Friday 30 March 2018

EPA accused of urging staff to downplay climate change after memo leaks

Extract from TheGuardian

Scientists say an internal Environmental Protection Agency document encourages the use of misleading statements about scientific certainty


Scientists have accused the US Environmental Protection Agency of distributing misleading statements about climate change, following the leaking of an internal email advising agency staff to downplay the certainty of the science.
The email, sent to EPA communications staff by Joel Scheraga, senior climate adaptation adviser to the agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, acknowledges that communities face “challenges” in dealing with the consequences of climate change.
However, the email, obtained by HuffPost, also sets out ambiguous talking points favoured by Pruitt, such as: “Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.”
The email adds that “while there has been extensive research and a host of published reports on climate change, clear gaps remain including our understanding of the role of human activity and what we can do about it”.
Scheraga adds in his note that Pruitt encourages an “open, transparent debate on climate science”.
An EPA spokeswoman said the points were “developed by the office of public affairs. The agency’s work on climate adaptation continues under the leadership of Dr Scheraga.”
Since becoming EPA head under Donald Trump, Pruitt has erroneously denied that carbon dioxide is a “primary contributor” to warming that has seen the Earth’s average temperature increase by about 1C (1.8F) over the past century. Pruitt has also said industrialization has warmed the planet “to a certain degree” but that “humans have most flourished during times of warming trends”.
During his tenure, the EPA has removed information on its website about climate change, scrapped a climate adaptation program and advocated the need for “regulatory certainty” by loosening emissions regulations for vehicles and the fossil fuels industry. A televised “red team, blue team” debate between climate scientists and those who reject the science has also been mulled.
Pruitt was a vocal supporter of Trump’s decision to remove the US from the Paris climate agreement and is busy dismantling the Obama administration’s clean power plan, which Pruitt fought in court when attorney general of Oklahoma.
Scientists have pointed out that while the exact ramifications of climate change are yet to play out, the science behind it is well established and points directly to human culpability. A major report released by government scientists last year reiterated that humans are the “dominant” driver of global warming, with it being “highly likely” that the release of greenhouse gas emissions has caused more than half of all warming since 1951.
Scheraga’s email is “literally true but carefully crafted to mislead”, according to Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.
“There is uncertainty in climate science, but the uncertainty spans the range of climate change being somewhat serious to extremely serious,” he said.
Dessler said any gaps on scientists’ understanding are not big enough to declare climate change a “non-problem”. He added: “And what we can do about it is quite clear: to stabilize the climate, we need to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to near zero.”
Kerry Emanuel, a meteorologist and climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: “If confronting serious risks depended on first converting risks to certainties, no one would get flu shots, there would be no attempt to reduce stockpiles of nuclear weapons and businesses would fail at a high rate, having made no efforts to mitigate their risks.
“Mr Pruitt is engaged in a disingenuous effort to stall measures to mitigate climate risk under the false pretext of concern about uncertainty.”
The leak comes as it was revealed that Pruitt, already under fire over his use of first class air travel, lived last year in a Washington DC house co-owned by the wife of a leading energy lobbyist.
Property records obtained by ABC News show that Pruitt lived in a townhouse partly owned by Vicki Hart, the wife of Steven Hart, chief executive of lobbying firm Williams and Jensen. Hart’s clients include the NRA and gas company Cheniere Energy.
“Pruitt’s corruption knows no bounds and he should be fired immediately,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, one of a coalition of environment groups who have demanded Pruitt be removed from his position

