Root Privileges

Analysis

The foolishness of a carbon-negative blockchain

With the experience of ‘fortress conservation’, poor implementation of the Forest Rights Act and the CAMPA philosophy in India, it’s hard not to think that the idea of carbon offsets is stupid. This mode of ‘climate action’ has been most popular in the US and the EU, given that carbon offsets are essentially status-quoist: they only remove carbon downstream, after the activity that released it has been performed, and doesn’t lower the demand for carbon or carbon-producing activities (i.e. consumption) in the first place.

With the emergence of entities that collect carbon debt from multiple sources and offset them through afforestation drives, many organisations and companies now claim to be carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative by simply passing on their debt and paying a fee to have it offset. And now, dispiritingly, even cryptocurrency enterprises have joined this party, with advertisements of carbon-negative blockchains that continue to ignore the fact that crypto is still a solution looking for a problem.

It’s constantly baffling how a community composed mostly of rich, white libertarians, presumably with a good education culminating in some of California’s or Massachusetts’s finest institutes of study, fails to acknowledge the inefficiency of a financial system more cumbersome and energy-intensive than the one already in place, sustained by self–indulgence and inflated promises of socio–financial revolutions and carbon-neutrality, all in the name of liberties that few others care for.

Now specifically, crypto hitching its wagon to the international carbon-offset programme is doubly problematic because it’s two status-quoist enterprises working together to further erode climate and social justice.

Crypto proponents, notably the Ethereum community, have deflected arguments against the energy demand of cryptocurrency transactions by claiming they’re already implementing or planning to implement the ‘proof of stake’ over the ‘proof of work’ model of verification. I’m sure you’ve heard that to earn bitcoins, you use your computer to solve some difficult math problems, with the coins as your reward. Your computer’s work is your proof of work – the thing you use to demonstrate that you’ve earned the coins. ‘Proof of stake’ demands that you already own some coins – or, more generically, tokens – to perform transactions on the blockchain that the tokens are already part of.

Proponents of the ‘proof of stake’ model like to say that it’s less energy-intensive than ‘proof of work’, which is true in the same way the Delhi government plans to cut traffic pollution by asking drivers to turn off their cars’ engines at red lights. This is because ‘proof of stake’ has its own big problems, ranging from concerns that it’s a scam to, more pertinent to this post, being rooted like ‘proof of work’ in the more fundamental tenet of ‘proof of preexisting wealth’. To quote Everest Pipkin writing in March this year:

Proof of stake is, and always has been, valuable as a bait and switch, but there are other, obvious problems with PoS (and various other proofs), which are that to more or less degrees they don’t address any of the problems with access to cryptocurrency relying on existing wealth.

Proof of stake coins use a variety of mechanisms to determine “lottery ticket” allocation, but it essentially boils down to: 1 coin in your wallet, one lottery ticket. Proof of capacity gives you a lottery ticket per available hard drive segment. Proof of assignment gives you a lottery ticket per smart device / internet of things consumer electronics good you own. Proof of donation gives you a lottery ticket per donation to a charitable organization.

I’m sure you’re seeing the problem here – there is not a schema that doesn’t reward those who already are already wealthy, who are already bought in, who already have excess capital or access to outsized computational power. Almost universally they grant power to the already powerful.

This is also a climate issue.

Climate justice is social justice. This is true in that the worst impacts of climate collapse are felt by those with no means to avoid them, while those with resources easily fuck on off to somewhere where they don’t have to see it.

But climate justice must mean giving leadership and power to those who will bear the worst effects of climate catastrophe, including the very young, those living in the global south, those living rurally in coastal areas or farming regions, those living in poverty, those in marginalized communities, and particularly to indigenous communities who have actual experience in managing complex local ecosystems for generations without creating spiraling, resource-extractative devastation.

And carbon-offsets just make a false promise to make this better. Trees planted today to offset carbon emitted today will only sequester that carbon at optimum efficiencies many years later – when carbon emissions from the same project, if not the rest of the world, are likely to be higher. Second, organisations promising to offset carbon often do so in a part of the world significantly removed from where the carbon was originally released. Arguments against the ‘Miyawaki method’ suggest that you can only plant plants up to a certain density in a given ecosystem, and that planting them even closer together won’t have better or even a stagnating level of effects – but will in fact denigrate the local ecology. Scaled up to the level of countries, this means (I assume) that emitting many tonnes of carbon dioxide over North America and Europe and attempting to have all of that sequestered in the rainforests of South America, Central Africa and Southeast Asia won’t work, at least not without imposing limitations on the latter countries’ room to emit carbon for their own growth as well as on how these newly created ‘green areas’ should be used.

Too many people also continue to maintain the colonial-era view that planting trees is the answer even if it means we degrade ecosystems that don’t want trees – helped along by one wildly misleading 2019 study that pro-offset groups have cited more often than they have cited a big correction it received a year later. Ultimately, by bundling so many injustices together, crypto + carbon-offsets is just a bigger racket.

Featured image credit: Michael Dziedzic/Unsplash.

Dec 10, 2021
On The Caravan’s new profile of The Hindu

On December 1, The Caravan published a 50-page report entitled ‘Paper Priests: The battle for the soul of The Hindu’. The report – actually, as a friend put it, a big profile – has many good parts and many others, not so much, especially from the point of view of an insider: I worked there from June 2012 to May 2014, coinciding roughly with Siddharth Varadarajan’s tenure as editor-in-chief.

