The Ecologist and the Resurgence Trust extend their support and condolences to the colleagues and families of those who suffered in the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris yesterday.

The attack is a sad reminder of the increasing threat under which many journalists work around the world. We have long championed principles of non-violence – championing human rights, opposing war, and respecting persons of all faiths, and none.

But in a free and civilised society, the freedom of the press must be defended from those who believe murder is an acceptable response to criticism or satire.

The Ecologist & The Resurgence Trust.

In Oxford this week, two major farming conferences have been under way.

The newer, forward-looking Oxford Real Farming Conference is discussing innovations in technology that are needed for farming to face the challenges of achieving massive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, tackling the horrendous problems of diet-related ill health, and restoring beauty, colour, wildlife and human cultivators to our farmed countryside.

Meanwhile, speakers at the much older Oxford Farming Conference seem stuck in a time-warp where for decades almost the only new development in agriculture worth discussing is GM crops, and where an annual attack on organic farming seems to be obligatory.

The Secretary of State for Environment, Liz Truss, did her bit in praise of GM – which is now just “one tool in the toolbox”, having been demoted from the “future for all farming and food” that was heralded in the 1990s.

Under what seem to be strict instructions from David Cameron not to do any more damage, if that were possible, to his “greenest government ever” claim, Liz Truss steered clear of saying anything new about GM, or announcing any action that would bring GM crops in England any closer, or indeed doing anything which you might expect an allegedly pro-GM government to do.

However, now that the Scottish referendum is over, the English Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is happy to forget that agriculture is already devolved to Scotland and Wales, and that both those countries remain staunchly opposed to GM crops.

So Liz Truss talked grandly about GM crops coming to the UK, when she’s actually only able to talk about England – 60% of the UK. Nor did she mention the commitment given by one of her junior ministers at the end of last year, namely that GM crops for England are, at best, “several years away“.

Over to you, Lord Krebs …

It was left to Lord Krebs to mount the seemingly obligatory attack on organic farming and food.

That’s the same Lord Krebs who made himself a figure of fun several years ago, when he was chair of the Food Standards Agency. On taking up his position, he announced, without any scientific evidence, that anyone buying organic food because it had nutritional differences with non-organic were “wasting their money”.

In his own field, which does not include nutrition or farming, Lord Krebs is a very distinguished scientist, so it must have hurt somewhat when, last year, a major meta-analysis was published which looked at 343 individual studies comparing antioxidant levels, heavy metals and pesticides in organic and non-organic food, focusing on salad crops, vegetables, grains and pulses.

An international team of scientists, led by Newcastle University, pooled all the existing research, and showed unequivocally that there are significant differences between organic and non-organic food, with 18 – 69% more beneficial antioxidants and 48% less dangerous cadmium.

We need more and better research in this area, and the researchers said that more studies would be likely to confirm the significance of a number of other positive trends in the differences between organic and non-organic food that they detected.

Yes, the science indicates that organic food is healthier!

That research did not look at the impact on our health of eating organic food – this takes many years and is very costly. To get clear results, scientists need to follow large groups of people who eat organic food, and a similar group who do not, for their whole lives.

As many modern diseases, like cancer and heart disease, tend to mainly emerge much later in life, it would take many decades of expensive monitoring to identify any differences. However, health problems that emerge early in life should be identifiable more quickly.

A Dutch study comparing mothers and children who drank organic milk and used organic dairy products with those that did not, found that those children suffered 36% less eczema than children on a non-organic diet.

More recently, a Norwegian study has linked organic vegetable consumption to a 24% lower incidence of pre-eclampsia, a major cause of illness in mothers and deaths of babies worldwide.

But while it is clear is that the way we farm does affect the quality of our food, the jury is still out on whether eating organic food will lead to people suffering less illness or disease over their lifetime.

Now the problem is ‘climate change’, claims Krebs (wrong again)

Given that Lord Krebs could hardly maintain his “it’s a waste of money” position in the face of this overwhelming scientific evidence, he has changed tack, claiming at Oxford that organic farming is bad for climate change, because it yields less than non-organic.

As is often a problem when scientists step outside their own fields of expertise, Lord Krebs has missed two other recently published meta-analyses, covering organic and non-organic farming, looking at yields and climate change impact.

First, a new meta-analysis published by scientists at the University of California at Berkeley pulled together all existing research comparing organic and non-organic yields (reported on The Ecologist), and concluded that the productivity of organic farming has been substantially underestimated.

Scientists found that globally organic yields are generally around 19% below non-organic, and that could reduce to only 8-9% below with better use of modern organic techniques.

It has always been the case that for some crops, like beans, peas, tomatoes, lentils and oats, organic and non-organic yields are the same, while grass-reared beef and lamb will be as or more productive on organic farms.

The study’s author, Professor Claire Kremen said: “This paper sets the record straight on the comparison between organic and conventional agriculture.”

Organic farming sequesters more soil carbon

On an even more positive note, a global meta-analysis looking at farming’s ability to restore carbon in soils came to the conclusion that organic farming stores 3.50 Mg Carbon per hectare more than in nonorganic systems.

The research found an estimated maximum technical mitigation potential from soil carbon sequestration by switching to organic agriculture of 0.37 Gt Carbon sequestered per year globally, thus offsetting up to 3% of all current GHG emissions worldwide, or 25% of total current global agricultural emissions.

The climate summit in Paris at the end of this year is going to focus everyone’s mind on to the appalling threat that climate change poses.

Most attention in climate discussions focuses on emissions from industries like power generation (coal and natural gas versus renewables) and transport (petrol and diesel cars versus public transport and electric cars).

Food and farming, which account for as much greenhouse gas emissions as either of those sectors, is largely ignored – but that cannot continue. Indeed this year Parliament’s official Climate Change Committee will be looking in more detail at greenhouse gas emissions from farming.

The story here is an exciting one – globally, soils contain massive amounts of carbon, the release of which adds to the threat of climate change. However, as research shows, globally soils also offer an amazing opportunity to store more carbon.

The things that farmers need to do to achieve this, which include growing more grass in their rotations, returning crop residues and animal manure to farmland, particularly as compost, and growing green cover-crops through the winter, are all things that organic systems encourage or require.