Thursday 29 March 2018

Tim Storer insists he won't horse-trade, but flags boost to Newstart as top goal

Extract from The Guardian



The newly installed South Australian independent senator, Tim Storer, says he isn’t about backroom horse-trading, but he has identified achieving a boost to the Newstart payment as a key objective of his period in federal politics.
Storer this week forced the Turnbull government to hit pause on its much vaunted big business tax cut, refusing to sign on until the Coalition countenanced broader tax and policy reform to accompany its proposal to cut the corporate rate from 30% to 25%.
In a broad-ranging interview with Guardian Australia, Storer said he intended to assess all legislation on its merits rather than engaging in horse-trading, but he said he was clear about what he wanted to achieve during his time in Canberra.
He said a boost to Newstart was a priority. “For me, it is a priority that I would like to take forward,” Storer said.
“I’ve got 500 days from when I was declared as a senator to the end of the period. There will be an election in that of course, but yes, [boosting Newstart] is an issue I wish to take forward.
“It’s obviously of personal interest to me. I’ve been struck by the implications over the last 25 years,” he said, adding that governments of all stripes were responsible for the current suboptimal level of the benefit.
“Newstart has shrunk against average wages, median wages and the minimum wage and the pension. There are groups such as the Business Council of Australia, as well as KPMG and the Australian Council of Social Service and economists like Chris Richardson who have all made calls to link it with wages and increase it.”
Storer said the Turnbull government’s standard response to arguments that the benefit was currently too low was to point out that Newstart recipients often received other forms of government payments, but he said even when that was taken into account, people were falling “$96 dollars short of the absolute minimum required to cover the basic cost of living”.
The new senator also nominated accountability and transparency in government as a significant preoccupation. He said that policy interest drew him to Nick Xenophon. Storer was aligned with the NXT before splitting with them, and taking his place as an independent replacing Skye Kakoschke-Moore when she was felled by last year’s dual citizenship fracas.
Storer also identifies an interest in trade and tourism and public infrastructure investment, as well as business development and transformation, to promote economic growth in South Australia and nationally.
Storer is an economist, with an MBA from the Australian National University. He speaks fluent Mandarin, and before politics, ran an Asia-focused consultancy.
Asked to summarise his political philosophy and values, Storer said he wants to promote “prosperity and fairness” during his period in public life, and will bring that rubric to considering legislation in his cross bench role.
On the company tax cut, Storer said he was concerned the big business relief being proposed by the Coalition was inconsistent with the government’s medium-term fiscal strategy and provided only “modest economic benefits, relative to its cost”.
He said the Henry tax review recommended a 25% tax rate for companies “but there were six or seven other signature reforms, which I believe have not been acted upon”.
Storer suggested it would be hard to get him over the line on the company tax cut, given his current concerns, but if the government came back with a revised proposal “I will review what is put before me as a senator in legislation in the chamber”.

Australia's emissions rise again in 2017, putting Paris targets in doubt

Extract from The Guardian


Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 were again the highest on record when unreliable data from sectors including land clearing and forestry are excluded, according to consultants NDEVR Environmental.
Even including land clearing, overall emissions show a continued rising trend, which began in about 2011, putting Australia’s commitment under the Paris agreement further out of reach.
The rising greenhouse gas pollution comes despite continued decline in emissions from the electricity sector, following increased renewable energy generation and the closure of Australia’s dirtiest coal power station, Hazelwood.
NDEVR replicates the federal government’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory (NGGI) quarterly reports, but releases them months ahead of the official data. Previous NDEVR reports’ figures have been within 1% of the official figures when they are eventually released.
The latest NDEVR figures include the last three months of 2017, allowing a comparison of calendar-year figures since records began in 2002, revealing 2017 had the highest emissions on record, when those from land-use change are excluded.
Even including the unreliable land-use figures, overall emissions continued their overall upward trend, taking Australia further from the commitments it made in Paris to help keep global warming under 2C. It is even making its current target (a 26-28% cut below 2005 levels by 2030), which experts agree is not yet strong enough to comply with the Paris agreement, seem increasingly out of reach.
In 2017, Australia’s total emissions from all sectors excluding land-use change came to 556.11m tonnes of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases, according to NDEVR’s projections. That surpassed the last record, set in just 2016, by 7.21m tonnes.
Overall emissions including land-use change – which involves activities such as land clearing and forestry – were the highest since 2011, indicating a clear upward trend since that time, reversing years of declining emissions starting in 2007.
Emissions from the electricity sector in the last three months of 2017 were the lowest they’ve been in the data set, going back to 2001. And in the full year, they were the second lowest, pipped only by 2013.
But that reduction was overwhelmed by increases in other sectors. Emissions from transport were at a record high in the last three months of 2017, continuing a steady rise since the records began in 2001. Fugitive emissions, which include emissions from the production, processing, transport, storage, transmission and distribution of fossil fuels, were also projected to be the highest on record.
Stationary energy, which includes energy produced for industrial processes such as the growing LNG industry, was also projected to be at the equal highest on record, matching the previous quarter from July to September 2017.