It is hard for me to comment openly on the subpar parts because they’re rooted in my position as once-insider, with information that anyone else will have a hard time getting their hands on, at least not without considerable effort. In that sense, those parts of the profile may not be subpar per se. My second concern is that my comments at this point can only appear in a non-journalistic context and at the same time lack the liberty to be as detailed as they may need to be, and both these limitations are bad for the spirit of being fair. Nonetheless, I think I will attempt an overview with these caveats – of the subpar followed by the better bits.

The principal contention is that the profile is titled ‘The battle for the soul of The Hindu’ when in fact the ‘soul’ bit remains unclear to the end and ‘The Hindu’ refers to just the newspaper’s political and related journalism and not, as one might assume, its entire breadth of coverage. I was particularly disappointed that the profile didn’t bother with the sports and internet departments, for example, which have had many issues in the past under multiple editors and which merit inclusion.

Second (and also in my friend’s view), the profile’s authors could have spoken to more employees of The Hindu, both current and former, to get a fuller sense of what it means or meant to work there. It is interspersed with quotes but the bulk of it is narrative, with a lot of material collated from what is already in the public domain. There is value in curating things in the right context, and that to me is a big strength of the profile. At the same time, as an insider, reading it was both a big trip down memory lane and a sharp reminder at many points about which decisions, which people and which assets were left out, why, and how their absence diminished the narrative at that point. It serves to give non-insiders a good sense of The Hindu’s workings, but beyond that, the profile, while exhaustive, is not comprehensive.

Third, the profile overlooks some issues adjacent to running the newspaper smoothly and which provide insights that the more ‘mainstream’ issues in the organisation may not. One prominent example was The Hindu’s design. N. Ram and other members of the board overseeing the newspaper took a keen interest in its pages’ layouts, colours, fonts, etc., and made a big deal of getting designer Mario García to change the way it looked from its 125th anniversary. That The Hindu’s chiefs paid so much attention to the design was heartening. At the same time, when Varadarajan quit as editor, design changes made in his tenure became one source of contempt for Malini Parthasarathy’s new dispensation, with derisive comments directed that way to ensure there were no doubts about how much she was prepared to change things and little thought for the designers caught in the crossfire.

Other examples: the primacy of publishing in print versus online, how much different people should be paid, and the circumstances in which a person could be sacked.

The goodest part of the profile is that it places The Hindu’s Brahmanism front and centre. (I’m also glad it takes a sterner look at Malini Parthasarathy’s closeness to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a friendship discomfitingly proximate to its decision to part ways with Varadarajan because he was anti-Modi and its tendency to ‘balance’ criticism of Modi with favourable reports.) At the time I worked there, a friend and I received a considerable salary hike at one point and wanted to celebrate with a good dinner in the office canteen. We got there, got our plates, got some rice and dal, and sat down at a table along with a box of some egg-based dishes we’d ordered from outside. When we opened the box, the people on the tables around us suddenly lost their shit and had us leave, and we had to finish our dinners in my friend’s car parked in the office garage.

The Caravan profile discusses a similar incident involving overt expressions of Brahmin privileges, as well as quotes Sudipto Mondal extensively, and some others less so, on the newspaper’s upper-caste character at the newsroom level. My egg-eating colleague and I are both Brahmins, so we may not be able to fully articulate how the office’s few non-Brahmin, rather non-upper-caste, staff members felt in circumstances when others around them engaged in distinctly upper-caste rituals and conversations, excluded them in intra-newsroom social settings, and sidelined them in decisions about which stories could feature on the front or national pages, or what stories they could work on, even to the detriment of the stories’ implicit merit. The profile fixes this gap in awareness to an appreciable extent.

In fact, overall, The Caravan’s profile is well worth your time for its efforts to locate The Hindu and its coverage of political issues in the broader context of its preference – conscious or otherwise – for upper-caste ideals through its history and many parts of its inner workings.

Featured image credit: ashni_ahlawat/Unsplash.

Dec 9, 2021
The vaccine that was built from scratch

I have no plans to read ICMR chief Balram Bhargava’s new book, Going Viral, about the “inside story” of Covaxin’s making, and am grateful for that reason for Dr Jammi Nagaraj Rao’s quick but seemingly thorough review in The Wire Science. My lack of interest in the book itself also means I’m going to take those bits from the book quoted in Rao’s review literally, in no need of additional context (a reasonable assumption given the rest of the review and Bhargava’s now-tattered reputation). With this preamble: reading Rao’s review brought three things to mind.

First, is the Indian clinical research establishment aware of the catch-22 inherent to defending its decisions regarding Covaxin over and over in the public domain? Of the two major COVID-19 vaccines in use in India, Covishield hasn’t prompted even a tenth of the amount of defending (say, by number of words or inches in newspaper columns) Covaxin has seemed to need to maintain its reputation – even when there were multiple news reports in February and March to suggest Covishield may be associated with most vaccine-associated severe adverse events at the time.

Then again, the establishment will say – as it has said so far – that Covaxin has required defending because you were bent on attacking it for no good reason. And with Bhargava continuing to deflect criticism in his book, this circus will only continue. However, while both us critics and the establishment can keep going, as if our energies were conserved, the catch-22 is that Covaxin’s reputation is not: the longer the circus goes on, the more it will decline.

