO” with a board stacked entirely with government officials. The auditors’ remedy? The Commission graciously agreed to some reforms — scheduled for 2028 and 2029. A parliamentary censure motion failed by one vote. The EEB, which takes a tenth of its budget from LIFE, declared the whole affair a “scandal that wasn’t.” The beneficiaries of the funding pronounced the funding clean. Case closed.

But keep your eye on what the puppet was actually selling, because the invoice just arrived, and it arrived at 44°C.

This month, as the third heatwave since May cooked the continent, France’s EDF took reactors at Golfech, Bugey, and Chooz fully offline, roughly 3.65 GW, about 6 percent of the country’s nuclear fleet, with several more running at reduced output elsewhere in the fleet. Earlier in the same heatwave, curtailments across a wider set of eight reactors had reached 6.4 GW at one point, about 14 percent of French demand.

Not because the reactors couldn’t run. EDF says plainly there’s no safety issue. They were shut down by environmental discharge limits: the thermal-pollution rules governing how warm the cooling water returned to the Rhône and Garonne may be. The rules the green lobby spent decades perfecting. Paris had to issue an emergency exemption for Bugey “to ensure the security of the power grid,” which is a government’s way of admitting its environmental law and its electricity supply have become mutually exclusive.

And the rest of the grid Europe built to green-lobby specifications? Germany suffered a heat-driven blackout. The UK activated a supply alert and paid up to £1,379 per megawatt-hour — a ransom, not a price — to keep the lights on. Italian analysts project Q3 power prices up 36 percent year-over-year. Tens of thousands of French homes lost power while roughly 20 percent of European homes have air conditioning, versus 90 percent in America, because for thirty years the same subsidized chorus told Europeans that cooling was decadence and baseload was sin.

And right on cue, the heat has a courtroom application. Strasbourg is sitting on Müllner v. Austria — the ECtHR’s designated follow-up to the Swiss KlimaSeniorinnen case, granted rare priority status, in which an Austrian MS patient argues the summer temperatures aggravating his condition are a human-rights violation by his government. Expect the sympathetic profiles to multiply with every degree on the thermometer. What those profiles will leave out is the org chart.

Start pulling the thread. The plaintiff’s lawyer, Michaela Krömer, runs the case arm-in-arm with Fridays for Future (Greta Thunberg’s youth movement) whose Austrian arm hosts the case on its own website, crowdfunded the filing, and markets it under the #FightForYourHumanRight banner.

The “third party interveners” who filed with the court include GLAN, the strategic-litigation shop that took $175,000 from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations in 2022–23, and CAN Europe, the flagship of the European Climate Foundation flotilla — the Hewlett-, Bloomberg-, and Rockefeller-fed funding hub we’ve already mapped in these pages. FFF’s case site solemnly assures readers that such interventions “do not take sides.” CAN Europe’s own website says it intervened to support the plaintiff’s claims. Pick one.

And the punchline: CAN Europe heads a thirteen-NGO consortium running an EU LIFE project — yes, that LIFE — whose stated objectives include “supporting and dialoguing with decision-makers” on EU climate targets. So Brussels is funding the coalition backing a lawsuit designed to force deeper emissions cuts on an EU member state, through the very program whose grants the Commission’s own budget chief admitted “inappropriately” obliged NGOs to lobby lawmakers. American billionaire foundations supply one hand; the European taxpayer supplies the other; both hands work the same puppet.

So run the loop one more time. Brussels paid the greens. The greens lobbied Brussels. Brussels enacted the greens’ agenda and called it the people’s will. The agenda produced a grid that fails precisely when Europeans need it most — and rules that switch off carbon-free nuclear power in a heat emergency. And when the heat arrives, the same network sues the government for the heat — with Brussels helping fund the plaintiffs’ cheering section. Now the same chorus explains that the fix is to do everything faster.

They’ll tell you the auditors found no wrongdoing. Sure — the rules allowed it. That’s the scandal. It was never about the environment. It was about controlling the narrative, and billing you twice: once for the lobbying, once for the electricity.

What could possibly go wrong? Open a window. It’s 44 degrees out.

Whatever happened to the catastrophic climate collapse campaigners? What about the social justice warriors? Why are we no longer talking about post-capitalism, degrowth, the sixth mass extinction, chemical cocktails or the Pacific Garbage Patch? And Davos? Global finance moralists like Larry Fink have decided lighting data centers was more attractive than fighting to save the world.
This article argues that it is time to use the decline of activist influence in the policy environment to change the rules guiding the regulatory arena and address many of the issues that had led to irrational policies following the activist agenda.

During the American heat dome or Europe’s summer swelter and the hottest June days on record, we no longer have to endure the media hyperbole or the activist misanthropy, blaming man (industry, capitalism, consumers…) for the planetary destruction. Now we are sometimes reminded, in a deadpan tone, that these warm days are in keeping with climate models, but it is often greeted with a reaction similar to when my doctor tells me my excess weight gain is related to my eating habits.

After two decades of well-choreographed campaigns and narrative control that merged all environmental health issues into a centralized campaign against consumption, trade, capitalism and industry, with billions in foundation funding flowing in to enrich the activist movements, within a year, the tap was literally turned off. Everything just stopped. Why?

• The activist groups did not run out of money (foundation donations often stretch from three to five years).

• They did not run out of issues (none of the policies they demanded was actually delivered).

• These forever campaigners simply ran out of legitimacy.

The elections of 2024-25 across Europe and North America delivered a blow to the environmental left with economic, social and border issues taking priority in the political shift to the right. Over the last two years, policies, procedures and funding have migrated towards more economic, industrial and jobs development and away from the intangible feel-good fluff that the activists had pushed to the center of the policy arena. Buzzwords like simplification, deregulation, rationalization quickly replaced the environmental totems of circularity, decarbonization and degrowth. The electorate’s clear message was received in the policy halls of Brussels, Berlin and Washington.

Turning the Crisis Inward

The NGOs reacted as they have always done, not by reflecting and seeking a good compromise, but by declaring an imminent crisis. But the fabricated crisis was no longer a catastrophic climate collapse or a mass ecological extinction, but rather the threat to their own existence. Ever polarizing, the activists ran a campaign claiming the far-right was on a mission to silence NGOs (and free speech). Maybe it was the perpetual polarizing and lack of reflection or compromise that had turned so many off of their issues. The Firebreak published an article how their portrayal of the good activist fighting the “bad guys” was not setting the right tone and was not even singing the right hymn to their choir.

More recently, the activists have resorted to triage to try to make it through the lean years. Two weeks ago, the smarmy Good Lobby published their recent sales pitch called: “An Advocacy Survival Guide for Civil Society” claiming that the nature of the game had changed. Correction: the audience decided to watch other more important games. Of course, Alberto has been getting too fat living high off the foundation funding hog as the hypocrite blindly attacks other forms of advocacy (lobbying) funding so maybe he should follow his own advice.

Last week, a group of 60 activist NGOs, including the ever-opportunistic Good Lobby, published an Open Letter to the European Commission. The letter was quite remarkable in that their demands for better regulation were what these same groups had been condemning only three years earlier. The NGOs were demanding to be allowed to engage in dialogue while it was not too long ago that they were gleefully kicking their industry enemies out of the European Parliament and Commission. They demanded transparency, but the NGOs are the ones who do not reveal the billionaires and other interest groups behind their foundation funding. They demanded impact assessments. Good, so does that mean Europe will revise regulations like the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive where the NGOs got their way by rejecting the need for any impact assessments?

The NGO activist groups do face a crisis situation, but the crisis is coming from within.

Looking to the Post-NGO World

This is not the first decline in NGO influence, and they will be back, probably stronger and even more vengeful. What is dangerous is for other stakeholders to consider the recent shifting sands as the end of the uncomfortable decades of activist interference and use it as a chance to go back to business as usual. Rather, this is an opportunity to reshape the post-NGO world to redefine how stakeholders engage in the policy process. Here are four key changes to ensure a rational policy process in future.

• Clarify the role of foundations. With the professionalization of philanthropy (consultants creating networks of fiscal sponsorships and dark donor-advised funds), foundations have become billionaire-led activist NGOs. These groups pose as campaign organizations but as they don’t legally exist, they don’t have to declare their funding or be held accountable. The rules need to change so these groups follow the same rules of transparency and accountability as every other stakeholder group.

• Differentiate NGOs from activist lobby groups (APEs). The Firebreak has argued that most policy activist groups abuse their status as NGOs, pretending to be in the same league as humanitarian organizations or aid charities, claiming tax-free status while spending hundreds of millions on salaries, political donations and lobbying campaigns. They should be classified as Alternative Policy Enterprises (APEs), lobby groups whose millions in funding from special interests should not be tax deductible or classed differently from industry lobbyists. Meanwhile, those genuine NGOs trying to run food banks, shelters and development aid programs have to compete with these non-transparent lobbyists trying to impose their elitist dogma on society.

• Set stricter conditions for evidence in policy processes. For the last 20 years, NGO groups have done a good job discrediting industry research and excluding their evidence from the policy process. But the activist science they put forward is lower quality and designed to generate fear and doubt rather than facts and evidence. Since NGOs are no longer dictating the narrative at the present time, a clear, objective standard of scientific research and data should be established that would encompass the best available research and lab practices, regardless of its source.

• Consider environmental activist campaigns as marketing and PR activities rather than policy actions. The NGOs are communications organizations trying to shape the public narrative to enhance business opportunities (donations, funding, alternative products…). Their evidence is neither scientific nor economic but designed to persuade via the emotional triggers of fear and outrage. Some examples:
  - The anti-pesticide campaigns intend to push frightened consumers into buying organic food. Organic is nothing more than a high-priced marketing concept for the affluent elite to impose on struggling consumers.
  - The catastrophic climate agenda is woven into the promotion of renewables and promoting a post-capitalist neo-Marxist ideology.
  - The plastics fear campaigns (microplastics, waste, endocrine disruption…) work in tandem with alternative industries like copper, steel, glass and paper manufacturers.
  - The litigation industry is profiting nicely from the activist PR work in all of these fear business centers.

We need to consider the activist APEs campaigns and lobbying, not as policy engagement, but as marketing and PR for other interest groups.

The big problem for the environmental NGOs is that their marketing campaigns continue as usual, but not many people are buying them. It is time to change the business model.

My wife starts her day every morning with a long conversation with another man that she trusts more than me. His name is Claude.

As AI agents integrate themselves into more of our daily decisions, eventually driving our cars, cleaning our houses and preparing our meals, our societal institutions will need to get public buy-in (perhaps via a consultation, ballot or citizen’s assembly) for this major technological shift. But what would a participatory engagement on the future of AI look like? … Maybe we should ask Claude.

The public consultation or stakeholder dialogue approach was meant to improve public trust in institutional and regulatory decisions by engaging with the public, empowering them and seeking their buy-in for important decisions affecting their lives. A key element of trust is agency, that I (believe I) have control over decisions or actions that affect me. In the first two decades of this century, we saw a plethora of public consultations, townhall meetings, citizen assemblies, state ballots and referendums.

But today the public engagement process is broken: manipulated by stakeholders, ignored by policymakers and deemed worthless by a large part of the population. Many of the attempts by the activist left to conduct consultations to advance their transition strategies knowing that most people will not bother, giving their small but motivated movements a disproportionate voice in the outcome. Some examples:

• France held a series of citizen assemblies called Citizens' Convention on Climate (Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat) in 2019-2020. But after much fanfare and support at the highest level, the French government had to quietly walk away from the citizen assemblies’ 500 page report with 149 recommendations including banning 5G, large vehicles and suburban shopping centers.

• The EU Conference on the Future of Europe was launched in 2021 with grand statements from leaders of the European Parliament, Council and Commission as they started public consultations across the European Union. After wasting so much time and money by mid 2022, the EU quietly abandoned this engagement process.

• The most recent EU Consultation on tobacco and nicotine products has been shown to be a farce. Hundreds of thousands of ex-smokers who were able to finally quit with the help of e-cigarettes quite rightly shared their views in past consultations on why vaping should be promoted in the EU. This overwhelmingly outcome in favor of a policy that would force the EU to break with the WHO-Bloomberg diktats against tobacco harm reduction solutions meant that the European Union had to ignore the outcome of their consultation. This year, they tried to write an anti-harm reduction bias into the survey questions, making it nearly impossible to express a pro-vaping, anti-smoking view.

• The UK Brexit vote was conducted as a means for the UK Conservatives to purge itself from its anti-Europe faction. After a tumultuous time, the British people purged themselves of the Conservative Party. No one in government actually expected the UK to vote to leave the EU and this shocking result was enough to deter any other government from doing something so reckless as to ask the public what they think about complex policies.

• State ballots on social issues like legalizing cannabis attract a niche population supported by powerful money and influence. Other issues like demanding a minimum wage or childcare allocations do not enjoy such privileged access to public consultations.

The bottom line is that governments and regulators are no longer using engagement processes to help mold the policy process, or if they are, they are quietly ignoring the outcomes. If these consultations are not helping foster public trust, then the process is pointless, costly and raising expectations the policymakers will only disappoint.

How did Engagement Fall from Grace?

There is not one single reason why public consultations are now perceived as useless or merely symbolic.

1. The political decline of the “Green-Socialist-Anti-capitalist left” in the last electoral cycles has led to a shift in issue focus, away from “consultable” public programs like climate, migration and social support toward technical strategies on deregulation, access to energy and economic development.

2. The public engagement tools were used as weapons to legitimize activist transition campaigns (energy transition, food transition, economic transition…). As the fear campaigns pushed the apocalyptic scenarios too far, the public backlash made such a strategy unviable.

3. The rising social media tribal trust deficit means that I trust those like me (familiarity) more than those outside of my echo chambers. Algorithms have channelled individuals into groups of like-minded thinkers, rendering any consultation process obsolete. If one’s tribe rejects the outcome of a public consultation, then there is no trust benefit from public buy-in (agency).

4. AI technologies are already playing a role in public engagement tools. The ongoing EU tobacco and nicotine consultation is showing evidence of AI-assisted contributions. An article in The Firebreak ridiculed an NGO for conducting a consultation structured and moderated by an AI bot.

5. People are more concerned with efficiency than participatory engagement. If a technology works and I perceive benefits from it, then there is no point engaging the public. This may explain why there have never been any large-level public consultations on the Internet, mobile phones or social media.

With these points in mind, will our governments resort to engaging the public for policy advice on AI regulations? Will concerned citizens be able to direct the future of AI policies or is the field considered “not fit for public consultation”?

The AI Public Engagement Vacuum

Given the societal pressures the emerging AI technology is causing, if ever there was a need to engage with the public on the future direction of artificial intelligence, the time is now.

• Large populations are losing their jobs as this technology continues to encroach on different professions.

• As AI data centers suck energy off the grid and push prices up, certain populations are paying a higher price for less access to energy.