Data on disadvantage shows why Labor's message is resonating


The latest release of the Index of Relative Socioeconomic Advantage and Disadvantage (Irsad) reveals not just the wide disparities of wealth and advantage across the nation but also gives insight into why the ALP’s current policies are finding traction within the electorate and the difficulties for the LNP.
While measures such as income and wealth are more commonly used to record inequality across the nation, the Australian Bureau of Statistics after each census uses the data to estimate levels not just of wealth but advantage and disadvantage area by area.
It does this by factoring a broad range of indicators, which are generally associated with having a more advantageous life.
For example positive measures of advantage include having a household equivalised income greater than $78,000, but also the size of your mortgage, the percent of people employed as professionals, your education level and the percent of occupied dwellings with four or more bedrooms.
On the other hand measures of disadvantage include such things as a lack of either internet connection or car ownership, and a high proportion of single parent families in the area.
Using these measures, the ABS found the most advantageous local government area was Ku-ring-gai in Sydney’s upper north shore, closely followed by fellow north shore area of Mosman and Woollahra on the southern side of the harbour.
Woollahra is also within the prime minister’s electorate of Wentworth which is apt as Wentworth is also the most advantageous electorate in the nation.
Around 85% of the residents of Wentworth are in the top 10% of the most advantaged people in Australia. And no one is in the bottom 60%.
By contrast the most disadvantaged electorate is the Tasmanian seat of Braddon held by the ALP’s Justine Keay. Nearly a third of its residents are in the bottom 10% of the Irsad index:
As a general rule, the ABS data shows that there is not surprisingly a high degree of correlation between areas of socioeconomic advantage and income.
The ABS also provides an index of economic resources. This is a much more targeted index which does not include education and occupation data and has greater emphasis on income and housing status:
But the difference between the two measures does provide some insight into the reasons why the ALP’s policies targeting inequality and housing affordability are having such resonance with voters.
Of the 20 electorates with the greatest level of people in the top 30% of advantage, 16 are held by the Liberal party, three are held by the ALP and one – the seat of Melbourne – is held by the Greens.
And yet those four non-Liberal party seats all score much lower in terms of “economic resources”:
The reason is those seats are all in the inner city, which means they score lowly on measures such as number of four-bedroom homes and the percentage of people who are either paying off a mortgage or who own their house outright.
In effect while such areas do well in terms of advantage of education, occupation and even income, they do less well in terms of house ownership.
These are people for whom housing affordability is the key issue, rather than those who are more concerned about increasing the value of their house.
By contrast the 20 electorates with the highest percentage of people in the bottom 30% of advantage are a mixture of ALP, Liberal party, and very much National party, rural seats:
This is because of low levels of internet access and education, and higher levels of unemployment.
It is for that reason that despite how much Barnaby Joyce might think that upping sticks and moving to his electorate of New England is the way to go, most people do not. New England incidentally is the electorate with the 21st highest percentage of people in the bottom 30% of advantage.
But where it gets interesting is when we compare the level of advantage across the safe and marginal ALP and LNP seats.
Across the 26 seats the ALP holds with more than 60% of the two-party-preferred vote, there is a skew towards the lower ends of socio-economic advantage. On average 41% of residents in safe ALP seats are in the bottom 30% of advantage.
But the skew in the safe LNP seats is much more obvious and much more at the other end of the scale. Nearly half of residents in 31 safe Liberal party seats are in the top 30% of advantage, with nearly a quarter alone in the top 10%:
Marginal seats however are much more reflective of the national average. Among the ALP and LNP marginally held seats, there is only a slight derivation from the national average of 10% in each decile of advantage.
The biggest drop off is in the highest decile of advantage in marginally held LNP seats. These seats comprise semi-rural/rural seats such as Leichhardt, Flynn and Page which have very low levels of people in the top 10% of advantage.
The LNP policies that speak to its base are thus those aimed more at wealth and high income earners. But the marginal seats of both parties have much more equitable distribution of people with advantage.
In safe Liberal party seats, only 21% of people are with the middle three deciles of advantage – they actually under-represent “middle Australia”. By contrast, 31% of those living in safe ALP seats are with those middle three deciles – a similar level to that in both ALP and LNP marginal seats.
For these seats housing affordability, internet access, and the ability to send their child to higher education are all aspects that resonate as they would deliver higher levels of advantage.
For now, with its emphasis of company tax cuts, the LNP has been speaking much more to its base than its marginal seats, while the ALP with its polices has been able to speak well to both.

