After thousands of new members have joined this week, the Green Parties in Scotland and England and Wales now have more than both UKIP and the Lib Dems.

Farage’s party has 41,943, the Lib Dems head of membership tells me that they now have 44,680. On Wednesday, the Greens gained 2,000 members across the UK and overtook UKIP.

Today, Thursday, so far, they’ve gained more than 2000 more. As I write, Scottish Greens + the Green Party of England and Wales are at a combined total of 44,713.

In 2003, there were around 5,000 signed up Greens across the UK. That’s about the same number as has joined this week. What’s caused this growth, which has now so dramatically accelerated?

1) The debates

There’s something strange about British politics: an obsession with process. A huge portion of people feel that the exclusion of the Greens from the election debates is unfair.

For those who vote Green, or were thinking about it, being told that their chosen party isn’t significant is almost a personal affront. Hundreds of thousands signed a petition calling on the Greens to be included. Some clearly decided that they’d go one step further, and sign up.

2) The referendum

A huge portion of the growth took place in Scotland the week after the independence referendum – when the Scottish Greens grew from 1,800 members to 7,500. But it wasn’t just in Scotland. There was a significant surge in Green support in England and Wales that week too.

As one new member in Oxford put it to me, they and their partner had been students at Glasgow university. They were excited by the radical independence campaign, ‘Green Yes’, and the broader Yes movement. That’s what inspired them to join.

3) The Labour Party

It’s been 21 years since Tony Blair became leader of Labour. And throughout that time, despite ‘modernising’ it he also become a shield for it. People could persuade themselves that they still supported Labour, they just didn’t like Blair.

When Miliband came in, the excuses were gone. What was clearly the most left of the centre-left candidates of Labour had won the leadership. And the party still supported austerity. Without the charisma to be blamed personally, people started to look more closely at the party as a whole, and have found it wanting.

Look at a timeline of the growth in Green membership, and there were two, almost simultaneous events which happened before it started. If one was the referendum, the other was the 2014 Labour Party conference.

4) It’s the economy, stupid

Perhaps in a bid to stem the Green tide, Ed Miliband gave a speech about how much he cares about climate change.

Now, here’s the thing. I suspect he means it. But saying you care about climate change if you aren’t willing to stand up to big oil companies would be like saying you care about inequality without being willing to tackle bankers’ bonuses.

The fundamental problem in society is the power of massive corporations – of capital. And as long as Miliband and Balls promise to retain Tory cuts, as long as Labour remains a party of austerity, they will always look like they are on the side of capital, not ordinary people.

To put it another way, people have joined the Green Party because it opposes austerity and Labour doesn’t: the Greens have become the reasonable party of the left. 

5) The Lib Dems

A huge portion of the new Green membership is under the age of 30. The older ones in this group largely voted Lib Dem in 2010, and were then disenchanted not just by the trebling of fees but the blatant cynicism of Lib Dem leaders betraying their solemn promises.

The younger ones are of the sort who the Lib Dems were good at attracting five years ago. No more. For a long time, Lib Dems were able to appeal to different electorates by pretending to be very different things. Being in government meant they could only be one of those things.

6) UKIP

One consistent message from new members is that they felt so horrified by the rise of UKIP that they had to do something. The sense that Greens have the only party standing up to UKIP rather than pandering to them seems to have attracted many to the party.

A case in point here is the surge in Green membership around the Rochester and Strood by-election, where the party ran with the slogan “say no to racism”. When I got off the train in Rochester on polling day, the first person I bumped into had a big Green Party badge on, and had just joined, largely for that reason.

Likewise, though it’s uncomfortable for many Greens to admit this, UKIP have reshaped British politics in a way that’s good for outsiders of all hues.

They’ve shown that you can have huge political influence by supporting a party that will almost certainly not be in government; along with the SNP, they’ve made newer and smaller parties the major story of this election, and they’ve generated (along with the yes campaign) a sense that the establishment is on the run. These things all help Greens.

7) The politicisation of young people 

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the growth of the Greens is that around a quarter of new members are under 30. It used to be that the first rule of generation Y was ‘don’t join anything’. The fact that thousands have broken that is fascinating.

Specifically, the generation who flooded central London with angry protests four years ago has now graduated, and is facing a general election.

Looking for political organisations they can join now that their student union days are behind them and their university societies distant memories, they’ve largely rejected – or, more tellingly, not even considered, the NGOs that the New Left of their parents generations built.

They are interested in questioning power and the inter-relationships between problems, not just campaigning on one single issue after another. They don’t just want to sign petitions, they want to organise collectively to challenge those who rule them, and the Green Party has become a key path to do that through.

8) Syriza, Podemos and the global fightback 

This generation is very alert to the political mobilisations taking place across Europe. It was not just that the Scottish referendum showed that participating in official politics could be effective, even transformative.

The rise of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain in particular are inspiring a younger generation to rethink the opportunities offered by electoral and party politics

9) The snowball effect 

If the referendum and the Labour conference were the two external events which kicked off the surge, there was an internal one too.

The Green Party of England and Wales got quite a lot of coverage, back in September, for passing 20,000 members. This chat about joining clearly acted as an encouragement to lots of people to join, because there was a huge boost to membership in the next few days.

10) Natalie’s tours

Natalie Bennett is the second ever Green Party leader – before her, there was Caroline Lucas, and before her, there wasn’t a leader.