• The land-use and water issues have not been given serious considerations.

• These data centers create a lot of noise in local communities (expect the anti-5G and EMF campaigners to take ownership here).

• Deepfakes and disinformation have a serious affect on the general population.

• And with the rapid rise of billionaires (and one trillionaire), will the wealth disparity and the rise of the have-not majority lead to social discord?

If there were any issue today that demanded public buy-in and societal engagement, it wouldn’t be climate change or agrotechnology, it would have to be the future of AI. But this will never happen.

For regulators to pretend legitimacy via public consultations, there would have to be an alternative (however unrealistic) should the public reject the technology. A survey or ballot where the public might reject plastics, pesticides, GMOs, ultra-processed foods, nuclear energy or fossil fuels implies that there is an interest group pushing an alternative. Such polls are advanced by Big Change activist groups to advance their transition theology.

But where the benefits are so evident or the risk of falling behind without the technology so great (as in the emerging AI applications), no regulator would dare risk seriously asking the public what they wanted. Imagine any government tying its hands with a public consultation and then forced to block any AI development. That is about as likely as building data centers in space.

I asked AI (ChatGPT and Copilot) if a public consultation on the future of AI was a good idea. These agents gave me the standard LLM answer (that democracy and engagement are important) but they do not really know me well. So my wife asked Claude the same question, and got an honest answer adapted to her personality.

As Claude noted, the European Commission is presently consulting citizens, academia, industry, and public administrations on the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act and a unified EU cloud policy, but it has already been established that the Commission never listens to their consultations. Claude rightly called it “theater”.

Having a binding public engagement on the future of AI would be like letting the precautionistas force a consultation to ban mobile technology in the early 2000s after the Stewart Report suggested possible health risks from cellphone use. Rather, the emerging mobile technology was perceived as developing solutions with increasing promises of greater benefits. And there is the lesson for industry.

What Can we Learn from This?

For the last two decades, the public consultation strategy has taken aim at certain industries and products under fire from activist transition campaigns. What AI and mobile phone technologies teach us is that an industry needs to present its technology as indispensable while continuously improving the product. If an industry can do this, if the public can see the benefits, there would be no threat from activists attacking products through a transition campaign that forces a public consultation.

• Fossil fuels or nuclear energy are seen as necessary for the increased energy demand from the coming build-up of AI-driven data centers.

• GM and new genomic plant breeding technologies are deemed essential for protecting global food security given the threats to modern agriculture.

• We need better plastics to protect food from contamination and spoilage.

• We need to promote tobacco harm reduction products as the only effective measures to finally attain smoke-free status.

While the activist transition campaigns can no longer rely on the public engagement and consultation tools to force the strategies through, public engagement remains a legitimacy tool in most governance arsenals. It is up to industry to communicate the widespread benefits and indispensability of their technologies to ensure long-term market stewardship.

Professor Curry was leaving on a high-point, citing a number of recent victories (many thanks to her indefatigable work) that suggested to her the site was no longer necessary:

“There have been some decisive battles in the past two years, notably President Trump’s election, the DOE Climate Report, and widespread acknowledgement that RCP8.5 is an implausible emissions scenario. As a result, many news agencies have dropped or substantially reduced their climate desk, we don’t hear about climate change so much in the media (particularly as related to extreme weather events). Also, we can’t underestimate the impact of substantially reduced funding for climate-related NGOs, with USAID and other funds drying up.”

That being said, I could not help but feel sad about the end of an era built around a site where science, not consensus or position, was respected. Judith has been an icon of scientific courage, and she used her site to encourage scientific debate and promote others doing good work in the climate field. She served as a role model to so many in the field of science communications and science and policy (including myself).

In standing up to Big Climate, with its big money and big egos, Judith Curry also took her fair share of verbal and reputational abuse. In 2019, I posted one of her clear-eyed responses to the Extinction Rebellion fear campaigns on social media and was surprised to get more than 40, mostly negative, attacks on Curry’s person.

But unlike the Mud-Pit Michael Manns of the world, she deflected the slurs with grace, wit and humor. In academic pissing contests, Judith reminded us that science was always about the facts and data (rather than networks and titles). She never let her own authority and achievements distract us from that. At a time when the term “skeptic” was considered an insult, Judith’s steadfast strength reminded us that integrity has a greater resilience than emotional activism or ad hominem attacks.

Many of us may have forgotten what a pioneer site Climate Etc. had been in the field of climate science communications. Started in 2010, in the wake of the ClimateGate leaked emails from the University of East Anglia, Judith Curry’s first post said:

“My engagement in the blogosphere over the past several years have convinced me that the blogosphere has untapped potential for educating the public and for enabling large-scale collective intelligence to address the scientific and policy challenges associated with climate change.
The climate blogosphere is a vibrant environment but the signal is often hidden by the noise.”

The threads and comments section were indeed vibrant, and I often turned to Climate Etc. as a best practice case study in my communications lectures. The site was a vital source for ideas for my own work (I set up The Risk-Monger in 2010 as well, at a time when activist NGOs and special interests ruled the Internet). I used to reserve time on Sunday evenings for Judith’s weekly summary of “things that caught my eye”, notably her science policy and science communications sections.

The cost of keeping the site active through all of the technical issues was too high ($16,000 in the last four years) so Judith decided to wrap it up. As many of the climate research issues have become “boring” with the models and politicking, she is looking forward to a more “peaceful life with family and friends” in a new house, a new dog and a new garden … as well as a new Substack page (one can always hope).

At a time when the world had gone mad, with activists gluing themselves to buses, teenage savants growling at compliant world leaders and the mainstream media reporting the imminent Climageddon with each weather report, the community Judith Curry had built around her Climate Etc. site were the keepers of the flame, protecting the true objective of science while resisting the personal attacks from the billionaire-funded Climate Industrial Complex. That Judith could close her site with the flame of open scientific discourse on climate issues burning brightly, gives us hope for the other well-funded, wide-networked Big Change campaigns we are still struggling under.

Thank you Judith for inspiring us and reminding us of the true value of science and the cost of defending it.

Life must be sad if all you do all day is talk about the Good Ole Days. Life is definitely sad if you have to pay others to promote something you were involved in eight years ago. Life is even sadder when others then force you to shut up.

Such is the situation for the US Predatort law firm, Wisner Baum, which is spending the hundreds of millions of dollars it received from the first Bayer glyphosate settlement not on plaintiff payouts but on trying to promote their upstart lawyer who was in the news back in 2018 during Wisner Baum’s bellwether case.

This week, Wisner Baum paid a small PR firm to promote the beginning of the production of the film “Monsanto”, a movie “inspired by Wisner Baum’s historic win”, syndicating their paid “news” article in dozens of other newspapers. Within a day, the law firm was forced to take down their self-promotion, which seemed to suggest that the law firm was actively involved in the entire project. This is not unusual for US tort law firms to splash out lavishly on films promoting US tort law firms (see my “review” of a similar film called “Into the Weeds”) but they are often a little more discreet.

The paid promotion wanted to portray young lawyer, R. Brent Wisner, as a hero standing up to fight evil industry and bring justice to its victims. While the “news article” was removed from all of the publications, the Firebreak received a copy and thought an analysis into the vanity and secret influence campaigns rampant in the litigation industry was worthwhile.

The paid article starts innocently enough:

This lede already raises certain questions. Why is the film called “Monsanto”, when the company had no longer existed by the time the great lawyers had taken Bayer to court? While it is understood that film dramas are given license with the truth, from the very title it becomes clear that the film “Monsanto” would be a work of fiction.

Also, why is a film about a US tort lawsuit that took place in California being produced in Germany? It seems that part of the funding for the film is via a German organization and this allows for any other cofunding from US special interest groups to be outside of any transparency measures.

But this does not hide the special interests behind the promotion of R. Brent Wisner.

The scriptwriter, Michael Wisner, also known by his Hollywood Scientologist name, R. Michael Wisner, who is also known as R. Brent Wisner’s father. The second screenwriter is Alexandra Duparc, whose bio reveals that her birth name is Alexandra Wisner (Brent’s sister). Apparently, she worked at Wisner Baum as a side job (internship) while waiting for her music band to become famous (spoiler alert: it didn’t). As if the Wisner family doesn’t already suffer from self-aggrandizement syndrome, Alexandra not only was tasked with portraying her heroic brother, she also wrote herself into the movie.

As an aside, Wisner Baum partner, Michael Baum is an elder in the Church of Scientology hierarchy (allegedly involved in Operation Snow White during the 1970s), but I understand that anyone who tries to connect the law firm with scientology or a series of lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies producing antidepressants risks being sued, so the Firebreak will not make that claim. But it is widely known that Wisner Baum paid vast sums to RFK Jr for client referrals before he became the US Secretary for Health and Human Services. When Junior moved to Washington and was forced to disassociate from that plum business, his son Conor conveniently took his place in this noble law firm (as described below by some respected journalist).

It is sad to think that this law firm is spending millions to promote itself by writing themselves into a film where they will no doubt paper over the deception and corruption purveying the US litigation industry. It might make a nice fictional drama used to promote the ambitions of a young upstart, but it is sad to think that the film industry is tolerating such nonsense to just pick up the check.

But why did the law firm then take down the article they wrote about themselves within 24 hours after they had paid for widespread syndication? Perhaps Wisner Baum’s PR firm did not think through the fact that tort law firms only do well when they work from the shadows. Or perhaps the film’s producer, or maybe Netflix, did not want the role of these ambitious Predatorts to be revealed. If people hear about this, they might start asking questions over how deeply the lawyers were involved.

I suppose when your family has always been on the periphery of the film industry in Hollywood, self-promotion is irresistible, even in an field where discretion is highly valued. A young lawyer who has a PR firm to promote a film about a case he was involved in eight years ago, written by his father and sister (whose ambition rivals her sibling’s), and funded by dark special interests goes far out of line with the industry practice of quietly profiting in the background from the plaintiff’s they promote. It is no surprise that Wisner was forced to take down his article and I can imagine that many more experienced lawyers in the industry are quietly waiting to take down Hollywood Brent.

Someone in Wisner Baum must have seen how the folly of one man’s vanity was making the entire law firm vulnerable.

If such vain self-promotion isn’t sad enough, spare a thought for poor Carey Gillam. This sad queen of self-promotion is quietly waiting to see who plays her role in the “Monsanto” movie. In an earlier article, Carey could not help but claim the central role one of her books played in the entire case. If the Wisner PR machine chooses to pass over the self-proclaimed role of this EWG activist, then she may have to exercise the rights to her life story, sold to another filmmaker. And Carey knows a thing or two about how vengeance is best served.

The subplot of “Monsanto” is as a film about a group of sad individuals fighting to promote some relevance and meaning in their lives. Fitting that the film’s cast of B-list actors has been given one last chance at stardom.

• The Republic of Palau has filed an initiative with the UN to place nicotine under international drug control restrictions.

• Small island states like Fiji and Palau have been seen in the past pawning off delegate seats to NGOs wanting to attend large UN intergovernmental conferences.

• The Palau nicotine initiative at the UN was researched, prepared and written by anti-nicotine activist groups from Europe, the US and Australia.

• These NGOs were too busy using Palau as their UN front group to have noticed Palau has a significant level of gutka addiction.

Life has never been better for environmental-health activists. Unlimited funding from billionaire philanthropists that also own the mainstream media you are free to use, tort law firms willing to amplify your campaign message while lending you their highly-paid activist science networks and international research agencies, and political operatives in various governments happy to give you a microphone and access to lobbyists and funding. Activists can run worldwide campaigns against technologies they hate, from Golden Rice to nuclear energy to tobacco harm reduction strategies, using their deep foundation-funded pockets to impose their will on poor nations, global trade and international politics.

But sadly, one key element is missing that would give these environmental-health zealots total policy control. Although they no longer pretend to represent civil society or the public interest, they are still considered NON-governmental. This means that while they can control the agenda at large UN conferences, fly to climate COPs on private jets, shape the narrative in public dialogue…, when the doors to the global negotiations close, these masters of the universe are left outside and out of the process.

Fortunately for the activists, the UN has many small countries that are dirt poor and lack technical negotiating skills. These countries have recently been seen to be open to pawning their delegate seats to the power-hungry activists. At recent UN conferences, the Pacific Small Island Developing State (PSIDS) delegations have become more vocal (and more white), bringing delegates who are not at all connected to the country acting as mercenaries for large NGOs like Greenpeace or WWF. Equally concerning is how foundation-funded NGOs have used their billion-dollar budgets to take over developing country institutions. Michael Bloomberg’s flotilla of MPOWER NGOs is not only running the WHO tobacco control strategy, but also managing the implementation of Bloomberg’s objectives in most small and middle-income countries.

People are outraged that Russian-funded mercenary armies are supporting failed African states. How is this any different?

Buying Seats at UN Conference Delegations

The Firebreak covered the very strange manipulation of delegations to UNEP’s Plastics Treaty conference (INC-5) in Busan, South Korea. (See the list of delegates here.) We noted how of the 11 delegates Fiji brought to Busan, four were from large environmental NGOs (including a WWF director). The population of Fiji is less than a million people and although it is the fourth most populous country in Oceana, 61.3% of the population live below the poverty line, earning less than $5.50 a day in 2019. Small, poor countries don’t have the technical expertise to lead global policy discussions and poverty creates opportunities for corruption (like selling UN delegate positions to NGOs).

Take another small Pacific island nation, Palau, with a population of only 17,000 and 25% living below the basic needs poverty line (UN estimates although actual data is scarce). Palau is made up of 340 islands but only 12 are permanently inhabited. And while they don’t seem to have enough resources to gather basic data, the Republic of Palau has a very strong voice at UN conferences and international policy discussions. At Busan, for the UNEP plastics treaty conference, Palau brought six delegates, but four of them had no relationship at all with the small island state (except that they got an email address made for them under the name of the Permanent Mission of Palau to the United Nations). Who paid for these fake delegates (and how much did their organizations pay the Republic of Palau for the delegate pass-through)?

As at other UN conferences (like the climate and biodiversity COPs), Palau played an oversized role during this Busan event. Gwen Sisior, as the alternate head of the Palau delegation, was center stage as a Co-Chair of the Busan UN Plastics Treaty INC-5 conference, sitting at the front table and navigating discussions between over 190 countries. Was she representing the interests of her 17,000 citizens, or was she reading from script prepared by her “Big Change” mercenaries?

The UN rightly doesn’t scrutinize or interfere with a nation’s choice of official delegates to its events, but maybe they should pay attention when small island states, with populations smaller than some apartment complexes, start using the UN to initiate sophisticated policy campaigns.