Second, the Indian government has progressively invaded multiple public institutions and yoked their machineries to the ruling party’s electoral agenda. Perhaps the most ‘notable’ was the fall of the Election Commission, which, in a recent example, drafted the dates for West Bengal’s assembly poll phases to the BJP’s convenience. But Balram Bhargava’s new book seems to be a new frontier: Rao’s review indicates that Going Viral is one large advertisement for the Indian government, and for the BJP by extension. It’s a new frontier because it’s a book, and it’s a book by the head of a public institution that the government has already invaded. Put another way, there may be nothing Bhargava can say or do as the ICMR chief – including write a book – that we can assume will have any distance between himself and the party itself. (Once he’s done as ICMR chief, of course, the party is likely to offer him a cushy posting in some low-intensity government position.)

Now, it is tempting to consider that by guiding the composition of a whole book and stamping some pandering functionary’s name on the cover, the BJP is also attempting to invade the space of books as an expression of intellectual achievement, of the sort that the current government has liked to associate with its fiercer critics.

Third, there is a curious line in Rao’s review that may provide the fort of insight into Covaxin’s development that no government official (at least of this government) will ever admit. Rao writes that the book

… is not a detailed exposition of the science behind vaccine development in general or Covaxin’s development in particular. There is a retelling of the well-known Edward Jenner story, and some interesting details about why Bharat Biotech was uniquely placed to develop Covaxin: mainly that it operated BSL-3 facilities and had a track record of developing vaccines from scratch.

One reason the BJP, essentially Prime Minister Narendra Modi, blessed Bharat Biotech was that it could develop vaccines from ‘scratch’? Why should this matter during a pandemic with billions of people around the planet desperately looking for an affordable and good-quality vaccine – except the power that the words “homegrown” and “Made in India” carry for the party, and the government? Neither I nor others can offer dispositive proof that this is what Prime Minister Modi was thinking when he toured Bharat Biotech’s and Serum Institute’s facilities in November last year; the closest we can come is the way in which the party-government combine micromanaged every aspect of Covaxin – down to its ridiculous approval on January 3, 2021, in “clinical trial mode”.

This façade of self-sufficiency is just that, as two counter-examples can show. First, let me quote from Rao’s review:

… in his zeal to characterise Covaxin as a ‘completely indigenous vaccine, an epitome of Atmanirbhar Bharat’, Bhargava overlooks the fact that the thing that made Covaxin appropriately immunogenic was the inspired use of an adjuvant called Alhydroxyquim-II, under license from an American research company named Virovax. The licensing arrangement between Virovax, funded by the US National Institute of Health, and Bharat Biotech dates to before the pandemic, in 2019, in a collaboration set up at a meeting organised by the Indo-US Vaccine Action Program. The terms were later extended to include Covaxin.

Second, there’s a twisted irony in insisting on building a vaccine from scratch at home (because that is politically advantageous) instead of equally supporting both vaccine development and license-based vaccine-manufacturing, then dragging your feet on licensing a vaccine when you do have one to public-sector manufacturers within the country (much less anyone else), while demanding in international fora that vaccine-makers abroad and their respective governments be okay with waiving IP rights to broaden manufacturing.

Dec 4, 2021
Panicking about omicron

The new omicron variant of the novel coronavirus has got everyone alarmed – which is darkly ironic. This variant has reportedly racked up more mutations than previous variants of concern, including the delta, with virologists and epidemiologists from South Africa and the UK paying particular attention to real-world data that suggests it could be more transmissible and cause breakthrough infections and that some of the mutations in its RNA correspond to changes on the spike protein that could (speculatively) render the existing crop of WHO-approved COVID-19 vaccines less efficacious.

Uncertainty about what a new strain of the virus can do, or even uncertainty more broadly, has always been sufficient reason for panic. Nonetheless, the rise of the omicron variant is significant and the response to it more instructive because of its predecessor.

The delta variant set a new benchmark for how quickly the novel coronavirus could spread, but its effectiveness also prompted some wonderment if the virus may be approaching ‘peak mutation’ – that is, if the delta might represent one of the most transmissible forms of the virus and if future outbreaks happening in a partly vaccinated world may not be so deadly.

The omicron is thus significant because it dispels this line of thinking, while demonstrating that as bad as the delta was for global society, things can get worse if we let them. Clearly we have. And the world’s panic is ironic because of the particular ways in which we have.

As far as COVID-19 vaccination coverage is concerned, there are two distinct groups of people: those who have been fully vaccinated and those who have been partly vaccinated or haven’t been vaccinated at all. The corresponding split in India is qualitatively similar to the one worldwide, particularly in that it has come to be aligned almost perfectly with the class divide. This is the first point.

Second, most – if not all – of the current WHO-approved vaccines haven’t been tested for their ability to directly prevent or reduce the transmission of the novel coronavirus (such as by reducing the amount of viral shedding). So there’s a not insubstantial possibility that even fully vaccinated individuals could get and transmit the virus, while enjoying the vaccine-granted privilege of not falling ill.

Third, we don’t know if the omicron variant can cause more severe disease, so let’s say that – at least to those of us who aren’t experts – right now the chance of it not being able to cause more severe disease is a reasonable 50%.

Taken together, the three points suggest that panic is understandable only among those who haven’t received one or both doses of their (two-dose) COVID-19 vaccines, and whose populations may have been ‘incubating’ the same or different variants by allowing them to persist for longer in their bodies, and replicate, in the absence of the vaccines (depending on each vaccine’s time-to-recovery). For these people, the chance of the omicron variant being able to last for longer in the body and cause more severe disease is already higher.

