From The Risk-Monger Blog

Posted by RISKMONGER

In the introduction to this series, righteous risks were defined as the threat to societal well-being when value-based motives influence decision-making more than facts and evidence. Policies should be determined according to the best pragmatic solutions to complex problems with conflicting interests being addressed through a consensus approach. More and more though, regulators are being led by moral dogma and ethical exclusion techniques dictated by influential stakeholders.

Policymaking is often framed now in a virtue context rather than policy management.

• Fighting climate change is the morally responsible thing to do and takes an overarching precedent.
• Good leaders can only protect public health by banning synthetic chemicals and pesticides (associated with evil corporations peddling poisons).
• Plastic waste has caused moral outrage, from straws up a turtle’s nostril to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, so it is a righteous imperative that all plastics should be removed from the market.
• Industry has been profiting for decades at the expense of the poor, working class so the benign regulator must act to restrict company involvement in any policy process.
• The distinction is clear: industry lobbies (deceptive, bad) while NGOs advocate (supportive, good).Capitalism is inherently wasteful and unjust; we must transition to a degrowth, human economy.
• Sustainability is a virtue and pollution and waste are the key vices.

The problem though is that such moral dogma is usually framed in clear black and white (good v evil) distinctions while the reality of policymaking is usually more grey. Most plastic applications are more sustainable than the alternatives; a large proportion of proposed climate measures will damage the environment; industry is the key driver of sustainable innovations; agroecology and organic farming will lead to greater degradation and food loss… but any leaders who accept such realities are dismissed with a wave of righteous indignation.

Aren’t all Facts Value-Driven?

There has always been a normative influence to any decision-making process, often framed as “the right thing to do”. The values driving decisions may be socialist, Christian, liberal, conservative – such is the nature of politics. But these values were tones while the facts, the data, the scientific evidence, were always the anchors for their decisions. Such decisions had always been considered as objective or at the very least, respectful to the evidence.Post-modernists though want us to believe that scientific data is value-driven as well (by cherry-pickers with political interests). In reality, those who are funding the research are value-driven … and the scientists seeking such funding might be forced to pony up to the trough aware that they need to add those values or fit the research results to the funders’ interests. Today if a scientist wants funding or wants to get an article published, they need to exaggerate the link of their data to climate change, synthetic chemical risks, potential for biodiversity destruction… (reminiscent of debates on how many angels can dance on a pin). This creates a belief that there is morally correct data – a righteous risk.This mindset though raises a serious question for research integrity as seen with the recent debate after Patrick Brown admitted he had to over-emphasize climate effects to get his paper published. But it in no way means that scientific data is value-based as post-modernists portend.Much of the moralization of the environmental health policy process is driven by activist NGOs who are using their social media and mass media networks to define a narrative that funnels any decision into an ethical choice (our way or the bad way). Their simplistic solutions (organic food, renewable energy, zero-waste, carbon-neutral transportation…) are ethically framed as good things to do. Industry lobbies are bad but we are the good guys protecting you. Any industry that does not fit within their righteous framework is being systematically “tobacconised”: delegitimized and deformalized as evil scourges on the heart of humanity.But how did these activist groups become the key influencers in these ethically-driven regulatory chambers? How did policymaking shift from the pragmatic balancing of the best possible choices among the myriad of interests and stakeholders (Realpolitik) to pure virtue politics – leading by a sort of Divine Rite of Virtue? As always with any lobbying success, we need to follow the money.

Foundations: Virtue Capitalism

Time was that NGOs would raise money through membership dues, coin drums and the clipboard brigades on street corners. As the non-profit sector expanded in size and influence, around the beginning of the millennium, they grew in staff and campaigns, some becoming global powerhouses. Greenpeace had a fleet of pirate ships that needed funding, Friends of the Earth needed to hire the best lobbyists, Pesticide Action Network needed to pay for scientists … loose change just didn’t cut it.At the same time, the world of foundations and charitable trusts was changing.Time was that foundations and family trusts funded research into deadly diseases, humanitarian missions, scholarships and the fine arts. But their coffers increased and their boards became more ambitious (not to mention an influx of dot-com and Web 2.0 billionaires all taking the “Pledge”). In a recent Firebreak article, I examined this evolution in the non-government sphere.The policy arena is changing rapidly as certain righteous-driven foundations (from Bloomberg Philanthropies to the Rockefeller Brothers to Soros’ Open Society Foundations) are donating to NGOs who are driven to advance a fundamentalist narrative, put their values at the core of policy campaigns and lobby policymakers relentlessly to put their virtue policies above evidence and other stakeholder interests. In the last decade, foundations have become the key funding source for most environmental-health NGOs, and the number of these groups have grown impressively (while memberships and internal dialogue have declined to insignificance). Some of the more abrasive and less scrupulous NGOs, like US Right to Know and Corporate Europe Observatory, are entirely funded by the same group of, often, militant foundations or non-transparent donor-advised funds.Donor-advised funds allow interest groups like tort law firms and the organic food industry lobby to anonymously support activist groups without disclosing their support or their conflicts of interest. It allows NGOs to operate non-transparently while condemning other groups for, well, the same thing. I recently showed how Jennifer Baichwal, director of the film Into the Weeds, was funded via dark sources to produce a film saluting the tort law industry for taking on Monsanto and their non-transparent practices. As they travel the world promoting their film as part of the anti-glyphosate campaign, do these activists not see their hypocrisy? And Baichwal is excessively righteous.