Palau: The Anti-Nicotine Activists’ Useful Idiot

This week, the tiny Pacific nation of Palau launched yet another campaign on the global stage calling on the UN to initiate a critical review of nicotine with the intention of placing it under international drug control restrictions. This would put nicotine under the authority of the World Health Organization Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (WHO-ECDD), bringing it under international drug control (in the same way as heroin and crystal meth) rather than merely the tobacco control regulations of the WHO’s FCTC.

Palau’s initiative also included a supporting scientific evaluation of nicotine with contributions from a collection of international scientists. The scientists argue that past evaluations of nicotine only looked at combustible delivery systems (smoking), and given the growth of alternative nicotine products, their scientific review was necessary. There was no mention of funding for this review, but the phrase “An initiative of the Republic of Palau” was peppered throughout the pages, so it should be safe to conclude that this was all Palau-driven.

It is impressive to think that tiny Palau, with a population of 17,000, was able to produce a website like https://nicotinereview.org/ to launch an initiative with a research document to try to change how the international community thinks of nicotine. It is just as impressive to think that so many people were fooled into believing that this was legitimate and not just another case of the activist NGO community once again using a tiny island nation as their campaign front group. I hope Palau was well remunerated for dutifully carrying out the activist marching orders.

Clearing the Air didn’t have to dig too deep to discover that the entire Palau initiative was led by anti-nicotine activists tied to the European Network on Smoking Prevention (ENSP).

“Its application has been put together by Charis Girvalaki and Thomas Munzel, two names that are very familiar in the corridors of power in Brussels and paid up members of Europe’s tobacco control establishment lobbying to ban safer products across Europe. Girvalaki is the Scientific Director for the European Network on Smoking Prevention, the main non-governmental organisation advising the European Commission on its revision to the Tobacco Products Directive.”

Other activists involved behind the scenes include an activist from ASH (Action on Smoking and Health, USA), Carolyn Dresler, and Coral Gartner, Director at the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence on Achieving the Tobacco Endgame in Australia. Clearing the Air referred to Gartner as “the academic architect and chief defender of Australia’s failed prescription-only vape model.” Nobody from Palau was referenced in this “initiative of the Republic of Palau”.

As these are activist scientists working for NGOs, it would not be unusual to find deception or embellishment in their supporting scientific dossier. The cover page misleadingly tries to give the impression that the research is done by the WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence.

The layout spacing tries to turn a request for the WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence to do a critical review of nicotine look like the review was actually done by the WHO Expert Committee. After the line break, over the date of publication, the “WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence” is written where the names of the authors of the report would normally go. But the line above says that the dossier was “Prepared in accordance with the critical review format of the” and then the next line mentions the WHO Expert Committee. You don’t need to put your methodology on the cover page, unless…

If Page 1 tried to deceive the reader, then that set the standard for the rest of the supporting science dossier (done in the name of the Republic of Palau).

A Kick in the Gutka

While only 20.8% in Palau smoke (2023 Bloomberg data), 42.4% regularly consume gutka (or gutkha): chewing tobacco mixed with betel (areca) nut and a variety of spices and additives. Gutka is an addictive psychoactive stimulant containing arecoline, which has been linked to oral and esophageal cancers as well as cardiovascular disease.

Globally, around 600 million people consume gutka, mostly in Southern and South-East Asia. As a cancer hazard, gutka is banned in many countries, including the United States and (technically) India, but not in Palau. It has been called the “suicide masala” because of the speed at which it can kill its users.

But the Palau government is not speaking out against gutka in the same way they have condemned e-cigarettes. The anti-nicotine supporting scientific dossier, while an “initiative of the Republic of Palau”, did not mention gutka once.

Palau banned vaping in 2023, in line with Bloomberg Philanthropies’ MPOWER strategy. Didn’t Bloomberg look at gutka use in Palau at the same time? While gutka contains tobacco and nicotine as well as addictive, toxic stimulants from the betel nut, Bloomberg Philanthropies does not refer much to it or campaign against it. Two Bloomberg-funded NGOs did not mention gutka directly in their report on Palau.

I suppose Bloomberg would respond differently if Big Tobacco had moved into the gutka trade. But such a claim would imply that Michael Bloomberg and his flotilla of tobacco and nicotine control NGOs are hypocrites, more concerned about fighting industry than improving public health.

• Is anyone in Palau aware of the number of people using gutka, and the health consequences compared to e-cigarettes, or were they that far removed from the UN initiative the activists were conducting in their name?

• Perhaps the Western anti-nicotine activists should have done some research on the widespread use of gutka in Palau before they recruited the tiny island state as their UN front group.

• Did the president of Palau, Surangel S Whipps Jr, know what he was signing onto or was this agreement with the NGOs taken at a lower layer of government? How many layers of government does the tiny island state actually have? (The wife of the president of Palau is the sister of the previous president.)

Maybe the United Nations should look into who is actually calling the shots here before they take the “initiative of the Republic of Palau” seriously.

This week the US Department of State, together (nominally) with the Department of Health and Human Services, effectively discredited any scientific decisions coming out of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Their media note from June 8 concluded that IARC’s hazard assessments were inconsistent, not transparent, and not applicable to any real-world situations. In other words, its science was junk and any IARC findings should not be treated as “definitive” in the United States. Every country should come to this same conclusion.

While I am very pleased with these pronouncements that echo what I have been arguing for over a decade, I somehow cannot imagine that RFK Jr actually signed on to this decision. The former tort lawyer’s law firm, now called Wisner Baum, has pocketed millions of dollars from glyphosate lawsuits solely based on the corrupted IARC Monograph 112 – the only scientific agency document to have claimed that glyphosate was probably carcinogenic.

Surely RFK Jr could also not possibly accept the criticisms of IARC in the Department of State media note. Here are some of the more damning charges:

• “Too often, broad classifications based on limited or theoretical risks can create unnecessary public confusion, undermine confidence in everyday products and industries, and lead to policy outcomes that are disconnected from actual exposure and modern scientific standards.” In other words, IARC’s junk science only creates public fear and distrust of actual exposure levels and modern science.

• “IARC’s findings and monographs often blur the line between hazard and true risk, while diminishing independently verified findings of other research institutions.” That means to say that IARC’s hazard assessments have repeatedly undermined conclusions from regulatory risk assessment agencies like the US EPA and FDA.

• “Furthermore, IARC’s research provides diminishing returns on scientific enterprise, while advancing politicized narratives that are often cited for U.S. domestic legal contexts.” The Department of State has recognized that IARC monographs are misused by the US litigation industry. The politicized narratives” refer to activist NGO fear campaigns built upon IARC claims.

The phrase “diminishing returns on scientific enterprise” implies that IARC’s monographs are political, activist driven and opportunistic – anything but scientific. These quotes seem to suggest that people in the Department of State had read the recent monograph on IARC by Nathan Schachtmen (see the Firebreak’s review of this damning report).

A Post-IARC World

As IARC seems to finally be done and dusted, we need to ask what a post-IARC world will look like. In reality, it will look quite good.

Fewer Predatort Extortions. Without the influence of IARC’s manufactured evidence on the US litigation industry, there will be fewer bogus lawsuits filed solely on claims that a WHO cancer agency has determined a substance to be carcinogenic (spoiler alert: all IARC monographs conclude carcinogenicity). There would never have been the hundreds of thousands of glyphosate or talc lawsuits had IARC been a responsible research agency.

Fewer Corrupted Scientists. With the loss of lucrative funds for “litigation consultants” (averaging more than $500 an hour), scientists will lose interest in being involved with or supportive to the monograph program. As IARC becomes stigmatized, fewer opportunistic scientists will also be involved with the Collegium Ramazzini, an organization that is now also struggling to survive.

Less Fearmongering Activism. As IARC pronouncements become meaningless, NGOs, law firms and special interest groups will not be able to manipulate the public, regulators or the media with bogus, fear-laden claims based on useless hazard assessments. You will no longer hear claims like: “The WHO cancer research agency has declared…”

Less Ignorance. IARC monographs have been used as a basis for disinformation campaigns by opportunistic Predatort lawyers, activist NGOs and controversy-driven journalists. The fear their monographs have produced has resulted in a rush to alternatives (often more harmful), a distrust of industry and pointless public disquiet. Fear leads to misunderstanding, so the muting of IARC will reduce ignorance.

One interesting point worth noting. No one is arguing that a world without IARC will have negative consequences for our understanding of carcinogens or the advances in finding cures. Most significant research and development in cancer detection and treatment comes from industry, and IARC has prohibited any involvement with any scientist remotely tied to industry. Nothing positive will be lost when IARC shuts down.

Slowly but surely, other IARC member countries will pull back their funding and involvement, and budgets will have to be slashed. The IARC Monograph Program will likely be forced to take the WHO’s tobacco control route and rely fully on philanthropist project funding to survive. And like the decline of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, expect lower quality science and even higher political inputs as IARC has to submit to some special interest foundations and billionaires to pay the rent.

How Did This WHO Agency Go Off the Rails?

There are many reasons why IARC’s decline evolved to the state it is in today.

Corrupted, Politicized Activist Science. At one point in my IARC curation, I catalogued 30 scientific integrity transgressions. I called it IARC’s Dirty Thirty, but I was more stunned that these activist scientists felt they could operate with impunity. Shortly after that, the head of IARC’s monograph program, Kurt Straif was “hurriedly retired”, but it seems with recent monographs like gasoline and talc, that they are back to their same old shenanigans.

Close Ties to the US Litigation Industry. It was impressive that the Department of State media note expressly mentioned the role IARC has played in providing doctored evidence bespoke for law firms suing industries, in what has been called the La Jolla Playbook. The close ties between IARC (Ramazzini) connected scientists and the law firms that employ them to produce research, documents and testimonies has tarnished the reputation of the cancer agency. It is absurd to think that IARC was actually compelled to hold a supplementary monograph meeting on benzene because the law firms the IARC-networked scientists were working for had a large number of plaintiffs that needed a report that links benzene with a certain type of cancer.

Overly Zealous Cancer Classifications. IARC’s hazard-based approach has been misused to produce an excessive number of carcinogenic classifications that have become meaningless from a practical point of view. But one could argue that a hazard assessment is the first step in a risk assessment (if only IARC had considered that their role ended there). However, ten scientists tied to both IARC and the US litigation industry, pushed the classification process too far and too fast with their Ten Key Characteristics of Carcinogens (that was then rushed into the IARC Preamble). This checklist approach allowed any substance to be classified as a carcinogen, allowing IARC to “upgrade” its past classifications to make substances more convincingly carcinogenic in a court of law. There was no scientific value to this checklist and the Department of State has finally taken notice.

IARC may survive for a few more years as a hollowed shell, providing shared data on cancer rates and organizing a conference or two each year. The monograph program will be cut back into obscurity, and the organization will lose its platform for activist Ramazzini scientists to run their campaigns for their clients. IARC will soon be forgotten.

A personal note

To close on a personal note, many people know how long I have been challenging IARC’s activism, the consequences I have suffered and the walls of silence in the media I have been confronting. Several have asked me how I feel after seeing this statement by the US government that confirms what I have always been working toward. My feelings haven’t changed from that day nine years ago when I first discovered how an IARC insider, Christopher Portier, had worked as a liaison between IARC, Ramazzini and the US litigation industry to produce evidence for hundreds of thousands of glyphosate lawsuits, earning billions for the litigation industry (but not for the plaintiffs). That exposé broke the image of IARC as a credible research agency, so perhaps my reaction on that first day is still suitable today, as IARC is facing the coming end to its days.

IARC has intentionally caused such a colossal waste of time, money and energy. I won’t feel sad when that dreadful WHO agency finally shuts down.

Last month, a monograph entitled IARC’s Precautionary Science: How the WHO Cancer Research Agency Misinforms Regulation and Litigation was published. The author, Nathan Schachtman, counsel to UB Greensfelder and Columbia law professor, roundly criticizes the state of the cancer agency’s monograph classification process. He sets out in a clear structure how the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has created a process that misleads regulators, courts and the media on the presence and risk of potential carcinogens.

Schachtman begins with a history of how IARC’s emergence in the 1970s coincided with the massive increase in environmental health regulatory agencies, the use of the precautionary principle within many of these agencies, and the environmental NGO movement. Scientific papers also evolved around this period, at a time when literature reviews were still not considered as legitimate research contributions. It does not take much to add the elephant in the room, that from these evolutions, the US litigation industry has, since then, grown into the Hydratic monster it is today.

With IARC’s Precautionary Science, Nathan Schachtman meticulously details everything that has gone wrong with IARC, its use of precaution and the corruption of scientific evidence used in the US litigation industry. With Nathan’s clear biting style and borderline satire, perfected in his must-read website, Tortini, it becomes evident how far from science and evidence the international cancer agency has strayed. Every line echoes my thoughts ... a book I wish I had written.

Precaution is not science

Schachtman’s focus is to demonstrate how IARC, likely due to its ties to the Collegium Ramazzini ideology, has taken a precaution-driven approach to carcinogen classifications.

“The precautionary principle diverges dramatically from the U.S. legal system in which persons claiming to have been harmed must prove, among other things, the harmful nature of the defendants’ conduct or products, by a preponderance of evidence. The precautionary principle also diverges from science, where scientific claims are established with ample evidence after severe testing.”

Regulators may choose to take precaution, but that is a policy decision, not a scientific one. IARC, in taking a precautionary approach, is not forthcoming in its political interests and strategies. A good part of Schachtman’s work seeks to shine a light on how the precautionary bias manifests itself in their classification distortions, abuse of the risk-hazard distinction, and their checklist approach.

Hazard and Risk

Schachtman identified IARC’s ongoing ambivalence toward its role in merely providing hazard assessments (the initial step in the risk assessment process). Given IARC’s outdated prestige assumption, they seem to expect environmental health agencies to automatically adopt their monograph hazard classifications into national regulations. But in saying a substance is a hazard does not mean much on its own. Risk assessors need to consider if the exposure to these hazards is relevant and if risk-reduction measures can mitigate the threats.

“In IARC parlance, cancer risk requires a finding that an agent is a cancer hazard, that it can cause cancer, but identifying a cancer hazard without more information does not equate to any cancer risk. The assessment and quantification of cancer risk typically requires that we know the route of exposure, the actual conditions under which the agent is used, the level of exposure, peak exposure, and cumulative exposure to humans, the metabolic fate and distribution of the agent in humans, and toxico-kinetics of the agent (rate at which the agent is metabolized or cleared from the human body), the exposure-outcome gradient, and the existence of thresholds of exposure for any risk. The IARC classifications provide little to no information about the sorts of data needed to determine and characterize risk. To the uninformed public and media, hazard sounds a lot like risk, and the two concepts would naturally be confused.”

On their own then, hazard assessments are not very useful. Schachtman rifles off a series of IARC hazard classifications of substances they had classified as carcinogenic that are also produced naturally in the human body like formaldehyde, ethylene oxide, testosterone… “Encapsulating people or putting warning signs on people’s faces will not really help prevent cancer.” IARC’s hazard-based precautionary approach is “devoid of scientific meaning” and the contradictions in IARC’s monographs, from coffee to red meat to crystalline silica (sand), render them practically useless. Unless you are an opportunistic tort lawyer.