This is a crucial difference between the vaccinated and those who have been kept from getting vaccinated – a difference fostered by countries that hoarded vaccines, blocked attempts to ease patent protections and transfer technology and money – the same countries that are now blocking travel from parts of the world where their selfishness encouraged the rise of new variants.

On the other hand, panic verges on the offensive for fully vaccinated individuals – who are also likelier than not both in India and around the world to be able to access and afford good healthcare and antiviral drugs – to freak out about a viral variant that is currently only known to be able to be transmitted more effectively than the delta.

This shouldn’t bother us very much because most of us seemed to have stopped thinking about transmission even though the vaccines weren’t tested for preventing that, and went easier on masking up and washing hands just because we’d received our two doses, even as the delta variant continued to spread through the population. (Infections stopped surging but that’s not the way only way a virus can continue to circulate.)

It’s disingenuous to suggest now that the situation on the ground with omicron in play is somehow different (with the 50% disclaimer) even as we’re responding by blocking travel and trade instead of by increasing access to vaccines.

The effectiveness of Covaxin to prevent symptomatic infection is only 50%. It is clear that full vaccination alone cannot end the pandemic. It must be vaccines plus non-pharmaceutical interventions like mask wearing. Why aren't the top COVID taskforce members not wearing a mask? https://t.co/OJy39CbDeK
— R. Prasad (@RPrasad12) November 25, 2021

In fact, apart from whether any instance of panic could be pseudoscientific or offensive, there’s the question of whether it’s warranted. Among the fully vaccinated, it’s simply not. The rise of the omicron variant in a world of vaccine apartheid should in fact be a grim reminder that, again, we can’t afford to let things get worse, because they will. More people will fall ill, more people will die, more healthcare systems will collapse, more people ill with other diseases will be at greater risk of death or disability, and so forth.

If you’re fully vaccinated, mask up; if not, please go get vaccinated and still mask up. But if you can’t because vaccines are being withheld to your country – you may have reasonable cause for panic.

Nov 27, 2021
The toxic affair between Covaxin and The Lancet

That Covaxin has been leading a ceaselessly beleaguered life is no mystery – but The Lancet journal may not know that it has been pressed into the questionable service of saving the vaccine’s reputation on at least three occasions. In the latest one, for example, Bharat Biotech, some clueless media outlets and their hordes of followers, assisted ably by the aptly named bhakts of India’s ruling party, have been hollering from rooftops high and low that The Lancet ‘has said’ Covaxin is 77.8% efficacious. Background: The Lancet medical journal has published the paper describing Covaxin’s phase 3 trial results. But to Covaxin’s misfortune, these people appear to be assuming, as they have many times before, that a journal publishing a paper is by all means synonymous to the journal itself speaking for, even endorsing, the paper’s contents.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think The Lancet had pooled together all the evidence, comments and documents pertaining to Covaxin and pronounced its own verdict about the shot’s reputation. But because you know better, you know that a journal’s editors, and peer-reviewers if they were involved, only checked if the submitted paper’s data is consistent with the submitted paper’s statements and conclusions, and that it was free of research misconduct (although I’m wholly pessimistic about the latter).

The problem is that the number of people who know better appears to be vanishingly small – so small, in fact, that it didn’t strike me until earlier this year that both clinical trials and scientific publishing involve the sort of specialised education that most people, including (seemingly) all engineers and exponents of many other fields of science, peeled away from many decades ago (depending on how old they are). Even what constitutes publishing or the qualitative differences between good and great papers varies from one specialisation to the next.

As a result, when Bharat Biotech’s people cheer that The Lancet has ‘held up’ their findings, there’s both very few people to call out their bullshit – the journal published their paper, and didn’t wave a flag for them – and they’re met more often than you’d think with resistance from both Bharat Biotech’s and other scientists, typically because of vested interests. In fact, vested interest, singular: by publishing a paper in a journal, many scientists seek to partake of the journal’s prestige. Call this a nuanced take, but it has significant real-world effects, as we’re seeing with the strange but certainly myopic ways in which Bharat Biotech has sought to defend Covaxin (including, in the latest instance, by undermining the WHO’s approval for it).

Of course, The Lancet itself, together with some other journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and Cell, has actively cultivated this notion of ‘prestige’ to pad its pockets as well as to passively silence questions about the many problematic papers it has published. Journals engaging in such practices together with the scientists who fall for them have thus contributed in a significant way to the idea that ‘prestige journals’ are in effect ‘prestige conferrers’, so perhaps The Lancet deserves its fate. But the many less- or entirely ill-informed people out there don’t, especially when they start to believe, “The Lancet has said Covaxin is safe, so it must be safe.”

Medical journals, including The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, have expressed opposition to the idea of releasing medical research papers as preprints, contending that unlike potentially incomplete papers on other topics, the ones they receive could cost lives if they’re published without independent checks first. An entirely reasonable argument. So what happens when The Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine publish good papers about a vaccine that’s flawed in other ways, and whose authors then piggyback on the journals’ self-proclaimed superiority to toot their own horns, even as the journals all know that they’ve only checked the papers, not anything else? Apart from all the other problems with the notion of a journal’s isolated excellence, it’s ridiculous that journals accrue it the same way they’ve been accruing their profits: with no socially meaningful contribution of their own.