Majority of Australians support phasing out coal power by 2030, survey finds

Extract from The Guardian

50% of Coalition voters and 67% of Labor voters want to phase out coal, and majority also support striving to cut greenhouse gas emissions


A majority of Australians would support phasing out coal power by 2030, including half the people in a sample identifying as Coalition voters, according to a survey by a progressive thinktank.
The research funded by the Australia Institute says 60% of a sample of 1,417 Australians surveyed by online market research firm Research Now supported Australia joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance to phase out coal power by 2030.
The Powering Past Coal Alliance – spearheaded by the UK and Canada – was unveiled at the COP23 climate talks in Bonn. The agreement is not legally binding, and the membership does not include Australia or other major coal exporters and users.
The survey suggests there is a core level of support across Australia’s partisan divide for signing on, with 50% of Coalition voters supportive as well as 67% of ALP voters. The significant dissenters were One Nation voters, with only 36% supportive.
A majority of Australians also supported increasing ambition on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, with 58% support, including 47% of Coalition voters in the sample.
“The strong majority support for phasing out coal power shows how far the community is ahead of the government on climate change,” said the Australia Institute’s deputy director, Ebony Bennett.
She said the Turnbull government’s approach on climate and energy policy meant Australia was at risk of missing out on jobs and investment associated with a global boom in renewable energy, and was out of step with public sentiment.
The research follows a declaration on Wednesday at the National Press Club by the resources minister Matt Canavan that he was not interested in contemplating a discussion about a just transition for workers displaced by any phase out of coal consistent with Australia’s international climate obligations.
Canavan said workers suffered when industries shut down or were phased out so euphemisms like “just transitions” were best avoided. “I don’t like the term transition, let’s be frank, if you want to shutdown the coal industry, say it – that’s what will happen.”
The resources minister said expanding the coal industry was “not inconsistent with the obligations we’ve got to reduce carbon emissions”.
He said countries were increasing investment in high-efficiency coal plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the Paris accord. Canavan did not mention that some countries, such as Japan, are increasing investment in high-efficiency coal because of a phase-out of nuclear power.
Canavan also declared in response to a question about balancing his portfolio responsibilities to boost the resources sector with his responsibilities to the Queenslanders who elected him that he had been elected to parliament “on a platform that is unashamedly pro-coal”.
While Canavan was elected because he was given a winnable position on the LNP’s Queensland Senate ticket, the resources minister said: “I got elected on the basis I will support the resources sector.”

Wednesday 28 March 2018

'Extreme' fossil fuel investments have surged under Donald Trump, report reveals

Extract from The Guardian

Sharp rise globally in the dirtiest fossil fuel investments reverses progress made after the Paris agreement, with tar sands holdings more than doubling in Trump’s first year in office