Caroline, because she was candidate and then MP in the target constituency, had to pour a huge amount of her time into Brighton. Natalie, on the other hand, has been touring the UK, often speaking to public meetings two or three times a week.

On Wednesday night, the day that 2,000 people joined the party, 600 people in Exeter turned out to hear Natalie Bennett speak. Tonight, hundreds are hearing her speak in Norwich. For two and a half years, week after week, local parties have reported surprisingly large turnouts – with two or three hundred people showing up where they usually get five to a meeting.

That means there are thousands of people across the country who’ve been to a public meeting with Natalie Bennett. I know some who have joined directly because of that.

It’s worth asking the question: of the new members, who finally made up their mind and joined because of one of the more short term factors above, how many were in one of those meetings? Or were recruited by someone who joined at one of those meetings?

More generally, having a national leader who isn’t also the key target candidate has given the party the chance to develop a national strategy, outside of the few strongholds its traditionally done well in.

11) The move to the left

Greens have always been on the left. But they haven’t always been very good at sounding like it. Instead, too often, they’ve sounded like a sort of preachy hair-shirt party, who wants to tax anything fun.

Of course, more often this is an image painted of the party by its enemies, but Greens haven’t always been brilliant at challenging it.

Equally damaging, there’s long been a sense that Greens are a single-issue environmental party. In order to combat this, it was important that Greens spend a lot of time telling a different story about themselves. And, for years, they largely failed to do this – instead using party communications to appeal to the select group who already agreed.

With Caroline and then Natalie out in front, and with the (left leaning and very influential) Young Greens and groups like Green Left organising among the activists, the image presented in recent years has been much more consistently left. Gone are the days of ‘not left or right but forwards’. The party is now clearly an electoral expression of the emerging new left.

Last year, the minority in the party who don’t like this (old fashioned ecologist liberals) set up a group to oppose this shift. As a response to the ‘watermelons’ of Green Left (green on the outside, red in the middle), they established a conference newsletter ‘the kiwi and the lime’ (green all the way through).

Their protests were largely ignored, and the surge in membership is the party’s reward: at new members meetings all across the country, people cite the Greens opposition to austerity, and being the only party left on the left, as key reasons for joining. 

12) Staying radical

For a long time, Greens had radical policies – like supporting Basic Income – but were often a little embarrassed to talk about them. Natalie Bennett, who has an impressive grasp of the complexities of policy, has been more comfortable highlighting such ideas.

After the financial crisis, huge numbers are coming to the conclusion that ideas which aren’t radical aren’t enough, and Greens have got a lot better at attracting them.

13) Telling a story about the party

For years, the party used to seem to basically put out press releases in response to external events, long after the articles about them had been written.

Not only was this a useless media strategy, it also failed to tell any clear story about who the party was. And so people accepted stories written by others (cf hair shirts).

Since Natalie’s taken over, they’ve been much better at gaining proactive media coverage, and been much more willing to embrace conflict and controversy (because the opposite of being controversial is being ignored).

Whether gaining headlines by announcing support for a £10 minimum wage or getting praise for bare-knucked denunciations of Farage’s migrant-bashing, the leading Greens have got much better at using the media to paint a picture of a party that’s on the left side of the brewing culture war, that’s fearless in the face of the establishment.

Of course, what happens next is all to play for.

Adam Ramsay is the Co-Editor of OurKingdom and also works with Bright Green. Before, he was a full time campaigner with People & Planet. His e-book ‘42 Reasons to Support Scottish Independence‘ is now available.

Author’s declaration of interest: I am a long-standing member of the Green Party.

This article was originally published on openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.

Household energy bills are in the spotlight again ahead of the general election in May.

A recent report showed that more than a million Britons in work can’t afford to heat their homes. Meanwhile a drop in wholesale energy costs led the government to tell the Big Six to cut consumer’s bills.

Ed Miliband has also called for Ofgem, the energy regulator (which is already investigating the Big Six), to have powers to force energy firms to reduce their tariffs to reflect wholesale prices.

E.On took the lead this week by saying it will reduce its standard gas charge by 3.5% with immediate effect, while one analyst, Emily Gosden, tweeted that British Gas stands to massively profit from the situation:

“If British Gas fails to cut energy prices despite falling costs, its profits for 2015 could soar by 60%, analyst Lakis Athanasiou estimates.”

So, to what extent could coalition Government policies contribute to high energy bills?

Paying out to big players

One of the themes of cross-party discussions on energy has been the importance of stimulating competition.

Yet in practice the coalition’s complex series of reforms to the power market have tended to reduce competition and increase Government price-setting and largesse – largely not for the new players, but for the existing power players.

There are two main mechanisms that are problematic in this respect: the capacity market and Contracts for Difference.

1. Capacity market windfall. The capacity market has paid quite a lot of large electricity suppliers for keeping their generating stations going when that’s what they were planning to do anyway.

In particular old nuclear stations were almost certainly going to carry on as long as they could. But they’re now being paid to do so as well.

Meanwhile, coal stations are the biggest problem for the climate, and getting coal out of the power system is widely agreed to be (at least on the supply end of the power equation) the cheapest way of improving our environmental performance.

But over this Parliament they have started generating much more of our power than before – despite the Government calling for a stop to overseas coal finance at international climate talks, saying no to new coal without CCS, and enacting an Emissions Performance Standard for new coal.