That is why organic farming sequesters far more carbon in soils than non-organic farming.

Farming must get real!

This was on the agenda at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, where a session on a new report, the Square Meal report, focused on the vital importance of fighting food poverty and diet related ill-health, and the multiple benefits of agro-ecological farming systems – like organic.

These are proven to deliver better animal welfare, more wildlife on farms, lower greenhouse gas emissions, lower levels of pollution from pesticides and fertiliser run-off, and healthier diets.

This broad, inclusive vision for the future of food, farming and the countryside has been supported by ten major public interest groups, but this sort of discussion seems to be off the agenda for the old Oxford farming establishment.

Indeed the question of what this hugely taxpayer-subsidised industry might do in the public interest, rather than the interests of farm businesses, landowners and multi-national food businesses, is off the old Oxford agenda.

It is time the farming industry got real.

Peter Melchett is an organic farmer, and Policy Director of the Soil Association.

Photo: Sandy Lane Farm.

“Collapsing oil prices should give everyone in the ‘green movement’ cause for reflection.”

Say what! Really? Why is that?

I see the introduction to Steve Melia’s recent article for The Ecologist as indicative of a more general problem of how the environmental debate handles complex issues. Simplistic statements, such as that above, don’t necessarily reflect the complexity of the available evidence.

The article continued in the same vein: “With lower prices forecast to last for the next couple of years … “

Really? Yet again there’s little evidence to support those rosy projections, and many would state the contrary. Even environmentalism’s detractors question such assumptions these days.

For me, recent articles such as this expose the environmental movement’s quiet existential crisis. It’s a movement whose outlook has become narrowed by external forces as it has become skewed towards a media-led agenda – and which has shifted towards popularity rather than objectivity in addressing our ecological position as a species.

If we were to rely solely on what we see in the mass media, environmentalism is no longer a search to reconcile human needs to the limitations of their ecological circumstances.

It has become a debate over competing consumer choices which reflect, unquestioningly, the dominant consumer debate over affluence and growth, albeit of a green’ hue; and dominated by the single metric of carbon … and pandas!

The fact that we only significantly cut emissions and consumption during recessions, or that we’re running out of the resources needed to manufacture green technologies – oh, that’s so 1970s!

It’s not environmentalists’ fault, but it requires their participation.

As outlined recently by Adam Curtis, the purpose of the modern, engineered media debate is not to inform, it is to confuse. “Doubt is their product.“

The purpose of this approach is not advance a specific debate over change, instead it deflects criticism from existing practices. This happens because statements and events are not based upon evidence, but rather popularly acceptable and often contradictory assumptions – all of which engenders a widespread cognitive dissonance over precisely what ‘reality’ is.

That’s also a problem for major players in the environmental movement today, whose raison d’etre is to chase the media agenda to advance their cause.

Especially with on-line and 24-hour rolling news, the herd mentality governing the media melee overrides the ‘deep green’ fundamental questions about lifestyle which ‘traditional’ environmentalism raises. This is especially true in relation to evidence which contradicts the media’s dominant political message of growth and affluence.

For example, one of the ground-breaking – but little discussed – recent climate documentaries is Cowspiracy. It examines at the range of available evidence on one of the single biggest practices harming the global environment today: meat-eating.

One startling part of the film is when they interview campaign groups, who largely ignore or side-step the issue, or failed to acknowledge it altogether. Greenpeace refused to appear.

Why do media-led campaign groups feel the need to follow ‘the script’ the modern managed media assigns to them? Rather than, for example, standing apart and seeking to define their own agenda outside of the ‘usual channels’.

This is what the movement did during the 1970s and 1980s – and, thirty or forty years later, contrary to its anti-consumerist ‘hair shirt’ depiction, the weight evidence today shows that stance to have been correct.

So what is happening with oil prices?

The recent environmental debate on oil prices is an exemplar for how a failure of analysis is leading to a wholly mistaken assumptions about present trends.

And again, it’s because people are following a simplistic mass media agenda, rather than seeking to understand the range of evidence available – and use that understanding to their advantage.

Oil prices are falling because many the world’s strategic investors think the global economy is knackered. To understand why we need to look across all commodities, not just oil.

It if was just fracking, or a glut of conventional oil driving prices down, oil prices would be falling relative to other commodities. That would be a boon the the global economy and global growth – and yes, people would consume more oil.

But that’s not what we see.

Instead, nearly all commodity futures – from copper to cotton to tin – have been trending down over the last year. That’s due to the global economy stalling, cutting consumption generally, reducing demand, and thus driving all commodity prices down.

In fact, economists are now worried about deflation. As prices fall, people put off buying stuff in the hope they can get it cheaper in the near future – which depresses the economy even more.

Objectively though this is brilliant for the environment. Far more so than the paltry measures governments are using to address ecological issues – as the Australian finance minister recently admitted.

Whether you ‘believe’ in economics or not, the markets are reflecting the belief that, irrespective of the contradictory hogwash that lobbyists push into the media, there’s potentially another global crash coming. Remember, the problems of 2007/8 were never solved – they were just bailed out.

This is about economic power, not prices

The recent fall in oil prices has little to do with fracking. It arguably does have a link to the ‘ecological limits’ outlined by the peak oil debate, due to the changing the balance of power between OPEC and non-OPEC producers it creates. But the greatest factor here is geopolitics.

For the last fifty years OPEC has been what’s called the ‘swing producer‘. Whether OPEC opens or closes the taps largely determines the global supply oil – allowing them to manipulate the price. That power can be used for the benefit of the industry, raising prices to encourage investment, or for more nefarious political purposes.

Of course the Middle East, by cutting production, potentially takes a hit on their income. To make matters worse, all their economic loss does is to prop-up the more expensive production in the non-OPEC regions of the world – especially off-shore, in the Arctic, and unconventional production.

With a possible climate deal looming in December, and with the issue of ‘stranded assets‘ beginning to sink-in to the thinking of market investors, does being the ‘swing producer’ role benefit OPEC any more? That is perhaps what this current ‘crisis’ is really about.