Bank holdings in “extreme” fossil fuels skyrocketed globally to $115bn during Donald Trump’s first year as US president, with holdings in tar sands oil more than doubling, a new report has found.
A sharp flight from fossil fuels investments after the Paris agreement was reversed last year with a return to energy sources dubbed “extreme” because of their contribution to global emissions. This included an 11% hike in funding for carbon-heavy tar sands, as well as Arctic and ultra-deepwater oil and coal.
US and Canadian banks led a race back into the unconventional energy sector following Trump’s promise to withdraw from Paris, with JPMorgan Chase increasing its coal funding by a factor of 21, and quadrupling its tar sands assets.
Chase’s $5.6bn surge in tar sands holdings added to nearly $47bn of gains for the industry last year, according to the report by NGOs including BankTrack, the Sierra Club and Rainforest Action Network (RAN).
RAN spokeswoman, Alison Kirsch, accused banks such as JPMorgan Chase of “moving backwards in lockstep with their wrongheaded political leaders”.
“If we are to have any chance of halting catastrophic climate change, there must be an end of expansion and complete phase-out of these dangerous energy sources,” she said. “Banks need to be accountable and implement policies guarding against extreme fossil fuel funding.”
JPMorgan Chase has asked the US securities and exchanges commission for support in its bid to block a shareholder resolution calling for a bank report on financial and climate risks associated with tar sands projects.
Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto Dominion remain the biggest tar sands backers, with $38bn of holdings between them.
Kelly Martin, a campaign director at Sierra Club, said: Tar sands and other fossil fuel projects threaten our climate, public health, and communities, and until they stop supporting them financially, major banks … are complicit in this destruction.”
The bulk of new “extreme” investments came in a doubling of loans and bonds to Canada’s government-backed tar sands industry, even though its success would be disastrous for climate mitigation efforts, according to the former Nasa chief James Hansen.
Bank funding for tar sands production and pipelines more than doubled last year – compared to the 2015-16 period, when then-US president Barack Obama nixed the Keystone pipeline project, which Trump subsequently reapproved.
Support for coal among the 36 banks surveyed was also up by 6% in 2017 after a 38% plunge in 2016. Large Chinese banks actually reduced these investments last year and in Europe, BNP Paribas and ING moved to limit their exposure to fossil fuel assets.
However, 14 European banks collectively increased their coal financing by more than $2bn last year, with HSBC the worst performer by far.
“Europe’s top banks have got to stop their coal-focused assault on the Paris agreement,” said Johan Frijns, the director of BankTrack. “It is now vital that they move to stamp out their financial support for companies developing new coal-fired power plants around the world.”