The Capacity Market is now going to pay them to keep UK coal plants open, whilst the Carbon Floor Price is taxing them to close them down. Consumers lose both ways. I unusually find myself agreeing with Head of Centrica Sam Laidlaw on the “inherent paradox” in this situation.

2. Contracts for Difference supporting big energy firms – and Hinkley: The Contract for Difference (CfD) support mechanism really suits big players, who can keep out the smaller players and so maintain the existing system that has been responsible for the prices we see.

There is considerable complexity, little transparency over contract allocation, and considerable risk in investing for energy development upfront – a situation where the risks are best dealt with by large players with legal and public affairs teams.

Despite setting itself against consumer subsidies for nuclear power in the Coalition Agreement, the proposed new power station at Hinkley Point will have many implicit subsidies under CfD, such as grid connection, accident insurance, and repayment risks covered by Government.

Despite this, its index-linked headline cost of power will still be higher than onshore wind, and probably ground-based solar well before it gets built. If it ever does.

Failing to help citizens lower their bills

The best way for consumers of energy to lower their bills is to use less. Not by shivering in the dark but by using the gas, electricity and heating fuel more efficiently. This is not only a social good but should cut emissions too. How well have the coalition done in encouraging energy savings?

3. Green Deal ‘disappointing’: The Green Deal – the Government’s flagship project for efficiency – has been a “disappointing failure“ according to Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, with poor planning, communications and implementation.

4. ECO cut: Another scheme, the only publicly funded source of energy efficiency work on homes, called ‘ECO’ was cut in a move that PM Cameron alledgedly said constituted “cutting the green crap”.

This happened when the Government were on the back-foot politically after Ed Miliband pledged to freeze consumer energy prices.

This meant a considerable loss of momentum on efficiency installation – and so higher bills for consumers in the longer-term – and a windfall of around £245 million for energy suppliers, according to analysis by Association for the Conservation of Energy.

5. EU efficiency target blocked: The UK has also been highly obstructive in seeking agreement on a new EU wide target that would provide the certainty for a new round of efficiency gains. Much of the momentum for energy efficiency – and thus for lower bills – comes from EU targets and initiatives (don’t tell UKIP).

Examples include the product standards which provide savings of over £100 on the average bill (see chart 11).

Keeping the UK system stuck in the past

Not acknowledging the economic and security threat of climate change means not thinking ahead to a new way of doing energy. The future will not look like the past. There will be cheaper and better ways of getting energy services, unless UK policy locks us into the old way of doing things.

6. Blocking wind and solar: The cheapest forms of low carbon power will soon be onshore wind and solar. Senior members of the Government are blocking wind and undermining solar, despite David Cameron hailing Britain’s renewable power success at Ban Ki Moon’s summit last year:

“We’ve more than doubled our capacity in renewable electricity in the last 4 years alone. We now have enough solar to power almost a million UK homes.”

7. Decentralised energy: The coalition’s Green Investment Bank has recently announced £200m of funding for community energy schemes, but it is not fulfilling its full potential.

The GIB could do a lot more if it was given fully-fledged borrowing powers or if it was expanded into a broader state investor similar to green investment structures like Germany and France.

A number of major banks are now arguing that the future will be a decentralised smart grid. UBS are the largest private bank in the world and are advising that large-scale power stations (such as the ones supported by the capacity market and nuclear CfDs) will be rendered redundant.

Similar warnings about the rise of decentralised systems have come from Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays and other private banks advising investors on value for money.

Dr Doug Parr is Greenpeace UK’s chief scientist.

This article was originally published on the Greenpeace Energydesk.

Massive media exposure over the televised debates for the 2015 election has propelled Green Party membership forward by 4,043 people in 48 hours to reach a total of 44,713.

This now puts membership of the UK’s three Green parties ahead of both UKIP, which claimed 41,514 members on Monday this week, and the LibDems, who claimed 44,576 members as of November 2015.

Back in April 2014 the LibDems reported a “membership surge” with numbers rising by about 1,000 a year – but now the Greens have gained four as many members in two days.

The Green Party of England and Wales now has 36,687 members, and (this morning’s figures) the Scottish Greens have 8,026 members and the Green Party in Northern Ireland has 322 members.

The Greens defeated the LibDems in the 2014 Euro-elections and are now polling at their highest levels ahead of a General Election since 1989, a breakthrough year in which they won 15% of the vote in the Euro-elections.

TV debate debate works to Green advantage

The #Greensurge gathered new momentum as the political controversy over Green participation in the pre-election TV debates ran as yesterday’s top Westminster story on the BBC and other news outlets.

Last week Ofcom made a provisional decision to exclude the Green Party from the general election debates. However the Prime Minister, David Cameron, described the decision as unjust and pledged that he would not participate so long as the Greens were excluded.

Cameron and Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, clashed on the issue at Prime Minister’s questions yesterday. Miliband accused Cameron of making a “pathetic excuse” for not participating: “He has run out of excuses, he is running scared of these debates and in the words of his heroine Margaret Thatcher ‘he is frit’.”

But Cameron retorted: “You cannot have two minor parties taking place without the third minor party … Why’s he so chicken when he comes to the Greens? … When he looks at the Green Party, why’s he so scared?”

The argument carries conviction since the Greens are committed to a number of left-wing policies – including the return of private public service monopolies such as railways to the public sector, and the launch of a reflationary ‘Green New Deal’ – which most Labour supporters would love to see Miliband adopt.