The Middle East produces almost half the world’s crude oil, and it does so relatively cheaply. However, the idea that OPEC’s ‘cheap oil’ will guarantee low prices ignores the near $50 trillion cost which the IEA consider essential to maintain global energy production – which requires a near $100 to $115/barrel price to be economically viable.

Over the last decade, the fossil fuel industry had never invested so much money for such a small return; and that lower productivity is worsening the ecological footprint of their product. Somewhere between 60% and 75% of current production might be considered ‘conventional’ or ‘easy’ oil.

The remainder – the more extreme ‘conventional’ and unconventional sources, from the Niger Delta, to the Arctic, to the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, to fracking – is causing some of the highest ecological damage per unit of fuel produced.

If a climate deal, or acceptance of stranded assets, preserves the global balance of production in 2015/16, then it’s in OPEC’s interest to make sure they are the only oil producing group in the room.

By driving down prices – making all that marginal production in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Australia uneconomic – they may well be the last guys standing, if/when we have to ration future production to meet the needs of a realistic climate deal.

That turns Melia’s argument on its head

Far from weakening the environmental argument, as production limits begin to bite, the tussles within the industry are actually benefiting (at least in the short term) the objectives of the environment movement. Obviously OPEC are not doing this to help the environment, but we have to recognise this as a potential short-term outcome of their actions.

And on the far side of the present economic downturn? If OPEC get their way there will be less oil and gas capacity available in a year or two. If demand rises energy prices will spike once more, holding-down demand – again, a benefit for the environment (and OPEC).

Of course this is all geopolitics; and all these geopolitical power plays are incredibly short-term. It does absolutely nothing to address the fundamental ecological trends defining peak oil, nor the greater ‘limits to growth‘ which may collapse the global economy well before dangerous climate change does. But that’s another – and far more complex – debate!

Environmentalists should be cheering on OPEC! They’re bankrupting the companies environmentalists love to hate!

From the North Slope of Alaska, to tar sands and the Keystone pipeline in Canada, to the fracking patch of the Dakotas, they’re curtailing the development of some of the most damaging sources of petroleum operating today.

We don’t have to like OPEC, but we have to recognise the ‘unintended consequences’ their actions may have for the global environment.

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

See a fully referenced version of this article on the Free Range Activism Website.

“Collapsing oil prices should give everyone in the ‘green movement’ cause for reflection.”

Say what! Really? Why is that?

I see the introduction to Steve Melia’s recent article for The Ecologist as indicative of a more general problem of how the environmental debate handles complex issues. Simplistic statements, such as that above, don’t necessarily reflect the complexity of the available evidence.

The article continued in the same vein: “With lower prices forecast to last for the next couple of years … “

Really? Yet again there’s little evidence to support those rosy projections, and many would state the contrary. Even environmentalism’s detractors question such assumptions these days.

For me, recent articles such as this expose the environmental movement’s quiet existential crisis. It’s a movement whose outlook has become narrowed by external forces as it has become skewed towards a media-led agenda – and which has shifted towards popularity rather than objectivity in addressing our ecological position as a species.

If we were to rely solely on what we see in the mass media, environmentalism is no longer a search to reconcile human needs to the limitations of their ecological circumstances.

It has become a debate over competing consumer choices which reflect, unquestioningly, the dominant consumer debate over affluence and growth, albeit of a green’ hue; and dominated by the single metric of carbon … and pandas!

The fact that we only significantly cut emissions and consumption during recessions, or that we’re running out of the resources needed to manufacture green technologies – oh, that’s so 1970s!

It’s not environmentalists’ fault, but it requires their participation.

As outlined recently by Adam Curtis, the purpose of the modern, engineered media debate is not to inform, it is to confuse. “Doubt is their product.“

The purpose of this approach is not advance a specific debate over change, instead it deflects criticism from existing practices. This happens because statements and events are not based upon evidence, but rather popularly acceptable and often contradictory assumptions – all of which engenders a widespread cognitive dissonance over precisely what ‘reality’ is.

That’s also a problem for major players in the environmental movement today, whose raison d’etre is to chase the media agenda to advance their cause.

Especially with on-line and 24-hour rolling news, the herd mentality governing the media melee overrides the ‘deep green’ fundamental questions about lifestyle which ‘traditional’ environmentalism raises. This is especially true in relation to evidence which contradicts the media’s dominant political message of growth and affluence.

For example, one of the ground-breaking – but little discussed – recent climate documentaries is Cowspiracy. It examines at the range of available evidence on one of the single biggest practices harming the global environment today: meat-eating.

One startling part of the film is when they interview campaign groups, who largely ignore or side-step the issue, or failed to acknowledge it altogether. Greenpeace refused to appear.

Why do media-led campaign groups feel the need to follow ‘the script’ the modern managed media assigns to them? Rather than, for example, standing apart and seeking to define their own agenda outside of the ‘usual channels’.

This is what the movement did during the 1970s and 1980s – and, thirty or forty years later, contrary to its anti-consumerist ‘hair shirt’ depiction, the weight evidence today shows that stance to have been correct.

So what is happening with oil prices?

The recent environmental debate on oil prices is an exemplar for how a failure of analysis is leading to a wholly mistaken assumptions about present trends.

And again, it’s because people are following a simplistic mass media agenda, rather than seeking to understand the range of evidence available – and use that understanding to their advantage.

Oil prices are falling because many the world’s strategic investors think the global economy is knackered. To understand why we need to look across all commodities, not just oil.

It if was just fracking, or a glut of conventional oil driving prices down, oil prices would be falling relative to other commodities. That would be a boon the the global economy and global growth – and yes, people would consume more oil.

But that’s not what we see.

Instead, nearly all commodity futures – from copper to cotton to tin – have been trending down over the last year. That’s due to the global economy stalling, cutting consumption generally, reducing demand, and thus driving all commodity prices down.

In fact, economists are now worried about deflation. As prices fall, people put off buying stuff in the hope they can get it cheaper in the near future – which depresses the economy even more.

Objectively though this is brilliant for the environment. Far more so than the paltry measures governments are using to address ecological issues – as the Australian finance minister recently admitted.