Nov 12, 2021
Dirty power

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at the COP26 summit in Glasgow that India will install 500 GW of non-fossil-fuel energy generation capacity by 2030. In his analysis of Modi’s speech for The Wire Science, Kabir Agarwal wrote that the phrasing evokes a contrast with Modi’s announcement at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit on New York, where he said India would install 450 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030.

Apparently, “non-fossil-fuel energy” is not the same as “renewable energy”, and that the biggest difference between them is hydroelectric power production.

As much as drastic climate action is warranted, it must also ensure we don’t privilege the ends at the cost of the means. For example, decarbonisation must happen such that the inevitable wealth loss, current and prospective, is distributed justly in society – such that the super-rich lose the most and the poor lose the least – and climate deals (both international and sub-national) should account for the corresponding mechanisms in their terms. Saving the planet by destroying the poor would be a meaningless triumph.

Such incrementalism demands that we consider our problems one step at a time. For example, first we must all agree to phase out fossil fuels and replace them with renewable sources of energy. Then we can get on to figuring out ways to incentivise manufacturing and installation, and then to energy storage, distribution and grid parity.

On this path, hydroelectric power seems to have been relegated to the “non-fossil-fuel” side sooner than other renewable sources – so much so that invoking it requires a careful shift in the language used to talk about it at multilateral fora.

But while the syntactic choice shouldn’t surprise us, it should remind us that the differences between hydroelectric power and solar and wind power are often very small.

An important one is the perception that hydroelectric power is dirty – but so are solar and wind today, albeit in more circuitous ways. The shift from fossil fuels to so-called ‘green energy’ is fundamentally a shift from extracting hydrocarbons to extracting minerals and metals instead. It doesn’t spell the end of extractive capitalism, or change the fact that mining is bad for the land, its life, the air above and the local micro-climate, or that solar and wind installations are not as pleasant as they sound.

Some of the world’s largest extant reserves of the specific metals, especially lithium and the lanthanides, and minerals required for the systems of the futuristic ‘green world’ – electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, renewable-energy batteries and in fact everything ‘smart’ that promises to increase energy efficiency by adjusting demand according to supply in real-time – are located in Africa, South Asia and South America. These regions also host most of the world’s low- and middle-income countries, and are often the sites of extreme wealth inequality, unstable local governments and poor representation in high-level climate deliberations.

It is not unheard of, as in Bolivia, for governments to be erected on or trip over who gets the profits from mining these materials – the locals or privately owned conglomerates. An Oxfam review of the Africa Mining Vision in 2017, eight years after it was introduced, found that contrary to the vision’s goal to have mining on the continent benefit the people there, lax implementation and economic inequality were forcing countries to enter into deals with companies that were profitable in the shorter term but hurt later.

In addition, solar and wind power generation require substantial quantities of steel, plastic and concrete, most of which the world still produces using fossil fuels, and whose production releases significant quantities of carbon into the environment.

Taken together, solar and wind power are dirty as well, but perhaps just less dirtier than hydroelectric. Put another way, Modi’s new announcement roping hydroelectric power into the task of ‘greenifying’ India’s power generation mix only makes the mix dirtier than it already was.

Perhaps we’re giving hydroelectric short shrift because its turbine is located much closer to the ground its chassis has gouged out than ‘solar farms’ are to the sand removed from distant rivers or wind turbines are to the bauxite mined from a remote peninsula. And then there is the inundation that dams bring. The ‘dirtiness’ of hydroelectric power is much more in your face, whereas those of solar and wind are often hidden away as negative externalities.

A spate of accidents in Uttarakhand has only reinforced the awful reputation of hydroelectric power – and the recklessness of the people, including Prime Minister Modi, who make the decisions to build them the way they do.

Second, Modi must realise that solar and wind power need ‘cleaning up’, too.

The problem areas aren’t hard to find. In Gujarat, wind turbines are being installed on forest land and solar power plants have been flagged for “procedural” irregularities. In Karnataka, farmers and cattle-breeders have spoken out against the concrete foundations for solar farms that change soil-water interactions.

In Tamil Nadu, villagers had to mount a noisy protest to keep an Adani-built ‘solar park’ from guzzling water from a nearby river. In the Western Ghats, wind turbines have affected the diversity of predatory birds and the livelihoods of an indigenous population. In Assam, proponents of a solar power plant didn’t have patience for stakeholder consultation or the proper approvals before starting construction.

Incrementalism, especially if it’s quicker, is essential to ensure we make a just transition away from fossil fuels – while also committing to the possibility that things that are bad for the planet today needn’t always be so, through a combination of technological innovation and the value chain reshaping itself according to new incentives and sanctions.

If hydroelectric power is not “renewable”, perhaps this is an admission from the most powerful individual in India that it deserves to be discarded, not replicated. But equally importantly, Modi’s statement also visibilises the problems with solar and wind power, and reminds us that the cleanliness of our energy is fundamentally political. India, and other countries, need solar panels and wind turbines, but if our leaders in government don’t adopt them in sustainable, democratic and socially just ways, it will be just another meaningless triumph.

Nov 3, 2021
Is Covaxin’s WHO approval guaranteed?