Miliband evades the real debate

Miliband also refused to discuss the substantive question of whether the Greens should be in the pre-election debate, despite being challenged to support the Greens by their leader Natalie Bennett.

“Staging the debates without the Prime Minister might score a point but would not serve the public, who rightly expect the political parties and the broadcasters to find a format that is acceptable to all concerned”, Bennett wrote to the three party leaders.

“As a substantial majority of the British public would like to see the Green Party included in the debates, an alternative way forward would be for you to agree to this. This is the way forward which serves both democracy and the electorate best.”

On 13th January YouGov revealed polling that puts the Green Party of England and Wales at second place among 18-24 year-olds, tied with the Conservatives on 22% – comfortably ahead of both the Liberal Democrats and UKIP.

Its polls have also shown the Green and LibDems roughly tied for fourth place for voting intention for several months, with the latest poll putting the Greens at 7% compared to the LibDems at 6%. YouGov polling also shows strong public support for the Greens joining the debates

The Green Party of England and Wales is standing candidates in at least 75% of seats in May 2015 – 50% up on 2010.

Join the Green Party of England & Wales.

There has been a fascinating debate developing in the environmental movement – particularly in The Ecologist – over the meaning and effect of the oil price collapse.

Most recently, environmental consultant Paul Mobbs declared that “environmentalists should be cheering on OPEC!” for increasing production and lowering prices, thereby driving the ‘unconventional’ production (like tar sands mining) out of the threshold of economic viability. Unfortunately, the debate seldom zooms out at some of the broader conditions that caused the collapse.

Mobbs’s enthusiastic support of oil production in Saudi Arabia manifests a powerful rebuttal to Steve Melia’s dispatch on the troubled thesis of peak oil.

Whereas Melia claims we must continue to resist fossil fuels for the sake of the environment through civil disobedience not unlike the vital anti-roads movement of the 1980s, Mobbs seems to believe that “keeping the oil in the ground” will be counterproductive to the short-term goals of environmentalists.

Symptoms of a wider economic malaise?

To shore up his hypothesis, Mobbs argues against Melia’s claim that low prices are a challenge to the peak oil hypothesis of gradually increasing prices. The ecological metabolism of peak oil is responsible for the oil price crash, since the increased production of oil stems from high-cost and low-yield production, such as tar sands, which is being undercut by Saudi oil, causing oil prices to decline.

But, Mobbs ventures, this is not a sign of the supply and demand of oil. Instead, it is a complex phenomenon that involves the stagnation of the whole economy. Mobbs cites the declining prices of other commodities as evidence.

Mobbs does not provide a clarification by referencing recent economic events, which hinders his argument. After the housing market crash of 2007, investors from more prosperous financial centers of the world shifted capital to land speculation and resource extraction in the Global South.

This ‘spacial fix‘, to use geographer David Harvey’s term, remains part of an economic program called ‘credit easing’, through which junk loans are backed by land grabs. The so-called ‘fracking revolution’ in the Bakken Shale plays an important role in the US’s own attempts to emerge from the recession.

Busting the global resource grab

According to the US Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Adam Sieminsky, “just six tight gas plays taken together account for nearly 90 percent of domestic oil production growth and virtually all domestic natural gas production growth in the last 2 years.”

Bakken is 67% of oil growth, and Marcellus is 75% of gas growth. Bakken is relatively low-cost, high yield, while Marcellus has proven far more problematic for investors in the area (due in large part to the sheer amount of speculation happening).

But therein lies the rub: a financialization bubble bursts, leaving resource extraction to mop up the mess, but the glut of oil production is facing diminishing markets abroad. Between 2008-2015, production will have expanded by 3 million b/d, while US demand will have fallen by 1.5 million b/d.

With Saudi Arabia refusing to maintain the high prices by decreasing its own production, choosing instead to “ride out the oil price slump” as the NY Times put it, the relative growth of production against demand has caused low prices.

As oil prices decline, the prices of other commodities decline, because oil factors into every level of the supply chain, from the manufacture of the machines to work a mine or a tractor to the running of the machines themselves to the manufacture of the commodity to the transport of the commodity to market, and virtually all transports in between.

Due to the oil prices, food prices, for instance, are predicted to drop 10-15%, according to Arab News. Furthermore, along with the sharp rise of oil production since 2008, the extraction of tin, copper, and virtually any other commodity has risen as well.

Gluts have appeared across the board, while demand has declined-a phenomenon that has caused tremendous problems in supply chains for countries like China and Brazil.

In the North Atlantic, on the one hand, the banks have refused to invest in small businesses and homeowners, and on the other hand, working people have less confidence in the economy and their political representatives. Hence the Fed and the ECB have been unable to switch back from extractionist positions of ‘credit easement’ to their earlier financial policies.

Geopolitical games – or coincidence?

There are at least three spins that one could put on the oil price collapse and its implications. The one preferred by industrial actors around the world expounds the low price as a natural fix, which will decrease production, increase consumption, and eventually drive the price back to a higher equilibrium.

The challenge here would be, as Mobbs indicates, maintaining high-cost, unconventional projects at a price equilibrium, but that is a matter of eventuality, since the conventional crude is running out.

The second spin is that collapse of oil prices marks a natural boom-bust cycle of extractivist oligarchs who push supply beyond demand, only to have markets contract into a perfect situation for further speculation.

The final spin, of course, is more closely related to the attempts made by the BRICS countries to shift away from petrodollars and dollar hegemony while cutting oil and gas networks throughout Asia without regard for the interests of NATO.