Whether you ‘believe’ in economics or not, the markets are reflecting the belief that, irrespective of the contradictory hogwash that lobbyists push into the media, there’s potentially another global crash coming. Remember, the problems of 2007/8 were never solved – they were just bailed out.

This is about economic power, not prices

The recent fall in oil prices has little to do with fracking. It arguably does have a link to the ‘ecological limits’ outlined by the peak oil debate, due to the changing the balance of power between OPEC and non-OPEC producers it creates. But the greatest factor here is geopolitics.

For the last fifty years OPEC has been what’s called the ‘swing producer‘. Whether OPEC opens or closes the taps largely determines the global supply oil – allowing them to manipulate the price. That power can be used for the benefit of the industry, raising prices to encourage investment, or for more nefarious political purposes.

Of course the Middle East, by cutting production, potentially takes a hit on their income. To make matters worse, all their economic loss does is to prop-up the more expensive production in the non-OPEC regions of the world – especially off-shore, in the Arctic, and unconventional production.

With a possible climate deal looming in December, and with the issue of ‘stranded assets‘ beginning to sink-in to the thinking of market investors, does being the ‘swing producer’ role benefit OPEC any more? That is perhaps what this current ‘crisis’ is really about.

The Middle East produces almost half the world’s crude oil, and it does so relatively cheaply. However, the idea that OPEC’s ‘cheap oil’ will guarantee low prices ignores the near $50 trillion cost which the IEA consider essential to maintain global energy production – which requires a near $100 to $115/barrel price to be economically viable.

Over the last decade, the fossil fuel industry had never invested so much money for such a small return; and that lower productivity is worsening the ecological footprint of their product. Somewhere between 60% and 75% of current production might be considered ‘conventional’ or ‘easy’ oil.

The remainder – the more extreme ‘conventional’ and unconventional sources, from the Niger Delta, to the Arctic, to the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, to fracking – is causing some of the highest ecological damage per unit of fuel produced.

If a climate deal, or acceptance of stranded assets, preserves the global balance of production in 2015/16, then it’s in OPEC’s interest to make sure they are the only oil producing group in the room.

By driving down prices – making all that marginal production in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Australia uneconomic – they may well be the last guys standing, if/when we have to ration future production to meet the needs of a realistic climate deal.

That turns Melia’s argument on its head

Far from weakening the environmental argument, as production limits begin to bite, the tussles within the industry are actually benefiting (at least in the short term) the objectives of the environment movement. Obviously OPEC are not doing this to help the environment, but we have to recognise this as a potential short-term outcome of their actions.

And on the far side of the present economic downturn? If OPEC get their way there will be less oil and gas capacity available in a year or two. If demand rises energy prices will spike once more, holding-down demand – again, a benefit for the environment (and OPEC).

Of course this is all geopolitics; and all these geopolitical power plays are incredibly short-term. It does absolutely nothing to address the fundamental ecological trends defining peak oil, nor the greater ‘limits to growth‘ which may collapse the global economy well before dangerous climate change does. But that’s another – and far more complex – debate!

Environmentalists should be cheering on OPEC! They’re bankrupting the companies environmentalists love to hate!

From the North Slope of Alaska, to tar sands and the Keystone pipeline in Canada, to the fracking patch of the Dakotas, they’re curtailing the development of some of the most damaging sources of petroleum operating today.

We don’t have to like OPEC, but we have to recognise the ‘unintended consequences’ their actions may have for the global environment.

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

See a fully referenced version of this article on the Free Range Activism Website.

Six years after two oil spills destroyed thousands of livelihoods in the Bodo area of the Niger Delta, legal action in the UK has driven Shell to make an out-of-court settlement of £55m to compensate the affected community.

The £55m will be split between £35m for 15,600 individuals and £20m for the community.

The  compensation is an important but long-overdue victory for the victims of corporate negligence, said Amnesty International and the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development:

“While the pay-out is a long awaited victory for the thousands of people who lost their livelihoods in Bodo, it shouldn’t have taken six years to get anything close to fair compensation”, said Audrey Gaughran, Director of Global Issues at Amnesty International.

“In effect, Shell knew that Bodo was an accident waiting to happen. It took no effective action to stop it, then it made false claims about the amount of oil that had been spilt. If Shell had not been forced to disclose this information as part of the UK legal action, the people of Bodo would have been completely swindled.”

Mutiu Sunmonu, Managing Director of Shell’s operating company in Nigeria, said: “From the outset, we’ve accepted responsibility for the two deeply regrettable operational spills in Bodo. We’ve always wanted to compensate the community fairly and we are pleased to have reached agreement.”

But the pollution remains today

The wait has taken its toll on Bodo residents, many of whom had their fishing and farming livelihoods destroyed in the spill. Throughout this time they have had to live with the ongoing pollution and, without compensation, many have faced grinding poverty.

“The compensation is a step towards justice for the people of Bodo”, said Styvn Obodoekwe, Director of Programmes of the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD).

“But justice will be fully achieved when Shell properly cleans up the heavily polluted creeks and swamps so that those who rely on fishing and farming for their income can begin to rebuild their livelihoods”

Shell has always accepted that the two 2008 Bodo oil spills were the fault of failures on the company’s pipeline at Bodo, but publically – and repeatedly – claimed that the volume of oil spilt was approximately 4,000 barrels for both spills combined, even though the spills went on for weeks.

But in 2012 Amnesty International, using an independent assessment of video footage of the first oil spill, calculated that the total amount of oil split exceeded 100,000 barrels for this spill alone.

Shell is “fully committed to the clean-up process”, said Sunmonu. “Despite delays caused by divisions within the community, we are pleased that clean-up work will soon begin now that a plan has been agreed with the community.”

Court action forces Shell to disclose the ugly truth

During the legal action in the UK, Shell had to finally admit that its figures were wrong and it had underestimated the amount of oil spilt in both of the Bodo cases. However Shell has still not confirmed how much oil was actually spilt.

During the legal process Shell was also forced to reveal that it had been aware, at least since 2002, that most of its oil pipelines were old, and some sections contained “major risk and hazard”. In a 2002 document Shell stated that outright replacement of pipelines was necessary because of extensive corrosion.