Schachtman cites a term I believe he coined to describe one of IARC’s cottage industries: tortogenesis.

“Although IARC’s classification of a carcinogen cannot inform us whether specific exposure circumstances increase risks of cancer, the classification can and does result in ‘tortogenesis’. IARC classifications have been known to spark mass tort claims in the United States, and elsewhere. Careless expert witnesses have been known to misrepresent IARC hazard classifications as risk determinations.”

This is the beauty of Schachtman’s thinking and resultant prose. Tortogenesis is the act of initiating and promoting events that lead to mass tort lawsuits. IARC’s reclassification of glyphosate leading to hundreds of thousands of lawsuits is a prime example of tortogenesis. The cancer agency has spawned a new breed of scientist who is ‘tortogenetic’ by nature, producing research that is jury-ready. At that point in the book, I was on the edge of my seat as Schachtman brought me into the bosom of the Collegium Ramazzini - the place where tortogenesis was suckled.

The Ramazzini Ideology

Schachtman shows how IARC and the US tort industry were interconnected with Collegium Ramazzini fellows, and how their ideology of using research to prosecute industry and to promote precautionary regulations was exploited.

“In science, as in the law, the burden of showing that an agent is carcinogenic resides with those claiming causation. The precautionary principle, sometimes subtly, more often overtly, shifts the burden to those claiming non-carcinogenicity. The Collegium and its members are committed to the precautionary principle, which poses a major ideological conflict of interest when its members publish, testify, or participate in the IARC monograph process. The list of the Collegium’s American fellows reads like a Who’s Who of expert witnesses for the lawsuit industry. ... Many of the Collegium fellows have had important roles in the IARC program.”

Almost without fail, all of the scientists Nathan charged with having hidden their conflicts of interest were Collegium Ramazzini fellows.

I have covered the Ramazzini campaigns far too often, describing it as a private club for politically driven activist scientists. Ramazzini science is weak, with like-minded fellows peer reviewing each other’s papers to be published in their own journals. Schachtman hones in on the unscientific precautionary ideology at the core of the Collegium but he could have expanded on their volumes of poor methodology, non-transparent funding (like the Russian involvement) and hidden conflicts of interest.

If I may make a minor criticism though. Of the 16 scientists Schachtman cites as actively working within the Ramazzini – IARC – litigation industry nexus, I was surprised that he had missed Philip Landrigan, long-time head of the Ramazzini scientific board and litigation industry entrepreneur. And a chapter on Linda Birnbaum, the Ramazzini bank clerk, would not have been deemed inappropriate. But this can be overlooked as there are just too many conflicted researchers in this activist scientist pantomime.

Ten Key Characteristics

In several recent articles on IARC, I had been struggling with how the cancer agency’s recent conception of the Ten Key Characteristics (KCs) of Carcinogens could be considered as scientific. Nathan’s chapter on the Ten KCs assured me that they are most definitely not scientific.

“The group touted its identification of KCs as a way of organizing and understanding carcinogenesis, but they also advocated using KCs to predict carcinogenesis in the face of insufficient epidemiology and even insufficient animal evidence. The KCs working group was dominated by members of the Collegium Ramazzini and like-minded scientists who seemed frustrated with the inability to identify more carcinogens, more rapidly.”

Schachtman cited several cases where IARC then intentionally revisited past monographs using their newfound key characteristics to “upgrade classifications” to higher levels of carcinogenicity (noting how the lawsuit industry has found this “check the boxes” approach very opportunistic). I should add that my investigation into how IARC revisited its talc monograph a third time (solely to deliver a more litigation-friendly conclusion with the key characteristic strategy) came out while this book was in the publication process. Nathan’s conclusions more than confirmed the suspicions in my exposé.

Schachtman’s Recommendations

As much as Schachtman condemns IARC for its broken monograph methodologies, conflicts of interest, precautionary, Ramazzini bias … he makes many valuable recommendations that might be useful in rehabilitating the cancer agency, namely:

• Stop pretending that the monographs are part of a consensus process and open the deliberations to a wider range of views. “If IARC were to adopt this approach, and engage with adversarial points of view, it might have fewer consensus monographs, but more credible conclusions in the end.”

• Be transparent and root out all conflicts of interest. “While complaining about “vested interests,” IARC’s leadership and many of its working group members have special interests because of their membership in the Collegium Ramazzini. Many of the Collegium’s membership work in service of the American lawsuit industry as consultants or testifying expert witnesses. Given the ideological and positional conflicts of interest rife throughout IARC, it should be opening its deliberative process to inspection, not trying to shame stakeholders into silence.”

• Peer review the monographs. “The myriad systematic reviews published each year in higher quality journals undergo peer review of varying quality. IARC, however, remains steadfast in rejecting external review of its monographs before publication.” Schachtman though wonders if IARC monographs will ever be able to reach the same quality of the systematic reviews now available in the scientific literature.

But in the end, given the political bias, conflicts of interest, undue prestige and secretive process, Nathan feels that reform of IARC’s monograph program is futile. “When we add to these considerations, the redundancy, inaccuracy, and unscientific nature of IARC classifications, the simplest solution is to abandon the entire enterprise of IARC hazard classifications.”

Cynically, Schachtman concludes that IARC has achieved one thing.

“The IARC classification process clearly is a known litogen and tortogen, with a clear ability to create personal injury and environmental litigation. The lawsuit industry, made up of lawyers who pursue such litigation, along with their litigation lenders and funders, and aligned with environmental advocacy groups constitute a loud and persistent, rent-seeking, support group for the IARC classification process, with its precautionary principle leanings.”

In six lines, Nathan summed up the Predatort Playbook, something that took me a decade to figure out.

As a fellow writer on the need to protect scientific evidence from the onslaught of special interests unleashed within the IARC – Ramazzini – litigation industry nexus, I find Nathan Schachtman’s meticulous book extremely valuable. While his chronologies and timelines are precise, in reading his case study of the glyphosate fiasco, I couldn’t help but wonder if his research had been published a decade earlier, how different the world would have been.

Schachtman’s “IARC’s Precautionary Science” provides the teaching; we need to demonstrate the learning.

A recent campaign by the UK-based Copper Sustainability Partnership (CuSP) chose not to advance trust in the industry’s products by stressing the sustainability of copper but rather attacked what they perceived to be the unsustainability of competitive alternatives. Worse, the Copper Sustainability Partnership relied on cheap activist-style fear campaigns to make consumers distrust alternative products. And worst of all, they built their campaign on poor scientific research while hiding similar, if not worse risks from copper. Citing activist journalist reports is not science.

An Awful Campaign

The copper industry campaign asks if you would trust plastic with your planet. The cover image focuses on a child (emotional image) standing in front of a dark pile of trash (emotional image) with text written in scaremonger font (emotional image).

The message is clear. The copper industry wants you to believe that plastic is not a sustainable product and by exclusion, that copper is better.

Other images the copper industry used include those of bees struggling to get pollen in dark, dystopian settings suggesting that bees and other pollinators are contaminated with microplastics. This is a very common activist tactic to amplify fear but it is disheartening to see such abysmal conduct from an industry trade group. While the campaign does not focus directly on pollinator health, it cites a study led by Simon Potts, a British activist scientist who was once busy claiming pesticides were killing all of the bees (until, apparently, they weren’t).

Bees are the environmental equivalent of using children in activist health campaigns. Both are deemed vulnerable, essential and emotional. Bees and children’s issues go beyond facts and measurable dose-related data, making them perfect for fear campaigns. The bee campaign tactic started with the sudden die off of honeybees some 15 years ago that activists then linked to exposure to certain insecticides (it was later concluded that any die off was due to several cold winters and the Varroa mite). When honeybee populations started thriving again, the anti-pesticides campaign simply shifted to risks to pollinators in general and certain wild bees under pressure. The beauty here is that we have very limited data on certain pollinators so activists can adopt them in any campaign they want.

The copper industry then used another activist technique of stacking campaign issues, amplifying the fear of a beepocalypse with the widespread detection of microplastics in the environment. But they are a bit late to the scare party as The Firebreak reported, most research papers on microplastics, according to the European Food Safety Authority, have been determined as junk. A recent study has concluded that the microplastics detected in many of these studies more likely came from gloves and lab equipment than from the samples tested. But still, the copper industry persevered with their claims.

What is most stunning here is the blatant hypocrisy of the copper industry for even raising these fears. Chris DeArmitt, in a LinkedIn discussion, reminded the copper trade association that dust from copper pipes is far more toxic to the environment, humans or bees than any possible microplastics could ever be.

Confronted with facts, like any NGO, the belligerents merely changed the subject.

The key motivation of the copper industry’s anti-plastics campaign is to show how plastic water pipes are unsustainable (especially when compared to copper pipes). This is an important question at the moment given the US legislation to replace all remaining lead water pipes. The US Congress created a $15 billion opportunity for whichever pipe material is determined by regional authorities to be more favorable. Plastic water pipes are far cheaper, more efficient and easier to install than steel or copper pipes, so it comes across as an act of desperation for the copper industry to wage an intensive mudslinging campaign against the safety and sustainability of plastics.

There is a deeper concern here. One of the key activist groups in the water pipe debate is Beyond Plastics, a feral group that has been leading a campaign against PVC water pipes. The Firebreak revealed how Beyond Plastics is a phantom NGO. It does not exist as a legitimate organization but is only a “project” run by a fiscal sponsor (Bennington College in Vermont). This means not only that these anti-plastic activists cannot be held accountable for the claims they make against plastics, but also, that they do not have to declare who is funding them (since they don’t, technically, exist outside of some passive liberal arts college). Given how ethically compromised the copper industry has revealed themselves to be through their direct attack on plastics, it would come as no surprise if they were also funding this rogue NGO to run campaigns against their competitors.

The Beyond Plastics 2023 report: The Perils of PVC Plastic Pipes advocated for copper pipes in the replacement of lead water pipes.

It’s All About Trust

Nobody wins when two industries openly fight with each other. The public does not calmly examine the facts and determine which product is better. They see the confrontations, focus on the negatives and pull away. When activist NGOs attack industry, the public, to a certain degree, accepts that the NGOs are expressing a bias and filter their claims. When one industry attacks another, like the copper industry has, then this has a greater impact on the loss of trust, not just on plastics, but on all of industry. This is why there is a code of conduct within most industries to always present a positive position on the benefits of their products and not get into the mud with competitors.

What has the copper industry achieved with their campaign? They claim they just want to create an open discussion about the sustainability of the products, but using fear-triggering language and images is hardly beneficial to any open discussion. The Copper Sustainability Partnership have reinforced several activist campaigns against plastics (and the NGOs surely thank them), but the audience has not turned around to trust the metals industry. Environmentalists, seeing the ecological impact of copper mining and production, will not become the copper industry’s new best friend. Who are they kidding? The only thing they achieved is a further erosion of public trust in all industries.

Would public procurement officers deciding on pipe infrastructure projects look at the risk of microplastics to bees and then choose copper over plastic? One quick look at price and installation costs of both products would put that question to rest. They will endure the protests of the anti-plastics organizations, even with the apparent support of the copper industry.

Several years ago, I wrote a series called the Industry Complex, where I implored that industries need to work together against the activist onslaught against business, capitalism and innovation. As an industry is being devoured by hungry lions, too often other industries continue grazing, business as usual, oblivious to the fact that tomorrow they will be the slowest zebra. This is not a sustainable business strategy. But the copper industry, by throwing a competitor to the activist lions, is taking the industry strategy to a much darker place. Shouldn’t wider business associations speak up and enforce basic ethical standards or codes of conduct (or throw them out)?

The copper industry needs to apologize, immediately cease this destructive activist campaign and start to behave ethically.

Another day, another ridiculous statement by Oliver Várhelyi, the European Commissioner for Health. VarHar has become the bumbling Donald Trump figure of this European Commission, with no healthcare qualifications and no respect from his team that has given up bothering to factcheck and correct his embarrassing policies and misleading statements, particularly pertaining to his dossier on the revision of the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD).

VarHar does not read the comments or Community Notes attached to his X posts, correcting the continuous flow of misinformation like his belief that nicotine causes cancer (it doesn’t), that vaping is not effective as a smoking cessation tool (the Cochrane study confirmed it is) or that e-cigarettes are as harmful as cigarettes (a UK government study concluded it is 95% less harmful).

Like the WHO / Bloomberg echo chamber, and like the Trump administration, facts don’t really matter in advancing a political agenda. Add to that the curious sideshow that Várhelyi is a Fidesz leftover from the Orban regime, fighting for his political survival, and the TPD revision is taking on an absurd plot.

May 31^st was World No Tobacco Day and VarHar’s press release was a case study in confused statements and contradictory policies.

The Commissioner begins by repeating the opinion that Europe’s tobacco policy - or the restrictive parts of it at least - have been responsible for progress made in reducing smoking rates. But this statement has already been debunked by the Commission’s Better Regulation watchdog itself, which says that claim can’t be supported. Not a good start.

Várhelyi continues:

“But while traditional smoking is decreasing, new tobacco and nicotine products are increasingly reaching a new generation. Adolescents and young adults aged 12 to 29 are particularly exposed. More than half of nicotine pouch users are under 40, one in five consumers of tobacco and nicotine products aged 15 to 19 years started by regularly using e-cigarettes, and nearly one in ten young people aged 15 to 24 has already used heated tobacco products.”

Let’s break this down line by line.

“But while traditional smoking is decreasing, new tobacco and nicotine products are increasingly reaching a new generation.”

Why doesn’t Várhelyi acknowledge that traditional smoking has decreased due, in large part, to the increased use of lower harm nicotine products. The Swedish government, the only EU member state to attain smoke-free status (less than 5% of the population smoking) has recognised that.

“Adolescents and young adults aged 12 to 29 are particularly exposed.”

The ages Várhelyi is using for young people make no sense at all. In the public consultation, young people were defined as those between the age of 10 and 24.

This is a very wide classification ranging from very vulnerable children, to free-thinking teenagers with access to information to responsible adults going well beyond the “age of consent”. VarHar then pushed the age limit up to 29 in this statement. This is an age when most smokers begin to consider the need to quit and should be given access to effective smoking cessation tools like e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches.

In the next sentence, he seems to push the age of vulnerability up to 40.

“More than half of nicotine pouch users are under 40, one in five consumers of tobacco and nicotine products aged 15 to 19 years started by regularly using e-cigarettes, and nearly one in ten young people aged 15 to 24 has already used heated tobacco products.”

This is pure “VarHar speak”, just throwing out numbers and products with no concern for reason or common sense. It resembles the Trump “Weave”, but the European Union has to manage policy with more responsibility. What is he talking about here? Pouches? Vapes? Heated tobacco?