This final proposal marks a gap in Mobbs’s thesis: namely that it is OPEC that is responsible for the price decline. Instead, it is largely Saudi Arabia, with Venezuela taking a brutal hit to the balance books, and scrambling to prop up prices.

As The Telegraph noted, lower prices is bringing about a possible new era, which is ushered in not by OPEC, itself, but by an inter-OPEC crisis marking the crucial geopolitical rift that the oil price collapse plays into.

For its part, The Economist‘s blog, Buttonwood’s notebook, has put up a cheeky graph identifying the “Red Army signal“ showing how every price collapse in oil has come directly after a Russian foreign intervention: most recently, the intervention in Crimea, the 2008 invasion of Georgia, and the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan before it, which prompted Saudi Arabia to increase oil production and saturate the market.

This is the “cunning of history”, and the US’s connections to the House of Saud stands as reason enough for The Economist‘s bloggers to gloat. What is left between the lines is what Vijay Prashad calls “dispossession by manipulation.”

Opposing interests clash on Middle East battlefields

All the above proposals may, in fact, have some degree of truth, but the crucial focus should not necessarily be Russia or Venezuela or even Iran, but the battlefields on which their interests collide.

The oil price collapse is hindering Iraq’s ability to fight the menace of IS that remains ensconced in its third largest city, Mosul, while retaining the social services necessary to maintain a tenuous order.

Supporting the Kurds seems to have been the US’s most successful attempt thus far in confronting IS in Northern Syria and Iraq, but the presence of Kurdish HPG guerillas in Iraqi Kurdistan, who are also connected to the Kurdish YPG/YPJ self-defense forces fighting IS in Northern Syria, rankles the Turkish government to no end.

Turkey does not want to see its southern territories turned into an autonomous Kurdistan tied to the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq. In fact, the Turkish state seems more willing to help IS than the Kurds. If the Kurds are unable to fight down IS, oil prices will rise once again, which seems to be in the interests of oil producers.

An old Kurdish proverb states, “A head that is to be cut off cannot be ransomed” – and it applies here: IS serves a purpose, if not a devious one. Although the EIA posits that oil spot prices will continue to decline until 2018, prices may settle to a bottom later this year, only to increase once again because of regional discord.

And having sent Russia, Iran, and Venezuela a cruel message, along with Iraq and the Kurds, the North Atlantic oil companies may return to their traditional profits and risky, unconventional projects against the will of environmentalists like Mobbs who see the current price collapse as a prospect for greener pastures.

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013).

Tribal people have been forcibly evicted from India’s Kanha Tiger Reserve – home of Rudyard Kipling’s classic tale The Jungle Book – in the name of tiger conservation, according to Survival International.

Evicted tribespeople report that the Forest Department threatened to release elephants to trample their houses and crops if they did not leave immediately.

The area is the ancestral home of the Baiga and Gond tribes, who face a desperate future without their forests. Across India, many more face a similar threat.

The families were harassed for years to leave the reserve. When they were finally evicted, they received no land or help in establishing their lives outside. Months after their eviction, families report that they have received only a fraction of the compensation they were expecting – others have received nothing.

“We got some money, but we are lost – wandering in search of land”, said a tribesperson evicted from Jholar village in Kanha. “Here there is only sadness. We need the jungle.”

All in violation of Indian law

The communities have now been scattered among the surrounding villages. One Baiga man told Survival before the eviction: “They want to give us money. We don’t want money. We want land. Money doesn’t mean anything to us. It comes and it goes.”

In a similar eviction in December 2013, 32 Khadia families were moved out of Similipal Tiger Reserve in Odisha state and were living in dire conditions under plastic sheets. They have not received the compensation they were promised.

In a letter to India’s Tiger Conservation Authority, Survival reports: “Since their eviction, families report having had to ‘scatter’ to different villages; receiving abuse, including racial abuse, from residents of the villages where they are trying to settle; being tricked and cheated by middle men and land agents; and feeling lost, frightened and without means of livelihood or hope for their future.”

It also accuses the Tiger Authority of gross infringements of the tribal peoples legal rights to stay in, live from, and protect their forests as enshrined in both Indian and international law.

As Survival points out in a letter to the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), which has been providing infrastructural support, training and equipment for frontline Forest Department staff:

“The evictions are also illegal under both the Wildlife (Protection) Act Amendment (2006) and the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006 (FRA) because the gram sabhas (village councils) of these villages did not give their free, prior, informed consent and people left under duress.

“A vital prerequisite to relocation under both acts is that villagers’ forest rights should be recognised, but this process had hardly begun in these villages, and many people did not even know about the FRA.”

None of the required conditions were fulfilled in Kanha.

The ugly side of conservation

“What’s happening in Kanha epitomizes the ugly side of the conservation industry”, said Survival’s Director Stephen Corry. “Thousands of tourists career through the park in noisy jeeps, clamoring to take photos of the beleaguered tigers. Meanwhile, Baiga communities that have carefully managed the tiger’s habitat over generations are annihilated by forced evictions.

“The irony appears to be lost on the conservationists. If India doesn’t allow the Baiga and Gond to return and prevent further villagers being kicked out, these communities will be completely destroyed. Evicting tribes won’t save the tiger. Tribal peoples are the best conservationists.”

In response to similar heavy-handed and misguided indigenous evictions around the world, Survival has launched its ‘Parks Need Peoples‘ campaign, which challenges the current model of conservation.