I suspect after reading this PTI report that the WHO is practically helping Bharat Biotech put together a better application to have its COVID-19 vaccine, Covaxin, get the body’s approval for international use, instead of simply considering what Bharat Biotech chooses to submit. The overall tone of the report is mollificatory – as if the WHO wishes to appease both the angry and the doubtful that the many months the relevant committee is taking to decide on Covaxin’s candidature shouldn’t be taken as a comment on the Indian vaccine-manufacturing industry. The biggest supplier of vaccines to the WHO’s COVAX initiative is Serum Institute of India, in Pune, so the WHO has a conflict of interest when it says it holds the industry in good esteem. But even vis-à-vis Bharat Biotech (whose production planning and output have both been disappointing), PTI writes:

India’s Bharat Biotech has been submitting data on the EUL of Covaxin “regularly and very quickly” to a technical committee which hopes to have a final recommendation to the WHO next week, a top official of the global health agency said on Thursday, stressing that the UN body “trusts” the Indian industry that manufactures high quality vaccines.

There is something of an analogy with customer service. Say two companies both sell the same product at the same price. Company A’s customer service is excellent and its product has a quality rating of 75%. Company B’s customer service is average and its product has a quality rating of 100%. Which company will you buy from? I’d pick Company B because being spared the trouble of having to contact customer service is more valuable than having to contact customer service and then having a good experience. The same goes for Bharat Biotech’s application with the WHO for Covaxin: the company has been submitting more information “regularly and very quickly”? Great. But why does it have to do this at all instead of keeping all the data ready before any kind of approval?

This characterisation of Bharat Biotech by the “top official” also feeds into what the committee is prepared to do en route to Covaxin’s apparently impending approval. As the PTI report says later:

[Bruce Aylward, senior advisor to the WHO chief,] added that WHO’s job is to save as many lives as possible and as fast as possible. This includes ensuring no product lies unused.

Considering COVAX’s premise, to ensure everyone everywhere has access to vaccines instead of just the rich guys (and ignoring its inability to fulfill this mandate so far), what Aylward says is desirable, that all good vaccines should be used up. But this also raises a question about where the WHO draws the line between rejecting a bad application and accepting a bad application and helping to make it good.

Covaxin is clearly a bad product – its clinical trial, its emergency-use approval, its rollout and the agonising wait for access to the trial data (followed subsequently by issues of trial ethics and data quality) threw up so many questions, but none of the Drug Controller General, Bharat Bitoech or the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) have deigned to answer any of them, at least not honestly. This was followed later by questions about how Bharat Biotech, and the Indian government with it, estimated that the company would be able to produce X number of doses by certain dates, only to fall strikingly short on each occasion, so much so that together with Serum Institute’s failure to project output and demand, India – the “vaccine superpower” that ICMR’s Balram Bhargava recently said it was – had a shameful vaccine shortage for the first half of 2021.

As good as the science underlying BBV152 may have been, Covaxin the product is untrustworthy. This isn’t a comment on the science so much as a reiteration of the oft-overlooked fact that science progressively gives away to social issues that emerge in non-linear fashion when science’s requirements collide with societal gradients, particularly once the giant phase 3 tests have begun.

Given all of these issues, the WHO committee repeatedly asking for more data from Bharat Biotech regarding Covaxin served to highlight – loudly and effectively – an immutable fact: that the Indian government and Bharat Biotech didn’t have this data at the time the Drug Controller General approved the vaccine for emergency use (in “clinical trial mode” to boot) in January 2021, and probably that Bharat Biotech didn’t have this data ready when it claimed, on more than one occasion, that it had submitted all the info it had on Covaxin to the WHO.

Now, with a WHO committee member seemingly suggesting that Covaxin’s approval is a question of when, not if, are we to believe that the vaccine is really good and that we’re all thinking about it wrong? This is an important question, to me at least, because one less-than-ideal alternative is to contemplate how one committee can ‘fix’ a vaccine – by legitimising it with its approval – that is so broken that even with the Indian government’s support, only some 11% of eligible Indians have taken it. Another is to confront the similarly dispiriting possibility that millions of people are so desperate for vaccines around the world that the WHO can no longer afford to stop at being a quality filter – and should step up to help insincere vaccine-makers over the fence. (Recall the ‘right to choose without choices’ from January?)

Any which way, the implied promise of approval seems to me to be too much of an easy way out for Bharat Biotech, and the intractable, unabashed Indian government behind it.

Oct 29, 2021
It’s great that the WHO isn’t just ‘not cutting corners’

Call me anti-national (and I’m sure many will) but I’m glad that the WHO isn’t just “not cutting corners” in the process of considering Bharat Biotech’s application for the UN body’s stamp of approval Covaxin but is also openly calling for more and more information from the company at periodic intervals.

This isn’t just a validation process in the larger scheme of things – which could imply something as banal as the WHO considering a really complicated application – but has also served to humiliate the Indian government’s instruments, from the clinical trial regulation apparatus to the prime minister’s office (let’s not forget that the PM is indeed a tool). The WHO’s process is resistant to “diplomatic” and “political” inputs, even as every meeting of its vaccine approval committee has concluded thus far with demands for more information from Bharat Biotech. This doesn’t prove that the Drug Controller General of India and the Central Drug Standards Control Organisation screwed up their vetting process to push Covaxin’s emergency-use license through earlier this year – but surely suggests it, and that’s just as well.