As far as Amnesty International and CEHRD are aware, Shell took no action despite having this information years before the Bodo leaks. Shell repeatedly blames illegal activity in the Niger Delta for most oil pollution but its claims have been discredited in research by Amnesty International and CEHRD.

An internal Shell email from 2009 revealed that Shell knew it was exposed over spills in Ogoniland – where Bodo is situated; the email stated “the pipelines in Ogoniland have not been maintained properly or integrity assessed for over 15 years”.

“I am very happy that Shell has finally taken responsibility for its action”, says Pastor Christian Kpandei, a Bodo fish farmer, whose fish farm was destroyed by the oil spill. “I’d like to thank the lawyers for compelling Shell to make this unprecedented move.”

But thousands more people remain at risk of future oil spills because of Shell’s failure to fix its ageing and dilapidated pipelines. Hundreds of oil spills from Shell’s pipelines occur every year.

Background

Two oil spills occurred at Bodo in the Niger Delta in 2008, the first in August and the second in December. Amnesty International and CEHRD have worked on the Bodo spills case since 2008, supporting the community to secure compensation and clean up.

In 2011, the people of Bodo, represented by UK law firm Leigh Day, began court proceedings in the UK against the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria.

“Oil pollution in the Niger Delta is one of the biggest corporate scandals of our time”, said Audrey Gaughran. “Shell needs to provide proper compensation, clear up the mess and make the pipelines safer, rather than fighting a slick PR campaign to dodge all responsibility.”

But Sumonu insisted: “Unless real action is taken to end the scourge of oil theft and illegal refining, which remains the main cause of environmental pollution and is the real tragedy of the Niger Delta, areas that are cleaned up will simply become re-impacted through these illegal activities.”

Principal source: Amnesty International.

There’s no doubt that US-based fracking – the process through which oil and gas deposits are blasted from shale deposits deep underground – has caused a revolution in worldwide energy supplies.

Yet now the alarm bells are ringing about the financial health of the fracking industry, with talk of a mighty monetary bubble bursting – leading to turmoil on the international markets similar to that in 2008.

In many ways, it’s a straightforward case of supply and demand. Due to the US fracking boom, world oil supply has increased.

But with global economic growth now slowing – the drop in growth in China is particularly significant – there’s a lack of demand and a glut in supplies, leading to a fall in price of nearly 50% over the last six months.

US oil is flooding the market

Fracking has become a victim of its own success. The industry in the US has grown very fast. In 2008, US oil production was running at five million barrels a day.

Thanks to fracking, that figure has nearly doubled, with talk of US energy self-sufficiency and the country becoming the world’s biggest oil producer – ‘the new Saudi Arabia’ – in the near future.

The giant Bakken oil and gas field in North Dakota – a landscape punctured by thousands of fracking sites, with gas flares visible from space – was producing 200,000 barrels of oil a day in 2007. Production is now running at more than one million barrels a day.

Fuelled by talk of the financial rewards to be gained from fracking, investors have piled into the business. The US fracking industry now accounts for about 20% of the world’s total crude oil investment.

But analysts say this whole investment edifice could come crashing down.

Extreme oil is expensive oil

Fracking is an expensive business. Depending on site structure, companies need prices of between $60 and $100 per barrel of oil to break even. As prices drop to around $55 per barrel, investments in the sector look ever more vulnerable.

Analysts say that while bigger fracking companies might be able to sustain losses in the short term, the outlook appears bleak for the thousands of smaller, less well-financed companies who rushed into the industry, tempted by big returns.

The fracking industry’s troubles have been added to by the actions of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which, despite the oversupply on the world market, has refused to lower production.

The theory is that OPEC, led by powerful oil producers such as Saudi Arabia, is playing the long game – seeking to drive the fracking industry from boom to bust, stabilise prices well above their present level, and regain its place as the world’s pre-eminent source of oil.

There are now fears that many fracking operations may default on an estimated $200 billion of borrowings, raised mainly through bonds issued on Wall Street and in the City of London.

In turn, this could lead to a collapse in global financial markets similar to the 2008 crash.

Is fracking a busted flush?

There are also questions about just how big existing shale oil and gas reserves are, and how long they will last. A recent report by the Post Carbon Institute, a not-for-profit think tank based in the US, says reserves are likely to peak and fall off rapidly, far sooner than the industry’s backers predict.

The cost of drilling is also going up as deposits become more inaccessible.

Besides ongoing questions about the impact of fracking on the environment – in terms of carbon emissions and pollution of water sources – another challenge facing the industry is the growth and rapidly falling costs of renewable energy.

Fracking operations could also be curtailed by more stringent regulations designed to counter fossil fuel emissions and combat climate change.

Its backers have hyped fracking as the future of energy – not just in the US, but around the world. Now the outlook for the industry is far from certain.

Kieran Cooke writes for Climate News Network, where this article was first published.

In August 2014, two activists with the environmentalist group Rising Tide spent a week riding the backwoods highways of Idaho monitoring a megaload.

That’s big rig hauling equipment for processing tar sands oil that’s wide enough to take up two lanes of road, too high to fit under a freeway overpass, can be longer than a football field, and can weigh up to 1,000,000 pounds.

They had no idea that they would soon be wrapped up in a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe that encompassed three states and several environmentalist groups.

Helen Yost of Moscow, Idaho, and Herb Goodwin of Bellingham, Washington, have spent years travelling through area the bioregion of Cascadia to halt megaloads, from Washington and Oregon to Idaho and up through Montana.

They are used to harassment from law enforcement. That week, Goodwin said, the two were stopped on average twice a night, by law-enforcement agencies ranging from state troopers to local police in Sandpoint and Moscow.

Usually carrying equipment to upgrade and expand tar sands mining in Alberta, Canada, megaloads make a tortuous crawl along rural roads at night to avoid traffic, questions, and complaints.

Organizing resistance – too successful to ignore

But activists like Goodwin and Yost have been remarkably successful at organizing the people in mountain country. In August 2013, more than a hundred people in Idaho participated in a four-day mobile blockade of a megaload on US 12 headed for the Nez Perce reservation.