The core demands are that conservation programs must stick to international law, protect tribal peoples’ rights to their lands, ask them what help they need in protecting their lands, listen to them, and then be prepared to back them up as much as they can.

What next?

Survival is now awaiting from WWF answers to a number of questions, including what steps WWF-India has taken to oppose forced relocations and “ensure that WWF-India is not complicit in this gross abuse of the rights of the families evicted from Kanha”.

It also wishes to know whether WWF’s activities in the area are consistent with its own promises on indigenous peoples, and ILO Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

It has also asked the Tiger Authority to “act with great haste to investigate these illegal evictions, bring to justice those members of the relevant Forest Departments who are responsible for these illegalities and ensure that those who wish to return to their homes in Kanha are assisted to do so.

“We also call on you to enact a moratorium on any further relocations from tiger reserves unless and until it can be assured that all the conditions in the Act will be met in all cases.”

Source: Survival International.

On Friday 9th January I received a list of the witnesses who will appear as part of the Environmental Audit Committee‘s inquiry into the ‘environmental impacts of fracking‘.

Select committees exist in order to hold the executive to account, representing the public interest. And in this case, the Environmental Audit Committee are likely to be the last public body to hold such an inquiry before up to 40% of Britain may be licensed for petroleum exploration and development under the 14th On-shore Oil and Gas Round.

Viewing the list of witnesses who have been called, I believe the Committee may not be intent upon an open examination of the full range of environmental evidence.

Though I would hope to be proven wrong, it appears that once again the public will be denied a full and unbiased exploration of the issues surrounding unconventional oil and gas development.

There also appears to be a bias towards the industry viewpoint in the selection of witnesses, and a complete failure to engage with the community groups opposing these developments – many of whom submitted evidence to the inquiry.

We need an independent and impartial review of the evidence

Again, I believe that this jeopardises the ability of the Committee to carry out an impartial review.

To date there has never been an demonstrably impartial investigation by a public body into the potential environmental impacts of unconventional oil and gas production:

• The Energy and Climate Change Committee’s Fifth and Seventh reports (Session 2010-12) were issued before a significant amount of scientific research existed;
• The Royal Society / Royal Academy of Engineering review, produced for the Government’s Chief Scientific Officer, was also issued before much of the research available today, from USA, Canada and Australia, had been published – and their report was not subject to any public consultation/involvement;
• The Public Health England review of health impacts appeared to ignore new evidence from the USA and elsewhere, and drew conclusions which – as highlighted by other public health professionals – were highly questionable (and it too was not subject to public consultation);
• A review on the climate change impacts for DECC, by Mackay and Stone, also produced results which – on the weight of available evidence – are not credible given the data used to calculate the impacts of the process; and
• The most recent review, by the Lords Economic Affairs Committee, failed to consider the available evidence on the environmental impacts of these processes, and produced arguably biased opinions.

In my view, the witnesses the Committee have selected to appear will give a ‘politically acceptable’ account of this issue – but not a complete review of the available evidence.

So much to be said – but will the witnesses say it?

Such a limited investigation would not answer the need for an impartial and objective ‘public interest’ review of the evidence now available. In particular, I believe that the witnesses selected will fail to explain:

• The large body of peer-reviewed evidence, and studies by other public health agencies which now exist on the impacts of these processes – which the Royal Society and other subsequent reviews, due to prematurity or through taking an overly narrow view of the evidence, have failed to encompass;
• The failure of DECC’s strategic environmental appraisal process to consider, among other issues, the waste management implications of this policy – which (based on DECC’s appraisal criteria) could potentially create more than a billion gallons of effluent, with as yet no identified treatment facility, and which in turn could create potentially millions of tonnes of hazardous wastes requiring disposal, for which there is no identified repository;
• The serious flaws in the Mackay-Stone review for DECC – which has possibly understated the climate impacts of unconventional gas development by 300% or more due to the inaccurate data used as the basis for their calculations;
• The often neglected impacts upon the environment of these processes, away from the drilling sites, and from other essential aspects of development – such as pipeline construction;
• The distinct differences which exist between the three unconventional fossil fuel technologies currently under development in Britain today – shale gas/oil, coalbed methane and underground coal gasification.

Two independent Commissions abolished (why?)

The public were denied the chance an impartial review when the Government abolished both the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, and the Sustainable Development Commission, in 2011. I believe it is likely that, by now, one of those bodies would have carried out such a study.

In my view, what reviews of Government policy have taken place have been subject to unacceptable bias, and a failure to consult and hear the public’s concerns – and thus do not meet the public’s legitimate expectation to have an ‘impartial tribunal’ address their environmental concerns.

Unless the Environmental Audit Committee conduct a thorough review, taking a wide range of evidence, then this issue will not receive an impartial examination before the issuing of the new exploration and development licences.

If the Committee fail in their duty to hold the executive to account on this matter, by undertaking a review of the full range of evidence now available on the potential environmental effects of these processes, I believe that the public in communities affected by these developments will hold the Committee in contempt.

If the EAC fails, only one remedy will remain – direct action

Accordingly, the democratic process having failed to objectively hold the Government to account, and legal remedies having been effectively barred through recent reforms to judicial review, the public will have no other option than to oppose these developments directly ‘on the ground’.