And which age groups? 15 to 19 years old? 15 to 24? Or those under 40?

Like Trump’s Truth Social posts, VarHar’s single sentence here is just too nonsensical to even begin to try to unpack.

The press statement continues:

“This month we published both a call for evidence and public consultation on the revision of the EU Tobacco Products Directive and Tobacco Advertising Directive. We welcome all contributions to inform how we can tackle the health consequences of tobacco across the EU.”

The words “public consultation” is misleading when you consider that most of the questions are leading, meaning that the participants cannot actually express their position most of the time but are trapped by the bias of the consultation architects. In an analysis we undertook, we found that it’s impossible to express views consistent with tobacco harm reduction: advocating strong rules on cigarettes, but a permissive stance towards safer nicotine products.

That’s because safer nicotine products like vapes and nicotine pouches are grouped together with cigarettes, assuming that their safety profiles are the same and that the regulations will be applied equally to all of the various products.

When Várhelyi says he welcomes all contributions from all stakeholders, we should be reminded how, in past consultations, when thousands of ex-smokers took the time to fill out the form and declare how they were finally able to quit with the support of e-cigarettes, their contributions were downgraded as being part of a tobacco industry lobbying campaign. Stakeholders only matter when they agree with VarHar’s political agenda.

Europeans look on with horror as an imperial dictator destroys the US political establishment, replacing it with a regime of policy by diktat. But they don’t have to look that far to see a similar political manipulation in Brussels. It is time for the President of the European Commission to demand the resignation of Oliver Várhelyi.

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

A recent US Department of the Treasury announcement that organizations claiming tax exempt status (NGOs, foundations, universities and some media groups) will have to be transparent about their project and campaign funding has changed the rules of the US policy game. The news went largely unnoticed, but the Firebreak celebrated how this little adjustment to the tax declaration process will force activist groups to declare billions of dollars in dark campaign funding (which will likely deter secretive interest groups from funding further covert operations via activist groups, foundations, universities...) The environmental-health policy playing field has just been levelled, eliminating the means for NGOs to so easily control the narrative, media and public opinion.

Another Silver Spoon NGO

If anyone needs an example of abusive activist behavior from dark, special interest funding, they need to look no further than the hundreds of millions of undeclared funds pouring into the coffers of Earthjustice. Earthjustice is a law firm / NGO founded in 1972 as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (changing its name in 1997). While it functions like a law firm, Earthjustice is structured as a tax-exempt (501(c)(3)) NGO.

Looking at this non-profit’s latest IRS 990 declaration and its website, some curious things emerge. In 2025, Earthjustice had a revenue of over $207 million. But as a law firm, only $5 million of that amount came from court awards while the rest came from donations and investments. With 150 ongoing litigations in 2025, this implies that they are losing most of their cases (or have a very bad cash management system). There are two possible justifications:

1. As an NGO, they exist to sue industries as flanking strategies in support of other activist campaigns. Its clients are mostly other NGOs like the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society and Natural Resources Defense Council, as well as local conservation groups and native tribes. In other words, their goal is to continually file nuisance lawsuits against companies and governments, clogging up the US legal system with no intention of winning their cases. Much like the foundation-funded law firm, Sher Edling, lawfare is their business model.

2. The other possible explanation is that Earthjustice staff and management are living too high off the hog. Their IRS 990 declaration reveals that the top ten managers in the NGO pay themselves annual base salaries ranging from $620,000 to $360,000 - or from $50,000 to $30,000 per month (see image below). From the $207 million in 2025 revenue, $167 million went into salaries and wages.

Given how unsuccessful Earthjustice’s legal outcomes have been, and that they are functioning as an NGO, the tolerance of these unhinged salaries, like Bloomberg’s flotilla of anti-nicotine NGOs, implies that billionaire philanthropists are operating behind the scenes and allowing such largesse.

If only these foundations and NGOs would have spent this kind of money planting trees, we could finally say they are doing something positive for the environment.

Foundations and Special Interests Hiding in the Shadows

While Earthjustice chose not to be transparent on which foundations or special interests are funding their lawfare activities, a quick scan of the websites of large foundations that tend to fund NGOs to conduct similar lawsuits did show a considerable network of well-connected funders.

• The Ford Foundation was one of the initial founding donors of Earthjustice. Does it really make sense for a philanthropy built on a century of auto industry profits to be funding an NGO suing the fossil fuel and tire industries? The Ford Foundation remains a funder but there has been no disclosure of recent donations.

• The MacArthur Foundation has made 11 grants to Earthjustice totaling almost $15 million. Most of those payments have come in the last six declared years.

• Other foundations that have listed support for Earthjustice include the Sandler Foundation, Packard Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation, to name but a few (source: InfluenceWatch).

Earthjustice claims that only 17% of their funding comes from foundations, but they do not provide details. Until the Department of the Treasury announced changes to the tax declaration process, they did not have to. In their IRS 900 declaration, they list the top two donations in 2023 from two individuals, one for $15 million and the other for $14.05 million (see image below). The identity of neither donor was declared, but we can assume these individuals have means (and probably very special interests).

Why is transparency important in this matter? First of all, transparency is always important from the perspective of credibility. As long as NGOs like Earthjustice think they don’t need to reveal the interest groups operating from behind the curtain, they will never be considered as credible. How do we know that neither of the anonymous $14 million or $15 million donations in 2024 from private individuals weren’t from billionaires who would benefit from an alternative product once a competitor succumbs to relentless litigation? As these individuals would stand to profit nicely should the courts order that an industry stop using a product, then Earthjustice has a fiduciary duty to declare this conflict of interest. But they don’t.

From the 2025 financial statements, almost $25 million of Earthjustice’s net assets are donor restricted, meaning the residual funds remain earmarked for certain cases. That Earthjustice is taking these marked millions and keeping quiet is a clear indication of how morally compromised these activist zealots have become. Normal people must be wondering how these corrupted environmental campaigners sleep at night? Like most tort lawyers, they must need “very well-padded” pillows.

Even worse, Earthjustice is reportedly receiving funding from the Chinese Communist Party via an aligned Chinese energy foundation. An investigation by the Pelican Institute For Public Policy revealed that Earthjustice received donations exceeding $6.5 million from Energy Foundation China to file lawsuits against American fossil fuel energy interests. Chinese industries would benefit both from the sudden increased market for renewables and batteries in the US and from handicapping US energy and industrial capacity. Did Earthjustice file a FARA registration for foreign funding? Of course not. Like every other donation, the NGO kept its funding non-disclosed. The US government should shut Earthjustice down as an enemy of the state.

Conflicts of interest are only recognized as conflicts if the activist organizations decide to declare them. Zealots, though, think the objectives of their campaigns are more important than any ethical codes of conduct, so declaring their special interest funding will only happen if they are forced to. With the recent changes to the US IRS 990 form tax requirements, Earthjustice can no longer maintain these secret, dark alliances.

In a case like this, saying: “Trust us, we’re an NGO!” just doesn’t cut it. Especially when top directors are already enriching themselves and have an obvious interest that goes well beyond any so-called justice for the earth.

Shoddy Reporting

The Daily Mail was one of the few mainstream media groups to cover last week’s Greenpeace report. In an article spookily entitled: “The pesticides lurking in your roast dinner: Scientists discover a cocktail of over 100 dangerous chemicals in the Sunday staple – with onions and leeks harbouring the most”, the journalist, Shivali Best, applied Chemophobia 101 rules without reserve:

• focus on the contamination of common foods eaten during a weekly family tradition,

• cite how these baddies are lurking and ready to attack you and

• stress the presumed chemical cocktail of dangerous chemicals.

Shivali Best claims the title of the Daily Mail’s “Science and Technology Editor”, but she missed the point in the very title. I suppose Greenpeace should have done a better job proofreading the final copy. It is not 100 dangerous chemicals (there are a thousand dangerous chemicals in a cup of coffee) waiting to attack us, but rather more than 100 pesticides. Perhaps a chemical and a pesticide are the same thing to a naive chemophobe. Best also warned the Daily Mail readers about the existence of “PFAs” or “forever chemicals” in your dinner (I think she meant to say “PFAS”).

Such scientific illiteracy is just what Greenpeace is looking for when they push their research garbage through the media meat grinder. But is this the best the Daily Mail can find as their “Science and Technology Editor”?

The Daily Mail article did add a small dose of reality in the reporting:

“Most samples contained pesticides residues below the maximum residue level (MRL), which is the amount legally allowed on food or in animal feed. Officials say these are set usually well below the level considered safe, applying to food both grown domestically and imported from abroad.”

But the journalist quickly questioned whether the MRL levels were actually safe, especially when other chemicals from “drinking water, plastic packaging and a range household products” were added to this apparently toxic cocktail of industrial poisons.

This tangent to all sorts of other chemical exposures was not in the Greenpeace report. Shivali Best clearly wants to be running her own anti-chemicals campaign, but her day-job pays the rent, for now.

The Methodology?

The Greenpeace report itself is only 24 pages (much like a second-year university term paper in both effort and quality) with a very simple data-gathering methodology.

Greenpeace came to its conclusions by filtering through a public database that lists all pesticides allowed for use on these seven food staples. That is all they did (as well as creating some rudimentary infographics for their media amplification). They did not explain how and when these 102 pesticides are applied, if at all. They did not compare them to the chemical usage in organic farming or to the levels of exposure found on the crops. It was merely a numbers game to create a shocking headline to feed to the chemophobic faithful.

The reality is that farmers use pesticides only if and when needed. More than risk, it is a question of time and money. If the summer is excessively damp, they will need to use fungicides to protect crops from the elements. They won’t need to use them in a dry summer. Certain areas and weather conditions leave crops prone to insect infestations, so it is good for farmers to know they have certain tools in their crop protection toolbox to use if needed.

Greenpeace isn’t interested in that reality. They want to show the number of 102 pesticides (which is really quite a small amount to protect every potential threat to seven staple crops) and claim that they are being repeatedly doused on crops, destroying the environment and causing unnecessary health risks.

The Rhetoric BINGO Card

Greenpeace packed a significant amount of emotional rhetoric into such a small report. Here are some of the NGO’s more spine-chilling classics:

“Everywhere we look, nature is barely hanging on. The struggles of our moths and butterflies are anything but unique. They reflect how the foundations of our environment are crumbling.”

“Imidacloprid and fipronil have been banned in agriculture because they are so potent, but they remain in heavy use in the UK as part of popular over-the-counter flea treatments for our millions of pet dogs and cats. A single monthly dose for a large dog is enough to kill 25 million bees.”

Wait, so treating Fido for fleas kills 25 million bees a month??? Why doesn’t Greenpeace just campaign to ban dogs (they are also a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions)? By the time a reader comes across this claim, reality has been sufficiently numbed.

The chemophobic rhetoric hasn’t changed much over the last three decades I have been watching the evolution of Greenpeace campaigns. It is, however, now no longer just fear of chemicals and pesticides poisoning our land. Almost every paragraph in the Greenpeace report was amended with the inclusion of “artificial nitrogen fertilizers” or “synthetic fertilizers”. Their anti-fertilizer campaign has to qualify the threat from synthetic or man-made fertilizers because, like pesticides, organic farming also needs to enrich the soil. Greenpeace is attacking an essential agricultural tool while assuming that natural cow dung releases no harmful chemicals into the soil and groundwater. Greenpeace wants to have their poisons and eat them too.

So why is natural, animal-based fertilizers more preferred by these cosmopolitan zealots? According to the report, these synthetic, industrial fertilizers are just too efficient. I wish I were making this up.

“Artificial nitrogen fertilisers are very different chemicals. They boost the nutrient content of the soil far beyond natural levels, rather than killing animals and plants. But in doing so they also disrupt our environment.”

This is all about industrial agriculture, getting more from the soil, and that goes against the activist, post-capitalist orthodoxy.

It also goes against common sense and social justice.

It also goes against the goal of the report to show how seven UK food staples are dripping in pesticides. The constant references to fertilizers, their burden on the environment and their increased financial costs given the recent wars in Ukraine and Iran, shows how Greenpeace is unable to focus their campaigns on a coherent message. They just like to rant.

There were no quotes from experts or other views. Greenpeace did not attempt a balanced review and they did not consider the pesticide load on organic vegetables (which use equally toxic pesticides approved for organic farming). This is activist science – the goal is not evidence or discovery, it is about advancing a campaign.

But the NGO cannot help itself – it is in its activist DNA. But the Daily Mail should have sought out expert views beyond the prepared Greenpeace script. Shoddy journalism in the true style of the Daily Mail (one of the only media groups to cover this campaign, except for an X post from GMWatch).

The Conflation Tactic

Fear is stronger when it can be associated with other, unrelated fears. NGOs like Greenpeace saw how effective that conflation tactic could be in likening ultra-processed food production to Big Tobacco, trying to claim the same researchers are up to their old tricks. Piling fear and outrage of one known industrial malfeasance on top of the targeted scare campaign creates a perception of a relentless industry playbook to harm consumers and the environment and a complicit government to corrupt to bother to stop the continued destruction.

In this case, pesticide use is conflated with Big Tobacco and Big Oil. The report executive summary states:

“Yet for too long the government’s response has been ponderous. Agribusinesses have used tactics previously employed by tobacco and oil companies, systematically undermining scientific evidence of the damage they inflict.”

This is not about actual toxicity or risk to human health and the environment, but rather about how big business is controlling our food supply.

The NGO has also not missed the opportunity to conflate pesticides with PFAS even though the term represents over 10,000 fluorine-based formulations and the one often cited as being used in agriculture, TFA, has been determined to be harmless. But it’s PFAS, it’s a chemical, so it’s bad.

How these tired scaremongers continue to operate without critical scrutiny or public disgust is beyond me.

If you’ve been following the Firebreak’s running investigation into how U.S. foundations use fiscal sponsors, NGO networks, and compliant journalists to reshape entire industries in their own ideological image, then Marc Gunther’s piece this week in Inside Philanthropy (“Yanqui Go Home: Chilean Salmon Farmers Say U.S. Foundations Are the New Colonialists”) will feel immediately familiar. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, headquartered in Los Altos, California, is funding a coordinated network of NGOs, legal groups, journalism programs, and certification bodies systematically working to shut down Chilean salmon farming, an industry that generates $6.3 billion in annual exports and supports between 60,000 and 86,000 workers across the Araucanía, Los Lagos, Aysén, and Magallanes regions of southern Chile.

Gunther tells the story well, but the scale of the operation is such that one can’t capture it in a single feature piece. One of Gunther’s sources, a letter sent from the Chilean Salmon Council to Packard’s Board several months ago—a copy of which the Firebreak has obtained—is rife with detail about that foundation’s work that didn’t make the cut.

Here’s some of what was left out.