The Nez Perce Nation said the megaloads threatened treaty-reserved resources, historic and cultural resources, and “tribal member health and welfare.” Tribal chair Silas Whitman was one of the blockaders arrested, while activists from Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT), the group Yost helped form, played important support roles.

Rising Tide North America’s network, spun out of the Earth First! grassroots environmentalist movement in 2005, now spans the Cascadia bioregion, with chapters in Seattle, Spokane, Olympia, Bellingham, and Vancouver, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Moscow, Idaho; Missoula, Montana; and Vancouver, B.C.

In the last six months, they have collaborated on an average of a blockade per month, and have helped to spearhead the movement against fossil fuel exports through the Pacific Northwest.

The network has worked in solidarity with indigenous peoples to halt megaloads, has marched in pickets with unions to shut down ports, and has aided community groups to stop permits for coal, oil, and gas terminals on the Pacific Coast.

The FBI steps in

On Oct. 9, Herb Goodwin was approached at his home in Bellingham by two FBI agents asking about a group called Deep Green Resistance (DGR).

The FBI and Joint Terrorism Taskforce had previously contacted several members of DGR and their families both by phone and through home visits in places as dispersed as Georgia, New York and Seattle.

Goodwin was alarmed but not surprised when the lead agent “flashed a badge and claimed to be from the FBI.” Refusing to tell him anything beyond her first name, ‘Brenda’, she provided a sloppy excuse for not presenting a business card.

The other person identified himself as ‘Al Jensen’, and his card identified him as a member of the Criminal Intelligence Unit of the Bellingham Police Department.

“Jensen jocularly mentioned that we knew each other from the Occupy movement / camp and train blockade, attempting to coax up conversation”, Goodwin said in an e-mail. “I did not take the bait.”

The Occupy encampment in Bellingham lasted for two months in the winter of 2011-12. Goodwin was one of four people arrested during the eviction, which came about two weeks after the mass blockade of a coal train Jensen mentioned. He says he recognized the detective’s face, but didn’t know his name:

“I think he was one of the undercover guys who was shifting in and out of our camp for the couple of months we had the camp up. I got a lot more surveillance after the Bellingham coal train blockade. I had people scoping out my apartment off and on for a couple months after that … I could see people scoping me from cars with binoculars.”

Goodwin says he is not a member of DGR, but suggests that it has drawn the interest of the FBI for advocating an ‘underground’ strategy to dismantle industrial civilization. At the same time, he adds,

“all the people remotely connected with DGR call themselves ‘aboveground,’ and they say that they’re going to be involved in the same kind of aboveground actions that other activist groups are, but as far as I know they haven’t really done anything.”

There is no love lost between DGR and Rising Tide. In February 2014, Rising Tide North America signed a letter along with some 40 other groups, such as Greenpeace, the National Lawyers Guild, and Tar Sands Blockade, petitioning the University of Oregon to cancel a keynote address by one of DGR’s leaders at an environmental-law conference on the grounds that the group’s transphobic beliefs promote “exclusionary hate that breeds an environment of hostility and violence.”

Questioning a Rising Tide activist about DGR seemed to blur some important differences between the groups, but activists still saw between the lines. The FBI inquisition was an obvious campaign to silence dissent, Yost says: “When Herb got visited we knew it wouldn’t be long before they came around to someone from Idaho.”

Habeas corpus battle in rural Idaho

On 9th October, the same day Goodwin was visited by the FBI, an activist named Alma Hasse attended a public meeting of the Payette County Planning and Zoning Commission to testify against the expansion of a gas-processing facility in the area, along the Oregon border northwest of Boise.

She recommended that the five Commission members recuse themselves from the permitting process on the grounds that they had signed oil and gas leases with Alta Mesa, the company seeking approval. (All three of the county commissioners have signed oil and gas leases as well.)

An associate of Yost and Goodwin, Hasse has worked in rural Idaho for years, agitating and organizing against fracking and oil trains. Cofounder of Idaho Residents Against Gas Extraction (IRAGE), which works with WIRT, she regularly attends Payette County government public meetings and brings up problems with their processes.

This time, something was different. The Commission members closed the meeting to the public, brusquely challenging Hasse’s testimony, and ordering her to leave or face arrest. After insisting on her right to participate in the public meeting, she was arrested and kept in jail for a week without being charged or even processed.

In protest against her mistreatment by the Commission, Hasse refused to give her name. Though the police knew her, and called her ‘Alma’ when they talked about her, they refused her requests for a telephone call until she obtained a PIN number, which she could only get after being processed.

Police refused to process Hasse until she volunteered her name. Instead of booking her as ‘Jane Doe’ (a formality, since they already knew her name), they kept her in a cell by herself.

“I felt like it was a game”, Hasse says. “They had my name. I had to sign in to testify at the public hearing, so both my name and my address were on the sign-in sheet.” She also had been granted a permit to carry a concealed weapon by the county sheriff’s office, so they had her Social Security number, date of birth, and fingerprints.

When police asked for her name, Hasse would tell them that they already knew her name, and that she wanted to talk to her attorney. They refused, which she insists was a violation of her civil rights and right of habeas corpus.

Only after she drew attention to her incarceration by going on a hunger strike, supported by a media campaign led by her husband and civil disobedience spearheaded by her daughter and WIRT, was she allowed to go free.

“I felt like I had to stand on principle”, Hasse says. “At some point, we as citizens have to stand up and assert our rights, because if we don’t, we’re just going to be steamrolled.”

When the FBI sends texts

On 10th December, Helen Yost of WIRT received three phone calls from an unfamiliar number in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Thinking they were from a telemarketer, she did not answer them. But nine days later, she awoke to another call from the same number. She had anticipated the text message that followed for years.

“Helen, I am trying to get a hold of you to speak with you. An issue has come up, and I need to speak with you. Please give me a call. I am an FBI agent. SA Travis Thiede.”

Yost responded within ten minutes: “NO!”

Agent Thiede’s reply came four minutes later: “OK, I understand, just wanted to have a conversation with you. Thanks.”

According to his LinkedIn profile, Thiede joined the FBI in 1997 after serving in the Army and as a police officer in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He was involved in the providing security at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and the investigation of a power-station bombing on the games’ last day.