As social media campaigns can deliver more efficient lobbying returns, as research studies can be more economically financed and poor findings more easily published, and as media groups can be more easily manipulated (by the same foundation funding), these foundations have grown more successful in advancing their ethical values onto policy measures. The public policy landscape has changed as these soft lobbyists are able to instal activists to represent their moral objectives.

For ambitious young people today, I would recommend working your way up a foundation’s management structure. The directors of large foundations carry more influence and (moral) power than many global leaders. The president of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Mark Malloch-Brown, for example, was the former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations. But what you gain in influence you will likely have to pay for with cynicism.

Uncompromising Promises

Ethics may speak of good v evil in some absolute virtue theatre, but there are grey scales … or should I say: “white lies”. These are ethical compromises for the greater good. A white lie is pragmatic and removes the uncompromising sanctimony that rigid, righteousness demands. Politics is the art of compromise but moral zealots would refuse any compromises to their level of virtue excellence. If you hold yourself to a higher noble standard, and you identify others as pure evil, then any compromise to the interests of the heathens (ie, industry, researchers or consumers) is inconceivable.

People do not compromise if they don’t have to. If activists, or their NGOs, are handsomely paid by ethically-driven foundations to pursue some policy outcome that is deemed morally pure, then they will fight it out to the bitter end. Some examples:

• Earlier this year, The Risk-Monger leaked an internal document from a group of German anti-biotech campaigners who had admitted the evidence on plant breeding was against them. Their solution was to reframe their campaign as a social justice struggle of good v evil. As the organic retail chain, Bioland, is still funding their admitted lost cause, it is inconceivable for them to sit down with policymakers and find a compromise with industry.

• If foundations like Bloomberg Philanthropies pay activists to campaign to stop the use of nicotine alternatives like vaping, and they have identified the companies promoting e-cigarettes as evil, then it will be very unlikely that they would be open to a compromise. They are accountable to their funders and no one else.

Ironically, in order to hold to their higher moral identity, these activists are lying to the public and spreading baseless fears. But as they see themselves as crusaders, I’m sure they don’t see it that way. As long as these foundations keep the NGOs well-funded and ready to fight over the long haul, then compromises are not on the table. Their righteous virtue is not for sale.

Spreading their Wings of Influence

Each foundation has, by definition, a set of moral objectives that earmark their philanthropy. Bloomberg Philanthropies‘ objectives, for example, “guide initiatives that tackle a wide range of issues to save and improve lives around the world”. This cause includes funding campaigns on public health and the environment, promoting NGOs taking a strong position against sugary drinks, snacks and vaping. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation aims to create “enduring solutions for just societies and a healthy, resilient natural world”. In seeking justice on issues concerning human health and the environment, it is not surprising that much of their money goes to moralising, militant NGOs.But these foundations are not just funding NGOs to do their bidding; they are also buying ink in the mainstream media, paying tort law firms to pursue public nuisance lawsuits and using their donations to UN agencies as free microphones for their activism (COP28 in Dubai seemed to have a special hall dedicated to speeches from philanthropists who have donated to UN activities).As media organisations go through a painful economic transition with the shift to digital news, foundations have discovered the benefits of funding news organisations like The Guardian or creating new ones like the The Examination. But we would be naive to think their funding was not tied to issues and values that are central to the foundations. These foundations are effectively buying off struggling journalists to articulate their shameless sanctimony.

Through their well-funded, multi-pronged programmes and a diverse army of NGO activists, media groups and public figures, these foundations are able to manipulate public perception on food diets, energy sources, new nicotine products, packaging materials, livestock and farming practices… They don’t need to be scientific or evidence-driven, just forceful and ethically-postured.