Everyone from Bharat Biotech’s upper management to Prime Minister Narendra Modi have failed to understand that bad data alone doesn’t cause vaccine hesitancy, that absent data has the same effect. The Indian government, specifically the Bharatiya Janata Party, dragged Covaxin to the centre of its vaccine triumphalism and afforded it the same privileges it has extended to other parts of government – trenchant opacity, approval sans data, vanishing accountability. As such, we were never talking about a product of the Indian medical research community as much as something resembling a corrupted political object, and that in turn should lead us to the conclusion that this vaccine deserved to be met with hesitancy, and the WHO’s repeated requests for more data indicates that it still deserves to be.

Thus far, the current government has seemed most responsive (albeit like a child, lashing out and hurting someone else) to the threat of humiliation. So, glad, even if I’m sure it will be short-lived. Once the WHO grants its approval (although there’s no guarantee), the government will certainly embark on a past-washing campaign, pressing its ministers to the task of weaving together an alternative history of why the approval process was unusually protracted. Is there any way we can preempt that?

Oct 27, 2021
Dream11: How hard should we work to play cricket for India?

The TV ads for the fantasy cricket app Dream11 seem objectionable, to my mind. Thus far, I’ve seen three high-profile players of the Indian men’s cricket team in these ads: Rohit Sharma, Shikhar Dhawan and Jasprit Bumrah (there may be others). Each player stars in a version of the ad in which the ad summarily chronicles their childhood pursuits of becoming a professional cricketer. Dhawan’s and Sharma’s ads both extol lots of hard work and commitment to the demands of the sport, as does Bumrah’s ad but I think to a lesser extent.

What the ads fail to mention is that India is a country of 717 million men (2020) but for all of whom there is only one men’s cricket team. We’ll obviously need to subtract those younger than 18 years and older than 40 years, but assuming a highly conservative estimate that men of the ‘admissible’ age make up only 10% of the total, we are still left with 71.7 million men. Consider New Zealand, on the other hand, which had almost 250,000 men in 2020 – including those on either side of the 18-40 group – and still fielded a cricket team among the world’s best in that year.

Simple logic dictates that by virtue of having a larger pool of talent to pick from, the Indian men’s cricket team should be orders of magnitude better than those fielded by other countries – and simple logic is clearly wrong. The exploits of the Indian men’s cricket team have demonstrated, repeatedly, that if you put 11 sufficiently talented and qualified players together, train them, and give them the resources and the opportunities to get better, they will get better. And the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has the money, the political heft and talent pool to achieve this – but it won’t.

Instead, by considering only 11 (or 15, 21 or whatever) players at a time, the BCCI has created a hyper-competitive environment that is conducive neither to the fair selection of cricketing talent at the bottom rungs nor the selection and retention of talented players at the highest level. The abundance of talent only forces players to be in form at all times – or in excellent form sometimes – under threat of being replaced, even as the hierarchy of contracts with the BCCI tapers rapidly towards the top, squeezing more and more resources into fewer and fewer players, and ultimately leaves more for itself. The consequent demand for an intense physical regimen will in turn privilege richer players over poorer ones.

As such, the BCCI has been administering an unjust model of cricket in India, and which companies like Dream11 are glamourising in uncritical fashion. Dhawan’s Dream11 ad – embedded above – concludes with the man himself saying that he plays for India because he dared to dream that big, in effect saying those who don’t make it didn’t because they didn’t dream, because it’s their fault, because dreaming is all it takes. The inequitable nature of this model only further undermines the knee that the Indian men’s cricket team took ahead of their game against Pakistan on October 24, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement – although we must admit there wasn’t much left to undermine.

Given India’s population and the popularity of cricket around the country, it should by all means field 10 teams – maybe even 30, one for each state. Uttar Pradesh’s population alone is 40x that of New Zealand, and to echo Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, making better use of so much talent will always be a better idea than to coerce people to reproduce less. In the same vein, brands like Dream11 should stop glorifying the sort of backbreaking work required to break into the top 11. Doing so only glorifies the absurdity of rigging a system to produce only 11 men (or 11 women, for that matter) and then claiming this team is better than every other combination of 11 people drawn from a base of 71.7 million (or 67.6 million).

By the way, that’s 5.97 x 10²⁸ possible combinations without repetition.

Oct 26, 2021
A new way to harass editors?

There’s a new way to harass editors – or perhaps it’s an old way that we’re just finding out about, first-hand. We know that repressive governments have started using the US’s infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as a new means to censor content they do not like. But it now seems private parties have also discovered the utility of using alleged copyright infringement to target media coverage.

In the first week of October, an individual with an address in Thane, Maharashtra, lodged a complaint with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which hosts The Wire websites, including The Wire Science, alleging that one of the latter’s articles contained ‘unlicensed copyright protected content’.

It has been my experience, and that of every other editor, I imagine, that honest complaints of copyright infringment are addressed to the editor and the reporter in question – and not the website’s host. (My email ID is on The Wire Science homepage; our ombudsperson’s email ID is available on the ‘About’ page.) But in this case, the complaint was lodged with AWS, with a link to the corresponding article on The Wire Science.

The AWS abuse team, in turn, has written to me and my colleagues multiple times asking us to specify what steps we have taken or will be taking to resolve the issue. We have written back but I am not sure if the members of the abuse team are equipped to understand the editorial issues involved. Their principal issue appears to be that the charge implies The Wire Science has violated AWS’s terms of service and could therefore have to be removed from its servers.