Yost believes that the agent’s calls were related to her role as an organizer with WIRT. On 10th December, the day the first ones were placed, she had just returned to Moscow from a road trip organizing for the third annual Stand Up! Fight Back! Against Fossil Fuels in the Northwest!

She’d been in Sandpoint on 8th December and in Spokane, about 35 miles from the FBI office in Coeur d’Alene, on 9th December.

Continuing harassment

After years of dedicated activism, Hasse and Yost were not surprised. Groups like IRAGE and Rising Tide have felt the presence of the FBI for years.

The intensity of repression depends on the success of their campaigns, and not since the late 1990s has the Pacific Northwest seen so much mass action for environmental causes. During that period, the FBI inaugurated a broad strategy of repression, known by activists as the Green Scare, to track down suspects implicated in actions deemed ‘eco-terrorist’.

According to leaked documents, its surveillance net was so large that officers even tailed random Subaru-driving patrons of a farmers’ market. Earth Liberation Front spokesperson Craig Rosebraugh was subpoenaed eight times to testify before grand juries.

The FBI’s Operation Backfire led to 13 people being indicted and nine convicted on various charges, including arson. Of the other four, one committed suicide in jail, two are still fugitives, and one escaped prison time by turning snitch, but was later jailed on heroin charges.

That era is said to have ended in 2006, but the bureau is still using agent provocateurs to infiltrate environmental and social-justice movements. (One was recently arrested for failing to register as a sex offender and for credit-card fraud.)

In 2008, a young man named Eric McDavid was sentenced to more than 19 years in prison, after an agent provocateur who called herself ‘Anna’ seduced him into talking about committing acts of sabotage at a cabin in Northern California the FBI had rented and wired for her.

Repressive ‘ag-gag’ laws against fossil fuel activists

Legislation such as the 2006 federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, largely drafted by the far-right corporate American Legislative Exchange Council, has expanded the criminalization of advocacy for the environment and animal rights.

Because of Idaho’s new ‘ag-gag’ law – enacted in February after animal rights activists released videos of dairy workers abusing cows, it outlaws filming or recording agricultural operations without permission – activists in Payette County are afraid to take photographs of new fossil fuel wells and processing plants.

The surveillance has continued apace, as well. In 2011, activists with WIRT heard from an arrested megaload blockader that the local police were communicating with the FBI. They wrangled two meetings with the police and sheriff, but did not get any substantial information regarding the extent of federal involvement.

That fall, minutes after Yost received a call from an activist telling her that a protest was about to begin, police showed up and shined flashlights into people’s cars. She believes they learned the protest’s location by tapping her phone.

The local sheriff also approached associates of a professor at a university in Spokane and asked them about why he ‘Liked’ WIRT’s Facebook page.

In June 2013, the FBI called the parents of an activist with Portland Rising Tide, and six other activists who have worked with Rising Tide Seattle were visited by FBI terrorism expert Matthew Acker and forensics leader Kera O’Reilly. There was also a third agent, who did not give his information.

The agents asked about the movement against tar-sands and fossil-fuel shipments. It was apparent immediately that the target was the Summer Heat action scheduled for that July 27, a joint effort with 350.org that would send a hundred or more kayaks and boats into the Columbia River for a symbolic blockade on to protest coal barges, oil-by-rail, and gas pipelines.

“My [attorney] was not able to find out what or why they were bothering my sweet folks, but I will tell you why”, one activist whose parents were visited wrote.

“Its because Portland Rising Tide is outreaching, training, and organizing hundreds of Pacific NWers of all age groups to engage in a level of civil disobedience not seen in decades. We are going to do it to save our neighborhoods, our communities, our salmon, and our climate. And that scares the shit out of the powers that be.”

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).

This article originally appeared at DefendingDissent.org.

The government is preparing for the planting of GM crops in the UK by putting in place ‘rules’ to govern their use once the EU has finalised its new regulation – which could take place next week.

In a letter to the Beyond GM campaign group, Lord de Mauley states that “the government will ensure that pragmatic rules are in place to segregate GM and non-GM production, so that choice is facilitated.”

Alarming campaigners, this looks like a significant weakening of the Conservatives’ 2010 manifesto which commits the party to “develop a legally-binding protocol covering the separation of GM and non-GM material, including clear industry liability.”

He also makes the astonishing claim that “cross pollination is, again, a normal process between compatible plant species and there is nothing different about GM crops in this respect.”

He is apparently unaware that cross pollination from GM crops introduces GM genes into nearby fields and the wider environment – undermining his later statement: “We support the principle that farmers should be free to choose whether to adopt GM cultivation.”

The last time the UK government engaged in a serious consideration of co-existence of GM, organic and non-GM crops it commissioned Scimac, a pro-GMO industry body to write the rules – and adopted them wholesale in 2002.

There is now good reason to fear that the Government intends to brush the dust off Scimac’s GMO industry focused, voluntary ‘Code of Practice‘. De Mauley’s use of the term ‘rules’ rather than ‘laws’ or ‘regulations’ only adds to such suspicions.

The other danger is that the rules will be made “pragmatic” for the farmers of GM crops who want to be made exempt from liability if organic and non-GM crops and habitats are contaminated – rather than for organic producers and others who want to avoid contamination with GM seeds and pollen.

Commercial plantings ‘at least a few years’ away

The revelation comes in a letter to campaign group Beyond GM from junior environment minister Lord de Mauley, in response to the Beyond GM initiative The Letter from America which was delivered to the Prime Minister’s office in November.

It also provides some reassurance to campaigners who have feared that proposed changes in the EU’s GMO authorisation process would lead to GM crops being grown in England as early as the 2015 planting season:

“We do not expect any commercial planting of GM crops in the UK for at least a few years as no GM crops in the EU approval pipeline are of major interest to UK farmers”, writes de Mauley.

However the letter leaves no doubt that the Government intends to press ahead with growing GM crops in the UK as soon as it is expedient to do so – provided it wins the next general election. During its period in Government, the Conservative Party has become increasingly supportive of growing GM crops in the UK.