I do not believe that this would be a welcome or acceptable outcome. We could have done better. However, there having been no objective review which the public can have faith in, I do not see that there will be any other likely outcome – both Parliament and the Government having failed to take account of the well founded, evidentially-based concerns the public have expressed over the last few years.

The Environmental Audit Committee must carry out a full review of all the evidence pertaining to this issue – irrespective of the political sensitivities that offends.

I ask that the Committee review the range of opinion which they hear before proceeding to produce their final report.

Or, should no further time be available, that the range of witnesses heard by the Committee on January 14th is changed – removing the bias towards the industry, and including representatives from communities opposing the Government’s unconventional oil and gas policies.

Paul Mobbs is an independent environmental consultant, investigator, author and lecturer.

See also: ‘The Environmental Risks of Fracking‘ – submission to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee Inquiry by Paul Mobbs, Mobbs’ Environmental Investigations.

Massive media exposure over the televised debates for the 2015 election has propelled Green Party membership forward by 2,000 people in 24 hours to reach a total of 43,829.

This now puts membership of the UK’s three Green parties ahead of UKIP, which claimed 41,514 members on Monday this week. And it’s fast approaching the LibDems, who claimed 44,576 members as of November 2015.

Back in April 2014 the LibDems reported a “membership surge” with numbers rising by about 1,000 a year – but now the Greens have gained twice as many members in a single day.

And according to the Green party’s press office, “membership continues to surge at an unprecedented rate today”. In other words, the Greens are set to overtake the Libdems in a matter of days.

The Green Party of England and Wales now has 35,481 members, the Scottish Greens have 8,026 members and the Green Party in Northern Ireland has 322 members.

The Greens defeated the LibDems in the 2014 Euro-elections and are now polling at their highest levels ahead of a General Election since 1989, a breakthrough year in which they won 15% of the vote in the Euro-elections.

TV debate debate works to Green advantage

The #Greensurge gathered new momentum as the political controversy over Green participation in the pre-election TV debates ran as yesterday’s top Westminster story on the BBC and other news outlets.

Last week Ofcom made a provisional decision to exclude the Green Party from the general election debates. However the Prime Minister, David Cameron, described the decision as unjust and pledged that he would not participate so long as the Greens were excluded.

Cameron and Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, clashed on the issue at Prime Minister’s questions yesterday. Miliband accused Cameron of making a “pathetic excuse” for not participating: “He has run out of excuses, he is running scared of these debates and in the words of his heroine Margaret Thatcher ‘he is frit’.”

But Cameron retorted: “You cannot have two minor parties taking place without the third minor party … Why’s he so chicken when he comes to the Greens? … When he looks at the Green Party, why’s he so scared?”

The argument carries conviction since the Greens are committed to a number of left-wing policies – including the return of private public service monopolies such as railways to the public sector, and the launch of a reflationary ‘Green New Deal’ – which most Labour supporters would love to see Miliband adopt.

Miliband evades the real debate

Miliband also refused to discuss the substantive question of whether the Greens should be in the pre-election debate, despite being challenged to support the Greens by their leader Natalie Bennett.

“Staging the debates without the Prime Minister might score a point but would not serve the public, who rightly expect the political parties and the broadcasters to find a format that is acceptable to all concerned”, Bennett wrote to the three party leaders.

“As a substantial majority of the British public would like to see the Green Party included in the debates, an alternative way forward would be for you to agree to this. This is the way forward which serves both democracy and the electorate best.”

On 13th January YouGov revealed polling that puts the Green Party of England and Wales at second place among 18-24 year-olds, tied with the Conservatives on 22% – comfortably ahead of both the Liberal Democrats and UKIP.

Its polls have also shown the Green and LibDems roughly tied for fourth place for voting intention for several months, with the latest poll putting the Greens at 7% compared to the LibDems at 6%. YouGov polling also shows strong public support for the Greens joining the debates

The Green Party of England and Wales is standing candidates in at least 75% of seats in May 2015 – 50% up on 2010.

Join the Green Party of England & Wales.

There has been a fascinating debate developing in the environmental movement – particularly in The Ecologist – over the meaning and effect of the oil price collapse.

Most recently, environmental consultant Paul Mobbs declared that “environmentalists should be cheering on OPEC!” for increasing production and lowering prices, thereby driving the ‘unconventional’ production (like tar sands mining) out of the threshold of economic viability. Unfortunately, the debate seldom zooms out at some of the broader conditions that caused the collapse.

Mobbs’s enthusiastic support of oil production in Saudi Arabia manifests a powerful rebuttal to Steve Melia’s dispatch on the troubled thesis of peak oil.

Whereas Melia claims we must continue to resist fossil fuels for the sake of the environment through civil disobedience not unlike the vital anti-roads movement of the 1980s, Mobbs seems to believe that “keeping the oil in the ground” will be counterproductive to the short-term goals of environmentalists.

Symptoms of a wider economic malaise?

To shore up his hypothesis, Mobbs argues against Melia’s claim that low prices are a challenge to the peak oil hypothesis of gradually increasing prices. The ecological metabolism of peak oil is responsible for the oil price crash, since the increased production of oil stems from high-cost and low-yield production, such as tar sands, which is being undercut by Saudi oil, causing oil prices to decline.

But, Mobbs ventures, this is not a sign of the supply and demand of oil. Instead, it is a complex phenomenon that involves the stagnation of the whole economy. Mobbs cites the declining prices of other commodities as evidence.