I have referred to this trend as eco-prohibition or greenhibition. This can be seen as NGOs start to impose their righteous restrictions on consumers who may enjoy snacks, alcohol, meat, vaping, fashion or travel. Not everyone can or wants to pay more for elitist organic food they are told is morally better. Affordable energy supplies should be a right in the West and not a privilege for the wealthy. In fact very few consumers welcome or share the green ideals, appreciate how they are being imposed and share their values. But when foundations have billions to spend, control the media and have convinced themselves they are in the moral mainstream, the democratic process is just a minor detail.There is, of course, a poison pill to protect these foundations. Should any group attack how the foundations are undemocratically imposing their values, they would be seen as “shooting Bambi” and come across even more despicably. The Risk-Monger has shot Bambi on several occasions when the campaign sanctimony had fermented with too much hypocrisy (and has paid heavily for it).And then, just when we thought it could not get any worse, in the last five years, the nature of foundations and activist philanthropy evolved to a worrying state: virtue on steroids.

Effective Altruism and Earn to Give

The FTX-Sam Bankman-Fried and Sam Altman episodes of the past year reflect another type of righteous risk to be considered, when foundations start to interfere with capitalism and democracy for all the wrong reasons. The “foundation consortium”, Effective Ventures, ties together a series of donor-advised funds targeting high-income individuals (particularly in the tech and crypto sector).

In cult-like fashion (including multiple cases of sexual abuse of young women pulled into the organisation’s opportunistic appeal), the Effective Altruism (EA) philosophy is that you should try to earn more to be able to give more in order to more effectively save the world. It started out as a methodology to determine the most efficient way for busy, high-net worth individuals to donate to charities making a difference (like malaria nets, vaccines…), but the algorithms (and the key influencers) shifted to promoting more existential risk projects like preventing nuclear meltdowns, climate collapse or runaway AI bots taking over the world. It morphed into a type of algorithmic philanthropy and their solutions could only justify the argument why bots should not have money.

And while the Effective Ventures organizations did well with third-party donor-advised commissions, conference fees and a rapidly expanding following of young worshippers flocking to San Francisco, some young billionaires got a little too caught up in the idea of having the power to save the world. Sam Bankman-Fried, an outspoken advocate and board member of the Effective Ventures group, took the “earn more to give more” righteous philosophy to a higher level by stealing billions from his Alameda Research hedge fund investors, using their money to save the world.

This morality stuff is hard for millennials to get right.

Effective Altruists in the Silicon Valley are forming an influential network for pushing (their conception of) ethical policies forward with large donations aimed at advancing their interests. This network was made evident when two EA-connected OpenAI board members tried to remove Sam Altman as its CEO (for pushing forward the commercial interests of AI over the group’s philanthropic objectives). See my assessment of how aggressive these EA philanthropists have become.

Having thousands of little Robin Hoods running around feeling better about their questionable business practices is a righteous risk in itself. Today billions of dollars of unaccountable donations are flowing through these shell foundations to activist groups and zealot lobbyists who are aggressively running communications campaigns to raise their dogmatic ideologies to the centre of public dialogue, shaping a particular value-driven narrative. From these anti-capitalist campaigns, there has been a marked increase of vilification of practices from conventional farming to vaping to using fossil fuels. The American donor-advised fund structure, where investors can advance their interests non-transparently by donating dark money to activist groups through these third party laundering foundations, should be made illegal.US Right to Know was exposed for accepting USD 360,000 in stolen Alameda Research investors funds in 2022. Until this day, they have refused to give these illegitimate funds back. Their righteous sanctimony must never be used against themselves.

Controlling Righteous Funding

Righteous risks are like any other risk management situation. In order to reduce exposure to righteous risks, the methods in which foundations are operating needs to be addressed. As they are becoming larger and more influential, their role in the influence game must be controlled.

• Foundations should not be funding news organisations directly or through media foundations.
• The dark money, non-transparent, donor-advised funds should be made illegal (or at least not tax deductible).
• Without a representative population (outside of some billionaire), foundations should not be actively involved in policy debates

While foundations present themselves as virtuous, philanthropic endeavors to improve the world (along their objectives and goals), they are effectively undermining democratic institutions by enabling a small group of activists to impose their elitist value system on the greater population with little dialogue or consultation. With seemingly unlimited funding, their influence is expected to expand.

We will not be able to manage righteous risks until we manage the fuel that is powering the key drivers.

The Righteous Risks series will now look at some case studies where policymakers got a bit carried away with their sanctimony.

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