Why would the complainant take this route to resolving an allegation of copyright infringement? The article in question could provide the answer: it is an investigative report by science writer Anusha Krishnan (April 3, 2021) about a device called ‘Shycocan’, whose makers have claimed it can “attenuate” particles of the novel coronavirus by simply emitting photons into the air of a room. The report cast doubt on ‘Shycocan’ as well as its maker’s claims.

The news report

One particularly important, but easily refuted, claim made by the company was that the device has the approval of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The truth comes in two parts: that the FDA found the device to fall in a category that could be distributed in the US without complying with certain regulatory requirements, and that according to ‘Shycocan’’s maker, the device belongs in the category of ‘sterilisers and disinfectants’, not ‘medical devices’ per se, meaning it doesn’t need clinical trials to prove its merit. Some claims had simply spun these loopholes in the maker’s favour.

The maker’s representatives responded to our article on ‘Shycocan’ with a detailed statement sent to me seven weeks after the article was published, even though both the reporter and I had asked them many of the same questions during reporting (with many days to reply). I refused to publish it because I had no obligation to do so – plus it seemed to me to contain unclear science.

For example, Umesh Kadhane, the head of the physics department at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, had told The Wire Science that the maker’s “claims that the electrons produced by their device will only kill the coronavirus is completely bogus. Electrons cannot distinguish between viruses or bacteria or any other thing.”

The statement responded thus: “Most bacteria are negatively charged. The Coronavirus is a positive sense virus. Human cells have a negative potential. The electrons emanated by the Shycocan and due to this opposite polarity they attach themselves to the Coronavirus in real time thereby neutralizing or attenuating it.”

By this logic, ‘most bacteria’ should not be able to affect human cells, so this part of the statement is likely incomplete. The electrons should also be affecting every susceptible particle they encounter once they are emitted – not just the coronaviruses in the air. Many atoms and molecules in air capture free electrons. As the report also said:

“It’s … unclear how ‘Shycocan’, though capable of producing so many electrons – much more than air ionisers that are currently in the market as air purifiers – apparently doesn’t produce ozone, according to the company marketing it. When oxygen in the air encounters free electrons, it becomes ozone.”

But the maker’s statement said our sentences lack “scientific basis” and that the device produces photons in the “trillions per second, which in turn produce photoelectrons when striking solid surfaces.” This raised two further issues:

1. Photons need to have a specific energy to produce photoelectrons from specific materials, called photoemissive materials. Not all photons can elicit photoelectrons from all surfaces (“aerosols, microscopic impurities, viral particles, solid surfaces, walls, etc.,” as the statement says). 2. If all these surfaces are photoemissive (unlikely), why don’t their photoelectrons lead to the formation of ozone? And so forth.

The Wire Science report also raised concerns about missing details in the documents ‘Shycocan’’s maker shared with us (requesting us to not share them publicly; we agreed). Independent experts Anusha Krishnan and The Wire Science spoke to said the documents lacked information about the testing methods and, in at least one case, efforts to eliminate bias.

Arindam Ghosh, a physicist at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, had also told Indian Express last year: “The claim is that if you fire a lot of electrons, it affects and deactivates the S protein of the coronavirus. I do not know of any scientific document which proves this. To my understanding, there is no data available even outside the publication domain which proves it. I do not understand … how some weird electrons seek only the coronavirus to kill, leaving everything else unaffected.”

As a result of these findings, The Wire Science report said: “As of now, there appear to be no published scientific studies, experiments or publicly available data (that other scientists can use) to establish the efficacy, safety or usability of ‘Shycocan’. All of the information on the device is to be found on the company’s website, in news articles, press releases and anecdotes related by the people marketing it.”

The implicated para

Now, the complaint with AWS alleges that The Wire‘s report contained one paragraph in the article that was copied from a magazine with a single ‘article’ hosted on Issuu. The article, which carries the date of March 30, 2021, is published by ‘jaiprakash36’ (who has published nothing else) and contains precisely two paragraphs – one, the supposedly copied para, and two, a para that appears to be an advertisement for ‘Shycocan’:

Shycocan Stands for Scalene Hypercharge Corona Canon you can buy it on amazon at the price of 24,999. According to the device makers Shyconcan can disable upto 99.9% virus in the installed area.

Turn now to the paragraph which the complainant claims was copied:

The company Eureka Forbes has also advertised the “Forbes Corona Guard, powered by Shycocan” as a device that could attenuate 99.9% of coronaviruses in enclosed spaces. In November 2020, after complaints from scientists, the Consumer Complaints Council of the Advertising Standard Council of India directed Eureka Forbes to withdraw its claims. Yet the company still lists the product as available, along with its purported effectiveness against the novel coronavirus.

Shortly after receiving the first communiqué from the AWS abuse team, we responded with a timestamped document that clearly shows Anusha Krishnan and me co-editing a Google Doc document containing her report, with edits of the concerned paragraph dated before the Issuu ‘article’ was published, on March 30, 2021. (I suspect, sans proof, that the complainant published the single-page magazine after our article was published and then backdated the page).

However, the AWS abuse team has been repeatedly emailing us asking us to describe the steps we will or are going to take to resolve this issue, unmindful of the proof we have provided. To them, it appears, this is a potential DMCA violation that can only be resolved by us responding to the complaint by making some changes at our end. To us, the abuse team doesn’t seem to be prepared to consider that the complaint is baseless.

This has been a frustrating experience, and is still yet to be resolved.

The Wire
October 16, 2021

Oct 18, 2021