Where the “green colonialism” comes from

Juan Carlos Tonko Paterito is the president of the Kawésqar Indigenous Community in Puerto Edén, a remote fishing settlement deep in Chile’s Patagonian channels. In July 2019 he published an open letter in the ICCA Consortium’s Latin America bulletin titled “Indigenismo y colonias verdes”: Indigenism and Green Colonies. He was writing about what he had watched happen to his territory after the Tompkins land donation put Magallanes on the international conservation map, and the NGOs followed.

“Diverse organizations of environmentalists have appeared here for the business of conservation, humiliation and submission,” he wrote. He described how they arrived with maps already drawn, dividing territory between them—“an NGO here, another there.” One representative told him Magallanes should become “a climate refuge.” Tonko Paterito asked the obvious question: for whom? Not for the Kawésqar, who already lived there. “They are trying to depopulate forever a huge territory,” he wrote, “as a ‘climate refuge’ for rich green people.”

He called indigenous communities that cooperated with the NGO network “the new yanaconas”—a charged historical reference to the indigenous people who served as auxiliaries to Spanish colonial forces. “The new yanaconas are now digital and globalized at the hand of the green colonialists.” He was not writing in support of the salmon industry. He was writing about the loss of his people’s sovereignty over decisions affecting their own land. “Our counterpart are the States, not the NGOs,” he concluded. “It cannot be that we are at the mercy of organizations we don’t know, ones for which the Chilean citizens have not voted to govern our destinies.”

That is the precursor of the phrase “philanthro-colonialism” that the Chilean Salmon Council’s letter deploys.

The boat that wouldn’t dock

In April 2023, a local media group, Patagonia Ambiental, reported on how Greenpeace and Oceana sailed the yacht Witness through the channels and fjords of southern Chile on a campaign they called “Patagonia sin salmoneras”—Patagonia without salmon farms. The campaign was well-funded, well-publicized, and designed to document the industry’s environmental footprint from the water.

When the Witness arrived at the pier in Puerto Natales, it was met by a protest. Artisanal fishermen, processing-plant workers, and representatives of the Kawésqar community had turned out on the dock with banners. Among them was Amil Caro, a Kawésqar elder, holding a sign that read: “Greenpeace won’t pay my bills.” He had tried to approach the vessel to speak with the crew. The crew chose not to disembark. Port authorities had to prevent protesters from approaching the boat.

According to Chilean journalist Claudio Andrade, it was the first time Greenpeace had encountered this kind of reception in the region. Greenpeace raises significant funds presenting itself as the protector of indigenous communities. That April, a Kawésqar elder walked to the dock to speak with them. They stayed on the boat.

Carlos Odebret, president of the Magallanes Salmon Farmers Association, told the trade publication Salmonexpert afterward: “There is no possible improvement if activists, like Greenpeace, without asking anyone, seek to leave the people of Magallanes without opportunities.”

The legislation the NGOs are weaponizing

The letter to Packard devotes considerable space to a regulatory mechanism that hasn’t gotten much attention in English-language coverage: the ECMPO, or Coastal Marine Space for Native Peoples (Espacio Costero Marino de los Pueblos Originarios), established under Chile’s Lafkenche Law. The law allows indigenous communities to petition for coastal exclusivity over traditional-use areas—a legitimate protection mechanism that, the letter argues, is being systematically deployed by NGO-funded legal teams as an industrial chokehold.

In Chiloé, ECMPO applications covering more than 621,000 hectares have been filed on behalf of just 36 indigenous people. The math: roughly 17,000 hectares of marine exclusivity per person. Marcelo Lipka, VP of the Multi-Union of Salmon Farming Workers, described it plainly: those 36 people “now get to say who works in their areas and who does not, thus impacting our work.” Gerardo Balbontín, General Manager of Blumar, said the NGOs had found a way to “trap” salmon farming by overwhelming the regulatory system with ECMPO requests faster than it could process them.

Packard has funded this directly: $836,100 to FIMA, Chile’s foremost environmental litigation firm, with one 2025 grant explicitly labeled a “civil society communications campaign.” FIMA has won five consecutive environmental tribunal rulings against named salmon farms. Packard separately gave $226,000 to Observatorio Ciudadano to build a “legal network for indigenous communities”—the mechanism that connects the litigators to the indigenous plaintiffs whose standing the lawsuits require. The lawfare is coordinated, not coincidental.

What it produced in practice: In May 2023, tens of thousands of workers marched from Biobío to Magallanes against pending legislation that would have further restricted salmon farming in protected areas. The marches stretched the length of a country. Signs read: “¿Sin salmoneras quién nos paga el sueldo? ¡¿Las ONGs?!”—“Without salmon farms, who pays our salary? The NGOs?!” The protest in Puerto Natales alone drew 2,000 people and a vehicle caravan four kilometers long. Participants included not just salmon workers but artisanal fishermen, shellfish farmers, truck drivers, and indigenous community members.

Chilean Senator Fidel Espinoza captured the mood with a tweet directed at the government: “Stop governing from Ñuñoa and from comfortable positions.” Ñuñoa is a wealthy Santiago suburb.

The response from Packard? The letter reports that not one of the workers, union leaders, indigenous representatives, or elected officials mentioned in its pages has ever met anyone from the foundation, received a call, or received a reply to correspondence.

The NGO transparency bill they’re trying to stop

One consequence of all this that hasn’t been reported in English at all: Chile is on the verge of passing landmark legislation requiring NGOs to disclose their foreign funding. Deputy Miguel Ángel Calisto, who represents Aysén—the region most affected by the regulatory campaign—authored the bill.

Calisto’s stated rationale cuts to the heart of what Gunther’s piece describes: many NGOs “mask negative intentions, such as undermining industries like salmon farming, behind positive rhetoric,” he said, and use regulatory mechanisms to “trap” the sector. “There are some organizations labeled ‘indigenous’ but some are disguised to hide their true intentions. We need to know how many NGOs are in the country and who finances them.”

Greenpeace Chile Director Matías Asun gave the Senate Environment Committee an unintentionally useful piece of testimony in 2024. He told the committee that his organization had “so many economic resources that he could easily stop projects of industries like salmon for up to 2,000 days.”

Packard’s website promises “engaged sensitivity toward the communities its work impacts.” It promises to “work with those communities to develop and carry out solutions” and to ensure “communities have a meaningful voice in decisions that impact their lives.” It is a reasonable aspiration. The gap between that language and what Tonko Paterito described in Puerto Edén, what Amil Caro experienced at the Puerto Natales dock, and what the workers marching from Biobío to Magallanes were protesting—that gap is so big not even Gunther’s carefully reported piece could capture it all.

Will Packard Defend Its Actions?

The Packard letter from which most of these details come is signed jointly by the Chilean Salmon Marketing Council and El Instituto Tecnológico del Salmón, and runs to several thousand words. It is addressed directly to Jason K. Burnett, Chair of Packard’s Board of Trustees, with the full board copied.

It closes with three questions: 1) Whether the board believes Packard’s conduct in Chile meets its own stated ethical standards for community engagement. 2) Whether it is troubled that a comprehensive range of Chilean stakeholders feels deeply insulted by the campaign it has underwritten. and 3) Whether the board will commit to visiting the affected communities in person for direct dialogue.

The Firebreak has spent three years documenting a specific and repeating pathology in the world of big-philanthropy-funded environmentalism: the substitution of communities’ own expressed interests with the preferences of distant, wealthy institutions that claim to speak on their behalf. We’ve tracked it through agricultural policy in Europe, through fisheries debates in the North Atlantic, through the quiet defunding of inconvenient science. The Chilean salmon story is—so far—the most completely documented single case of the pattern we’ve found anywhere. This is what the Firebreak exists to document: not the lofty stated goals of these institutions, but the real-life consequences for the people in the communities where their money lands.

Clarification / Editor’s Note:

Firebreak has received an email from Oceana declaring the organization “had no involvement whatsoever with the yacht Witness or with the “Patagonia sin salmoneras” campaign, contrary to our reporting. Oceana points to a passage in our article that, “In April 2023, Greenpeace and Oceana sailed the yacht Witness… on a campaign they called ‘Patagonia sin salmoneras’” insisting that was incorrect.

Our characterization was based on Chilean news outlets (such as this article in Patagonia Ambiental) that reported on the Greenpeace and Oceana campaign against the salmon farming industry and described local demonstrators as being outraged at both groups. Here is a key passage from that Patagonia Ambiental article, reporting contemporaneously from the scene of those demonstrations.

“Two environmental organizations, Greenpeace and Oceana, are carrying out a plan of action against the continued presence and installation of salmon farms in the region. Aboard the Greenpeace yacht Witness, they are traveling through the channels and fjords of southern Chile until April 22. According to their statements, their task is to document the activity of the salmon farming industry in the region and how it affects the environment.

This campaign affected their arrival in Puerto Natales, where people who earn their income from the activity turned out to demonstrate. Artisanal fishermen, representatives of the Kawésqar community, and employees of several processing plants received them with banners in which they defended salmon farming activity, opposing the environmentalists’ intention to ban the industry throughout Patagonia.Faced with this situation, the crew of the yacht — among whom are journalists, scientists, and Greenpeace campaigns coordinator Estefanía González — decided not to disembark to avoid conflicts. Port authorities, meanwhile, prohibited protesters from approaching the vessel.”

We can assume that Oceana has already contacted the Patagonia Ambiental media group with a similar complaint, but they seem to be standing by the evidence they reported on.

It’s worth noting also that, over just five years, Packard has given Oceana close to $1 million, according to Packard’s financial disclosures — while both organizations operate as part of the same coordinated multi-funder coalition driving anti-salmon-farming advocacy in Chile.

We are glad to note here, however, that Oceana explicitly disavows any involvement in the Greenpeace yacht or the Patagonia sin Salmoneres campaign — and we have modified that portion of our article to reflect the original attribution to Chilean news outlets.

What would happen if the health zealot policies imposed against tobacco harm reduction strategies were to be applied to a greater addictive activity: food consumption? We would, for one thing, make far greater health advances and see important reductions in noncommunicable diseases. As a dogmatic health zealot, I am ready to take the lead in imposing this on our ignorant, addictive consumers.

Food is addictive by nature. The food industry deliberately makes food sweet, tasty, flavorful, attractive in presentation (via colors and packaging), aromas and textures. Because of this manipulation, consumers find pleasure in food, overeat, become obese and expose themselves to an enormous number of diseases like cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. As consumers easily become addicted to food and the pleasure of eating, and as they cannot be trusted to make good food decisions by themselves, others like myself need to step in and control how and what they eat.

Such interventions into food choices are based on the belief that all addictions are bad and must be prevented by those righteous enough to assume leadership and enforce their views on others. Such techniques have been used to prevent smokers from taking up reduced harm alternative nicotine strategies like vaping and nicotine pouches so its success against food addiction is, well, baked in.

To this end, I am introducing a “Safe Food” concept restaurant that will prevent food addiction and promote healthy eating that is also better for the planet. The menu and restaurant will have the following features:

No Flavors

Bland, tasteless food prevents people from overeating. Our sustainable cuisine involves removing all spices, salt and sugars from the few plates on offer. It is hard to imagine people wanting to eat more flavorless foods than what is necessary for sustenance. This will contribute an enormous amount to fighting food addiction and improving public health. Banning food flavors will perhaps be the greatest health advance humanity has ever seen as it will immediately curb food consumption. We will focus this food revolution on the young, who will be less resistant to the removal of tasty food or long dining experiences (as they tend to see meals as interruptions in their gaming endeavors … another addiction we will soon have to address).

No Bright Colors

Food arranged in a pleasant or attractive presentation creates an emotional bond before the first bite is taken. Tests have shown that bright colors add to food addiction (not to mention the health risks from unnecessary food coloring). This is how children get hooked on bad food choices. All of our restaurant food will be dull, brown and unpleasant to look at. It will essentially be a consolidated mash. Our takeout food will be covered in plain packaging with no attractive logos or convenient wrapping.

No Aromas

Anyone who has walked by a Belgian frituur or waffle house on an empty stomach knows how smell influences how addictive food can be. Engineering food to smell nice contributes to making food attractive, so this practice will need to be regulated out. Our goal within the next five years is to move to food legislation towards ensuring they emit a repellent aroma (with soapy or stale notes) to ensure that people only eat when they have to.

No Textures

Part of the addictive attraction to food is the texture food may have in the mouth (as in crunchy vegetables, smooth creams, fatty meats and food that is warm to the tongue). This contributes nothing to the nutritional value of food but only makes it more pleasant to eat. Pleasant dining encourages food addiction. By banning all food textures, we will also reduce food waste, food preservation costs and energy use. Everything just gets thrown into the blender.

No Choices

Giving consumers choices increases consumption and encourages marketing techniques. These are the pillars of the industrial food system and cannot be tolerated in our post-capitalist world where degrowth and sustainable food chains are more important than consumers thinking they can get what they want at any expense to the planet. With fewer choices, people will eat less as the banality of the culinary experience will remove the addictive attraction of the joy trap. People will learn that it is better to eat to live rather than to live to eat.

No Comfort or Celebrations

There was a time when people would over-consume at a table with friends or family, eating and drinking for hours at a time. It usually involved a large roast or some other farmed livestock, where the cruelty of animal slaughter was actually celebrated. With our new, sustainable, healthy approach to food, the comfort of a meal as a feast will be replaced with the recognition of the selfishness of such abundance. People will learn to feel better when they eat better for the planet and their health. Our restaurant will have hard seats and small tables, but guests will be encouraged to stand while eating (to promote digestion and enable a faster customer turnover).

More Expensive

Based on the thought experiments performed by the good people at the True Cost of Food, our restaurants will double the price of food, first because we have been promoting a heavy taxation policy on food consumption and secondly, because the ability for the food chain to support the alimentary needs of a growing population without crop protection technologies means we needed to disincentivize certain food production methods and markets. While higher taxes on tobacco and alternative nicotine products have proven to be a dismal failure leading to increased black markets and gang violence, we believe that higher food taxes will be different. Certain foods will be taxed to the point of prohibition, leaving the healthier, more sustainable and less addictive foods to fill the void. Let them eat mash.

Postscript:

Our first Safe Food restaurant had to close almost immediately after opening as it appears no one was interested in eating our non-addictive selections. This was surprising because when we imposed these very same tactics on the vaping and smoking communities, the nicotine addicts just shrugged their shoulders and adjusted to the new situation (with many going back to smoking). We also received a lot of unwanted verbal abuse, which is sad because we see ourselves as very good people doing very good things to save humanity and the planet. In any case, we will not relent. We are presently seeking funding from several billionaire philanthropists to re-open on a larger scale. There is this former New York mayor with emotional baggage about past food fights that seems quite interested.