It's been a week since I quit Facebook. It feels like liberation

Facebook was an Exocet into the bunker of my obsessive compulsions


The revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s harvest of Facebook data signalled the end of the end for me.
The beginning of the end had come a year or so earlier when I deleted the Facebook app from my phone (yes, I reinstalled it; I’ll deal with the addiction shortly) because I felt it had become an unhealthy compulsion – somewhere between not being able to stop eating one of those huge buckets of synthetic-buttery popcorn at the cinema and hating yourself for watching Midsomer Murders week after week after week.
I was a late adopter of Facebook, having opened an account before leaving it mostly dormant for years. I’m a cyber Luddite and didn’t quite know what to do once I’d opened it. The whole “Like” thing I found as pointless and empty as making friends with people I’d never – and had no special desire to – meet. Still, I let them all in.
So by the time I’d actually engaged I’d already friended hundreds of people I didn’t know at all. Once I started posting I was soon checking the app on my phone dozens – perhaps more – times a day, especially after I’d shared a pic of my dogs, something I’d written or something I’d read that I thought friends (real or virtual) would like.
The little thumbs-up (and eventually other emojis) were a drug. But why has so-and-so (who I’ve never met but who I know lives alone with her seven corgis and is obsessed with Claire Foy) suddenly stopped liking every one of my posts? Did the depression finally win over? And why doesn’t such and such, who I am actually real life mates with, ever – ever! – like my stuff? What sort of friend are they?
Still, I didn’t need my kids’ encouragement to resist (with a couple of exceptions) posting about them; I compensated with dozens of pics of my dogs who, in any event, often seem to like me more. One of the things that shat me to tears about Facebook from day one was the way real and virtual friends boasted about the unparalleled genius of their children with violins, golf clubs, diabolos, any and every ball, skis, chemistry assignments, fashion and speech night orations – about how they were the most loving, giving, responsive children in the universe who always cleaned their rooms, looked like angels when they slept, had breath like fresh vanilla beans, emptied the dishwasher without being asked, walked and talked at nine months, always said thank you and by the way I really, really love you Mum and Dad, washed their own clothes, got straight A-pluses, and never projectile vomited onto the ceiling, got caught up with a dodgy crowd, busted underage by the cops or lost in the dark tunnel of adolescence.
We are all, the kids I’ve helped raise included, exceptional in some way – or so it’s said. But if I told the truth about mine on Facebook (“Yeah I came eleventh – whatevs ...”; “I told you – I hate Osso-Bucco with risotto Milanese.”; “There’s no icecream ... and by the way, did you know your generation has wrecked the world?”; “Stop asking – I’ll shower on the weekend.”; “Dad, did you ever wish you were born into a different family – just asking?) they’d seem diminished.
Then there are all of those perfect, seamless marriages, lived in architecturally flawless citadels to emotional, financial and familial success, with enviously curated interiors and perched by water or bucolic bush. Facebook can give you that, it seems. It’s why I’m always so stunned to hear of the divorces and the eating disorders, the breakdowns, infidelities and addictions when real life, as is its way, eventually outs the grimy truth. Mostly they don’t post that stuff.
The pathology of both real and cyber-friends started to concern, anger – and especially – distract me. Not nearly all, of course; I’m good actual friends with people I’ve connected with on Facebook. Just as I feel I’ve lost real friends because of it, too.
“These are not your really your friends,” I’d find myself saying to the image on my phone of a troubled person I did know and care about. “I wish you’d lose the desire to share with total strangers what happened in yesterday’s psychotherapy session.”
My writing habits are set in stone: 45 hours a week – more, if need be, towards the apex of a major project. I’ve never had what some call “writers’ block” – never much believed in it either. My answer has always been to stomp and slosh on through the swamp. But I’ve only ever been a Facebook compulsive during the construction of one (the latest) of my six books. And it literally distracted me off the rails a couple of times as I checked the app, again and again – a convenient out from the swamp on the screen, yes, sure, but also a repetitive impulse I desperately wanted to shelve because it shredded concentration.
Facebook was an Exocet into the bunker of my obsessive compulsions.
The ads in my feed – for dog food, arborio rice, books about history, children and violins, parenting websites – I found increasingly creepy, insidious, infuriating. The quizzes and pop psychological profiles (Which historical figure do you most resemble?) – obviously harvesting ruses – enraged me; if a friend completed and shared one, I, too, was potentially caught in the data harvest (as the CA files illustrate).
On the positive side, I found Facebook a wonderful way to connect with communities, and maintain contact with a bunch of men and women – and younger people – who I know and care about. I loved seeing what the blokes in my skiing gang are up to, maintaining close contact with the writers I know and the ease with which I could contact Indigenous people and historians with whom I align.
Already I wonder if it’s to my professional detriment. And I do miss the positives.
In the past 10 days I’ve wanted to share important articles – one about National Geographic’s truth telling on its racist past, another on a book in the Indigenous space, pulped because of serious cultural transgression. I’m doing a public event in Sydney this week with a historian I greatly admire; ordinarily I’d have shared notification about that, too. I’d like to share this on Facebook.
As someone who works alone I miss the easy interactions. But I’ll not miss the sense of emptiness and occasional anger when I considered the dross and the confected realities in my feed. At the moment it feels like liberation.
Never say never. I may yet reopen a properly managed professional page.
But meanwhile, friends know where to find me.
  • Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist

EU referendum won through fraud, whistleblower tells MPs

Extract from The Guardian

Former Cambridge Analytica worker says Brexit result may have been different without financial ‘cheating’

 Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: Vote Leave 'cheating' may have swayed Brexit referendum – video