But even a Labour election victory could produce the same result. Its 2013 ‘Feeding the Nation‘ food policy review states: “Biotechnology cannot, by itself, increase the UK’s domestic food supply, but it can be one of the tools used to ensure better resilience in the UK food chain, and to reduce environmental damage.”

But at least Labour acknowledges the need for public acceptance: “GM may have a role in UK food security and environmental protection, but public views – informed by the science – must also be heard. Public and political acceptance is vital, as is proof of its benefits to the environment and producers.”

European Parliament vote imminent after secret negotiations

It is likely that the European Parliament will vote in favour of the proposed GMO authorisation process in its imminent plenary session on the 13th of January and thereby open up the EU to GM cropping as early as spring 2015.

This so called ‘opt-out’ regulation is really an ‘opt-in’ measure, as its effect would be to breach the existing de facto moratorium on GMOs, and free up countries such as the UK which want to press ahead with the cultivation of GM crops.

The proposal has already been through a behind-closed-door, non-transparent process known as the trialogue – where the European Commission, Parliament and representatives of the Council of Ministers secretly wheel and deal to facilitate the passage of legislation.

Despite the efforts of the EP’s Environment Committee representatives, the trialogue process stripped out all mandatory measures to prevent contamination of non-GM crops and establish liability rules to give non-GM farmers legal and financial protection.

These issues will be left to EU Member States. Some will put in place robust and legally binding arrangements to protect non-GM farmers and the countryside even if they constrain GMO production – but on current form, the UK is unlikely to be among them.

Action is needed now

The fact that there are virtually no commercial GM crops suitable for the UK in the pipeline does not mean that any of us can feel confident of a GM free future for the UK:

• The EU’s push to sweep away the ‘Precautionary Principle‘, the ‘polluter pays’ principle, indeed all legal and technical obstacles to GMOs in our farming and food, will increase momentum from the start of 2015.
• There is a possibility – albeit a remote one – that Syngenta’s GM maize (GA21) with tolerance to glyphosate could find some uptake in the UK by 2016.
• It is very likely that research institutions in the UK will gear up their GM crop trials and, using taxpayer money, plant more research field trials to benefit the GMO industry and private patent holders.
• At the same time GM ingredients and products are increasingly finding their way into the UK food system.
• And of course there is the long running and ongoing scandal that supermarkets refuse to put GM labels on livestock products where the animals have been fed genetically engineered feed.

Lord de Mauley’s letter assures Beyond GM that “In the UK, the Government believes people should know what they are buying in shops or in restaurants.”

But this form of words is much less robust than the 2010 manifesto promise to “ensure that consumers have the right to choose non-GM foods through clear labelling.” Not that the 2010 promise has been kept – products from animals reared on GM feeds are not labelled nor does the government have any plan to require it.

His statement that the government “regards safety as paramount and will only agree to the planting of GM crops and the sale of GM foods if it is clear that people and the environment will not be harmed” also appears reassuring.

But it lacks the rigour of the 2010 manifesto promise to “not permit any commercial planting of GM crops until and unless it has been assessed as safe for people and the environment.” Moreover he makes it clear that the UK will accept the EU’s “robust evaluation system” for GM crops – widely criticised as grossly inadequate and subservient to industry wishes.

Again, this gives little cause for confidence that the Government will put in place effective GM labelling regulations, or measures to protect farmland, the countryside, and the food chain from GMO contamination.

Raising voices and getting heard

Individuals and organisations representing nearly 60 million US citizens – just under 25% of the total adult population – have signed and endorsed the Letter from America which sets out the US experience of GMO food and farming, and warns us not to follow this example.

This is just the tip of the mounting opposition to GMOs in the US, which follows years of growing environmental contamination with herbicides and the decimation of wildlife, including the near extinction of the Monarch butterfly.

The fact that David Cameron – the head of what was meant to be Britain’s “greenest ever government“ – has no interest in citizens’ concerns about GMOs was made clear when he passed the Letter on to Defra. Environment Secretary Liz Truss indicated the same when she, in turn, passed the letter on to a junior minister.

Nonetheless, we are grateful for Lord de Mauley’s reply because it highlights the need for more active and vocal citizen engagement – so that the next time a letter on the issue of GMOs is delivered to 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister is on the doorstep to receive it, and replies in person.

Through campaigns such as the Letter from America, GM Free Me, our support of networks such as Mums Say No to GMOs and other initiatives which will be rolled out during 2015, we aim to stimulate and facilitate an effective opposition to government- and industry-backed GMO invasion of the UK.

GM crops might not be ready for planting in the UK in 2015 or even 2016 – but the ground is being prepared for them now, as is the GMO creep onto our supermarket shelves and into our food.

That means that now is the time for citizens to find their voices, speak up and campaign effectively – especially in the run-up to the 2015 election.

Lawrence Woodward is founder and director of GM Education and a co-founder of Beyond GM, where a version of this article first appeared.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Oxford Real Farming Conference: Lawrence Woodward and Pat Thomas will be discussing the issues raised in this article at the Oxford Real Farming Conference – tomorrow Tuesday 6th and Wednesday 7th of January 2015.

The sad state of Britain’s dairying has the same root cause as the billion worldwide who are undernourished, the billion who are overweight and/or diabetic or in danger of heart disease, global warming, the mass extinction of our fellow creatures.

That is a global agriculture, and indeed a global economy, that is geared not to the wellbeing of humankind and of the planet but to short-term wealth, in the simplistic belief that money per se is good and can solve all our problems no matter how it is produced or what it is used for.

To put things right we have to think deeply – in fact re-think from first principles – and act radically.

The world’s global strategy of food and farming is founded on three great untruths – lies, in effect – which between them are threatening to kill us all, and in practice are well on the way to doing so.

 ‘We must produce more’

Lie no. 1 is that the world needs 50% more food by 2050, and will need 100% more by 2100. This provides the excuse for the agrochemical/ biotech companies to focus ever more energetically on productivity.

In truth, the world already produces twice as much food as the world needs and – since the world population should level out by 2100 if not before – produces 50% more than the world will ever need.

We should be focusing on food quality, social justice, sustainability, and environmental protection. But the pursuit of quality and justice would not be profitable to the corporates, so that is not the prime target if indeed it is seriously on the agenda at all.