The US litigation industry is constantly trying to find the next Big Tobacco. As the number of tort law firms grow, with the increasing costs of multi-district mass tort litigations, the amount of debt multiplying via the litigation finance loan sharks, law firms have become desperate to find the next big carcinogen or extend the longevity of existing caseloads. Central to this search is their scientific community of litigation consultants involved with the International Agency for Research in Cancer (IARC) and the Collegium Ramazzini.

IARC has been prone to publish monographs that “coincidentally” have an important influence on the evidence needed for big ticket lawsuits. The best known case is the IARC glyphosate monograph, that had litigation industry fingerprints all over it before the agency’s scientific panel of experts had even met to determine the herbicide’s carcinogenicity. IARC has also been used to produce further evidence to expand the number of ongoing lawsuits like benzene (where litigation consultants forced IARC to go back and perform an extra week-long monograph expert panel meeting to manufacture a link between benzene and non-Hodgkin lymphoma). Such is the case with the third, and most recent monograph on talc where IARC was seen to be working on behalf of the litigation industry.

The Three Talc Monographs

Talc is a naturally occurring mineral known for its smoothness and softness. Most will know talc in its fine powder form as talcum powder, but it has a very wide number of uses, including many cosmetics and personal care products, in pharmaceuticals as fillers, carriers and lubricants, in food as anti-caking and polishing agents and many industrial uses from ceramics to paints, plastics and paper. Talc is also used in school products like chalk, sculpture materials and crayons.

Talc and asbestos are both silicate minerals often found in the same geological deposits, suggesting a risk of cross-contamination during mining. Industries have assured consumers that their talc has been asbestos-free since the 1970s but recent Predatort lawsuits have tried to cast doubt on that assertion. The first IARC monograph on talc in 1987 looked at the occupational hazards of talc with and without asbestiform fibers, concluding that only talc with asbestos was carcinogenic (Group 1).

The second IARC talc monograph in 2010 again looked at talc with and without asbestiform fibers, but focused on the use of talcum powder from the perspective of inhalation versus perineal applications. They found there was limited evidence for carcinogenicity (Group 2B) for the perineal use of talc-based body powder.

It is important to note that in 2010 there were already a number of lawsuits against talc mining companies and personal care companies like J&J. But the successful cases against J&J linked mesothelioma cancers to the talcum powder with potential asbestos contamination. There were thousands of other plaintiffs with cancers that did not fit the asbestos link. If only there could be some evidence linking these cancers to talc.

The third IARC talc monograph in 2025 only examined talc without asbestiform fibers, and unlike the previous two monographs, “succeeded” in classifying this uncontaminated form of talc as Group 2A – probably carcinogenic to humans. (A Group 2A classification was the minimum needed for legal wordsmiths to convince a jury of a link between talc exposure and cancer, allowing Predatorts to increase their plaintiff pool with a wider range of cancers.)

Irregularities with IARC’s Third Talc Monograph

One could assume that the differences in the outcomes of these three talc monographs were due to better research and more data to prove a link to certain cancers. But there were no new studies that threw overwhelming evidence to move talc from a Group 3 classification (inadequate evidence of carcinogenicity) in 1987 to Group 2B (possibly carcinogenic) in 2010 and finally, in 2025, Group 2A (probably carcinogenic). Rather, there were a series of irregularities that suggest the third talc monograph was produced with ulterior motives.

• The 2025 IARC talc working group relied heavily on the 1993 NTP animal study, claiming it provided sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity. The problem here is that the 2010 IARC talc monograph considered this very same study to be inadequate and lacking relevance.

• The 2019 IARC Advisory Committee considered talc as a priority substance for the upcoming monograph meetings. Among thousands of potential substances that had not yet been considered by the monograph program, and given there were no significant studies since the last talc monograph, was there really any justification for bumping talc again up the priority list?

• IARC rushed the publication of the talc part of the IARC expert meetings to June, 2025 instead of waiting and publishing the full monograph together in September of that year, together with the chapter on acrylonitrile. There was no reason to break with standard publication protocol and publish a partial document only to republish it in full three months later.

• Importantly, there was significant dissent against the conclusions of IARC’s 2025 talc classification. While IARC never publishes dissenting views (considering them as abstentions) and pretends their monographs represent a scientific consensus, the dissenting talc working group experts did not stay silent (see below). Taking their views into account, the 2025 IARC talc monograph should have classified talc, at best, as Group 2B, possibly carcinogenic.

The only rational justification for these actions is to look at IARC’s decisions through the “litigation lens”. In 2019, when the IARC Advisory Committee bumped talc up the priority list, law firms were amassing tens of thousands of lawsuits against J&J on talc, but with only a few of them relying on the mesothelioma asbestos link.

The 2019 IARC Preamble revision also made it almost certain that talc without asbestos contamination would be classified as probably carcinogenic (see below). Rushing the publication of the talc part of the full monograph before the final report was complete would only make sense if you consider the high number of talc lawsuits in front of juries at the time.

But perhaps the most damning indictment of IARC’s indentured servitude to the US litigation industry is how a group made up mostly of scientists working as litigation consultants to US tort law firms worked to revise the IARC Preamble, the guidance document for how IARC classifies carcinogenicity. They basically ensured that IARC monographs would be “litigation-ready”.

IARC Moved the Goalposts

In 2016, a group of scientists closely linked to IARC or the Collegium Ramazzini published a paper linking cancers to Ten Key Characteristics. By 2019, this strategic approach was adopted into the revision of the IARC Preamble (the guidance document for monograph classifications). See the Firebreak’s analysis of IARC’s Key Characteristics strategy.

The “key characteristics” concept claims that cancers share many of the same characteristics. If a substance, for example, is genotoxic, alters DNA, induces oxidative stress or chronic inflammation … then there is a higher likelihood it is a carcinogen. The logic is that the more of these characteristics a substance shares, the more carcinogenic it is. If benzene, for example, shares seven of the ten key characteristics, there is strong confidence that it is carcinogenic. Note that IARC merely conducts hazard assessments, so a finding like “glyphosate is genotoxic” does not consider at what dose or level of exposure such a hazard might become an actual risk.

The problem with this checklist approach is that any substance can fall under a certain number of these characteristics and still not be carcinogenic. A paper published by Becker et al found the 10 Key Characteristics to be so open as to not be able to discriminate between a carcinogen and a non-carcinogen. Becker tested the Ten Key Characteristics against 248 substances (of which 54 were carcinogens) and found the IARC checklist could not distinguish the non-carcinogens.

Once the goalposts had been moved with the Preamble revision, IARC could go back and reassess a number of substances that had not delivered litigation-friendly classifications (like talc). But not every scientist on the IARC working group panels appreciated the lawsuit expediency of such strategies. Not every scientist on IARC expert panels worked for the US litigation industry.

The EPA’s Andrew J. Ghio was a member of the third IARC talc monograph panel and wrote a letter to the editor to the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine in February, 2025. He noted that the different classifications between the 2010 and 2025 IARC talc monographs were not made on the basis of any new research or evidence, but because IARC had updated their Preamble – the rules for determining the carcinogenicity of a substance.

As a member of this working group, I suggest that this conclusion conflicts, in part, with a previous IARC classification that provided that inhaled talc not containing asbestos or asbestiform fibers was a group 3 carcinogen (“not classifiable”), while perineal use of talc-based body powder was a group 2B carcinogen (“possibly carcinogenic”) (2). These evaluations were conducted by two working groups that included some of the same experts who reviewed much of the same data (1, 2). The dissimilar conclusions of the two groups may reflect the impact of an amended IARC monograph preamble, delivered between the two classifications, that was intended to provide a stronger and more transparent method for the identification of carcinogenic hazards (3).

For this reason, Ghio and other working group members dissented. But IARC did not address their concerns in the monograph report.

IARC in Service to the US Litigation Industry

At least ten of the 19 scientists involved in the IARC 2012 workshop to establish the Ten Key Characteristics have worked as litigation consultants, including the lead author and main architect of this checklist strategy, Martyn T Smith. They knew the value a simple checklist would have in convincing a jury of a link between a substance and a cancer.

The Key Characteristics approach is not scientific, avoids having to deal with epidemiology, or even the difficult rodent evidence of carcinogenicity, and turns the science into an automated process. There is no scientific justification for the Ten Key Characteristics of Carcinogenicity to have ever made its way into the IARC guidance document for cancer classification.

IARC monograph program managers, namely the head, Kurt Straif, and the later acting head, Kathryn Guyton, were complicit from the start in the conception and integration of this key characteristics strategy. SlimeGate has reported how these two scientists were very active in pushing the IARC glyphosate monograph into the political / policy realm and how they used dirty tactics against other scientific agencies that disagreed with their conclusions.

Many of these scientists are also Collegium Ramazzini fellows, a type of closed-membership club of activist scientists closely intertwined with IARC. Several of the scientists have been involved in developing the concept of adversarial regulation. The logic, following the La Jolla Tobacconization Playbook, is that regulation does not work at curbing the power and pollution of industry, so it is better for scientists to work with Predatort law firms and sue the hell out of industry until they submit (or, better, go bankrupt). It worked to bring Big Tobacco to its knees and is now being applied against the fossil fuel, pesticide, chemical, plastic and food industries. And with the IARC / Ramazzini network, it has also made a certain select group of scientists very wealthy.

A logical argument would be to simply retract the IARC monographs that have been shown to be corrupted. Every national risk assessment agency that has looked at IARC’s evidence on glyphosate has rejected the conclusions and kept their regulations on the herbicide unchanged. That should be enough to retract IARC’s glyphosate monograph (let alone the corruption revealed by Reuters in IARC’s post-meeting document production). The dissenting views of the 2025 IARC talc monograph that went unattributed is sufficient reason to retract that document.

But retracting these monographs would imply that IARC monographs have a scientific value. It seems, more and more, that their only value is found in the courtrooms.

As the new Hungarian Prime Minister, Péter Magyar, begins to dismantle the corruption of the former Orbán regime, removing VarHar must be on his “to-do” list. There are many good reasons to justify removing him from office.

• He has already been deemed incompetent by the European Parliament given they would only approve his second posting as Commissioner for Health and Animal Welfare if certain responsibilities (oversight of the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority, as well as safeguarding sexual and reproductive health rights) were removed from his mandate.

• Várhelyi is a lawyer and career diplomat. Unlike his predecessors, he is neither a medical doctor nor public health specialist. He is as qualified to run the European Health Directorate General as RFK Jr is at the Department of Health and Human Services.

• His previous post, as European Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement from 2019 to 2024, was widely criticized. He was accused of bias towards Serbian interests while meddling in internal Bosnian politics.

• He has repeatedly shown disrespect to Members of the European Parliament, at one time calling them “idiots” on a hot mic.

• Even worse, when he was the Hungarian ambassador to the European Union, there were reports that he was running a spy ring out of his Brussels office. A recent European Parliament investigation into Várhelyi concluded that his actions “demonstrate a pattern that is incompatible with the standards of accountability, reliability and sound administration required of a Member of the Commission.”

VarHar has no experience in health issues and carries a stench of corruption wherever he goes while his mistakes and missteps seem to confirm his incompetence.

Inexperienced and Incapable

Almost two years on, it is clear that Olivér Várhelyi has failed to reassure anyone that he is capable of carrying out any health-related responsibilities. He has made a large number of claims that have embarrassed the European Union within the health research community.

Outside of implementing the strategies from the previous European Commission, VarHar has only taken the lead on one new regulation: the revision of the European Tobacco Products Directive (TPD), and there his inexperience and lack of knowledge has been troubling. In February, a group of 23 scientists and professors wrote the President of the European Commission an eight-page letter outlining Várhelyi’s “false and misleading European Commission statements about novel nicotine product safety”.

Some further examples of VarHar’s false and unscientific claims:

• VarHar falsely declared on an X post that nicotine causes cancer (see image below). As nicotine is widely known to not be a carcinogen, the post was quickly taken down when someone with some scientific literacy corrected him. But since then, he has been making claims like vaping and nicotine pouches being as harmful as tobacco, or relying on a series of questionable studies to falsely claim that these tobacco harm reduction strategies cause a wide number of diseases, including even obesity. Hmm…

• A recent report to guide the upcoming EU Tobacco Products Directive revision was subcontracted to a group of anti-nicotine NGOs and the statements were so biased and unsubstantiated that the Regulatory Scrutiny Board (RSB) rejected it (see image below). Várhelyi ignored the concerns of the RSB and the European Ombudsman and published the report without revision. He regularly references parts of the report out of context. Since then, the management of the TPD regulatory process has been quietly moved to another more science-oriented unit within the Health Directorate.

• VarHar’s attitude to the upcoming consultation on whether alternative nicotine products should fall under the most stringent tax and regulatory measures as tobacco products has been curious to say the least. He stated during a recent speech that it is clear for him that e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches were as harmful as tobacco products. Going into a consultation on the revision of the Tobacco Products Directive, Várhelyi stated: “But the winner must be sure when we start this whole exercise. It has to be, it has to be the consumers. It has to be the young generation.“ So will VarHar just cancel the consultation requirement and impose his views? Or will he patiently wait until the “idiots” finish? That seems to be what he has been doing all along.

As Orbán’s man in Brussels, combative and scandal-prone, should we still be asking these questions or should VarHar be sent packing?

How do you remove a European Commissioner?

There are different ways to remove an ineffective, corrupt and embarrassingly ignorant European Commissioner like Olivér Várhelyi.

• The Commission President can force a resignation. This is the easiest and cleanest option, but like so many other issues, Ursula von der Leyen does not seem to have the stomach for such a fight.

• The Court of Justice of the EU can force VarHar’s removal arguing that he no longer meets the conditions for office or is guilty of serious misconduct. The Brussels spy ring scandal or his meddling in Serbian and Bosnian politics could allow a case to be made, but this will take years and the combative Orbanist will certainly fight it out.

• The European Parliament can only remove the whole Commission (like they did in 1999 with the Santer Commission over the misconduct of the Commissioner for Research, Édith Cresson), but as they would need a two-thirds majority vote, they would have to be very angry. After VarHar called the MEPs “idiots”, I think they are close.

• The new Hungarian Prime Minister cannot remove a commissioner who is now in office as an EU official. Once confirmed, Member States have no formal control over their Commissioner appointments. But there is no doubt that Péter Magyar has discussed a possible new Commissioner with von der Leyen who does have the power. Likewise, Magyar’s Tisza party, as part of the European People’s Party, is putting pressure on the EPP to persuade Ursula von der Leyen, a member of the EPP, to have her take the easy route. Manfred Weber won’t be able to keep betting on this lame horse for much longer.

The reality though is that an embattled Commissioner, fighting to stay in power amid claims of spying, an Orbán legacy, incompetence and corruption is not doing a service to the European Commission. Worse, he is becoming a folk hero to Commission-haters on the far right that welcome dysfunctional governance.

