6 | COMMENT
THE OBSERVER | SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 2013
JOE MERLIHAN PUBLISHER STEVE KANNON EDITOR
COMMENT
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OUR VIEW / EDITORIAL
THE VIEW FROM HERE
Russian tyranny shines light on Olympic debacle ADD THE ELOQUENCE OF the brilliant Stephen Fry and the wry commentary of George Takei to the growing list of those calling for a boycott or move of the Winter Olympics scheduled for next year in Sochi, Russia. Driving the petitions and critiques are the Russian government’s new anti-gay laws, spearheaded by the increasingly-militant Vladimir Putin. When the two celebrities joined the fray this week, they added to a long list of those critical of the latest crackdown, not to mention the outright corruption of both the Games and the government. You can also count U.S. President Barack Obama among those decrying the anti-gay legislation. Homosexuals are only the latest in a series of persecutions attributable to Putin’s hard-line rule. Fry, in a letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron and the International Olympic Committee, decried the Russian legislation, saying allowing Russia to host the Games in 2014 is comparable to allowing the Nazis to do so in 1936. “An absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014 in Sochi is simply essential,” Fry wrote. “At all costs, Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilized world.” The IOC has, characteristically, chosen to do nothing, barely acknowledging the backlash, and opting to do and say nothing that would interfere with the most important aspect of the Games: profits for the corrupt few who line their pockets with public money. They hid that under the guise of separating sports and politics. Fry, of course, was having no part of that: “Let us not forget that Olympic events used not only to be athletic, they used to include cultural competitions. Let us realise that in fact, sport is cultural. It does not exist in a bubble outside society or politics. The idea that sport and politics don’t connect is worse than disingenuous, worse than stupid. It is wickedly, wilfully wrong.” The hateful Russian legislation aside, there are plenty of reasons why Russia should never have been awarded the Olympics – just as was the case with China in 2008. The country is rife with corruption – fine by IOC standards – and the site, Sochi, so remote that problems were bound to occur. The chances of the Games going off smoothly are rather smaller, even though they are now the most expensive in history at $50 billion ... and counting. The Games and the venue are seen as massive ego boost for Putin, as well as a chance to funnel even more public money into the hands of oligarchs in the country. That is a constant part of the Games, a good reason to do away with them completely, not just in Sochi. The Olympics are in essence founded on corruption, each event designed to separate taxpayers from their money to enrich a few and providing no real benefit in return. We’ve all seen enough examples of Olympic costs to know the numbers trotted out in advance are no more than fairy tales. Promised tourism dollars, even if they materialize, are a one-time deal, while the debt payments go on for years. Even those Games purported to have made money employ creative accounting, forgetting to add in much of the infrastructure and operational costs, such as security, for example, that are covered by governments as a matter of course. Given that the Olympic ideals have long vanished, if they ever existed, perhaps it’s time to look at doing away with the Games.
Playing Charlie Brown to council's Lucy, Al Marshall takes another run at joining CPAC, with a predictable outcome. WORLD VIEW / GWYNNE DYER
Biting into the world’s most important hamburger WORLD AFFAIRS The most important hamburger in the history of the world was cooked (but only half-eaten) in London on Monday. It was grown in a lab, not cut from a cow, and it tasted – well, not quite good enough to fool the experts, but then they forgot the ketchup, mustard, cheese, onion, bacon, tomato and lettuce. Not to mention the fries. “I miss the fat, there’s a leanness to it,” said food writer Josh Schonwald, “but the general bite feels like a hamburger.” Austrian food critic Hanni Ruetzler agreed: “It’s not that juicy, but the consistency is perfect. This is meat to me. It’s not falling apart; it’s really something to bite on.” Even in a blind tasting, she added, she would say that it was real meat and not a soya copy. Of course she would. It WAS real meat, grown from a cow’s stem cells just like the flesh of its own body. It tasted lean because the stem cells
the experimenters used were only programmed to make muscle tissue, not fat. (They’re working on that). The real test was whether tens of billions of lab-grown muscle cells could be organised into something with the consistency of proper meat, not mush, and the lab-burger passed that test with flying colours. But why would anybody want to pass that test? What’s wrong with just eating cows – and sheep and pigs and chickens? Far beyond the objections of vegetarians and animal-rights activists, what’s wrong with eating “natural” meat is that there are too many of us, eating too much of it, and we’re running out of land to grow it on. “Right now, we are using 70 per cent of all our agricultural capacity to grow meat through livestock,” Professor Mark Post, the lead researcher, told The Independent at a conference in Vancouver last year. “You are going to need alternatives. If we don’t do anything, meat will become a luxury food and will become very expensive....”
“Livestock also contributes a lot to greenhouse gas emissions, more so than our entire transport system,” explained Post, a medical physiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. “Livestock produces 39 per cent of global methane, 5 per cent of the CO2, and 40 per cent of the nitrous oxide. Eventually, we will have an eco-tax on meat.” On meat raised in the open air, that is. Whereas meat grown in the lab is a potentially inexhaustible resource, and it does far less environmental damage. According to an Oxford University study published in 2011, a tonne of “cultured” beef would require 99 per cent less land and between 82 and 96 per cent less water than its “natural” rival, and would produce between 78 and 95 per cent less greenhouse gas. It would also use 45 per cent less energy. These are seriously impressive numbers. If Post’s process can scale up successfully, then in 10 or 20 years we could be producing enough meat for a growing global population
even though many people are eating more meat per capita as their incomes rise. Moreover, we would be able to turn most of that 70 per cent of agricultural land back into forest and prairie, or switch it to growing grain for human consumption. “There are basically three things that can happen going forward,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who bankrolled Post’s research. “One is that we can all become vegetarian. I don’t think that’s really likely. The second is we ignore the issues, and that leads to continued environmental harm. The third option is we do something new. “Some people think this is science fiction, I actually think that’s a good thing. If what you’re doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it’s probably not transformative enough. ...We’re trying to create the first cultured beef hamburger. From there I’m optimistic we can really scale (up) by leaps and bounds.” You probably can. Post’s DYER | 8