Mobbs does not provide a clarification by referencing recent economic events, which hinders his argument. After the housing market crash of 2007, investors from more prosperous financial centers of the world shifted capital to land speculation and resource extraction in the Global South.

This ‘spacial fix‘, to use geographer David Harvey’s term, remains part of an economic program called ‘credit easing’, through which junk loans are backed by land grabs. The so-called ‘fracking revolution’ in the Bakken Shale plays an important role in the US’s own attempts to emerge from the recession.

Busting the global resource grab

According to the US Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Adam Sieminsky, “just six tight gas plays taken together account for nearly 90 percent of domestic oil production growth and virtually all domestic natural gas production growth in the last 2 years.”

Bakken is 67% of oil growth, and Marcellus is 75% of gas growth. Bakken is relatively low-cost, high yield, while Marcellus has proven far more problematic for investors in the area (due in large part to the sheer amount of speculation happening).

But therein lies the rub: a financialization bubble bursts, leaving resource extraction to mop up the mess, but the glut of oil production is facing diminishing markets abroad. Between 2008-2015, production will have expanded by 3 million b/d, while US demand will have fallen by 1.5 million b/d.

With Saudi Arabia refusing to maintain the high prices by decreasing its own production, choosing instead to “ride out the oil price slump” as the NY Times put it, the relative growth of production against demand has caused low prices.

As oil prices decline, the prices of other commodities decline, because oil factors into every level of the supply chain, from the manufacture of the machines to work a mine or a tractor to the running of the machines themselves to the manufacture of the commodity to the transport of the commodity to market, and virtually all transports in between.

Due to the oil prices, food prices, for instance, are predicted to drop 10-15%, according to Arab News. Furthermore, along with the sharp rise of oil production since 2008, the extraction of tin, copper, and virtually any other commodity has risen as well.

Gluts have appeared across the board, while demand has declined-a phenomenon that has caused tremendous problems in supply chains for countries like China and Brazil.

In the North Atlantic, on the one hand, the banks have refused to invest in small businesses and homeowners, and on the other hand, working people have less confidence in the economy and their political representatives. Hence the Fed and the ECB have been unable to switch back from extractionist positions of ‘credit easement’ to their earlier financial policies.

Geopolitical games – or coincidence?

There are at least three spins that one could put on the oil price collapse and its implications. The one preferred by industrial actors around the world expounds the low price as a natural fix, which will decrease production, increase consumption, and eventually drive the price back to a higher equilibrium.

The challenge here would be, as Mobbs indicates, maintaining high-cost, unconventional projects at a price equilibrium, but that is a matter of eventuality, since the conventional crude is running out.

The second spin is that collapse of oil prices marks a natural boom-bust cycle of extractivist oligarchs who push supply beyond demand, only to have markets contract into a perfect situation for further speculation.

The final spin, of course, is more closely related to the attempts made by the BRICS countries to shift away from petrodollars and dollar hegemony while cutting oil and gas networks throughout Asia without regard for the interests of NATO.

This final proposal marks a gap in Mobbs’s thesis: namely that it is OPEC that is responsible for the price decline. Instead, it is largely Saudi Arabia, with Venezuela taking a brutal hit to the balance books, and scrambling to prop up prices.

As The Telegraph noted, lower prices is bringing about a possible new era, which is ushered in not by OPEC, itself, but by an inter-OPEC crisis marking the crucial geopolitical rift that the oil price collapse plays into.

For its part, The Economist‘s blog, Buttonwood’s notebook, has put up a cheeky graph identifying the “Red Army signal“ showing how every price collapse in oil has come directly after a Russian foreign intervention: most recently, the intervention in Crimea, the 2008 invasion of Georgia, and the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan before it, which prompted Saudi Arabia to increase oil production and saturate the market.

This is the “cunning of history”, and the US’s connections to the House of Saud stands as reason enough for The Economist‘s bloggers to gloat. What is left between the lines is what Vijay Prashad calls “dispossession by manipulation.”

Opposing interests clash on Middle East battlefields

All the above proposals may, in fact, have some degree of truth, but the crucial focus should not necessarily be Russia or Venezuela or even Iran, but the battlefields on which their interests collide.

The oil price collapse is hindering Iraq’s ability to fight the menace of IS that remains ensconced in its third largest city, Mosul, while retaining the social services necessary to maintain a tenuous order.

Supporting the Kurds seems to have been the US’s most successful attempt thus far in confronting IS in Northern Syria and Iraq, but the presence of Kurdish HPG guerillas in Iraqi Kurdistan, who are also connected to the Kurdish YPG/YPJ self-defense forces fighting IS in Northern Syria, rankles the Turkish government to no end.

Turkey does not want to see its southern territories turned into an autonomous Kurdistan tied to the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq. In fact, the Turkish state seems more willing to help IS than the Kurds. If the Kurds are unable to fight down IS, oil prices will rise once again, which seems to be in the interests of oil producers.

An old Kurdish proverb states, “A head that is to be cut off cannot be ransomed” – and it applies here: IS serves a purpose, if not a devious one. Although the EIA posits that oil spot prices will continue to decline until 2018, prices may settle to a bottom later this year, only to increase once again because of regional discord.

And having sent Russia, Iran, and Venezuela a cruel message, along with Iraq and the Kurds, the North Atlantic oil companies may return to their traditional profits and risky, unconventional projects against the will of environmentalists like Mobbs who see the current price collapse as a prospect for greener pastures.

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013).