VarHar seems to think that the best defense is a good offense. He thinks his war against tobacco harm reduction strategies will distract from his personal issues. But that would require him being equipped for such a battle. At the moment, VarHar, like MAHA in the US, is shooting blanks and further embarrassing his administration.

This is Part 4 of the Firebreak’s Big Change series. It is a case study of how philanthropists working with NGOs, a United Nations organization and the media can control global health policy.

Summary

• Michael Bloomberg has invested $1.6 billion (with commitments for a further $400 million) into global tobacco and nicotine control programs.

• He has created a complex web of at least 15 NGOs that interact with and interfund each other, while trying to disguise their intertwined relationships around Michael Bloomberg

• These 15 NGOs are coordinating to implement a WHO program. This program has no funding outside of Michael Bloomberg, making this UN organization compliant to the billionaire’s views and initiatives.

• This dependence has compelled the WHO to attack tobacco harm reduction strategies like vaping and nicotine pouches, pressuring its members and bodies like the European Commission to fall in line with Michael Bloomberg’s rhetoric, despite the lack of scientific evidence.

This is a case study of how Big Change philanthro-capitalism can control a global health policy agenda and a UN agency program.

How to Waste $2 Billion

What would you do with $2 billion? If you want to spend it on dominating a global policy issue, you should take a lesson from Michael Bloomberg.

With his latest $400 million round of commitments, an even $2 billion is how much Bloomberg’s two main foundations have spent to single-handedly direct the global tobacco and nicotine control campaign, shaping it to fit his puritan, prohibitionist strategy. This is a case study in how the Big Change movement can be controlled by one wealthy billionaire with ambition and a complex network of organizations.

Calling Michael Bloomberg a “philanthropist” would be a mistake. A philanthropist is someone who donates to organizations with the intention of supporting vulnerable populations, easing suffering and improving the world. He is more of a “philindustrialist”, directing his funding to make an impact that forwards his political objectives, personal ambitions and need for self-aggrandizement.

More often than not, Bloomberg creates organizations that he actively controls via fiscal sponsors. Many of these projects are not legal entities, but merely front groups for the campaigns that advance Bloomberg’s global status. The Firebreak has looked at several of his creations like a media implant called The Examination that writes reports on health campaigns his other projects are campaigning on. He has invested more than $100 million into fiscal sponsors and universities to run campaign projects like Beyond Coal, Beyond Petroleum and Beyond Plastics.

How the money is spent is neatly hidden behind a web of intermediary organizations with little to no transparency, accountability or fiscal controls. These organizations only exist so long as Michael continues to write the checks, and so long as they continue to promote Bloomberg’s image and his interests. What is fascinating is the complexity of Bloomberg’s philanthropic endeavors. He does not donate to an organization or a campaign, he creates or takes over organizations he then integrates into a web of activism and policy domination.

The best example of this is how Michael Bloomberg created a complex web of organizations to essentially take over the World Health Organization (WHO) program on tobacco control, and now uses it to advance his strategy and ambition at the global level to remove tobacco harm reduction strategies like vaping and nicotine pouches.

Strategic Control Within the Bloomberg NGO Flotilla

In an earlier article, parts of Bloomberg’s flotilla of tobacco control NGOs was mapped out, how they coordinated with each other and redistributed funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies and Bloomberg Family Foundation. For example, Michael Bloomberg’s tobacco control funding is usually first channeled through the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use Grants Program, which is jointly managed and run by The International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union), Vital Strategies and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids (all Bloomberg-funded or created groups). They then, in turn, fund groups and programs like Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI) – an initiative of Bloomberg’s Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. GHAI then makes grants to different organisations like the Coalición América Latina Saludable. Each of these groups is beholden to the views and whims of Michael Bloomberg.

Each NGO also takes a slice or commission of the funding as a pass-through and this keeps them engaged, enriched and duly compliant. This commingling and coopting of NGOs also distorts the true depth of control the philanthropy exerted on these organizations. Only a few people would catch or care that these NGOs are all funded by the same activist philanthropist or are all ordered to dance to Michael’s music. This includes the WHO.

It is curious why Bloomberg has spent so much time trying to deflect his involvement in his activist campaigns. The Firebreak has explained how this technique of hiding behind fiscal sponsors or universities frees his funds from being subject to rules of transparency, accountability or liability. So when Michael Bloomberg speaks out against alternative nicotine products like vapes and nicotine pouches, rejecting them as credible tobacco harm reduction strategies, a large number of seemingly independent organizations promote and implement his strategy. This includes the WHO.

While Bloomberg’s puritan view against tobacco harm reduction is controversial and lacking in scientific support, his flotilla has had no choice but to fall in line, supporting his views and translating them into campaigns. And, again, this includes the WHO.

Bloomberg’s Strategic Control of the WHO

A Firebreak exposé showed how 15 of the 29 NGOs allowed to attend the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) COP11 last December were Bloomberg organizations (including a project that does not even exist as a legal entity).

Bloomberg’s tobacco control NGOs work in coordination to create an image of policy consensus and multi-pronged attack strategies on threats to their political goals. They present themselves as multiple organizations with different interests, but as they are all feeding from the same funding trough, their strategic consensus is one borne out of necessity. As they are so intertwined, it would be suicide for any organization to dare speak out in favor of vaping and nicotine pouches as two effective means to reduce cigarette consumption and harm.

To say there is consensus against tobacco harm reduction products simply means that one billionaire believes it to be so. But shouldn’t someone in the World Health Organization look at how these alternative nicotine products have succeeded in reducing smoking rates in countries like Sweden and New Zealand? Especially when they make these claims very loudly at international conferences? That would be basic common sense, except that these Bloomberg-funded organizations all exist, essentially, to run different parts of the WHO tobacco and nicotine control strategy via a Bloomberg-funded program called: “MPOWER”.

What is MPOWER?

MPOWER is the WHO technical initiative providing a series of measures designed to help countries implement the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

It is an acronym that includes six measures to implement tobacco and nicotine control: Monitor, Protect, Offer help, Warn, Enforce bans, Raise taxes.

The WHO claims ownership of the program and provides the framework, but the funding for implementation comes from external donors, the largest of which is Bloomberg Philanthropies.

a) What is the WHO’s role in MPOWER?

The reality is that the WHO does not directly fund MPOWER implementation. They have no budget outside of being able to produce a webpage with three lines of text. The African WHO MPOWER report says a bit more, claiming they provide: “technical guidance, global monitoring and policy frameworks”, but what does that mean?

The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) aims to reduce tobacco and nicotine use at the member state level, meaning FCTC signatories set targets via the MPOWER initiative. But the WHO does not finance country‑level implementation, nor do they get involved.

To implement the FCTC/MPOWER targets, member states rely on: government budgets, philanthropic funding and NGO‑managed grants. It is important to understand that most lower and middle income countries can’t afford large budget allocations to such programs, so they depend on philanthropies and NGOs to comply with the WHO targets. Enter Michael Bloomberg.

b) What is Bloomberg Philanthropies’ role in MPOWER?

Bloomberg Philanthropies is the primary global funder of MPOWER implementation, via the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, which explicitly supports countries in adopting MPOWER policies. They claim that more than 100 countries now have at least one MPOWER policy in place due to this funding and they are expanding the initiative with Michael Bloomberg committing an additional $420 million to expand MPOWER implementation over the 2023–2027 period.

Does MPOWER actually exist as a real WHO programme or is it an externally run sub-contract. UN agencies like the WHO have very little budget and with recent funding cuts from (former) member states like the US and EU countries, they have been forced to rely more on philanthropists and their global NGOs to design and run their programs. This can have a serious negative influence on global policies. A few other cases:

• Why, for example, is the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization spending so much time promoting a backward peasant farming ideology like agroecology? Well, the Agroecology Fund has 100 million reasons for that.

• There can also be an effect on the long-term survival of such global programs. Like MPOWER, the UN Environmental Program played a symbolic role in the Net-Zero Asset Management Initiative or the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, marginally managing the program. It quickly fell apart when all of the funders and activist leaders left for “greener” pastures.

How beholden is MPOWER to Michael Bloomberg, and would it meet a similar fate should the emperor lose interest (or run out of funding)?

To understand this, we need to recall how Bloomberg does not fund a philanthropy, he manages a complex web of organizations directed to deliver his strategy.

c) How does Bloomberg money fund MPOWER?

Bloomberg funds MPOWER implementation via his flotilla of NGOs. It is important to realize that there is zero funding going directly to the WHO. Michael keeps tight control over what the WHO can say or do on tobacco control.

So how does Bloomberg fund his NGO flotilla to control and implement the WHO strategy? Here it gets curious.

Recall that MPOWER is an acronym for six services or strategies to implement tobacco control. Bloomberg NGOs are slicing up MPOWER implementation in a way that certain NGOs from his flotilla are responsible for different measures in the initiative which they, of course, then coordinate between themselves.

• Monitor tobacco and nicotine use via surveillance systems developed by the CDC Foundation (via a $360 million Bloomberg fund for tobacco control support)

• Protect individuals via smoke‑free laws implemented by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids that runs programs for advocacy and legal support

• Offer help via cessation services provided by Vital Strategies’ cessation programs and media campaigns

• Warn on the risks of tobacco and nicotine products via Bloomberg’s STOP (Stop Tobacco Organizations and Products) watchdog

• Enforce advertising bans and other restrictions is managed by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids which proudly identifies itself as the “enforcer NGO”.

• Raise taxes through the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease’s tax modeling support

It would be impossible for the WHO to cut this Bloomberg Gordian knot and still have a program. Most of Bloomberg’s $2 billion that keeps his flotilla afloat is directed toward this interdependent MPOWER strategy, with a centralized control nerve center.

There is no WHO involvement here, because, well, Bloomberg funding is always about control. To be fair, it is his money and he can decide how to spend it … but then don’t pretend that MPOWER is a WHO program developed by a large number of separate NGOs coming together to provide a consensus view …. and don’t pretend that the WHO Global Ambassador accolade wasn’t anything more than cheap ribbon awarded by a broke international agency.

How MPOWER (ie, Michael Bloomberg) influences tobacco reduction strategies in developing countries?

As mentioned earlier, MPOWER implementation depends on funding from governments, philanthropies and NGOs. Most developed countries can afford to fund their own programs and their leaders are intelligent enough to recognize how harm reduction strategies using alternative nicotine products like vaping and nicotine pouches can dramatically reduce smoking and its health consequences. But many lower and middle-income countries cannot afford such programs and remain captive to Bloomberg-funded puritan dogma.

That being said, the Bloomberg MPOWER pixie dust also rubs off on wealthier nations. The European Commission awarded €3 million to a consultancy to produce a report to guide the upcoming revision of the EU Tobacco Products Directive, and several Bloomberg NGOs were directly involved. Given how the EU’s Health Directorate is committed to obeying the WHO’s diktats, much of the report’s advice had parroted the Bloomberg rhetoric against alternative nicotine products.

But Bloomberg NGOs are generally focusing their funding and activism in developing countries where they can make a bigger impact. They often award individual grants that can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars per project. As these cash-strapped governments often lack the budget or expertise to implement the MPOWER / FCTC strategies, the Bloomberg groups often manage the show in regions where that kind of money speaks loudly.

The WHO is merely a shadow behind the curtain in these developing countries while a global health program has been effectively outsourced to a billionaire with a messianic complex.

And Michael Bloomberg does enjoy the limelight on the global stage. In helping lower and middle income countries reach MPOWER targets, Bloomberg Philanthropies then gives out awards to countries that achieve certain goals. At last year’s celebration gala, government ministers from India, Mauritius, Mexico, Montenegro, the Philippines, and Ukraine were able to pose for photos with Michael at the World Conference on Tobacco Control.

Time was when Michael Bloomberg was a candidate for President of the United States, but now he has found another stage for global attention.

How the WHO became subservient to one billionaire

The Big Change series has shown how the well-funded groups behind the campaigns are more concerned about winning than about advancing human health or improving the environment. The MPOWER debacle shows how one billionaire can pretend he is saving lives in a simple black or white issue while his prohibitionist strategies are actually forcing so many to continue smoking due to his failure to understand the complexities of the issue.

Bloomberg’s flotilla of NGOs is determining global tobacco-harm reduction strategies and policies, against the evidence of scientists, academics and wealthier governments not reliant on the billionaire’s money.

The regulatory reactions against nicotine harm reduction strategies like vaping and nicotine pouches is mainly based on activism run by Bloomberg NGOs in the name of the WHO. It is now creeping into regulations like the EU Tobacco Products Directive which is planning to submit to the WHO by imposing restrictions and higher taxes on e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches.

The WHO is powerless to intervene – they do not control the funds or the policy implementation and can only accept what Michael Bloomberg tells them to say. Their scientists have to systematically reject each study that shows how vaping and nicotine pouches are far less harmful than smoking. They have to turn the microphones off on member states at FCTC COPs when they demonstrate how promoting tobacco harm reduction strategies have significantly helped reduce smoking levels. They have to raise fears on Big Tobacco funding aimed at the youth to deflect from the reality of the exponentially higher Bloomberg funds they are receiving.

The WHO is left powerless and forced to provide Michael Bloomberg with a veil of legitimacy that he uses to promote himself and gain facetime and photo-ops with national leaders when they celebrate MPOWER achievements. For the WHO, the only thing worse than this is for Michael Bloomberg to suddenly get bored with the WHO and stop writing the checks. If that happened, the WHO MPOWER and FCTC websites would be taken down within weeks.

Conclusion: What can be done?

This case study shows a serious abuse of Big Change, but there are measures that can be taken.

• The UN needs to clean out the activist cobwebs from its agency programs and remove its dependence on billionaires, foundations and interest groups. The UN needs to downsize and rely on member states for their program initiatives.

• UN member states need to define clear guidelines for non-state actors they choose to collaborate with. Rather than celebrating billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, they need to impose limits to their influence. If Elon Musk funded the UN peacekeeping program and started directing blue berets to war theatres of his own liking, would the UN support this? Would they be in a position to stop this?

• The US needs to impose stricter tax and transparency regulations on foundations run by billionaire philanthropists, especially when they are operating outside of the US and often against US interests. Bloomberg’s NGO flotilla are not doing humanitarian work in the same way an NGO like GAVI is, but are simply running activist lobbying campaigns and extorting governments in developing countries.

• Finally, we need to differentiate between NGOs and other civil society non-profits that do humanitarian work and what I have referred to as APEs (Alternative Policy Enterprises) that manage large lobbying and litigation budgets as fronts for interest groups and billionaire “philanthropists”. Bloomberg’s flotilla are more APEs than NGOs.

Otherwise, the only other alternative is to wait until the billionaire runs out of money or his interest wanes and common sense on tobacco harm reduction can return. Given how Big Change operates to preserve itself, that may be a long wait where far too many people will believe the anti-harm reduction dogma and continue smoking.