The EU referendum was won through a fraud, the whistleblower Christopher Wylie has told MPs, accusing Vote Leave of improperly channelling money through a tech firm with links to Cambridge Analytica.
Wylie told a select committee that the pro-Brexit campaign had a “common plan” to use the network of companies to get around election spending laws and said he thought there “could have been a different outcome had there not been, in my view, cheating”.
“It makes me so angry, because a lot of people supported leave because they believe in the application of British law and British sovereignty. And to irrevocably alter the constitutional settlement of this country on fraud is a mutilation of the constitutional settlement of this country.”
Vote Leave has repeatedly denied allegations of collusion or deliberate overspending. When they first surfaced over the weekend, Boris Johnson, who fronted the campaign, said: “Vote Leave won fair and square – and legally. We are leaving the EU in a year and going global.”
Wylie, who used to work for Cambridge Analytica, gave evidence in a near four-hour session before the digital, culture, media and sport select committee. He made a string of remarkable claims about Brexit and Cambridge Analytica, including that his predecessor, Dan Mursean, died mysteriously in a Kenyan hotel room in 2012 after a contract in the company turned sour.
Wylie said it was striking that Vote Leave and three other pro-Brexit groups – BeLeave, which targeted students; Veterans for Britain, and Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party – all used the services of the little-known firm Aggregate IQ (AIQ) to help target voters online.
He told MPs that AIQ was effectively the Canadian arm of Cambridge Analytica/SCL, deriving the majority of its income by acting as a sub-contractor. He said AIQ had also worked with Cambridge Analytica on a failed campaign to discredit Muhammadu Buhari in the Nigerian presidential election, which included hacking into his emails and spreading disinformation via Islamophobic videos that showed people “with their throats being cut”.
“So, the first question that I have is: why?,” Wylie said. “Why is it that all of a sudden this company, that has never worked on anything but Cambridge Analytica projects, that had no public presence, somehow became the primary service provider to all of these supposedly independent and different campaign groups.
“When you look at the accumulation of evidence, I think it would be completely unreasonable to come to any other conclusion: this must be co-ordination, this must be a common purpose plan.”
Wylie was speaking after it was alleged that Vote Leave had broken electoral law by donating £625,000 to BeLeave, which in turn spent the money on Aggregate IQ. Vote Leave officially spent £6.77m, just below the £7m limit, but if BeLeave’s spending was taken into account it would breach that limit.
The allegations of collusion and overspending were also discussed by MPs in the Commons during an emergency debate attended by only a few Conservative MPs. Having secured the debate, the Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake asked in his opening speech whether the government could be confident that nobody from Vote Leave who now worked for the Conservatives was going to be charged with electoral offences. Tory MPs interjected to ask him whether he could be sure the remain campaign had not overspent.
Jon Trickett, the shadow cabinet office minister, said the Electoral Commission needed to have all the resources and power available to complete its inquiry into spending by Vote Leave, and referenced the roles of Johnson and Michael Gove in its campaign.
“It’s because the government is in it up to its neck,” he said. “Two cabinet ministers fronted the organisation. There they sit, week after week, the Bonnie and Clyde of Brexit.”
Trickett said that, if necessary, the police should also investigate the allegations.
Chloe Smith, the minister with responsibility for electoral law, said she would not comment on the allegations while they were under investigation. She said, however, that the Electoral Commission had the resources it needed, and was set to underspend on its budget this year.
AIQ has denied it is linked to Cambridge Analytica. Jeff Silvester, its chief operating officer, told the Times Colonist, that “AggregateIQ has never been, and is not a part of, Cambridge Analytica or [its parent firm] SCL. AggregateIQ has never entered into a contract with Cambridge Analytica.”
However, Wylie told MPs that, while technically true, the corporate structures were designed to be confusing and ensure that regulators could not always keep up with what was going on.
Wylie said he was surprised that Dominic Cummings, Vote Leave’s campaign director, had discovered AIQ, which did not have its own website. He said he had one meeting with Cummings in late 2015, when he made an unsuccesful pitch for work.
“Data was really important for Dom,” Wylie said, nothing that Cummings was aware of both Cambridge Analytica and its principal backer, Robert Mercer, a rightwing US hedge fund billionaire and Donald Trump supporter.
Cummings responded during the hearing by writing in a blogpost that Wylie was a “fantasist-charlatan”. When put to Wylie by a member of the committee, Chris Matheson, Wylie said his evidence had been “fact checked by the Guardian, the Observer, the New York Times, Channel 4 News and the ICO [the Information Commissioner’s Office]”.